The brilliant faux-estuarine seer Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser came on Thought for the Day for our further enlightenment. Of such incandescence was his thought that the wireless was briefly on fire. He started by talking about the Notting Hill Carnival – that annual celebration of druggery and thuggery before which honest men board up their shops against the looters and at which  the police traditionally ignore gross acts of violence and the ingesting of illegal substances – out of respect for diversity and our multicultural utopia

Come to think of it, the carnival is mono- rather than multi- and the word culture is inappropriate here unless, I suppose, we are using it according to the usage of the pathology lab..

But the BBC’s in house semi-sacerdotal Trot went on to discover a far more profound meaning of carnival. After much ferretting around in the archives of the bleedin’ obvious, the seer took us back to the carnivals of the Middle Ages, to the Feast of Fools, the Festival of the Boy Bishop and the Lord of Misrule. Gratuitously, and out of the copious resources of his unsearchable understanding, Dr Fraser informed us that these were high days when the usual hierarchies were turned on their heads, the lowly were exalted for a day or a weekend and the high and mighty were put down.

The seer thought that this was a jolly good thing and that we could all – especially the church – do with a lot more of this role-reversal.

What he failed to notice, however, is that the reason we don’t keep these feasts of social inversion, insubordination, rudeness and ubiquitous oikishness as special days in our calendar is because our society, and particularly the church, is now like that all the time.

Perhaps, Dr Fraser, the Church of England and the rest of the nation might actually invert the inversion and, for just a couple of days in the year – it would be impossible to do it all the time of course – be serious, dignified, noble, reverent, God-fearing and proper?

By the way, I wonder if, when he becomes leader of our great nation and inaugurates misrule as a fundamental principle of society, Jeremy Corbyn will appoint the faux- estuarine seer as his chaplain?