The bearers were completely overweighted, they bowed and bent and nearly fell and threw the coffin down on the floor. It's the weird thing where sexual attraction gets mostly sublimated into waxing lyrical about rosy cheeks and angels, which, because there's nothing in it that's specific to the qualities of adult women, gets lavished on little girls too, even though to our eyes it seems so clearly sexual. You get the sense he was quite the charmer, but even so it couldn’t have been easy for an upright, single clergyman to get laid back then. The church is very much integrated in the community - Kilvert, though a solid Anglican, is generally fair to Catholics and nonconformists, though I suspect wouldn't be very accommodating to sceptics or atheist, and he shows the Church world as varied in character and virtue as any other. As the procession moved across College Green to the Cloister arch, the men staggered under the weight and the coffin lurched and tilted to one side over the short bearer.

So there are a lot of impassioned descriptions of pretty women where the poor guy’s longing is embarrassingly obvious. It may not add up to much, it may not make a damn bit of sense, but it happened and it was real and if we don’t hold on to it, who will? The first entry in Kilvert's diaries in which he records his naked bathing was for 4 September 1872, at Weston-super-Mare. The first entry in the published version starts on 18 January, so we do not know if he gave a reason for starting to keep a diary on that particular date.Kilvert has touched and delighted (and mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published. They're undifferentiated from each other and have no personality apart from being lusciously innocent and good.

Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me’. One very fat man had constituted himself chiefest mourner of all and walked next the coffin before my Father and myself. It might be because it was all just too low-key and a bit too arty for the BBC to bother much with - or it might be because Kilvert made no secret of being (apparently innocently) enchanted by the young girls among his parishioners. Then there are his love affairs- we only get the earlier ones in detail as his wife seems to have censored some of it eg leaving an 18 month gap! Some of his actions and thoughts seemed a little suspicious and if he had been around now the guy would be locked up.An amateur, sub-Wordsworthian poet, he’s always going into raptures over the landscapes he crosses on his long walks around the countryside. His duties brought him into daily contact with the poor and infirm; he visited their homes, drank their tea and listened to their stories (and horrifying stories they are, too: murders, suicides, insanity—my God, the insanity: every other house in nineteenth-century England seemed to have a mad relative stashed away in some upsairs room). It took either Kilvert or me a little while to get into it -- diaries can sound so self-conscious, and be rendered so much less interesting because of it. A different selection from Plomer's abridgement was published as Journal of a Country Curate: Selections from the Diary of Francis Kilvert by The Folio Society in 1960. As a book it is awful and I found it too a long time to read but then it is a diary after all with a lot of editing by his wife who I suspect did not want people to know what he go up to.

The Cornish Holiday was also published in 1989, edited by Richard Maber and Angela Tregoning and published by Alison Hodge. As I came down from the hill into the valley across the golden meadows and along the flower-scented hedges a great wave of emotion and happiness stirred and rose up within me.It's fun to look up all the history Kilvert is living through, but the best parts come when he describes his 11 mile hikes to farms and hermits and villages. The sense of a human chain stretching all the way back, though all but a short section of the preceding chain in lost to sight. It is hard to judge his partly paedophile proclivities from a current perspective - the dubious sentiments of older men for younger girls seem to have been more accepted then - if not acted on - though his belief that those subjected to his attentions always adored and felt comfortable with him, was not necessarily right. I would have liked to have known more about his courtship and marriage but it seems that these diaries were sadly destroyed by his wife. Maybe I’m projecting my morbid anxieties onto the book, but I don’t think so; I think this sense of the heartbreaking ephemerality of things is woven into the text by Kilvert himself.