Today...

...the funeral of Katie Jaffa, a journalist who worked for magazines and newspapers in Fleet Street in the 1940s and 50s and was a popular and active member of the Catholic Writers' Guild right into her 90s. A beautiful Mass with a packed church singing the Kyrie and Sanctus and beautiful hymns including "The day thou gavest, Lord..." Katie was fiction editor of a leading women's magazine in the days when such magazines tackled travel and history and topical debates, along with lots of practical stuff plus fiction from new and talented authors. Can you imagine any women's magazine today publishing real, readable, page-turning fiction with genuine plots and twists? No, nor can I. To cast a cursory glance over the trivial, sordid, smutty, semi-pornographic drivel offered to girls in today's teenage and "celebrity" magazines, is to recognise what has been lost.