It’s probably too soon to suggest, as the Rev Richard Coles recently did, that Elizabeth Bingham’s Kneelers is the best non-fiction book of 2023. But, like him, I’m a little in love with this guide to the most practised (and overlooked) British folk art of the past 90 years. Bingham is an authority on Anglican church canvas-work kneelers, and in her lovely book she traces their history from their beginnings in 1930s Winchester, through their zenith after the coronation of Elizabeth II, to the present day, in which a dedicated few keep the tradition alive.
Kneelers celebrate and memorialise every aspect of life, not only the religious – though Bible stories do feature, if you’re in the market for a tapestry of Jonah and the whale – and this makes them both touching and surprising. My favourites so far: a grey whippet (St Peter and St Paul, Deddington); a Second World War ARP warden fighting a fire (St Mary Magdalene, Woodstock); Sizewell nuclear power station in the sunshine (St Edmunds, Southwold).
In the 1980s, my mum designed a new set of kneelers for St George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem. They depict the fruits of the Holy Land – dates, figs, pomegranates – and whenever I’m there, I like to check up on them, though this isn’t always straightforward.
In 2018, I rocked up for evensong, only to find myself the sole congregant (Christian communities in Jerusalem, increasingly under threat, are ever more depleted). Aargh! I tried to make a dash for it, but I’d already been spotted, and so it was that I joined a priest, a curate, a caretaker and a resident American pilgrim for the service. They were so kind: warm, welcoming, amazed to hear of my mother’s handiwork. But I’m a non-believer, and British to boot. My cheeks burned and my buttocks clenched as I struggled to read a lesson minus my glasses, warbled my way tunelessly through an unfamiliar hymn, and fumbled appallingly the splendid words of the Apostles’ Creed.
Theatrical impressions
To the National Theatre for The Motive and the Cue, a new play by Jack Thorne about Richard Burton, John Gielgud and the Hamlet they staged on Broadway in 1964.
I’m glad to have seen the performances at its heart. Mark Gatiss’s turn as Gielgud and Johnny Flynn’s as Burton are marvellous; Gatiss’s, I think, is touched with greatness. But as the hours ticked by, I grew twitchy. I can’t be the only one who feels that our culture is ever more secondhand; that TV and theatre are increasingly peopled with facsimiles; that impersonation is supplanting character. Imagination has fallen to its knees. Who is writing the Jimmy Porters and the Archie Rices of the future? The Hester Collyers and the Lady Macbeths?
Millennium lift off
On the subject of making stuff up, I’ve just finished Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of This Book, a novel that reads, teasingly, like memoir. Its narrator is a nameless woman who’s walking across London, and, because every geographical detail is accurate, when she stepped into something called the Millennium Inclinator, I rushed to Google. This, surely, was fantasy. To my knowledge, there’s no such thing.
But it seems that McCracken, who lives in Texas, did not invent this unlikely sounding portal: a funicular by any other name. Though she might as well have done, for I’ll never ride on it now. The Millennium Inclinator was an inclined lift (effectively, a tiny cable-hauled railway) that enabled pedestrians to climb from the north bank of the Thames to the Millennium Bridge above without using the stairs. It opened in 2003, was refurbished in 2012, and closed forever in 2021.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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