My granddaughter was christened at the Brompton Oratory on Saturday. Although the day was muggy and storms had been forecast, I am sorry to say that there was no thunder and lightening. Like Hector Berlioz recalling the circumstances of his birth — ‘I came into the world quite naturally, unheralded by any of the signs which, in poetic ages, preceded the advent of remarkable personages’ — I was a little put out that Holly’s reception into the Church was not accompanied by some celestial commotion.

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