Even before I became a semi-lapsed Christian, back in my younger, more zealous days, I liked to think I had a healthy scepticism for organised religion, an irreverent attitude to Church authority. So I was surprised to find I experienced a little thrill when I spotted Sarah Mullally, soon to be installed as the first female archbishop of Canterbury, among the clergy traipsing into St Paul’s Cathedral on Sunday evening.
She was there in her capacity as Bishop of London, and I was there in my capacity as a bereaved daughter. Each year, St Paul’s holds a memorial service for the families of late patients of the nearby St Bartholomew’s Hospital; the room on the ward in which my father spent his last weeks looked out on to the cathedral.
It was a strange way to spend an evening. Chiefly, because my father’s own young, zealous days ended rather more dramatically than mine in vehement atheism. As I headed out into the cold, dark evening to travel to the service, I could hear him in my head saying: what are you bloody doing that for?
As my stepmother and I took our seats in the circle beneath the great domed ceiling, I considered our fellow churchgoers, still ensconced in their coats and scarves, and thought what a strange and depressing bunch we were. Whose idea was it, to gather a load of grieving people and stick them in a room with each other and hospital staff, just round the corner from where their loved ones died? It reminded me of the time my shorthand teacher, an elderly woman called Margaret, told me she was that evening to attend a party held by the funeral directors who organised her late husband’s send-off. What fun!
I had been to two previous services at St Paul’s, both of which were ordination ceremonies for friends and had the stupefying effect of a school prizegiving or university graduation: two hours of trying to focus your mind on the drudge of readings and unknown names, just for the ten seconds the person you know is at the front. The memorial service, having been designed for those of different faiths and none, was a zippy, more accessible hour. The readings were mostly too mawkish for my taste, and our mumbled efforts to follow the sheet music for the hymns, painful. Among all the familiarity of a Church of England service, it was the chanted recitation, or qiraat, from the Koran that took me to another place.
But far more emotional than any words spoken or sung was looking around at the hospital staff and bereaved families, and wondering at the great pain each of us carried, the things we must collectively have seen. It was a monument not just to the dead, but to the fortitude of the living.
There were more thrills in store a few days later, at a local brewery near Blackhorse Road, where M— and I, together with a couple of much smarter friends, raced to the top in the pub quiz. I bring very little to this semi-regularly assembled team, which consists of a tech/maths whizz, a biologist who also has an astonishingly good grasp of geography and the world champion* at music intros (* not technically verifiable). And me, a woman who contributes maybe three correct answers per quiz.
But what answers! This week, the final question of the last round – a wipeout, whereby if you get one of the six wrong, you lose all six points – was: in what French city did Joan of Arc die? Somewhere, deep in the depths of my brain, a thought stirred. When I was growing up in the Nineties, we had a Michael Morpurgo audiobook about Joan’s life and death. As a child, the French place names in it had held a mystical, beautiful lyricism: Domrémy, Orléans, Rouen… I ventured haltingly: I think it’s Rouen. Victory, and a modest prize of £50 in cash split four ways, was ours!
So reader, if you are a parent, pay careful attention to the audiobooks you play to your children. They may one day earn them £12.50.
[Further reading: Who killed Pasolini?]
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This article appears in the 06 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Exposed: Britain's next maternity scandal