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The nuns were wrapping up their night prayer when I entered the chapel at Tyburn Convent. I couldn’t see them but heard their soft voices singing the last phrases of the “Salve Regina”: “O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.” Across the road in Hyde Park, an outdoor concert heaved. What was I doing, spending my Friday night here instead? I had come to see if the rumors of a “nun girl summer,” as it’s being called on TikTok, were true. Earlier this year, a video of two nuns discussing their ultimate frisbee skills went viral: “Sister, you are so good at that!” “Sister Miriam, you also are!

As any Catholic master of ceremonies will tell you, it takes only the tiniest sartorial mishap to lend a Python-esque flavor to moments of the utmost solemnity. On July 1 the rebel traditionalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) created four new bishops in defiance of Pope Leo XIV during a five-hour open-air Latin Mass in a Swiss alpine meadow. The consecrating prelates wore dark-red velvet chasubles over scarlet-and-gold dalmatics with matching gloves. They descended from their thrones bearing sacred chrism. Afterward the new bishops stood in a row, miters perched on their heads for the first time. Liberal bishops wear stumpy headgear.

Has grace-and-favor accommodation now fallen from grace – and favor, too? In recent days, we have learned that both our head of state and our (likely) head of government are giving up the free homes that come with the job. The King has said he will not live at Buckingham Palace once major refurbishment works are completed next year. His heir has let it be known that he won’t live there either. The monarch is very happy living at Clarence House, just as his mother was when she became Queen in 1952. Back then, Winston Churchill formally advised the Sovereign that she had to move into the Palace. No modern prime minister would dream of telling the Sovereign where to sleep, least of all one who plans to follow his example. Andy Burnham has said that he will not live at No.

As I scribble these words on a train to London, I’m wearing a lightweight Italian wool suit, a shirt from Gieves & Hawkes, a silk spotty tie and a pair of Church’s suede brogues. You might mistake me for a prosperous Neapolitan gentleman of a certain age. But in fact, I’m a charity-shop dandy – my outfit came to less than £60. That’s less than a pair of new trainers for my teenage daughter. I’m particularly pleased with the shoes, which I picked up locally for £30. A new pair would set you back £700. If you’re not too grand to buy secondhand, it’s actually far easier and cheaper for men to dress smartly than to be slovenly. I learned this important fact in my early twenties.

The Spectator was there at the founding of America. George Washington had six copies of the original, 18th-century Spectator at his Mount Vernon estate and read them often. He shared with Joseph Addison, The Spectator’s co-publisher, an interest in how to educate ideal citizens: men and women with wit and grit. Young Washington read The Spectator in the hope of bettering himself, too. Both of his older half-brothers had been educated in England and he wished also for the manners and polish of an English gentleman. For the pioneering, self-improving men who would go on to create an independent America, the 18th-century Spectator was both an education and a guide. “I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography.

“You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul for all eternity,” I once said half-jokingly to my husband over a glass of wine. We were having one of our regular conversations about what he was going to do about his late uncle’s possessions, which had arrived at our house in lorry-loads about a year after we had married. “Why don’t you do half an hour of sorting every weekend? I will help you,” I would suggest in reference to the multiple barns, basements and attics at our farm, which were now piled high with three generations’ worth of male hoarding. But with an increasing number of children in the house and no sense of urgency, progress was slow.