‘Ask your telephone,’ said my husband satirically when I made an innocent enquiry on a point of fact. My telephone was having a little rest, since it had run out of juice in the annoyingly capricious way these machines have. But my husband had unwittingly hit upon a trend in modern culture: that we hardly know anything if we are deprived of the help of Mr Google and his friends.
Last week I was standing outside St Fin Barre’s cathedral (in Cork) and someone was pointing out the angel on the central gable of the west facade, which the architect William Burges had wanted to be a figure of Christ in Judgment, until the good Protestants of the city vetoed it. The angel stands in a pointed oval frame of stone. ‘That’s a mandorla,’ observed a friend, ‘or do I mean mandala?’ Whichever it was, no one could remember, on the spot, where the words were accented.
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