“He had sometimes attempted to keep a diary himself, the kind of record of his daily life that could rival famous clerical diarists of the past, a nineteen-seventies Woodforde or Kilvert. What was he to write about the events of this morning? ‘My sister Daphne made a gooseberry tart and told me that she was going to live on the outskirts of Birmingham’? Could that possibly be of interest to readers of the next century?”