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Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman once described progressive rock as the ‘porn of the music industry; you bought an album under the counter in a brown paper bag’. He was no doubt referring to the genre’s mid-1970s nadir when punk burst onto the scene and nicked all the cool kids, leaving the nerds to their embarrassing flares and concept albums. Fast forward 50 years and it’s the nerds who prevail. Anyone out there still listening to Sham 69? These are the marginalised, workaday Brits you rarely get to see on television anymore Yes, the proggiest of the 1970s rock behemoths, is on tour again with an album of new material in the

‘You’re what?’ ‘What do you do?’ ‘Why do they need one of those?’ These are some of the questions I was asked when I first became the chaplain of Scunthorpe United Football Club in 2002, a position I’ve held ever since. At that time, there were fewer than one hundred sports chaplains across the United Kingdom, mainly in football, but some in Rugby Union, Rugby League, cricket and, er, horse racing. Now there are nearly a thousand. Not all managements are happy with chaplaincy. Several Premier League clubs don’t have one So what does a chaplain do? I like to think that a chaplain loiters. I realise that in other spheres, loitering with intent may

I recently had an encounter with Oliver Cromwell’s hat which, these days, rests on a bespoke hat-rest in the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon. It’s an astonishing piece of craftsmanship being far wider than any normal hat at nearly three feet across. The perfectly horizontal brim is constructed from thick black felt and the central head-holding part is a cylinder that rises sharp and perpendicular, like a chimney pot from a roof.  What is absent from small museums like this, mercifully, is the over-bearing hand of a committee of arts graduates What a sight he must have been, wearing this extraordinary hat, at the dissolution of the Rump Parliament in 1653,

Over the last decade, I have offered legal advice to thousands of students accused of cheating in their assessments. In university jargon, the term for cheating is ‘academic misconduct’. Although many assessments remain online after Covid, some have returned to the exam hall. There are still instances, therefore, of cheating à l’ancienne, with students writing notes on various limbs or smuggling in scraps of paper with minute writing.  I have had clients whose former partners have tipped off their ex’s university about historical episodes of cheating At times, the cheat is caught by an invigilator spotting a nervous glance towards an annotated palm. In other cases, the crib sheet falls