There are days when, without wanting to do anything much about it, I can't see any point in living; to sleep for the best part of twenty hours and feel as bears must emerging from caves in Spring. Today I emerge nearer noon than when I first woke, catching an extract from Hiroshima 08:15 on the radio. This first-hand account is well worth listening to if you're having a bad day, incidentally, but I go on to watch a Financial Times vid on the 'Tube as well.
I do this largely in the hope that future historians of the diarised past will debate if 'the Tube' refers to London's Underground instead of a long-dead streaming service now that it's done telepathically? But the video documentary, which I feel we should call a 'vocumentary' but sadly don't, is about a collapse in worldwide fertility rates, which the man on the telly attributes to the introduction of smartphones circa 2005 and the lives (or lack of) that came with it.
I say this because none of the reasons given for a collapse in coupling, physically or as a way of life, were connected with religion ~ yet it largely governed how societies worked universally until quite recently.
The chapel above was designed by Pugin, or actually six of them seeing as at the time people hooked up physically. One or other Pugin would design both the Houses of Parliament and the school ~ Scarisbrick Hall ~ my son went to briefly because to my wife it looked like Hogwarts and I was paying the fees.
The chapel was connected to the Catholic seminary that began before Catholicism was legalised in the UK, and only closed as such in 2011. It did so not because, as I might have suggested to the dean, people were tired of majoring in paedophilia, but because there were not enough men applying to the priesthood.
But there were two forces essentially at play at the time, the one being a pressure to marry and to procreate shortly afterward; the other being to abandon any hope of doing so in obeisance to a higher calling. Nowadays it is more about watching the confected lifestyles of a your 'besties' at a distance, leaving little time or opportunity for going out and fucking them: as the dean and I lamented over a cappuccino.
For much of the time that the seminary was operating, that would have entailed not only off-spring but marriage in perpetuity, the only alternative to which would have been a life of abstinence in perpetual worship of a higher being and in the hope things improved after death.
Have a good week!
The author recommends a visit to Ushaw in the northeast of England, but was there too for the Parkrun they host. He did this in 00:31:52, for which he had any number of Hail Marys to recite prior a flat white and cheese scone.
