For the last time, on Saturday, I stuck the head of the late Queen, without a barcode, on an envelope and posted it. I have kept the two remaining stamps of my sheet as souvenirs. Stamps survive, of course, under the new King, but they are gradually becoming like cash – marginal and out of date. The letter is no longer a primary means of communication, just as notes and coin are no longer the primary means of purchase. I wonder how these changes will affect our view of monarchy. The head of the monarch, unnamed, has been the daily sight of virtually every citizen since the Penny Black arrived in 1840. The head of a monarch on coins, similarly visible to all, is more than two millennia old. When the Pharisees seek to trap Jesus about the conflict between worldly and spiritual authority in the Roman Empire, he calls for a penny. ‘Whose is this image and superscription?’ he enquires. They answer: ‘Caesar’s.’ Famously, Jesus then says: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ The very word ‘sovereign’ for our gold coin worth £1 in the 19th century was a reminder that money was Caesar’s. This gave the coin an added magic. How could Jesus make his point so neatly today, what with cards and PINs and crypto? Will children now growing up link their sovereign, their money and their means of communication? Does money have new Caesars and, if so, who are they? It is slightly frightening that there is no unambiguous answer.

It is a curious fact, by the way, that Elizabeth II was our only monarch whose head consistently appeared on our banknotes (from 1960). I imagine that the reason for this is that banknotes started as the inventions of individual banks, promised against actual money (sterling) and so acquired official status only with the passage of time. Perhaps as a vestige of this, Scottish banknotes do not carry the monarch’s head (it is a phenomenon that predates devolution and is therefore not a piece of SNP mischief), or is it just that Scots never wanted to see the words ‘Bank of England’ in their wallets? In any event, it is possible, given the pace of technological change, that cash will disappear altogether and so Charles III will be not only the second monarch to appear on our banknotes, but also the last.

I cannot agree with Toby Young’s view (see his column last week) that Barbie is just ‘a gender studies seminar disguised as a summer blockbuster’. First, the film is funny, which a gender studies seminar (presumably) isn’t. Second, the only character who touches one’s heart is Ken. It turns out that he really does, after his own fashion, love Barbie. Surely gender studies seminars have no time for poignant men.

Last week, 4 Canon Lane, Chichester, was renamed George Bell House. It had been called 4 Canon Lane since 2016. Before that, it had been called George Bell House. This forth-and-back reflects the strange sequence of events. In 2015, the diocese paid compensation to ‘Carol’ for an alleged sexual assault by Bell, when Bishop of Chichester, in the late 1940s or thereabouts. In that year, the present Bishop of Chichester also gave her a formal apology. Bell had died, unaccused, in 1958. The church process by which he was posthumously convicted nearly 60 years later had not included anyone speaking on his behalf. A number of us, one or two of whom had known Bell, started an informal group to clear his name. We were confident that the accusation was false and certain that the process had been wrong. The latter point was conceded by the Church after a fine review by Lord Carlile. The former was not. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, asserted that a ‘significant cloud’ still hung over Bell. He finally retracted this in November 2021. By then, poor Bell had been unpersoned by the diocese – his name, which had been hallowed, effaced. George Bell House, founded to promote his interest in vocation, education and reconciliation, was one example. The re-renaming all but completes the formal restoration of Bell’s reputation. The Chapter of the cathedral, especially the interim Dean, Simon Holland, deserves credit, because this change was resisted in some quarters. The innocent man won in the end. I hope history will record this fully. If, for example, you look online at the ICSA report on child abuse, which made Bell one of its cases, you will not pick up the vital fact that Bell did not abuse anybody. 

Algy Cluff, former proprietor and chairman of this paper, has just completed his quintet of recollections, the last being called, at the suggestion of Tom Stoppard, The Importance of Being Algy. Each book is wonderfully succinct, weighing in at about 140 pages of quite large print. Taken together, though, they make a magnum opus. The series, begun when Algy was already 65 and holed up in the Scottish Highlands in midwinter, is a subtle, unstructured way of capturing a particular era and his uniquely mixed milieu – military, business, art, journalism, aristocracy and the very end of Empire. Of these elements, he tells me, he loved most, ‘without any question’, the army. ‘I loved the good-natured brutality of the NCOs. They would reduce you to rubble but somehow made you laugh rather than cry.’ He wrote all the books with his fountain pen and in capital letters. He had kept only desk diaries, and recommends everyone do the same, because they are excellent prompts to the memory. Is there anything he left out? ‘Yes, I had wanted to put in a chapter called “Myself and MI6”, 100 per cent redacted except for place names like “Lagos”’, but this was frowned on. Now, for the first time in his 83 years, Algy is keeping a diary with a new book in mind. It will be an account of a lithium mine he is opening in conjunction with a government somewhere in Africa.