So ended a global empire which dispatched fleets of giant gray warships round the world to secure its wealth and which needed to be underpinned by \u00adserious ideas, nobly phrased and spoken by serious people. A post-imperial country increasingly famous for the Beatles (for heaven\u2019s sake) and the miniskirt did not need such things. Although the deep old sources of our wealth were drying up, we were for a time affluent. No other power could so effectively have dispelled the austere, hollow-cheeked stoicism, the tolerance of bad food in inadequate amounts, the thin sour beer, watered to help the war effort, the national motto of \u201cmustn\u2019t grumble.\u201d<\/p>\n
English Protestantism, with its secret enjoyment of the chilly, the grim, and the frugal, was killed in fifteen years by supermarkets and TV commercials, fake Italian restaurants, cheap holidays in Spain. The Church\u2019s loveliest and most accessible service, Evensong, was killed off in many parishes because, in the days before VCRs, worshippers preferred to watch a dramatization of John Galsworthy\u2019s The Forsyte Saga on TV. Thus do great traditions end, and a culture that in living memory still read The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress and readily recognized quotations from Isaiah now watches Sex in the City and thinks Vanity Fair is a magazine. I have learned, in a time of loss where anything good and beloved fights to survive, to mourn such departures but not to imagine that, in this life, what is lost will ever return. It will not. But anyone who is pleased that it is gone for good is a fool.<\/p>\n