City and Suburban
THIS week I had my fiftieth birthday. I had felt it coming on for some time. Standing nude in the bath- room two months ago, I suddenly realised I could not see my toes any more because my stomach was in the way. 1. Is it legal for me to turn myself into a company with my family as shareholders and me as a paid managing director?
2. Is it legal for me to make a reciprocal arrangement with a friend whereby I pay an allowance to his children and he pays one to mine?
3. Ant I entitled to a clothes allowance because I sometimes appear on television and often lecture on behalf of old churches, and how much allowance am I permitted?
I am not asking the Commissioners their opinion of the morality of my actions if I were to turn myself into a company, make a reciprocal agreement and claim a clothes allowance. just as I am not questioning the State's moral right to erect a huge new school in contemporary sprawling geometric cut?es of glass on the hill above Wadebridge where the road turns off to Polzeath. I merely call out from my rowing boat of the individual for, help to the State liner as she sails out into the night, or is it into the dawn?
'REDUNDANT' I have been touring in pastoral Notts near the exquisite old town of Newark—warm red brick villages with pantiled roofs clustering round grey churches among oaks and ash trees. And I came across the supreme example of the 'redundant' church—an old chapel-of-ease in a field, a few hundred yards from the trim, well-kept parish church of Elston where the great Darwin family had its seat and has its monuments. The chapel-of-ease—nave and chancel and bell in the west wall- - was of greyish stone with an orange-coloured Norman south door and roof of old red tiles. Dr. Pevsner's useful guide warned me of a good interior. But when he saw it six years ago, it was probably not ruined. Now I looked through the smashed early fifteenth-century windows of this locked build- ing and saw the box pews and hat pegs and Jacobean, two- decker and squire's pew and west gallery all rotting with damp. There were holes in the plaster ceiling. The eighteenth-century texts and royal arms painted on the walls were fungus-marked and fading. Some pears were shrivelling on the desecrated altar. Another winter will see this delicate and unspoiled village interior past repair. If the Historic Churches Preserva- tion Trust has any money left, this little church must be saved however apathetic the Diocese of Southwell, which presum- ably has let it fall into decay, may be about its condition.
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