The Architecture of Christmas
Having now received three or four examples of the “midnight service in an English village in the snow” Christmas card, it struck us this morning how very peculiar the architecture of the dear old village church appears.
The general type of the church would appear to be Midland perpendicular with displacements. The transept is roughly where the north porch might be and has a window rather than a door, entrance is through the bellringers’ door in the tower and the fenestration is consistently at variance with the date of the rest of the building. Our tentative conclusion is that there is a deep collective nostalgia for oddly designed perpendicular churches subjected to a vicious and not particularly scholarly restoration in the late nineteenth century.
Which would doubtless have incurred the righteous wrath of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, a body not especially popular in this household at the moment since their latest comic failed to distinguish that “enormousness” and “enormity” mean different things, and also made nauseous and repeated use of the word “feel” in places where the meaning was “think” or “judge”, or “decide”. I’m not sure one pays subscriptions to bodies (however worthy) to cultivate their sensibilities.