As a small group of Pentecostals sing on the edge of what had once been the churchyard, the clown recalls a travel weary day when shops were fewer and the distance between them farther away; a July afternoon when a cruel sun blasted the mud of the High Road until it baked into cracks. On this day, he sought the cool of stone flags and walls too thick to be warmed by the sun. Seating himself on a wood pew at the back of the church, he genuflected as was the custom. The day was a Wednesday; the curate, an effete boy from Peterborough or one of the villages thereabouts reading first the sixteenth chapter of the Second Book of Samuel, followed by the First Epistle of Peter chapter two commencing at verse eleven, his reedy voice concluding at chapter three verse seven, husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives. Once this was complete, Bonavia Hunt in majesty striking the whalebone keys of the great organ, a suspended C, an A major, E in the seventh, C again and trilling down the scale like water over flat stones. The notes resounded against the tall pillars and mullioned rose of the great church of St Paul that is now a graffiti stained precinct of market stalls and cheap fashion, and a seventeen storey tower owned and managed by Brent Council. It was the last time he attended a church service, and the first he’d been to in a century.