I remember the ephemera at the back of St Barnabas. The church stands in Oxford’s suburb of Jericho, near the University Press. It had proper church clutter: stumps of candles, dogeared pamphlets and reminders of long gone diocesan initiatives. St Barnabas – a beautiful Italianate monstrosity, plonked by the high Victorians, with their classic tact, amid a cluster of crabby little houses, once slums but now worth millions – is good at collecting this stuff. In the sacristy is a vestment made from the coronation hangings of Tsar Nicholas II, smuggled out of Petrograd at the revolution; now the double-headed eagle peeps through the incense, delighting porters, dons and motor workers alike on high days and holidays.
The piece of uselessness that most captivated me, as I pretended to help tidy up at the back when an undergraduate, was a pamphlet entitled ‘DID JESUS COME TO BRITAIN?’. The question was answered in the very first word of the long diatribe that followed, which was an emphatic, capitalised ‘YES’.
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