***
Sacrilege is an outdated concept in our anything-goes culture. But there still are things that shock us because they go against fundamentally held principles which we often don’t know we still have – particularly if you’re an agnostic Anglican like me. I felt a similar but lesser feeling of sacrilege a few days earlier at the Chapel of St Peter and St Paul at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. I’d just been to see the newly refurbished Painted Hall. Sir James Thornhill’s paintings in Christopher Wren’s vast hall are well worth a visit, even if they do show the triumph of Protestantism after the Glorious Revolution: William of Orange is painted trampling on Louis XIV and the papal mitre and crown. After looking round the hall, I dropped in on the 18th-century chapel next door. There were three tourists there – I couldn’t work out where they were from. One of them was innocently wearing a baseball cap. They were a jolly, chatty trio, not wishing to cause any offence as they took selfies. I didn’t find the selfies offensive but I did find the refusal to take the cap off in church, well, sacrilegious. I didn’t say anything to the cap-wearer. In my personal religion, being told what to do is the biggest sin of all; telling others what to do is, by extension, almost as bad. But I was surprised at the depth of my feelings.***
I was in Whitby writing a travel piece about the new Whitby Abbey Museum and the Synod of Whitby in AD 664. Recently, I’ve found that many more travel pieces I write – and commission – are about Britain rather than abroad. A travel expert tells me it’s part of a growing trend: people have had enough of the hell of airports. I completely agree. I’m off to Greece in a few days’ time and I’m already in low-level horror at the thought of those winding queues. It isn’t just the increased security that drives me nuts. It’s the hideousness of airports: huge, over-illuminated glass boxes stuffed with people; transparent human sardine cans. If only airports were more beautiful – and more varied; they all look like human sardine cans, from New York to New Delhi – the queueing might be a little less torturous. If airports were prettier and air travel less agonising, I’m sure people would drink less at airports, too. In a wicked move, World Duty Free, the biggest duty-free company at British airports, is now wrapping up booze in bags that can only be opened with the knives and scissors that in turn are banned in flight, to stop the rise in mid-air drinking incidents. If flying wasn’t so bloody horrible, we wouldn’t be reaching for the bottle.***
On the plus side of life, I’ve discovered a new pleasure: overhearing bores. I was in a pub in Buckinghamshire recently, sitting on my own, when I eavesdropped on a world champion bore, sitting two yards from me. In his 70s, he was telling his poor benighted companion, at staggering length, about his gap year more than half a century before. “Well, I started in Costa Rica. And you know the amazing thing was, I had absolutely no set plan for my route … And then I headed all the way down to Tierra del Fuego …” He had all the tools in the ultimate bore’s armoury: the ability to talk continuously without hesitation or repetition; the raised voice to talk over his companion whenever she looked in danger of saying anything; and the complete absence of a sense of humour. If I’d been in conversation with him, I would have been agonisingly frustrated. But because I was two yards away, with no obligation to be the bore’s silent interlocutor, it was a strange pleasure to watch a master at work. And yet I was listening to exactly the same words as if I were being personally bored to death by him. I wonder if any leading philosopher has dealt with the Theory of Bores. It’s really quite interesting. Harry Mount is editor of The Oldie
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