A week after the scaffolding which has protected its blushes since 1983 was removed, Lincoln cathedral has been accused of betraying the Sistine-hood, promoting sluttiness as next to Godliness, and “basically asking for it, the slag”.
‘You can’t win,’ complained the magnificent 11th century edifice. ‘For nearly 40 years bully-boy basilicas like Canterbury and Winchester have accused me of priggishness, while flaunting their own flying buttresses and rounded apses to the world. Well, four decades of sweaty-fingered architecture students fiddling with your entablature and fingering your cupolas in the name of “cleaning” feels more like purgatory than purity, let me tell you.
‘Now I’ve been defrocked, I’ve had nothing but lewd tweets about my magnificent West front, while Mumsnet have accused me of corrupting school parties with my Romanesque grotesques. And those mortar-addled masons undressed me with unholy haste: the weather might be warm now, but in a few weeks I’ll have nippy colonnades and goose-pimples right up my pilasters.’
Rumours are circulating that Tom “you can leave your Tugendhat on” and Grant “crotchless” Shapps are locked in a bidding war to have naked images of themselves “accidentally” projected onto the cathedral to highlight their back-to-basics credentials. This has been denied by the cathedral, whose spire was the most prominent erection in the Western world until it collapsed in a shower of lumber and hubris in 1547; a trajectory faithfully repeated by Boris Johnson.
image from pixabay