Speaking generally, since all laws have their exceptions, the privileged classes of our rural districts take infinite pains to be abhorred by their poorest neighbours. They enclose commons. They stop footpaths. They wall in their parks. They set spring-guns and man-traps … They build jails, and fill them. They make new crimes and new punishments for the poor. They interfere with the marriages of the poor, compelling some, and forbidding others to come together. They shut up paupers in workhouses, separating husband and wife, in pounds by day and wards by night. They harness poor men to carts. They superintend alehouses, decry skittles, deprecate beer-shops, meddle with fairs, and otherwise curtail the already narrow amusements of the poor.

Rowan Williams begins ‘The Body’s Grace’ by observing that ‘Most of us know that the whole business [of sexual intimacy] is irredeemably comic.’ The problem is that most Christians who write about sex either don’t know that sex is irredeemably comic, which in itself is irredeemably comic, or write about sex with such earnestness and didacticism that their pontifications are irredeemably comic.