Thoughts on this story from last week. Churches in pre-modern times were the gathering places of communities, serving as hostels, markets, breweries and - yes - venues for feasting and celebration and no doubt lots of music and dancing. They could be so again, especially if we could persuade them to get rid of the pews (unnecessary Victorian innovations, usually). But that's PARISH CHURCHES - the gathering places of local communities, where informality is quite appropriate when it’s not Sunday. This story is about ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, where it should be 100% solemnity 24/7. St Paul’s is the pre-eminent monument of Britain’s greatness and its Christianity. Built after the apocalyptic Great Fire and on the eve of our extraordinary success in the 18th and 19th centuries - the resting place of our quintessential national heroes Nelson and Wellington - it represents the rededication of the country to the religion it was founded on. Like Trafalgar Square - scene of the notorious Ifthar - St Paul’s isn’t an empty space. These places aren’t neutral. They’re not village halls to be borrowed by any community group or business that wants to hold an event. They stand for something meaningful; ‘august and royal’. A country that can’t see this is in deep trouble. What next? The nightclub Heaven doing a deal with Westminster Abbey - ‘the sacring place of the Kings of England’ as Evelyn Waugh described it - to license dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier? ‘Of course not’, you scoff. But why not, if you see nothing sacred (that is, unviolable) about such places? It’s instructive that the people praising the St Paul’s Fabric deal are two of the most prominent liberals of the day. Sadiq Khan and David Aaronavitch have celebrated every brick dismantled from the walls and foundations of our national life and called it progress. The result of their work is the cultural desert we’re in, and all our divisions and despair.