As I walked up from St Albans City station I heard someone behind me complaining to a friend: “My girlfriend doesn’t trust me. She won’t give me the money. She gives it straight to the dealer.”
So although this little cathedral city looked lovely in the spring sunshine, it is no ethereal Barchester. Where is? County-lines drug crime stretches far beyond the Home Counties.

A few minutes later I was lighting a candle at the restored shrine of St Alban. It was put together by indefatigable antiquaries 140 years ago from 2,000 fragments laid out in rows on the south transept floor. This brought to mind Ronald Knox’s brother Dillwyn, the Bletchley codebreaker, who had devoted years to piecing together papyrus fragments of the inconsequential and bawdy mimes of the ancient Greek dramatist Herodas. At least the result at St Albans was seemly. As the Rev. Lord Henry D’Ascoyne, in Kind Hearts and Coronets, remarks of the west window of his church: “It has all the exuberance of Chaucer without, happily, any of the concomitant crudities.”