Tomorrow is Whit Sunday. On a day just like today, Philip Larkin was late getting away to take the train, and wrote 'The Whitsun Weddings'

Originally I gave this as an address,  at Evensong at an Oxford college (St Hugh's) a few years ago. 

Tongues of Fire
 
A Whitsun Address

 

Here we are on the first of the great Christian festivals to have been abolished by the British secular state. Until 50 years ago, Whitsun - which everyone called it then - was a national holiday. Pentecost was a technical term, explained to me in the Scripture classes we still had in those days.

 

Tomorrow would have been a holiday, and not just ...