I didn’t go to church this year. I mean, I did. I went to a few. I like to look at how they were built, the small doors, the forgotten, blocked-off stairways and here, where I live in exile from my land of lost content, Wessex and its blue remembered hills in the mountainous coastal region of Suffolk, the evidence of the shrinking churches showing how even hundreds of years ago the decline began, when storms and shingle and sheep meant it just wasn’t worth hanging around here any more. The people drifted away and with them the money to keep the roof on huge churches once full to bursting; they pulled down parts of them to keep the bills down, long before Cromwell’s Puritan taliban came along to chop the heads off statues and desecrate fonts. God told them to do it, after all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n