Miracles happen. The Archbishop managed to speed in London
The speeding conviction of the Archbishop of Canterbury reveals an unexpectedly racy side to the leader of the worldwide Anglican communion. Not the least surprising aspect of the case is that he found a road in London on which to exceed the limit.
When I was learning to drive around Bloomsbury in the 1980s, London driving was a terrifying destruction derby of hurtling vehicles. More recently, the impenetrable congestion has rendered it a sedater
(if more frustrating) experience. But the fact that no one was going anywhere seemed to have a strangely beneficial effect on road manners: allowing someone to emerge from a side road was generally met with courteous flashing of hazard lights.
I wonder if the Archbishop was offered a speed awareness course. If so, it might have been worth considering, not just as a break from his fractious flock, but for the unexpectedly powerful benefits. Years ago I attended a speed awareness course in a drab Portakabin, where my fellow malefactors and I were lectured by a couple of chaps in beige slacks. It was the most boring few hours of my entire life, but also the most transformative. Our instructors’ vivid illustrations of the potentially fatal selfishness of speeding meant that I have kept to the limit ever since.
In London this was easy enough, but in rural Kent it has been another story. The roads are picturesquely winding and the speed limits a fast-changing mix of anything from 20 to 60mph. While I am keeping one eye on road signs and the other on the cavernous potholes, there will invariably zoom up behind me a person on an urgent mission to Cackle Street or Pratt’s Bottom.
Headlight flashing ensues, often followed by irritable overtaking on a blind bend. Around that bend, I have learnt, may be pelotons of cyclists in fluorescent Lycra, heedless drivers of racing sulkies, ramblers and slow-moving agricultural machinery.
My aversion to running into my fellow road users is even stronger than my aversion to being bullied by a person in a performance car. So I cling to the speed limit as to a lifeline – which one of these days, it may well turn out to be.
A letter to The Daily Telegraph bemoans the creeping replacement of printed restaurant menus with QR codes. “Even a solitary diner can enjoy a more convivial experience than simply staring at the phone,” observes Nick Crean. Physical menus can be many things: works of art, historical documents and treasured mementos. An online collection of international royal blowouts – royalmenus.com – includes the exquisitely illustrated birthday menu for “mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Twelve courses, including goose liver in aspic and sweet woodruff sorbet.
The menus of humbler meals are no less resonant. Would I still remember so vividly my first encounter with the alarming shellfish known as “violet” at an Avignon restaurant, or the fragrant vegetable soup in a modest establishment in Pontarlier if I had ordered them via a QR code rather than an animated discussion over a printed menu?
In my recollections of memorable meals, the food is inseparable from the company and the cheerful preamble of discussing a menu – printed or handwritten on a blackboard. To reduce all that to a QR code is to sterilise the elemental pleasure of sharing a meal.