The minister leading worship today – an elderly man, retired I would say – sought to communicate a light-hearted, welcoming, personable style. But he managed it in such a way that it seemed (to this worshipper, at least) that this was an effect he desired rather than a fact he could assume. The actual communication seemed (to me), conversely, to be avuncular, saccharine, condescending; forms which attempted informality but which rather betrayed professional ineptitude, a style which attempted to make us present but which itself lacked ‘presence’.

I had lined up with all the other visitors who had come to bathe themselves in the spectacularly fulsome aesthetic experience of vaulted stone and ethereal voices which is a chapel service at King's. That was my hope too, and I would have left, well-satisfied, had that been the sum of my experience. But there was more. One presumes, given the illustrious reputation of the place, that every aspect of the liturgy will have been meticulously rehearsed. I was therefore struck during the prayers of intercession, by the noticeably ‘prayerful’ quality of the prayers, and, on glancing up, realized that the chaplain, though he had manifestly prepared the topics of prayer, was in fact praying ‘extempore’. The aesthetic experience moved through to a more exactly worshipful experience.