Angels and Ministers of Grace

This being a fine Autumnal Sunday, I hoped you would appreciate a more spiritual ouevre than has recently been the case.

Lunched today with my angelic daughter, who has celebrated another year on this woeful planet without serious mishap. Indeed, she appears to thrive in the west of the Metropolis, and is still managing to cope with the three sciences. I am in awe: as Bro1, Bro2 and pater mortis would agree, the disciplines of Newton, Darwin or Einstein never troubled me. My offspring, however, is keen to apply Bunsen burner to Boyle's Law and multiply the Periodic Table. I harboured fond thoughts of a barrister, or someone in the City, but I now seem to drift towards dynamite and the Arctic Circle. Don't struggle with my oblique references; think 'yes we can'! If a difference can be made for later generations, I am sure she will not demur.

We wandered around the old church of St Pancras, avoiding his rather newer arriviste temple on the Euston Road, to savour the quick and the dead. Pancras did not make it to the age of my current angel, yet was eponymous of Augustine's first English church. Note to my transport correspondent: we can neither confirm nor deny that Domitian had Pancras put to death because the trains weren't running on time, but it is an interesting martyrdom. The quick were struggling through the church, so we toured the graveyard.

A son of Bach, some well-to-do families, and a pretty grand monument to all buried therein were in evidence. A tree surrounded by upended gravestones, where Thomas Hardy once worked, and the tomb of the Godwin family, who spawned Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley are highlighted too. The grave of Polidori is also in this church yard, a reminder of Byron's and the Shelleys' horror tales which brought Frankenstein to the common domain.

We mused on the theme of death and reincarnation, and on the transience of all life. And then we laughed about Betjeman's 'friendly bombs'. Truly a fecund area for literary discussion, and no signs of ghosts. Hamlet was calling for protection from a spectre he probably realised immediately as his father: my progeny offered me an afternoon of salvation from the deathly realities of life. Her middle name is Grace.