Curiously Ironic.

The place where I grew up used to be one of the country’s major coal mining areas. At the height of the Industrial Revolution there were hundreds of pits jostling for position with the factories and the foundries. And that meant there were thousands of mine shafts deep underground, many of them worked out and abandoned. They were the ones that were prone to collapsing, and sometimes that would lead to craters opening up at the surface. It still happens today, though not that often fortunately, and the only casualty is usually somebody’s car left nose-down in a hole that’s opened up in a road or driveway.

This story, though, comes from a time before people had cars. It tells of a man walking down a road one day who was swallowed up when the ground beneath his feet collapsed and he was never seen again. The newspaper of the time told the story through the words of an eyewitness, a neighbour who had seen the man walking past his house singing a hymn. There had been a loud noise and the singing had stopped. When the neighbour went to investigate, he’d found a gaping chasm in the road and the man had disappeared. The police and engineers decided that the hole was too deep and dangerous to attempt to retrieve the body, so it was simply filled in.

And the hymn the man had been singing was Rock of Ages Cleft for Me. Isn’t that about as sublime as irony gets?