GREAT BRITAIN: The March of St. Paul’s

Londoners received massive tidings last week: St. Paul’s is gliding down Ludgate Hill toward Fleet Street. Its rate of travel: an inch a century.

The Rev. Sidney Arthur Alexander, the Cathedral’s venerable Canon and treasurer, broke the news that St. Paul’s had shifted one-third of an inch during his 36 years in office. No man to miss such an item, the Daily Express’s famed “Beachcomber” observed: “St. Paul’s Cathedral is bitten by the fashionable bug of perpetual fidgeting, and is unable to remain still any longer. . . . It is due to crash into the Daily Express building in February 236,481 A.D. unless the Daily Express, feeling itself pursued, takes to its heels and crawls up the Strand.”