Heartwarming / To Say Nothing of the Dog

• A rather subtle one: throughout the book people encountered in 2057 are almost universally dismissive of Lady Schrapnell's quest to reconstruct the original Coventry Cathedral in Oxford, calling it a waste of money. At the end, we discover that possibly the entire plot was down to a future temporal anomaly that will be found in that same reconstructed cathedral in the twenty-seventh century, implying it will still be around at least five hundred years later. Particularly poignant given that Ned had previously sadly noted how the vicar of the original Coventry Cathedral in 1888, while performing his own renovation, had hoped that it would last for centuries when Ned knows it will be destroyed only 51 years later.

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