Among the Archives

For the last several months I’ve become something of a weekly fixture at the History Centre in Woking, working through first wodges of service registers and more recently copies of Crockford’s to investigate the clergy who have served churches in the diocese at the Catholic end of the spectrum. I can’t find any indication that I’ve mentioned it here before, so I admit now how crushingly dull a lot of this has been. At the History Centre you can order up to ten documents from the stacks in advance, though you can request more once you’re there. Oh dear, I thought before I started, how restricting that will be, but I discovered that working through ten old service registers over the course of three hours or so was quite sufficient to exhaust and render me almost incapable of speech. I rarely saw a church in the middle of a transition from one way of doing things to another, though here and there you could tell when a new incumbent had brought a sudden change of direction. I found books where clergy doggedly recorded every time they said Morning or Evening Prayer, even when alone, and ones where they listed the times of services but not what they were. I found churches which helpfully recorded numbers at every service, but this was rare: most of the time, until priests became defensive about how many people were turning up (or weren’t), only totals of communicants were noted down. I discovered the odd rude remark scrawled in a margin by a frustrated incumbent. I recoiled from the aroma of mould and marvelled at teacup rings or mice nibblings.

Going through the lists of clergy uncovers a couple of very late exchanges of livings, some interesting connections between churches, and several clergy passing through the big mission parish of St Mary’s Portsea. Few of them go on from serving a Catholic parish in Surrey to anything more high-profile, but given the career structure of the Church of England this is no great surprise and you could probably say the same of any sample of incumbents. It’s very clear how the turn into the twentieth century leads to the increasing dominance of theological colleges in the training of curates: go back before WWI and it’s rarer and rarer for a priest to have been to one, and before 1900 it’s extremely uncommon. But I did find that Fr Lushington, who caused such ructions at Thorpe, had been trained at Sarum College in the 1870s; and, even more strikingly, Vincent Musgrave of Hascombe had attended Wells College as far back as 1853. That would have made him exceedingly unusual: there were only about 15 students at Wells then and none of the other colleges would have had many more in an age when there were far, far more clergy about. Gems, my beloveds, gems. 

Rotherhithe at Night

Katrin my god-daughter shares a house with two friends not far from the Thames in Rotherhithe, commuting from there to the Treasury where at the start of the year she began working in a department so obscure that even Dr Abacus hadn't heard of it despite working in the same building for many years. Monday was my first chance to see her since she started. She took me for a meal at the Mayflower, a clambering old hostelry overlooking the river which plays on almost certainly non-existent connections with the Pilgrim Fathers and contains the scrapings of several junk shops scattered over the walls, shelves and windowsills. The food was good but it was just as well Katrin had booked. 

Katrin led me around the area pointing out as much of its history as was visible in the dark: a pavilion in the park which had been located in several places before ending up where it was, a former workhouse now inevitably converted into a café, streets on the sites of wharves and docks, one lonely Art Deco building soaring upwards in amongst the converted warehouses and modern developments along a side street. We bought ice cream at her favourite gelateria but were thrown out as they were about to close, and finshed our desserts looking along the river. 'I think this is the best view of the river in London', Katrin said. 'I'm lucky to be here'.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

The Infants School children came to church this morning to deposit their Harvest gifts, sing some songs, and listen to me reflect on the season for a minute or two. I decided to think about work: the fact that at Harvest we focus on farmers (and the children often sing about them), and a younger cousin of mine decided she wanted to be one, but hardly any of us will have much contact with that kind of life. 'I wonder what you will be when you grow up?' I asked Years 1 & 2, and got a variety of answers. The traditional train driver was the first, followed by scientist, vet, police officer ('so I can stop bad guys being bad' the little girl in question claimed) - and fairy. I didn't ask the Reception class what they thought.

As they left, I remembered that although fairy may seem an unlikely career trajectory, there is a professional mermaid operating in St Ives in Cornwall. She was the one who posted the video of her priest uncle accidentally setting himself alight during an online service early in the first lockdown (the Revd Beach, to add to the sense that the whole thing was scripted by a higher power). In fact, trying to recover the facts today, I find there are quite a lot of professional mermaids about. Perhaps it's not inherently less likely than anything I do.

Rainbow Over Swanvale Halt

Or even a double rainbow, as has been pointed out to me. Rainbows are always a tremendous delight to me. They stand for renewal and optimism, quite apart from any resonances with the story of the Flood. I think it might be because of their gratuitous, and mostly entirely unexpected loveliness. 

If I worry in any existential way, it's about the amount of time I've wasted, and the chance that I could reach the end of my life and conclude that I might have taken the wrong turn at some point, and there was another place where I could have been more use. This is not to do with any problem of faith - that's a separate business - but it might be to do with my fitness to be a parish priest, as sometimes it feels that I'm no good at it at all. When we went on our ordination retreat from Staggers at Alton Abbey, the retreat conductor Bishop Timothy Bavin told us, among other gems such as the advice that there was no shame in going to sleep under the table if a meeting got particularly pointless and boring, that we might well conclude at some point that the Church had made a dreadful mistake in ordaining us, and if so we should (as a first resort, anyway), try to recall that despite appearances the Holy Spirit knows better than we do and that God would honour the call and equip us with what we needed even if something had gone awry with the process. I try to hold on to that. I suppose we all have shadow selves, paths we might have trodden and routes we could have taken had things been different, and we can't pursue them all. 

Tomorrow's Gospel is the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard from Matthew, the labourers who get paid the same by the landowner regardless of how late in the day they turn up. Perhaps I regret not getting going in my Christian life earlier, but then again maybe that brings me some insights I wouldn't otherwise have had. All in the end is harvest, and the Lord can work with the least we bring him, no matter how late we arrive.

Litter & Liberty

Wednesday was a varied day: communion at Widelake House, a funeral where everything went wrong including a downpour at the cemetery which left us all drenched, and Church Club at the Infants School. Somewhat wearily I got to the church, ready for a walk to the supermarket to do my shopping as it was too wet to cycle, and found the porch full of trash.

There's a certain amount of research examining why people litter, most of it (quoted, for instance, here and here) concluding that it mainly relates to the availability of bins. This can't be the case with the youngsters who hang around the church, as, every adult who comments on the matter points out, they leave rubbish about despite being directly alongside a rubbish bin. There must be something else going on. 

Imagine being a teenager, especially a teenage boy, in a group sitting outside Swanvale Halt church, or in the porch, with a bottle of radioactive sweet pop or a horrible spicy sausage in a packet with a strikingly low actual meat content. You're certainly not going to put the remains into a bin if nobody around you is - but the likelihood is that you won't do it even if you're on your own, and I know this is exactly what happens. It's not just group dynamics. 

Think of it like this. Putting your rubbish into a bin, provided for the purpose by a public authority, would show that you accepted a constraint on your behaviour. It would mean recognising that you are not completely free to do whatever you like, that you have to take other considerations, other people and their feelings and ideas, into account; that you are not utterly autonomous, absolutely the master of your own destiny. Trash is freedom. It's more than that, it's a symbol of freedom.

Imagine, again, being in a place where leaving a crisp packet on a paving slab is what it means to be free. Great.

Talking Tamara

Among the crowd at Cathi Unsworth's reading in Camden a few weeks ago was, I only realised afterwards, Lisa, the artist of a painting I bought at a small exhibition in Walton-on-Thames years ago. She's on the board of the Arts Society in Kingston-upon-Thames and had just achieved her ambition to get a talk about Tamara de Lempicka on the schedule, so last night I went along. 

Lecturer Pamela Campbell-Johnston, who was involved in the Lempicka exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2004-5 (which I think I saw) challenged us to consider which side of the divide we fell on: was she a genius who pioneered female artistry with a unique style, or (as Waldemar Januszczak claimed) a maker of 'creepy daubs'? 'Daubs' I couldn't agree with - that's a deeply unfair description for Lempicka's amazing technical proficiency, and her sketches show even better than the paintings what a brilliant draughtsman she was - but 'creepy' and 'genius' both seem equally just as epithets. Ms Campbell-Johnston illustrated the latter with images of the queasily erotic paintings of the artist's daughter Kizette, but it's there throughout the whole project: the transformation of humans into aloof, godlike beings composed of razor-sharp angles and metallic curls of hair falling like swarf off a lathe. Given the right-wing, aristocratic circles Lempicka moved in, this is art born of the 1920s lust for liberty which edges uneasily towards fascism. The glamour is often the glamour of cruelty.

What strikes me most is that Lempicka's most dramatic and memorable work was done in such a short period. By about 1927 she'd hit on a style which enabled her to make money, and work quickly with tremendous productivity, but it clearly excited her as well. Whether the pictures are gentle or whether they're cruel, there's a passion in them which energises and powers them. After about 1933 when she married Baron Kuffner and no longer had to work for a living, the steam goes out of the art, and all her ultramodern accoutrements of skyscrapers and telephones no longer seem as radical. For the next forty-odd years, she paints as someone who doesn't have to but thinks they should. The moment had passed. 

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Ockham & Burgh Heath

My accounts of Surrey church visits are nearing their conclusion. A while ago I saw two very contrasting buildings. All Saints', Ockham, sits on its own in a very rural setting, with not a lot to show from the Oxford Movement and its successors apart from antiquarianism; although, rather as Church Crookham has the only shrine of Bd John Keble to be found anywhere, Ockham's choice to commemorate local lad the medieval philosopher William Ockham is presumably unique as well. Not quite unique, but next to it, is the church's great treasure alongside all its medieval and later bits and pieces, the amazing seven-light east window which may have come from Newark Abbey after the Dissolution. Even with recent glass in it, it renders the chancel an amazing, affecting space.

St Mary's Burgh Heath, in contrast, is a breezy Edwardian brick barn, but had a Catholic tradition in advance of its parent church of Banstead at the time of its building. In fact, it was the scene of a bit of conflict when Mrs Colman, one of the church's chief benefactors, kicked up such a fuss about the liturgy at St Mary's that a weekly Sung Eucharist was abandoned by the second week after opening in 1909 (there were still Stations of the Cross on Good Friday and a eucharist on All Souls' Day later in the year, though). From the 1980s Burgh Heath shifted further and further to the ecclesiological centre, and is now moderate Evangelical (which is what 'centre' currently means). The plaque in the photo refers, intriguingly, to a sanctuary lamp which is no longer there!

In 1923 the Colman family sold Nork House and left the area and their phalanx of reserved seats in the church. St Mary's celebrated its liberation by converting the space where the Colman pews had been into a Chapel of St Monica, fitted out by no less than Ninian Comper. Not that I've ever thought glass design was really the great man's strong point!

Unbuttoning the Church

How do you read Caravaggio's The Calling of St Matthew? Which figure is the evangelist - the bearded man in the black hat, or the younger fellow keeping his gaze fixed on his cash rather than Christ on the right of the picture? Is the bearded man gesturing to himself, or to the other figure? I think the latter, while Canon Chris Russell, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Advisor on Evangelism and Witness, argues that it's the former, which radically changes your interpretation of the painting.

This is just one and not the most important point I disagree with in the online CofE 'Leadership for Evangelism' material I'm working through at the moment with a view to fulfilling the bit of our development plan which deals with 'faith sharing' (the overall significance of the painting is that it's an illustration of the way the encounter with Christ can take place in the midst of our everyday lives, which is fair enough). A more notable example is the episode in another passage where two commentators discuss what holds ordinary Christians back from sharing their faith. 'We've done extensive work across years in 18 countries,' says one, 'and what comes back consistently is that they're worried about rejection.' Hm. My mind goes back many years to a different context, to a Liberal Democrat meeting in Oxford where my late and lovely friend Sam was asked by the future MP for Oxford West why he didn't invite any of his friends to our meetings: 'Because I want to keep them, Evan', Sam answered reasonably, and I have always believed the situation is the same in matters religious. Nobody wants to think that their friendship is instrumental, that the relationship is actually about recruitment into an organisation, and what Christians are afraid of is not their friends or relatives saying No as such, but being thought to be fake, to be engaging in a relationship for the sake of something else. I'm not sure the Church's officials really want to think about that.

But there is a lot of useful material there, too, and it makes me reflect differently about some of our activities at Swanvale Halt. The things we’re doing at the moment to try to widen our diet of worship in ways that might provide different routes into faith for those on the edges of it – Forest Church, Compline online, and Sunday Space – are not on their own drawing in a single soul beyond the ones I could have predicted all along would take part in such things. I now doubt they will. What they might do is get some of the congregation acclimatised to the habit of being more than passive consumers of religion, but being more open and articulate about it, a little less controlled and buttoned-down. It’s not easy for me, frankly, because I rather prefer controlled and buttoned-down, but it’s absolutely necessary. So I carry on lowering my sights until they are almost level with the ground!

Move 'em On, Head 'em Up

This Saturday's Messy Church was the worst-attended we've ever had, even more than the one we forgot (all right, I forgot) to tell anyone about. Blame the hot weather, which meant that nobody much wanted to venture out of doors after a week of the children sweltering back at school: there were virtually tumbleweeds rolling across the village streets. 

Among those bold souls who did turn up, though only as we were packing everything away, were Andy our local beat constable and a colleague, just checking in to see how everything was going. In fact, as far as antisocial behaviour is concerned, everything has been quite quiet for the last few weeks. "Yes", agreed Andy, "we think we've managed to stir things up a bit. The older individual who hangs around with the kids and who we're most interested in knows we're trying to make his evenings a bit less comfortable. Of course", he went on, "that just means he now spends most of his time in Guildford. And Guildford will probably move him on to Woking eventually".

"Still", said his colleague as she looked across the church to where the Messy Church collage had just been put up, bearing the theme of the day, "Sharing is Caring".  

Where Coincidence Leads

‘There is no coincidence in this world, only inevitability’, insisted Yuuko Ichihara of xxxHolic, and the transdimensional witch’s words are apposite today. My god-daughter Katrin has just been on holiday in Japan; a card from her has arrived today showing one of her destinations, the Kinkakuji temple in Kyoto. Is that not, I thought, the building whose burning Yukio Mishima wrote about in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion? So it was - very oddly, as a stray reference somewhere today had made me think about Mishima an hour or so before I picked the card from the doormat. These days I am more and more inclined to agree with Yuuko-san, and see time as folded and coiled, touching on itself at points that produce resonances, echoes, and bleed-throughs, that we, encased in chronology as we are, call coincidence.

In my teens I was rather captivated by the melodramatic extremity of Yukio Mishima’s life, culminating in a ritual suicide that ended his derisory, doomed-to-fail would-be military coup on November 25^th 1970 (St Catherine’s Day, you may note). ‘The compromise climate of today, when one can neither live beautifully nor die horribly’, he wrote in On Hagakure, his paean to the old samurai ethic: now there’s a creed for an adolescent who’s done little living and has never seen anyone die. I bought all the books, at least the ones readily available in mid-to-late 1980s Bournemouth, of which The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was one.

But it was Mishima’s final work, The Sea of Fertility, I found myself thumbing through again today. This stretching novel – 800-odd pages in the Penguin – is four books bolted together like fate, and is the bleakest, bitterest thing you will ever read. Notwithstanding some readings, which glimpse in its conclusion what a Westerner might call redemption, I think that overarching title expresses nothing more, or less, than an irony so dark and hopeless that it becomes almost unbearable, like the fire consuming the Kinkakuji.

Apart from the climactic, disorientating and beautiful scene in the nunnery garden, I was always most drawn to the episode in the final part of The Sea of Fertility, The Decay of the Angel, where Keiko, the protagonist Honda’s oldest friend, dolls herself up to confront his adopted son Toru with the truth over Christmas dinner. She doesn’t believe, as Honda does, that Toru is the reincarnation of a doomed young lover from the 1910s; a right-wing idealist who killed himself between the wars after assassinating a banker; or a ludicrously beautiful Thai princess who died of a cobra bite. She’s convinced he’s just a nasty, clever, manipulative boy. He’s not pure enough, even pure evil enough, as he might imagine. Keiko is the murderer of all illusions: an ‘angel-killer’, Toru thinks. ‘We are two bored, cynical old people’, she tells him, ‘Can your pride really permit you to call us destiny? A nasty old man and woman? An old voyeur and an old lesbian?’ I rather wanted to be Keiko, telling horrible truths to horrible people. God forgive me, but part of me still does.

Forty years later or nearly, I look at Mishima’s life and I read a story of thorough falsehood, but even if his writing always centres on unbalanced, deluded, and unpleasant people, he almost could not help himself but be truthful there. In The Sea of Fertility’s second instalment, Runaway Horses, Isao Iinuma wants to restore the values of old Japan with a cathartic act of violence, but new Japan continues undisturbed, and that was the fate of Mishima himself. Both fictional revolutionary and real-life rebel sacrificed themselves to an ideal which was, like all political ideals enacted in any real context, compromised with money, desire, and power. Surely someone as clearsighted as Mishima couldn’t have believed in that nonsense? Was that final act not just a way of escaping the consequences of what he had written?

“And the Golden Temple grew until it consumed the entire world; it became sufficient to consume the entire meaning of the world”

Performance

A little while ago S.D. told me of the traumatic experience a group of friends had suffered when attempting to go to church the Christmas-before-last. Today we have an uncannily similar occurrence which makes me wonder how common they are. My brother-in-law works at a church school: there is a new incumbent at the parish church. The term starts with a service for the staff, something I'd been thinking of offering. In came the new vicar whose words of welcome were 'This is going to be an informal communion service. I've brought my guitar and I'm going to sing you a song'. 'It would have been rude if we'd all put our heads in our hands', my brother-in-law said.

This is an artist's impression of what it would be like if I was to try doing it. Ha-ruuuuu!

Tech Milestone

There was a baptism at Swanvale Halt church on Sunday, the younger daughter of a family whose older child was baptised a few years ago. She is already 3 and a bit, and missed out her original baptism date because of the pandemic. She took it all very seriously.

One of her godmothers gave a reading, as families occasionally do. 'Remind me what it is', I said to the little girl's parents before we started: 'ChatGPT wrote it', they told me. This is the first time this has happened here, at any rate. It was wordy and repetitious, though no worse than anything else a family might look up online and then adopt for their own use. Had it been me I would have cut it down a bit. What surprised me was that, in contrast to the absolutely vapid stuff I've read in various places that's very clearly AI-generated, it did have some content, talking about the 'limitless possibilities' ahead of little Amelia. Was that the brief they gave the system, or did it lift that from somewhere else? I can see that this might be very helpful for people who are not used to articulating their own thoughts and writing them down (and that means most of us) but ultimately it might be better if they did. 

Secrets of the Pharoahs

This is a propos of nothing, but it was where my mental travels took me yesterday. My fascination with Ancient Egypt goes back to my childhood where there was a half-shelf of books on the subject in our local library where (as a special privilege) I had an adult reader’s ticket from the age of about 9. I was captivated by them, even as I was slightly terrified by the photographs of mummies. The spell has never quite been broken.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Dorothy Eady who fell down stairs at her home in about 1907 and was taken as dead before reviving, and thereafter increasingly identified with the Egypt of Seti I, the pharoah who came to visit her in her teenage dreams. It is worth saying that there was never any independent witness of any of these events so we will never know the truth of them. Dorothy became an entirely self-taught Egyptologist, and moved there in 1931, eventually living in a tiny adobe house in Abydos, worshipping the ancient gods, dreaming of encounters with Seti whose lover she was convinced she had been in a past life, and acting as a consultant to more orthodox students of the subject. She had a son who she insisted on calling Seti, hence her adopted name of Omm Sety, ‘Seti’s mother’. Despite being clearly quite odd, she had an unerring feel for Egyptian folkways and habits and her predictions of what features might be found in a particular place usually proved uncannily accurate when a dig was eventually carried out.

Omm Sety reserved an abiding hatred for the ‘heretic pharoah’ Akhenaten who had turned the kingdom away from the old gods she and her spectral lover revered. She claimed that she knew where Akhenaten's queen Nefertiti was buried, and that it was ‘in a very obvious place, yet where nobody would think of looking’. But why wouldn’t she reveal it? Although Omm Sety conceded that Nefertiti must have been ‘a very courageous woman’ for sticking to her principles, however misguided, she quoted what her beloved Seti had told her - ‘We don’t want anything more of that family known’. The location was near the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, she maintained (against all opinion at the time, that no tombs remained to be found there), and that was the most she would give away: ‘you’d never believe it if I told you’, she chuckled to her collaborator Hanny el Zeini.

It was known since 1976 – when Omm Sety was still alive – that there were two anomalies, empty spaces, beyond the north wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber; a radar scan in 2000 suggested that these were rooms, and five years later an unrelated excavation broke into one, finding mummification equipment relating to the period, but no human remains. So what is the other void space?

Nicholas Reeves, late of the British Museum and many other places, adamantly holds that that space is the tomb of Nefertiti. In 2015 he wrote a paper arguing that newly-released high-resolution photographs of the north wall of the tomb suggested that it was at least partially not natural rock but a construct to close off whatever lay, and still lies, beyond it, and that the form of Tutankhamun’s tomb is one more associated with a queen than a king; he also argued that the most charismatic artefact we have from Ancient Egypt, Tutankhamun’s great gold burial mask, was in fact made for Nefertiti. Then there is the decoration of the tomb’s north wall. The traditional interpretation of the figures is that they show Ay, Tutankhamun’s successor, performing the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth on the boy king’s mummy; not surprisingly, because this is what the hieroglyphs on the wall say is going on. But it’s always been a bit funny. Ay was a man in later middle age when he succeeded, and this figure is very youthful: even by the stylised standards of Ancient Egyptian art, that’s odd. Dr Reeves points out that the subtle distinctive features of these figures suggest that what we think is Tutankhamun is in fact Nefertiti, in male garb as a female pharoah would be, and what we have taken to be Ay is Tutankhamun. The strongest argument against all this is that it requires we assume Nefertiti did reign, jointly with Akhenaten and then as pharoah in her own right, disguised beneath the name of the hazy Smenkhkare, a title in the king-lists and little else. That’s a plausible interpretation of what we know, but not the only one.

Of course, he may just be seeing things that aren’t there, convinced by his own conviction. A crack in a wall, a different sort of plaster here or there, the curve of the jawline of a painting, the shadowy hint of pictures beneath pictures: it’s not a watertight case, and never will be proved until that void space behind Tutankhamun’s north wall is opened. And you can only open it by burrowing down through the rock from behind. In 2018 another radar study reported there wasn't a space behind the wall at all. Despite conceding right from the start that he could well be wrong, Nicholas Reeves isn't ready to give up yet; late last year there was a bit of a flurry of media coverage when he announced that close examination of the names of the figures showed that they’d been repainted, confirming his identifications. We're all a little like this: we start out open-minded about our ideas, and gradually they become part of who we think we are.

Yet what a thing it would be if the heretic Queen is there, waiting beyond a few inches of wall, wrapped perhaps in her thirty-two-century-undisturbed splendour: as Omm Sety hinted, hidden in plain sight? I don’t think it’s just the glint of gold that’s so attractive in that idea, nor even the romance of what she was and stood for, but that suggestion that something very powerful is just a tiny distance out of reach. At any moment, we could break through a wall into a different reading of what is real.

To Bury Caesar

Fr Donald the ex-hospital chaplain was very exercised the other day about The Times's scraped-together survey of Anglican clergy who were, to a person it seemed or was made to seem, exhausted, despairing, and convinced the UK can no longer be described as a Christian country in any sense of the term. 'Just selling newspapers', he fumed, though why the paper should have thought what the Anglican clergy think about themselves or anything else is a matter anyone outside the Church of England should be interested in, I'm not sure. I don't feel particularly overworked and I suspect my moments of despair are to do with my deplorable character rather than my circumstances, but the state of the nation's faith is nothing more than obvious: unbelief triumphant, it seems.

In the Co-Op that evening I met Ella the Rainbows unit leader who runs an engineering business with her husband in town, who described a work event - and I can't recall the context, it must have been rather specific - in which it became apparent that 'our millennial junior staff' didn't know who Julius Caesar was. 'Wasn't he sort of a Roman?' was the closest any of them got. I tried the question on the young lads who I turfed out of the church porch when I locked up this afternoon, and they looked at me blankly. Clearly no point advancing any further into Classical history there. 

Now, lay to one side my feelings about my priestly ministry - as a historian I find the idea that young people don't know who Julius Caesar was deeply depressing. We live in a time in which vast areas of human knowledge and experience are there for the looking-up, easily available in almost everyone's home - in almost everyone's hand, for heaven's sake - and yet very, very basic things that frame the mental landscape of humanity are mysteries.

Could it be, then, that the advance of unbelief in the modern West is not due to increased human knowledge, but the lack of it? I was reluctant to accept it, but perhaps it's the case. Atheists might fondly imagine that millions are disconnecting from religion and religious awareness because they have taken conscious decisions to do so, analysing the claims of faith and finding them wanting, whereas in fact they're just falling into line with the people around them. A triumph, not of progress, but of ignorance.