We went to see Julian Stair’s pottery in deepest East Dulwich in order to admire his recent work: the font he has designed and made for St. Augustine, Hammersmith and an assortment of vessels, many in sets, simple in form, differentiated by subtle changes in shape, colour and glazing, some having a slightly archaeological character, much informed by his knowledge of ceramic history:-

I had a sudden moment of brief optimism last night, the first for a long time, as I watched the clips of the Prime Minister speaking in the street outside 10, Downing Street last night. It was as if he did not believe his own rhetoric, as the crowd bayed for his blood in Whitehall. All the puff and pomposity had gone out of him, as if he had suddenly realised that perhaps, after all, it was not such a great idea to have prorogued parliament, to have upset and alienated not just the fringes of the Tory party, but now increasingly its middle ground, those who may be anxious about losing their seats, those who were told, and believed, that he was a liberal at heart, and, instead, has thrown in his lot with the extremists, the zealots, taking advice only from a non-conservative who has moved his bunker from his father’s estate in Durham and believes that life is a war game. Maybe he will lose the election he may be about to call after all. He looked deflated.

I have been asked about the relationship of Hawksmoor and Gibbs and whether or not St. Anne’s, Limehouse was influenced by St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields (or vice versa). I thought this would be easy to answer, but it is not, because I had forgotten that both served as Surveyors for the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, Hawksmoor from when the Commission was first established in 1711, and Gibbs more briefly from 1713 to 1715, when he was ousted as a Tory and a Catholic. So, they would have sat round the table together, poring over the designs for the early churches built as a result of the Commission, including both St. Anne’s and St. Mary-le-Strand (St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields was the result of a separate Act of Parliament in 1720). Temperamentally, I see them as very different – Gibbs the product of a proper training in architecture in Rome under Carlo Fontana, Hawksmoor an apprentice and dogsbody to Wren. Maybe there was more of a crossover in ideas than I had thought.

I know St. George-in-the-East so much less well than St Anne’s, Limehouse, because it is not on any of my normal routes. But it was this morning – majestic as ever, more complex in its geometry than St. Anne’s, more highly ornamented, with its unexpected, highly decorated, pepperbox towers which are such a contrast to the more austerely geometric structure of the church as a whole.

The site to its south is still undeveloped:-

I love the purity and complexity of its geometry, demonstrating the restlessness of Hawksmoor’s mind, ingesting classical ideas and motifs from his extensive library and somehow creating an architecture which is so purely abstract:-

We walked through the churchyard of St. Anne, nostalgically peering through the fence into the back of our old garden. I have photographed it so many times that there is little to add, except the memory of Tony Snowdon photographing John Piper there in 1963, when he was preparing the print of his Retrospect of Churches, published by the Curwen Press the following year:-

The pyramid tomb in the churchyard, inscribed on its south face ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’, whose origin and purpose (and meaning) has never been satisfactorily identified:-

And the back of the builder’s yard, now being developed, next door to the churchyard:-

I gather that the film is based on Coker. Does this change one’s view of the film ? Not at all, except that it helps to explain its depth and its reality, the nuances of the English class system, which so appealed to Coker, his love of double-breasted suits and East Anglia. One feels without knowing it that the film is based on long buried and autobiographical pain and on some truth about the complexities of life and how they transmogrify into art, even without knowing the original character and how he might have inspired it. Anthony’s voice in the film was apparently based on a recording of the original. I would be interested in hearing it.

We watched The Souvenir last night, a troubling, disturbing and emotionally claustrophobic film, which is said to be partly autobiographical, and which we found the more disturbing because so many of the characteristics of the main character, Anthony, replicate in strange detail the life of Nick Coker, a friend of ours who was so exactly as Anthony is in the film, handsome, but louche, at Cambridge and then the Courtauld Institute, always living and spending beyond his means, always pretending that he had a life in the secret service (it was never made clear if it was the British or Russian), was a heroin addict, and, as Anthony does in the film, died of a drug overdose in the gentleman’s lavatories of the Wallace Collection.

So, is this a question of art imitating life ? Is it just an accident ? I was long ago castigated by a writer for seeing a possible correspondence to a fictional character. But Coker created a mythology of himself and was a close friend of the filmmaker, Julien Temple. The coincidences are too great.

I have been enjoying the garden in it’s late summer mode.

The crab apple tree, Malus John Downie:-

And its companion, Malus Golden Hornet:-

The medlars, or cat’s arse:-

Angelica gigas:-

Abuilon megapotamicum:-

I’m learning.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a bit more commentary on the sacking of Sonia Khan, because, as I read it, it was almost certainly illegal. From what I have read in today’s papers, she was a career civil servant who had worked in several other departments before being employed in the Treasury by, first, Philip Hammond and, now, Sajid Javid. So, she will either have reported to the Permanent Secretary – most likely – or Javid himself, if she had the status of a Special Advisor. Either way she should surely have been subject to the normal disciplinary procedures of the civil service, if she had, indeed, committed an offence, which is unclear.

Of course, she won’t go to an employment tribunal. People seldom do because they will be conscious that it will damage their future employment prospects.

What Cummings has almost certainly done is something which he wasn’t authorised to do, contrary to all established HR procedures, and possibly open to the charge of bullying.

Funny that ! It feels like their general approach to the rulebook, which is why they are so keen to tear it up.

Having read a certain amount about the decision to prorogue parliament today, I am struck by two things particularly. The first is the letter that Boris Johnson wrote to the One Nation group of MPs in order to win their support in July in which he said so categorically that he ‘would like to make it absolutely clear that I am not attracted to arcane procedures such as the prorogation of Parliament. As someone who aspires to be the Prime Minister of a democratic nation, I believe in finding consensus in the House of Commons’. He put the issue so beautifully clearly. This was a month ago. How must they now feel if they voted for him ?

The second is that he appears not to have discussed the decision in cabinet, which includes so many, including Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid and Matt Hancock, who have gone on public so recently expressing their extreme hostility to the idea of prorogation. So, it is not just parliament that he has kicked in the teeth, the Queen and his political opponents, but so many of his allies and supporters. How must they feel as they face their families and friends over the breakfast table and have to defend, and support, a decision, which they so vocally don’t and can’t ?