Do you have a preferred time to be alive in human history? Are you happy with the present, with its mod-cons, medical science, instant connectivity and high standard of living, or would you trade these undoubted benefits for a different era? Would you be happy to sheer off half your life expectancy for the chance to live in Georgian or Victorian times in England, a place where, if luck blessed you, you might end up at balls, driven by horse and phaeton through dim cobbled streets, certain of your nation's place in the sun.

As a younger man I often pined (that really is the right word) for the chance to hang out with the Romantics, somewhere at the beginning of the 19th century. Unlike now, one might write with a great lucid verbosity and compose verse with a flourish of high sounding language. Today this would be pretentious but then, you were assured of a reading public, holidays in the Lakes District and Italy, and female admirers. Poetry could be a profession if you were good enough, though I suspect my verse would fall short and I would "fade far away into the forest dim", contracting pneumonia and expiring promptly.

Today I was listening to a podcast on the Venerable Bede, the English cleric, scholar and intellectual of the 8th century. Bede's time, about which he wrote, was difficult. Plague consumed most all of the monks at his monastery at Wearmouth, except he and one or two others. The Viking invasions were yet to come, but for most people, life was threadbare and contingent. Only 2% of the population were literate and death was a constant handmaiden. Yet, the certainty with which people believed in God, where they had come from and where they were going, made the present more bearable. Their lives were meaningful in ways we cannot understand.

You know by now that this is one of my themes (surely, idee fixe - ed.) and that modern living has done a remarkably good job of stripping the meaningful from the life bit. People search in all kinds of ways to get meaning, but it is not found in extreme sports, composing buckets lists, taking drugs, pumping iron or becoming a celebrity. There are thousands of ways modern people seek meaning and for the most part, it alludes them. I am not chastising, moreover, I find it sad that we have thrown out those ways of being which better suit our condition, in favour of the gross distortion of contrived happiness that is consumer capitalism.

I have no answers, but like Larkin, tend to stop by at old churches. I am less sure than he that "the ghostly silt" has dispersed, but it seems true enough that we need to recapture something of that certainty, that lost wonder.