Social media has been in meltdown in recent days about graffiti allegedly defacing the hallowed walls and pillars of Canterbury Cathedral. The graffiti in the Cathedral has been seen as symptomatic of a range of ills – from the death of the Church of England to the final demise of Western Culture. Some have called for Anglican clergy to be 'strung up' for this blasphemous outrage. JD Vance and Elon Musk piled in, condemning the cathedral graffiti as ugly and disrespectful. If

It was in the mid-1990s that I discovered I was the Antichrist. The insight into my true identity came in a letter from a Mrs McPherson, who lived on the Isle of Man. She’d read a book I’d written on fashion and style, and was offended that a Christian writer (a minister no less) could write a book on a topic as worldly as bodily adornment. Mrs McPherson didn’t hold back. She described my book as: ‘a monstrous, blasphemous lie’ and ‘a wilful transgression of God’s word’. She

For the first decade of the 2000s I was a vicar in suburban southwest London. Part of my inheritance from the previous regime was a church with close links to a cult. It was a very British kind of cult, with an emphasis on high culture, old-fashioned values and the 1662 Prayer-Book. A sepia-tinted nostalgia for old England was combined with an eclectic mix of Eastern mysticism and esoterica dredged from the freakier wilds of Victoriana. They ran a number of schools, including

Back in 1978 the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti made a trip to the Pacific Northwest. Today it’s a quiet, sunny morning in August. I’m in a high-ceilinged apartment in the Rue de Surène, remembering my student days in the Grands Boulevards of Paris 40 years ago. Here I reflect on the moments, and the rivers, between these events – as well as other rivers, and other journeys. ❧ ❧ ❧ Northwest Ecolog Lawrence Ferlinghetti is best known as one of the Beat Poets in 1950s America. A na

I watched the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics at my neighbour’s house. Part way through the ceremony I laughed and exclaimed: ‘Ha! A drag parody of the Last Supper!’ The other neighbours present also laughed, because the symbolism from Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was clear. The Last Supper imagery was evident to millions around the world. For some, the obvious parody of Christian imagery was a step too far. Church leaders, particularly from the traditionalist evang

A friend of mine recently joined a new inclusive Christian network, and wanted to know if I planned to sign up. He used the phrase ‘standing with the LGBTQ+ community’. I hesitated before replying, just as I’d hesitated a decade earlier when asked a similar question at a church in the North of England. The leadership had decided, almost overnight, to affiliate to an inclusive church network, and asked everybody in leadership to sign up. When I hesitated it sparked a tirade fr

My interest in politics started at the age of 11. The secondary school I attended in small-town Warwickshire marked the 1974 General Election with a mock election of its own. Pupils stood as representatives of the political parties standing in the national poll. Hustings were held, speeches given, ballot boxes set up. I found myself drawn to the Communist candidate. He was tall and pale, with the hair of a prog rock bassist. He painted utopian word-pictures of the egalitarian

Toddlers love books. Especially board books, with titles such as The Dinosaur Who Didn’t Eat Pizza . So it was that I found myself in a Brighton & Hove library, browsing board books with a two-year-old. One was prominently displayed face-out: A is for Activist . Intrigued, I investigated further. A is for Activist  is by Indonesian-born writer and illustrator Innosanto Nagara. A Marxist, Nagara lives in a co-housing community in Oakland, California. The book is written in a f

Are you religious? It’s a question the pollsters Gallup have been asking Americans since 1999 – and charting a slow decline in the percentage of the population saying yes. It appears in polls and surveys this side of the Atlantic too, including one I filled in the other day. The pollsters clearly feel the question is uncontroversial and unbiased, a helpful tool to winkle out the desired information. The same question crops up in online dating encounters. From experience, it t

Search online for ‘revenge fiction’ and you’ll find examples of novels in which a desire for revenge drives the plot: The Count of Monte Cristo , Frankenstein , True Grit , Murder on the Orient Express , Gone Girl , Wuthering Heights … This story concerns a different type of revenge fiction, where writing a novel is itself an act of revenge – fiction that portrays a real-life person known to the writer in an unfavourable or compromised way. Think revenge porn, but with bett

In recent years drag has gone mainstream. Actually, it’s bigger than that. Drag has become all-conquering, ubiquitous, the performance art of the moment. The art of cross-dressing for entertainment has a long history, often confined to spaces frequented by consenting adults. By the late 20th century in Britain, drag was drawing an enthusiastic subculture to gay bars such as London’s Vauxhall Tavern, where Lily Savage (aka Paul O’Grady) became a cult figure. O’Grady consciousl

Amid the endless coverage of this year’s Glastonbury Festival I came across this enigmatic nugget from Time Out magazine: ‘Dermot O’Leary played a DJ set. It kinda slapped.’ Kinda slapped, says Time Out’s feature-writer Chiara Wilkinson. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I resolved to work out what this might mean, through Poirot-style deduction, without having to look it up in one of the ever-expanding online dictionaries of slang. Clearly, the metaphor being used is s