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I watched an interview on the Beeb between 'Andrew Marr' ... in my view, not the brightest cookie in the bag among our Meejah interviewers ... and a French Europe Minister called Mme de Lombard de Montchalin. She was young and bright and fluent ... the Marr kept explaining to her what the EU had got to agree to in view of the fact that the British electorate had voted for Sovereignty and knew what it expected from this. She patiently pointed out that Europe and its constituent nations also professed to operate on a principle of popular legitimacy. I don't think she quite got this difficult concept across to poor dim Andrew.

Apparently she is a practising Catholic.

Intrigued by her name ... or rather, her husband's name ... I started grubbing around on the computer (you know how it is). Apparently, his family stood well among the French aristocracy under the Bourbons. It included an Abbe who, in exile after the Revolution, gave orations in London after the deaths of the Duc d'Enghien (shot during the bloodlust of the Corsican Enlightenment) and of the Abbe Edgeworth (relative of Maria and, at the end, Confessor to Louis XVI).

These Orations were preached in the 'Chapel of S Patrick'. I suspect this may mean S Patrick's, Soho ... a church currently being (literally) undermined by an endless and intrusive project to construct an Underground Railway (zillions of years behind schedule and £billions over budget ... insultingly, they intend, so I think I read somewhere, to call it the 'Elizabeth Line'.). This church is currently under the management of the admirable and hospitable Canon Sherbrooke, who was educated in a large school near Slough ... why has Father never been made a bishop??? Perhaps our new Nuncio will remedy this oversight.

Dunno why, but somehow I invariably feel more at home in those Catholic churches which date from before the 'Restoration of the Hierarchy'. S Patrick's is one of these, as well as our Ordinariate main church, the Assumption Warwick Street.