Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the place for the rigours of Lenten discipline to begin. Some might say it is hardly the place for a clergyman at all. Peter Hitchens once commented on my clerical collar – stiff, crisp, linen – and said that if he saw a man wearing such a get-up at a racecourse he would assume he was an illegal bookmaker in disguise. Still, I recall that one of the most successful owner-breeders of all time was a clergyman. The vicar of Ashby de la Launde, the Revd J.W. King, won the Oaks, 1,000 Guineas and St Leger with his horse, Apology. There were, as the Bible tells us, giants in the earth in those days.
A bad beginning to the 40 days and 40 nights caused me to seek comfort in the words of Charles Kingsley, who was dismissive of performative piety: ‘An effeminate shaveling ideal. A poor pitiful thing.’ The Church of England’s social media this Lent has been full of this. I’m sure the pallid and thin social media managers and climate activists who have been the faces of their ‘causes for hope’ mean very well, but it all seems very far from the days of brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk.
The problem of modern Lent isn’t just uninspiring social media content from the Church. We aren’t very good at marking time any more. This is not just an ecclesiastical issue. A local gamekeeper recently complained to me that some shoots are flouting the well-established seasons that govern such things to seek corporate custom.
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