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Which cathedrals to put on the Christmas stamps must have seemed a thorny question
If you want to send a Christmas card to friends in places like Ireland, France or Spain, it will cost you £2.80 postage. That sounds a lot to me, but they will be able to get a stamp with a picture of Westminster Cathedral on it.
The new Christmas stamps all show cathedrals. I wonder if the thinking was that European destinations would be more likely to appreciate a Catholic one. But then, in Royal Mail’s eyes, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are in Europe too.
Which cathedrals to put on the Christmas stamps must have seemed a thorny question. A Catholic cathedral might have been selected for Edinburgh, Liverpool and Armagh. The most familiar cathedral in Edinburgh is St Giles’ (where the late Queen lay in state), but that is not a cathedral at all. It was made a cathedral only in 1633 and definitively lost it in 1689. Anyway the stamp people chose St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral with its three spires, designed in 1874 by Sir Gilbert Scott.
For Liverpool they chose his grandson Giles Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece rather than Paddy’s Wigwam by Sir Frederick Gibberd, architect of the much missed Didcot power station, with its six cooling towers each 374ft high.
For Armagh, the Church of Ireland cathedral made the stamp. In the naive style adopted by the designer, Judy Joel, it doesn’t look all that impressive, and nor does Westminster Cathedral. She makes the tower look squat when everyone knows it is tall and thin.
In any case, since the stamp simply bears the word “Westminster”, without any mention of “cathedral” or “Christmas”, postmen in the Stans, from Kazakh- to Turkmeni-, might take it for the central mosque.
I was thinking how tricky it is to switch from one version of the “Our Father” to another, and then Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London, used a phrase in the prayer that no one else does.
It was during the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph, and, as she led the prayers, she successfully negotiated the Book of Common Prayer’s archaisms: “which art in heaven”, “in earth”, “them that trespass”. Then came “And lead them not into temptation”. That can’t be right, I thought.
I’m in no position to criticise. I can hardly get a sentence out without tripping up. The other day, I had to read out something online containing the word tesserae. If it had been in a classical Latin sentence, the -ae would have rhymed with my. In English it can be like may or like me. (The Oxford English Dictionary gives the latter first.) I followed the OED, but in the recording, hesitation made it sound like a fluff. The Bishop of London’s recitation sounded like a fluff too: she clearly said them not us, but the timing and stress were awry.
I was reminded, though, of John Aubrey’s remark in his Brief Lives about Robert Sanderson, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. “He had no great memory,” he wrote. “When I was a fresh-man and heard him read his first lecture, he was out in the Lord’s Prayer.”
That would have been during the English Civil War, when there were bigger things to worry about than a verbal hiccup. So there are today, what with Ukraine, Israel and Iran. I’m glad that the Cenotaph service was broadcast live. The First World War was a long time ago, but you can hardly say it isn’t relevant just now.
Would you like a book inscribed by Mother Teresa, St Teresa of Calcutta? If so, why?
Perhaps it’s not straightforward to say exactly why. But a book is up for sale on Thursday at Forum Auctions in London expected to fetch £1,000. It is a paperback of Desmond Doig’s Mother Teresa: Her People and Her Work, from 1978.
On a preliminary page yellowed with age and spotted with water, in splodgy blue ink, is an inscription saying: “God is love and He loves you. Love others as He loves you and through this love become Holy because He who made you is Holy. God bless you. 23.4.79, Teresa.”
Is the book one of those “non-significant” relics nevertheless to be “preserved in sealed cases” and “honoured with a religious spirit”, as the Congregation for the Causes of Saints decreed in 2017? Or is it more like another book in the sale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows inscribed by J.K. Rowling “To Tess with lots of love”. That is expected to fetch £1,200.
Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.
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