Those Who Help Themselves

Doubtless with all due humility, cathedral authorities at York Minster are congratulating themselves on their achievements during God's little prank with the plague. With the help of funding from the Government, from the Church of England's moneybags and even from the York Minister Fund, they have toddled through the pandemic in true Tory fashion, by sacking fifty-five people and closing one of the country's oldest schools. Such is their faith in divine protection that they are now waving the begging bowl to pay for the restoration of a fifteenth-century stained-glass puff piece about Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, an Anglo-Saxon saint who pre-empted Boris Johnson in defecting from his native cult of Christianity to the Roman faction.