I’ve been rather preoccupied with the proposed sale of our house here in the Oval. I’m hoping this will resolve itself one way or the other in the course of this week – we agreed a sale but since the darling lambs have been silent.

I’m finding it hard to concentrate of anything much. that said I’ve seen Les Troyens at Royal Opera House 9wholly brilliant) Billy Budd at the ENO in the Colosseum – some good moments – and Joyce DiDonato at Wigmore Hall singing songs of Venice – La Serenissima by La Gloriosa! I will put these up.

I’ve found and tried two recipes for flour-less cakes – one of orange the other lemon. this will finally make me sort out the recipes for your delight and ease of use.

Mr Obama has won the Supreme Court judgement and that and other matters are now shaping the US election. ‘there is a good letter to America which might follow on from this…as the election seems to be taking the US into an even more polarised place than it found itself in 2000.

Today i went once again to Westminster Cathedral for Mass. The choir gave us the Mozart Missa Brevis in B – a delightful work of such purity one cannot help but be moved. the body of St John Southwell the Reformation martyr and saint is in the nave and it reminded me that the story of the English reformation. That history is still distorted by the prism of Victorian “exceptionalism”. These carbuncles encrusted the narrative histories and still poison the waters of historical interpretation. We owe to those who lost their lives in that great confessional struggle to tell their story more honestly. jingoism and false pride inflame history’s wrongs and make it harder for us to put the wrongs of the past in a proper perspective. I’ve therefore decided first to dig out and re-type my PhD and submit it and secondly, to start upon a narrative history of a single year – 1553 – which for better or worse changed England forever.

By next week these things will start appearing piecemeal here on the Webpage.

Finally i want to say Andy Murray may yet surprise his critics and prove to be both a champion and a better and more graceful one than his many detractors allow. I think he already deserves congratulation for taking UK tennis to places it hasn’t visited for almost seventy years!