After an unusually cold and dark start to the weekend in London, the Sunday of 2 June proved welcomingly warm and sunny. The favourable turn in the weather augured a special day in the UK's capital.
The usual hustle and bustle of modern central London life had an unusual element added to it from noon until the early evening that day: hundreds of people from all walks of life processing on the streets from Covent Garden to Marylebone via Oxford Street, following a faint but strong-smelling cloud of incense that enveloped an ornately embroidered canopy, carried and surrounded by an array of people that looked like they’d been transported straight from the Middle Ages.
