Thurifer considers private lives
“Very flat, Norfolk.” Driving through the fenland of North Norfolk do not miss The Walpoles, villages between King’s Lynn and Peterborough. Especially see Walpole St Peter. For once a popular soubriquet is correct; the Cathedral of the Fens is what you will find. Satisfyingly symmetrical, long, wide, proportionate, its earliest feature, the tower built 1300. Once heavily populated, proximate to King’s Lynn port, built on profits from sheep. Now populated by the glitterati in second or third homes. There are two quirky features. “The Hudd” looks like a sentry box and was used as a shelter at the graveside for the priest to shelter during rain-swept funerals. Externally there is a passageway at the east of the church. It had been built to the edge of the boundary of the site and to facilitate processions around the church this “Bolt Hole” as it is known locally, was constructed. It’s construction had implications for the interior and cause the interior’s most dramatic feature. As you enter through the south porch (ornate and impressive) there is a Jaccobean screen that forms a narthex. Walk to the central opening, turn to the altar and exclaim in order for here is the result of the construction of the passageway. The altar is lifted on high. A series of steps leads the eye up and up. At its apex is the altar of sacrifice. One of the most heart-stopping interior views in any church I have seen. It takes the breath away. There are many other features, not least the wide windows of plain glass that means the interior is flooded by light. A tiny fragment of medieval glass remains but, if there is a case for a protestant iconoclasm (and there is not) this might be it. If there is a slight, tiny, minuscule flaw it is that the Victorian east window is a tad heavy-handed. Ignore and just wonder and adore.
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The regular reader (there is one) of these effusions may have spotted my penchant for the acidic review, not least by historians. A recent issue of the excellent publication Literary Review contained this by an historian about the biographies of two historians (Lewis Namier and J. H. Plumb) by historians: “Namier was a great historian … [he was] beneath his charmless exterior a good man … D. W. Hayton’s biography – scrupulous, humane and leavened with dry wit – does its subject justice. Plumb was, at least until the mid-1960s, a good historian and his work ought still to be read. But he was a distasteful person and one who squandered his gifts in trivial endeavours. He too has got the biographer he deserves.”
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The word “got” in that gobbet jars. I hate it in written prose and its American variant “gotten” (used by Prince Harry in his farewell discourse). I try to eliminate it in speaking; not always easy. Aware of sounding ponderous, if not worse, I doggedly say I boarded and alighted from public transport. Not that I have done much of that in recent times.
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Often infuriating though it is, predictive text occasionally provides disturbing insight into today’s world. I typed “domestic”, the first option was “violence”.
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Gotcha! seemed to be the underlying principle to many press questions at the daily Press Conference during the pandemic. They were less concerned with information and explanation than formulating questions designed to trap or undermine. Andrew Neil was much missed from the airwaves for his forensic, informed and searching technique. That other Andrew, Andrew Marr, was, however, much in evidence. I have never understood his pre-eminence nor stranglehold on political and cultural commentary in BBC television and radio. His political and history documentaries have never risen above the superficial, bland and trite. In one encounter he pressed Michael Gove, who did not cover himself in glory by a ludicrous initial answer, to give an absolute guarantee that there was no risk to teachers or pupils when schools re-opened. Nothing is without risk. The issue should have been was the risk reduced to its practical minimum. Marr was more interested in scoring a point by having a minister answer “No”. There were too many instances from him and other journalists of that kind of questioning which was helpful to nobody, nor to the cause of accountability and truth.
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Nor have I ever understood how, why and when journalists arrogated to themselves the quasi-constitutional right to hold the government and others to account. Is it a fig-leaf for the prying, the door-stepping, telephone tapping, distortion, sensationalism, vilification that seems the basic fare of the trade? The job of journalists is to sell newspapers and make money for their wealthy employers. They are as entitled as anyone to scrutinise the actions of government but they cannot disguise muck-raking as objective scrutiny. Parliament, and specifically the House of Commons, is the proper constitutional mechanism for holding governments to account. Years ago the distinguished Fellow of All Souls’ and Conservative minister Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), as absurd a figure as he was clever, argued that the House of Commons was an elective dictatorship. It was a concept he adumbrated during a Labour government but not one he mentioned when he was a member of a Conservative administration. It was that kind of intellectual cynicism and dishonesty that undermines the system far more than bed-hopping or craven opportunism. After a particularity nauseating and manic interview during the Profumo scandal in which he seemed completely to have lost control, the Labour MP Reginald Paget commented: “When self-indulgence has reduced a man to the shape of Lord Hailsham, sexual continence involves no more than a sense of the ridiculous.” See Bernard Levin, “The Pendulum Years” for more of the same.