Thurifer has been out on the road
My first excursion out of London for eighteen months, I emerged from my enforced hibernation, sniffing the air and blinking, mole like, over the steering wheel. I had not realised that I had hired a computer rather than car. It looked like a car, it felt like a car but there was no key to start it. I traipsed, like some pathetic dinosaur, back to the office and was instructed in the mysteries. I pressed the starting button, depressed the brake and clutch as instructed and it started. The journeys were fraught. There were squeaks, buzzings, warnings, that told me that I had done something but I had no idea what my infractions were. The computer screen flashed signs, signals, sinister cartoon-like characters, none of which I understood. However, I survived. Driving a car has never been a pleasure, always a convenience, now a nightmare.
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Lincolnshire was the destination for my second excursion from my leafy suburb. The first day was spent at Donnington Hall and Lincoln Cathedral. The Elizabethan house was symmetrically splendid and satisfying. As was the Georgian interior, marred only by a modern “installation” in a major room. Why spoil it? The house passed down the female line and is still occupied. The guides were unobtrusive and excellent when consulted: the protocols now required were politely requested and not rigorous. The gardens in the late (lack-lustre) summer were full of interest and thoughtful planting. My only previous visit to the Cathedral was over thirty years ago and the nave was without seating. I can still remember the gasp of astonishment at the glory of the interior. Plastic chairs now. The Wren Library was closed as the roof is leaking badly and the cost of repair is vast. Bishop King’s grave was visited and his statue viewed. S. Blaise’s Chapel and the Duncan Grant murals was seen and admired for their bravura and candour.
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And that was it. The next day I was stricken. Not the dreaded Covid but much blood if little or no pain, and returned to London.
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My two months absence from this column has not, alas, seen any diminution of the corruption of the language, its descent into further idiocy, nor any slowing-down of the descent of the Church of England into irrelevance as it sloughs off its heritage, is throttled in a thicket of bureaucratic ineptitude. Some of it is too painful to chronicle.
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Which bishop, I was asked, at the installation in his (that narrows the field) cathedral of the Canon Pastor told the congregation that he hoped they would not bother the new Canon too much on pastoral matters, thereby being a distraction from diocesan responsibilities? Spoiled for choice.
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Pedant’s/Pedants’ Corner: A Today Radio 4 interview between a Conservative MP and a Think Tank Boffin, which lasted eight minutes contained twenty-two grammatical errors or linguistic redundancies and irritating fillers. One every twenty-two seconds.
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Does the ubiquity of the preface “super” originate in “super-spreader’ events and individuals during the pandemic? Now its use seems indiscriminate: super-happy, super-excited, super-honoured, super-ready, super-pleased. Well, I am super-fed-up with super.
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It has been a year of diaries. “Chips” Channon was followed by Sir Alan Duncan. Channon’s diary entries were more often than not substantial essays, with detailed observation, replete within portraits and detached observation. Even when emotionally invested in a person of occasion, he has a clear eye. He is often on the wrong side of history but that curiously gives more weight to what he wrote. He is not writing a diary as self-justification. Sir Alan’s diaries, while entertaining enough, are not in the same league, or class, given Channon’s class-based outlook. Sir Alan’s entries too often rise little beyond the notes he scribbled in his pocket diary to be written up later but, sadly, not always developed. He mentions an event which ends in “giggles and gossip” but says no more (p. 51). Channon would have given us a sample at least. Hugh Powell is mentioned once and never again (p. 137). Who is he? He causes Sir Alan to “raise an eyebrow”. Why? On the same page he mentions the death of the Earl of Snowden without comment. Had he met him (he knew his son)? Many other people died during the years covered by the diary: why him? Longer entries do capture something of the stench of political warfare and the whiff of cordite during the course of the battle of Brexit. His criticism and pen portraits can be as brutally dismissive as those of Channon’s. With Channon, however, it never seems like point-scoring. Not so with Sir Alan. He seems to write with a distinct eye on publication, newspaper serialisation, ready-made headlines. It is pension-pot prose. Channon left instructions that there should be no publication until fifty years after his death. All diaries are ego-centric but Channon succeeds in seeming self-effacing. Sir Alan is always centre-stage and if he finds himself in the wings he lets us know why he should be in front of the curtain. Like Channon, he is on the losing side of history. And loses to someone he likes despite himself, yet finds slapdash, dissembling, untrustworthy, treacherous, lazy, shambolic, disloyal, self-serving, a stranger to truth and integrity, self-aggrandising … yet he is Prime Minister.