The Hand That Baptised Christ? The Mystery of Malta’s Missing Relic

Before setting out to fight, the Knights Hospitaller in Malta are said to have knelt before a most unusual object: a fragment of human anatomy enclosed within a magnificent reliquary. This act of veneration they felt would give them both spiritual and physical strength as they prepared to face the dangers ahead.

The relic was a preserved right hand and forearm reputed to have belonged to St John the Baptist, the patron saint of their Order. John was remembered as an austere, courageous and uncompromising man. He lived largely in the wilderness of Judaea, wore clothing made from camel hair with a leather belt, and preached truths to power that eventually cost him his head.

According to Christian tradition, this was the very hand with which John baptised Jesus Christ in the River Jordan. Its presence must have given the Knights a powerful sense of divine protection as they embarked upon their hazardous missions.

Today, the magnificent gilded reliquary remains in St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, displayed behind glass. The relic itself, however, is no longer there. The story of its extraordinary journey takes some telling.

Before Malta: Rhodes

Before coming to Malta, the Knights had been based on Rhodes. An inventory compiled there in 1483 records a relic described as the right arm of St John the Baptist.

When the Ottomans forced the Knights to surrender Rhodes in 1522, the relic they venerated as St John’s arm travelled with them during their years of wandering through the Mediterranean. When the Order finally settled in Malta in 1530, the relic was initially kept in the Church of St Lawrence in Birgu.

Thirty-five years later, Malta faced the Great Siege of 1565. The Knights, assisted by Maltese soldiers and civilians, successfully defended the island against a much larger Ottoman invasion force. The siege prompted them to construct the heavily fortified city of Valletta as their new capital.

Between 1573 and 1577, they built the Conventual Church of St John as the principal church of their Order. The relic was installed there and became one of their most sacred possessions.  Today, the church is called St John’s Co-Cathedral because Malta has two churches sharing cathedral rank: St Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina, the ancient and principal cathedral, and St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta.

A magnificent reliquary

In 1689, Grand Master Gregorio Carafa commissioned an ornate ceremonial reliquary for St John’s hand. Designed and cast in Rome by the Baroque artist Ciro Ferri, it was made from bronze with gilded-silver ornamentation.

It originally occupied a prominent position upon the altar in the Oratory of St John—the same oratory that contains Caravaggio’s extraordinarily powerful painting, The Beheading of St John the Baptist.

When Napoleon captured Malta and expelled the Knights in 1798, Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch was permitted to take the sacred hand and several other important relics with him. Ferri’s large ceremonial reliquary, however, remained in Malta.

From Malta to Montenegro

In 1799, the hand was presented to Tsar Paul I of Russia, who had been elected Grand Master of the Order. It was placed in the imperial chapel at Gatchina and subsequently became part of the religious ceremonial life of the Russian court.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the relic was removed from Russia. It passed through the care of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in Denmark and later through Berlin before being entrusted to King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. In 1932 it was taken to Belgrade and kept in the royal chapel at Dedinje.

During the Second World War, the relic was hidden at Ostrog Monastery in Montenegro. It was later recovered and eventually placed in Cetinje Monastery, where the claimed hand of St John the Baptist remains today.

From St John the Baptist's burial to Rhodes

But how did the relic supposedly travel from the grave of St John the Baptist to Rhodes in the first place?

After John was executed, his disciples reportedly buried his body at Sebaste in Samaria (now called Sebastia, near Nablus in the West Bank.

Christian tradition relates that St Luke the Evangelist later attempted to remove the body but was able to obtain only John’s right hand or arm—the limb believed to have baptised Jesus. Luke is said to have carried it to his native city of Antioch.

Antioch had been under Muslim rule for centuries when, in 956, the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII reportedly arranged for the relic to be removed secretly. A cleric named Job is said to have carried it first to Chalcedon and then to Constantinople, where it was preserved among the sacred treasures of the Byzantine imperial palace.

After Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, many of its Christian relics passed into the sultan’s treasury. In 1484, Sultan Bayezid II sent an arm identified as that of St John the Baptist to Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson on Rhodes. An Ottoman ambassador formally presented it to the Knights.

A mystery remains – one arm or two?

There is, however, a problem with this apparently straightforward history. The Knights’ inventory of 1483 records an arm of St John on Rhodes one year before Bayezid presented them with another one. The Knights therefore appear to have possessed two claimed arms after 1484. This arm below, is reported to be from St John the Baptist is in Topkapi Palace treasury, Istanbul, Turkey.

Numerous other churches and monasteries have claimed to possess an arm, hand or finger of St John the Baptist. It is consequently impossible to establish with certainty whether the relic that travelled from Rhodes to Malta—and ultimately to Montenegro—was Bayezid’s gift or the arm already held by the Knights.

Some stages are supported by historical records; others belong principally to religious tradition. Together, however, they form the remarkable story of a sacred object carried across continents, empires, wars and revolutions for almost two thousand years.

When Bloodlines Become a Trap

When the Gene Pool Shrinks: What DNA Reveals About Inbreeding

It is well known that prolonged inbreeding can have serious consequences for a population. The reason is relatively simple. All of us carry some harmful recessive genetic variants without knowing it. Usually this causes no problem because we possess another, functioning copy of the gene.

If two unrelated people have children, they are relatively unlikely to carry exactly the same rare harmful variant. Close relatives, however, have inherited much of their DNA from the same ancestors. They are therefore more likely to carry the same recessive variant and more likely to pass two copies of it to a child.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is through the inbreeding coefficient, usually written as F. This expresses the probability that the two copies of a genetic region inherited by a child are identical by descent from the same ancestor.

The Habsburg experiment

Perhaps the consequences of this process are seen most dramatically in some of the royal families of Europe, where marriage between close relatives was repeatedly used to preserve territory, wealth and dynastic power.

The Spanish Habsburgs provide an extraordinary example. Genealogical research has calculated an inbreeding coefficient of 21.8% for Philip III of Spain and 25.4% for Charles II of Spain. Charles II therefore reached approximately the theoretical inbreeding level expected in the child of a brother and sister, even though his own parents were actually uncle and niece. The explanation is that both of his parents were themselves descended from generations of interrelated Habsburg ancestors.

This distinction is important. Charles did not acquire his extraordinary inbreeding level from one close marriage alone. It was the accumulated effect of repeated marriages between relatives over many generations.

One outward characteristic associated with the dynasty was the famous “Habsburg jaw”, or mandibular prognathism, in which the lower jaw projects prominently forward. A modern study comparing Habsburg portraits with their pedigrees found a significant relationship between the degree of mandibular prognathism and the calculated level of inbreeding.

Charles II also suffered from an extraordinary collection of health problems. It is impossible centuries later to prove that every one of them was caused by inbreeding, but his extreme level of consanguinity almost certainly increased his genetic vulnerability.

Modern medical reviews of Charles II describe developmental delay, dysarthria, skeletal deformities, recurrent infections, epilepsy and infertility among his many problems.

Tutankhamun: another royal example

A similar story may be seen in ancient Egypt.

DNA analysis published in 2010 concluded that the two mummies identified as Tutankhamun's parents were brother and sister. If so, his theoretical pedigree inbreeding coefficient would have been approximately 25% — strikingly close to the calculated 25.4% of Charles II.

Tutankhamun certainly suffered from physical problems. CT and genetic investigations identified abnormalities including problems with his feet and avascular bone necrosis, and malaria DNA was also detected. However, we should be careful about saying that these disorders were caused by inbreeding. His sibling parentage would have increased the probability of harmful recessive variants becoming homozygous, but it is not possible to attribute each of his conditions directly to consanguinity.

There is also an important difference between Tutankhamun and the ancient individuals whose complete genomes can now be examined. The famous Egyptian mummy study used genetic markers to establish relationships; it did not provide the sort of modern high-coverage whole-genome measurement of runs of homozygosity that can now be obtained from some ancient remains.

Ancient DNA allows us to see the process directly

Modern ancient-DNA techniques have transformed this subject. Instead of relying only upon a known family tree and calculating what the level of inbreeding should have been, scientists can examine an individual's genome for runs of homozygosity, usually abbreviated to ROH.

These are long stretches of DNA where the copies inherited from the mother and father are unusually similar because both ultimately came from shared ancestors.

The length and number of these stretches are particularly informative. Very long runs tend to indicate recent close-relative mating, while large numbers of shorter runs can reveal something rather different: a population that remained small and isolated for many generations.

That distinction becomes particularly interesting here in Malta.

The extraordinary genomes from Xagħra Circle

On Gozo, Malta's neighbouring island, the Xagħra Circle contained the remains of hundreds of people who lived during Malta's remarkable Neolithic Temple Period.

Researchers attempted to recover ancient DNA from several individuals. Three — Xaghra5, Xaghra6 and Xaghra9 — produced sufficiently good genome-wide DNA for detailed analysis. The researchers found that all three genomes contained unusually high levels of runs of homozygosity, indicating substantial inbreeding in their ancestry.

Xaghra9 was exceptional.

The researchers estimated that 19.12% of Xaghra9's genome was contained within runs of homozygosity. At the time the study was published, his was the second most extreme level of long ROH reported from prehistoric human remains, exceeded by the extraordinary individual buried at Newgrange in Ireland.

But Xaghra9 presents an interesting puzzle.

He was not a Spanish Habsburg with a documented family tradition of marriages between uncles, nieces and cousins. Nor does his genome look exactly like that of the straightforward child of one brother–sister union.

Instead, researchers found a mixture of long and shorter ROH. Their interpretation was that his extraordinary genome probably resulted from a combination of recent marriages between relatives and a population that had already been very small and genetically isolated for generations. They specifically cautioned against assigning Xaghra9 one precise parental relationship.

The other two Xagħra genomes reinforce that interpretation because, although less extreme than Xaghra9, they also contain unusually elevated homozygosity. One predates him by roughly four centuries. This suggests that the problem was not confined to one unfortunate family.

Just how small was the population?

The genetics offer an extraordinary glimpse of the size of this prehistoric breeding community.

Using one method, researchers estimated an effective population size of approximately 515 individuals, with a 95% confidence interval of 397–633. Another analysis gave a 30-generation average effective population size of only 382.

“Effective population size” does not mean that precisely 382 or 515 people were living on Gozo. It is a genetic concept referring approximately to the number of individuals contributing genes to subsequent generations. The actual population could have been larger.

Nevertheless, the result is striking. The researchers concluded that mating networks appear largely to have remained within the island, producing a genomic signature of an unusually small and restricted population over at least 400 years.

This makes Xaghra9 particularly interesting when compared with Charles II.

Charles II's 25.4% is a pedigree prediction based upon his known ancestry. Xaghra9's 19.12% is a measurement derived from his actual ancient genome. The numbers are therefore not precisely equivalent measurements, but both point towards an extraordinary degree of shared ancestry.

A society approaching its end

The story becomes even more intriguing because Xaghra9 and Xaghra5 lived close to a turning point in Maltese prehistory.

For more than a thousand years the inhabitants of Malta and Gozo had created one of prehistoric Europe's most extraordinary cultures. They built the enormous megalithic complexes at Ġgantija, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien, along with elaborate underground burial places.

Yet during the later third millennium BC this distinctive Temple culture disappeared.

There is unlikely to have been one simple cause. Archaeological and environmental evidence points towards a combination of pressures:

The ancient-DNA researchers themselves noted that Xaghra5 and Xaghra9 date from a period associated with a declining density of radiocarbon dates, worsening diet and nutritional status, increasing aridity and thinning soils.

Inbreeding therefore need not have caused the collapse of Malta's Temple culture. It may instead reveal something equally important: a population becoming dangerously small and isolated at precisely the time when environmental and nutritional pressures were increasing.

And then there is Newgrange

Perhaps the most extraordinary comparison comes from Ireland.

DNA was recovered from an adult man whose remains had been placed in the most elaborate recess of the great Newgrange passage tomb, constructed around 3200 BC. His genome revealed something remarkable.

His parents were first-degree relatives. Genetically, that means the relationship was consistent with either: brother and sister, or parent and child. Both relationships would normally produce an expected inbreeding coefficient of approximately 25% in their offspring.

Unlike Xaghra9, whose unusual combination of ROH probably reflects both recent relatedness and generations of life within a small isolated population, the Newgrange man's genome showed the unmistakable signature of an extremely close, first-degree incestuous union. The researchers described him as the adult son of such a union.

His burial place makes the discovery even more intriguing. He was not deposited in an insignificant grave but in the most prestigious part of one of prehistoric Europe's greatest monuments. Researchers have therefore suggested that he belonged to a powerful politico-religious elite in which such otherwise strongly prohibited relationships may have been deliberately permitted to preserve a sacred or dynastic bloodline. That interpretation is fascinating, although it cannot be proved from one individual alone.

So across thousands of years we can see very different routes leading towards the same genetic danger.

With Charles II, repeated dynastic marriage gradually accumulated relatedness generation after generation.

With Tutankhamun, the evidence points towards sibling parents within an Egyptian royal dynasty.

With Xaghra9, the genome tells of life within a tiny, isolated island breeding population, probably combined with relatively close marriages.

And at Newgrange, DNA reveals something more immediate and extreme: a man whose mother and father were themselves first-degree relatives.

It is extraordinary that thousands of years after these people died, their DNA can reveal not merely where their ancestors came from, but something as intimate as how closely related their parents were and how isolated the communities in which they lived had become.

COVID: When the Dust Settled

Having lived through the weirdness of Covid I kept thinking it was difficult to see the light clearly in the middle of a storm. However, I had hoped that when the dust settled there would be so many important lessons learned from this devastating outbreak. Some countries like Sweden avoided many of the compulsory restrictions imposed elsewhere, kept compulsory schools for younger pupils generally open and relied much more heavily on voluntary public-health recommendations. I wondered what was their experience in terms of excess deaths.

It is also clear that in 2021 wealthy countries had ordered billions more doses than they required for their own populations. Subsequently one wealthy country, the United States, ended up dumping more than 80 million doses. Although to be fair many of these wealthy countries were major donors of vaccines to other countries. 

It’s difficult to have a fair scoring card after all it was not a level playing field. Italy had a first-class health system in its North when the outbreak hit them, but it was one of the first to face the dire consequences of epidemic attacking the health system. No wonder they were quickly overrun with a shortage of ventilators and no available treatments. Others had time to observe their suffering learn from it and take preventative action that helped them cope better.

Perhaps one of the best scores was attained by New Zealand to emerge remarkably unscathed. It did help it was an island, not densely populated and had a leader who acted quickly to defend the population. But despite her evident success, she later became increasingly unpopular and was strongly criticised by sections of a population who perhaps did not know what they had been spared.

But even populations that should have known better had large numbers dying of Covid, not only stubbornly resistant to taking available vaccines but also to using masks or obeying basic isolation instructions. Even when my friend phoned her relatives in the US and learned of more deaths in their ranks all around them, their views remained unchanged. Perhaps the biggest lesson is how misinformation, always disturbing at the best of times, became deadly in the middle of the worst of times. How ignorance became a rock to cling to not a stepping stone to learning more.

You can see I have my own misconceptions and slant on the whole business but surely in six years someone intelligent with insight has gathered together all the experience and facts and made some progress and understanding what worked and what didn’t. So, this was my goal. Step back from my own particular view and consult others whose field of expertise is exactly this!

The Score Card

Probably the best single measure in comparing countries is generally age-adjusted excess mortality, rather than the officially recorded number of COVID deaths. This excess mortality successfully captures deaths missed by testing/reporting and some indirect effects of the pandemic. The age adjustment is required because it was the older population who were hit hardest and if you have a country with a huge population of older people then you would inevitably have higher numbers of deaths whatever your response. By using age-adjusted excess mortality you greatly reduce that variable when comparing countries, although many other differences between countries remain. WHO estimated about 14.9 million excess deaths worldwide in 2020–21, far above the officially recorded COVID death count.

But how did individual countries fare?

1. New Zealand was one of the clearest successes. Its elimination strategy—tight border controls, quarantine, testing, tracing and rapid lockdowns—kept COVID at bay until vaccines were available. Their vaccine uptake was high and it experienced exceptionally low cumulative excess mortality over the pandemic, with mortality actually below expected levels in 2020–21. Mind you islands generally coped better. There is an advantage in having a sea border to protect you. In fact, one international study found that islands fared about 3 times better in terms of age-standardised excess deaths than non-island countries.

2. Norway and Denmark also performed very well. Among the European countries these two had very low pandemic mortality. They reacted while hospitalisation numbers were still comparatively low. This is evidence that one of the strongest lessons to learn in a pandemic is that speed matters. Even a modest intervention at an early stage is much better than a severe intervention when hospitals are rapidly filling.

3. Sweden avoided many of the compulsory restrictions imposed elsewhere and initially suffered considerably higher mortality than neighbouring Norway and Finland, particularly in vulnerable elderly populations in care homes. However, in the longer term its overall excess mortality compared surprisingly favourably with many European countries. One interesting lesson from Sweden is that voluntary behavioural change can accomplish more than was thought.

4. Britain performed badly during the crucial first wave. It entered the pandemic with good scientific expertise but delayed important early interventions due to slow political decision-making and so transmission grew rapidly. It experienced high early mortality however, Britain did considerably better in vaccine development and deployment.

Early in the vaccination programme vaccines showed very high protection against symptomatic disease and also reduced infection and transmission, but this protection against infection became much less reliable as immunity waned and new variants appeared. Public-health messaging did not always make this changing distinction sufficiently clear. A useful message as the evidence evolved would have been:

“The vaccine may not prevent you catching COVID, but it greatly reduces your probability of becoming seriously ill or dying from it.”

That distinction might have preserved more public trust.

In particular, school closures carried enormous costs. Children had a relatively low risk of severe COVID and the long school disruption had detrimental educational and social consequences. Future pandemic policies may require a much higher threshold for closing schools. COVID mortality was extraordinarily concentrated among older and medically vulnerable people and responses should therefore be more carefully targeted according to risk.

In many other countries, those in nursing and residential homes were extraordinarily vulnerable to this pandemic. Protecting them should have been among the highest priorities. Lessons learned were the necessity of rapid testing of staff, good ventilation, adequate PPE, sick-pay arrangements preventing infected staff from working and the residents having early vaccination. More careful hospital-to-care-home discharge policies could have reduced the disease being channelled from hospital wards to the most vulnerable in society. Perversely, some countries concentrated enormous resources on restrictions affecting millions of comparatively low-risk people while the virus was allowed into institutions containing the people most likely to die.

Mind you many of these are easy in hindsight and perhaps much harder when you dealing with something of the unexpected scale of the Covid pandemic.

Another lesson learned was that SARS-CoV-2 is predominantly transmitted through respiratory particles, especially indoors. As a result, improved ventilation, filtration and air-quality monitoring should therefore become routine. Much less was achieved by washing surfaces. I had elderly relatives who spent hours using acholic wipes to clean each piece of grocery delivered by van from the supermarket.

The pandemic revealed that resilience really matters. Countries need spare hospital capacity, trained staff, surveillance systems, testing capability, vaccine manufacturing, strategic supplies and public-health organisations before a crisis begins.

And governments need something much less tangible: trust. People will put up with extraordinary restrictions for a limited period if authorities explain what they know, what they don't know, why a decision is being taken and what evidence would cause that decision to change. A recent academic paper concluded that Countries where people had greater trust in their government tended to have lower infection rates. Even more importantly, countries where people had greater trust in one another also tended to have lower infection rates. Lower government corruption was associated with better outcomes too. High-trust countries also tended to achieve higher vaccination rates once vaccines became widely available.

My asthmatic mother was hospitalised with Covid in her late eighties in Northern Ireland but thankfully survived. One of the genuine surprises of COVID-19 was that ordinary asthma did not substantially increase COVID mortality. In fact, some research suggests that asthmatic airways may have presented the virus with fewer convenient doorways into the cells and that some inhaled corticosteroids, used by asthma patients, may have reduced aspects of SARS-CoV-2 replication or the inflammatory response to infection. These remain possible explanations rather than established reasons for the unexpectedly low mortality risk. But there are conditions that really made catching Covid deadlier. Age is definitely the biggest contributor in risk of Covid death but diabetes and obesity also played major roles, as did a number of other underlying medical conditions.

Perhaps the Lancet summed it up best: the countries that did best weren't necessarily those imposing the most restrictions. They tended to be those that acted early, protected vulnerable people, maintained public trust, had competent health systems and adapted policy as the evidence changed.

That are probably lessons we should all remember.

While Disasters Scream, Progress Whispers

There is a saying that progress is silent while disasters scream. Every day we are bombarded with stories of wars, disasters, crime and political turmoil. The constant noise can make it seem as though the world is steadily unravelling. Yet news is designed to report what is unusual and alarming, not the quiet improvements that unfold over decades. To understand what is really happening, we need to step back from the daily fireworks filling our newsfeeds and look at the long view.

The evidence tells a remarkable story.

In 1830, around 80–90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today, despite recent setbacks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation, the figure is estimated to be under 10%—one of the greatest transformations in human history.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, safe piped drinking water was largely confined to the wealthiest cities. Today, more than 90% of the world's population has access to at least basic drinking water services, and the great majority also have basic sanitation. Hundreds of millions more people than ever before enjoy reliable food, shelter, electricity and essential services, although significant inequalities still remain.

In 1900, global life expectancy was about 32 years. Today it is around 73 years. We are living longer than any previous generation. Since 1990, the mortality rate for children under five has fallen by more than 60%, saving millions of young lives every year.

Two centuries ago, fewer than one adult in five could read or write. Today, around 87% of adults worldwide are literate. Education for girls, once a rare privilege, is now the norm across much of the world, although important gaps still exist in some regions.

Slavery is now illegal in every country, even though modern slavery and human trafficking continue to blight millions of lives. Women have gained the right to vote in virtually every sovereign state, while legal protections against racial discrimination and greater recognition of disability rights exist on a scale unknown to previous generations.

Violence, too, has declined over the long term. Research suggests that in many prehistoric and early agricultural societies, 10–20% of people—and sometimes even more—died through violence. Today, the global homicide rate has fallen to about 5.1 deaths per 100,000 people, one of the lowest levels ever recorded. Although violence remains tragically high in some parts of the world, humanity is far less likely to die by murder than our distant ancestors. Torture, public executions and cruel punishments, once accepted almost everywhere, are now widely condemned and prohibited under international law.

The Second World War claimed an estimated 70–85 million lives, around 3% of the world's population at the time. Since 1945, no conflict has approached that scale of destruction, and wars between states have become much less common, even though civil wars and regional conflicts continue to inflict terrible suffering.

Medicine has also transformed human life. Smallpox, a disease that killed hundreds of millions of people, was eradicated in 1980—the first human disease ever eliminated. Polio has been reduced by more than 99% since 1988. HIV, once almost invariably fatal, has become a manageable condition for many with access to modern treatment. Vaccination programmes now prevent an estimated four to five million deaths every year, and deaths from measles have fallen dramatically since 2000, despite recent outbreaks in places where vaccination rates have declined.

None of this means that the world is perfect. Poverty persists. Wars continue. Injustice, disease and suffering remain part of the human story. But neither should we overlook how far humanity has come. It is encouraging to know that the long-term direction has been one of progress. 

Progress is rarely dramatic. It arrives quietly—in healthier children, longer lives, cleaner water, fuller classrooms, greater freedom and expanding opportunities. These victories will never make the headlines, yet they have transformed the lives of billions of people.

Recognising that progress does not breed complacency; it breeds hope. And hope, grounded in evidence rather than wishful thinking, gives us every reason to continue the work of making the world better than we found it.

A rare and precious manuscript

A large bag sits at my feet, full of purchases. One is a plastic container for The Lady's Newspaper from the 1850s, bought to protect it from Malta's humidity. The journal itself was an unexpected gift from my great-grandmother to my father—her granddaughter's new husband. She had often clashed with neighbours and even members of her own family, but for some reason, when she met my parents on their first visit as a married couple, she disappeared into another room, returned carrying this priceless collection, and presented it to my father.

It is full of exquisite detailed plates, instructions on lacemaking, fashion advice of the day, serialised fiction, reports from abroad, accounts of accidents across Britain and—even more surprisingly—move-by-move analyses of chess games! Modern women's magazines, by comparison, seem more likely to be filled with cosmetic procedures, celebrity news, relationship advice, fitness, fashion and gossip. Indeed, many modern tabloids are written in language considered accessible to a ten- or twelve-year-old.

I sometimes wonder what future historians will conclude if they judge our aspirations by the reading material we consume, whether in print or, more often, online. What will our magazines, newspapers, websites and social media feeds tell them about us? Would they see a broadening of horizons, or a narrowing of them? Have we become more curious, or merely more distracted? 

Mind you, The Lady's Newspaper can be mind-numbing in its own way. Its meticulous reports of life at the Royal Court include not only every event but lists of those who attended and even detailed descriptions of what they wore! Some things, it seems, never lose their fascination.

I also inherited my grandmother's letters to this same great-grandmother, written while she was studying at Stranmillis College after winning a King's Scholarship to train as a teacher. They are penned in magnificent copperplate handwriting rarely seen today. Through those letters her excitement shines: life in Belfast, the lectures, new friendships and the bustle of college life. Coming from an isolated rural community, the city must have seemed an exhilarating new world.

Perhaps that is what all this is really about. We become, to some extent, what we expose ourselves to and, more importantly, how we respond to it. Is that exposure a deliberate choice?

In my great-grandmother's day, people selected a periodical that suited their interests and often devoured it from cover to cover. The magazine was then passed around the family, becoming a shared experience and a starting point for conversations. Today we tend to drift alone through endless streams of information—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Disney and countless websites—wandering wherever the next algorithm leads us, sometimes into surprisingly dark tunnels. We have access to more knowledge than any generation in history, yet it has become much harder to distinguish nourishment from noise. I am not entirely sure which age is better, but I do wonder whether our digital diet can sometimes be more toxic to our mental well-being than we realise.

Fortunately, we are often drawn back into the light by people of genuine worth.

Can I confess that I already miss David Attenborough? In a world where so many seem intent on deception, greed or division, his life and work feel like a golden thread of goodness. I know it is premature to miss someone who, at one hundred years of age, is still with us, but I already dread the day the world loses such a remarkable man. People like him are indeed precious like a rare manuscript.