In the Waiting Room

The Infants School were in church this morning for their Harvest Service - or services, split into three year groups, and very minimal and simple. I looked at the tinies in Reception and, reflecting that this was my eleventh Harvest in Swanvale Halt, could have sworn that some of those little faces were ones I'd seen before, coming through the school for a second go.

In the evening, older and naughtier children were hanging around the church, surreptitiously smoking fags and eating radioactive foodstuffs from the kebab shop. They asked how old I was. 50. 'Whaaaat? Mate, you're on the way out!'

And sometimes, brethren, that's a comfort ...

Oops I Did It Again

... except that Mr Magoo was always oblivious to the reality of his mishaps and rescued from them by good luck. Well, I suppose the latter is usually true for me. 

Acting as one of the Bishop's Surrogates is one of the tasks I quite like as it involves dealing with nice young couples and helping them get married. But there is also nothing that seems to bring me as much stress because I keep getting things wrong. There is a lot more business for surrogates at the moment because no church marriages can happen by the usual method of banns, so in most cases couples need Common Licences, and the surrogates hear the oaths in support of those applications. Not long after the restrictions came in, I had an awful day when I thought I had mucked up the process for several couples, and though it turned out I hadn't, this wasn't before having to admit to them and various Church officials that I had, and then that I hadn't after all. Then I made a mistake on one form and ended up driving to see a couple to swear the oath over again. Now it turns out that as well as taking evidence of identity I should have been asking for proof of nationality, as detailed in a document from 2016 I can't recall ever having seen. It stretches belief that every couple I've seen until now has always given me passports to demonstrate their identity, thus proving nationality into the bargain, but the issue has certainly never actually come up before. Nobody has been illegally married - there's no doubt of anyone's nationality - but if they don't have passports proving it becomes quite problematic, involving birth certificates and passports of parents at the time the person was born, which is a lot to ask for. And I do have to ask. I was in despair for a while and am very inclined to give the job up as something else I am not very good at.

But then Ms Kittywitch posted on LiberFaciorum about her recent experiences at her local hospital with gastroenteritus, no joke in its own right but even less amusing when you are a heart-and-lung transplant survivor of thirty years standing with a compromised immune system and various other things awry. The hospital could have killed her several times over the course of a few days, culminating in an attempt to inject an anti-coagulant again two hours after having done so, which would almost definitely have carried her into the other world had she not had her wits about her. Now she is at Harefield ('the mothership'), and feels much safer. At least, as I have often comforted myself, when I make a mistake it is vanishingly unlikely that anyone will die.

Hindhead Common

On Thursday I was in no great mood to go out, but was in the end glad I made the effort! Hindhead Common and the Devil's Punchbowl is not far away from me and thanks to my underused National Trust card I didn't even need to pay for the car park. Of course I've been before several times though I managed to find a couple of things I had never seen, and the dreary weather was actually rather comforting. 

Not far from the old route of the London-Portsmouth road is the Sailor's Stone, a monument to an unnamed sailor murdered here in 1786, which now looks out across the Devil's Punchbowl. The Punchbowl is one of those landscapes which I find rather fascinating as, though it is now pretty much wilderness, it was once a home to quite a community of scattered souls - broom-makers and turf-cutters and the like.

A green cathedral ...

Not so far then

This is all that's left of the Temple of the Four Winds, a hunting lodge built by Whitaker Wright, he of the underwater ballroom - go on, look it up if you don't know about it already - but ambitious though photographs show it was, it could only ever have seated four hunters, and then at a squeeze. It was ruinous by the 1950s and only years later volunteers unearthed the stone floor, still surviving under the soil.

The cross was put up by a local landowner in the 1850s to counteract the reputation the area had for being haunted - unsurprisingly, considering the murder, and the gibbet that once existed there. Around the base are encouraging Christian mottos:

Ah, one would very much like to think there was.

And that's a nice thought, considering everything.

Stood Up

On Tuesday we were all masked up and socially-distanced for the standing-up of the ATC squadron. In this photo it doesn't look as though there are many cadets present, because most of them are in fact in the classrooms at the side of the main hall, watching o/c Brian's presentation via linked computer screens. It's all very well thought-out including a strict one-way system operating through the building, which makes you think very carefully about whether you really need to move at all and necessitate a journey outside to get back to where you have to be. The staff and NCOs have all worked tirelessly (once they've been allowed to) to make it all function, though Brian has not implemented the recommendation that the HQ have a 'sterile room' where the cadets can leave stuff. Not only would it cease to be sterile as soon as the door was opened, it makes you wonder whether the authorities have any idea what a sterile room is and the challenges that any squadron HQ in the country might pose to providing one without complete rebuilding.

I have a pretty robust attitude to COVID risks, mainly because, thankfully, I am pretty robust, but of course there is the matter of the other people I am in regular contact with and the sheer inconvenience of either being ill, or having to shut yourself away because you might be, which in the context of Swanvale Halt church would be extremely inconvenient. Tuesday was the first time since March I've been in an enclosed environment with people moving around other than shops and the church, both of which are far easier to cope with and believe are safe. The HQ building is actually quite constrained and I couldn't help a little tremor of concern at the thought of all that breath swirling around, even with the windows open. It's most unlikely, I think, that we will make it through to vaccine-land without being shut down again at least once. 

Secret Histories

The image that the BBC used to accompany its account of the National Trust's report on slavery and colonialism connections at its properties seemed counter-intuitive: Glastonbury Tor. What possible connection could an empty hill with nothing on it but a ruined medieval tower, and no significant activity since Abbot Richard Whiting was burned to death there in 1540, have to the international slave trade, I wondered?

It's fairly tenuous, as it turns out. In 1836, the heir of the Duke of Buckingham, Richard Grenville (he had many other names but we will confine ourselves to 'Grenville'), received a payout of £6,630 5s 6d under the slaveowners' compensation scheme on account of the Hope Estate on Jamaica and its 379 slaves, who had been part of his mother Anne's property before she married Richard's father - also Richard, the first Duke of Buckingham. The Duke had already made a claim for the huge sum of £20,000, but this had been rejected: the 1836 one was made in respect of his son's marriage settlement, arranged in 1819. The Glastonbury connection comes through one of the trustees of the settlement, Revd the Hon. George Neville-Grenville, a cousin of the Buckinghams who owned Butleigh Court a few miles from the town, and one parcel of land which was part of the Butleigh estate was that empty hill with the tower on top, now held for the nation by the NT. The reverend gentleman probably did not himself receive anything at all, and the story shows the ambiguities of the history of slavery and slave-owning in that legally the trustees of the Buckingham marriage settlement were virtually obliged by fiduciary duty to seek compensation if it was available, regardless of what they might have thought about the matter (some Grenvilles, including the first Duke, were enthusiastic supporters of slavery, while others were abolitionists). And, as it transpired, Richard would need all the money he could get.

But the reverend gentleman was also very much a gentleman reverend. George Neville-Grenville was the son of Baron Braybrooke and married the daughter of the Earl of Dartmouth, and inherited Butleigh from another branch of the Grenville family. He was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, a post he held in tandem with the Rectory of Hawarden in Wales, and on leaving Cambridge became Chaplain to Queen Victoria and Dean of Windsor. You could hardly get closer into the establishment of the Church of England, and histories like this show how woven the story of slavery is into that of the British ruling class. 

(Dartmouth? I thought that rang a fairly local bell, and so it does). 

That's Democracy for You

Churches normally hold their Annual Parochial Church Meetings in March or April; this year, not surprisingly, the deadline has been extended to October. What to do at Swanvale Halt? The election of churchwardens is technically open to any resident of the parish, not just those congregation members whose names are entered on the church roll, so that can't be done remotely. Holding the meeting partly in person and partly by remote means was beyond us, and consequently we had to take our lives in our hands and do everything that legally needed to be done in a real-life gathering (allowed according to the rules). This grand event took place on Saturday, and we managed to get through all the business in a little over half an hour. Our Secretary is still very reluctant to join in corporate activities for health reasons so I took notes as well as chairing the meeting, and of course without guidance got several things wrong. But it is done!

Nobody ever wants to be Treasurer, not just of a church but of any voluntary organisation, so we are extraordinarily lucky that we have one who is both good at it and willing to carry on apparently ad infinitum. Church representative on the Deanery Synod is another office which it seems very hard to persuade anyone to do. It took our curate Marion to remind me that the reason Deanery Synod hasn't met even remotely is that churches haven't met to elect their reps. We failed yesterday, despite the clear delights afforded by travelling to various churches in the vicinity three times a year to hear reports about Diocesan Synod and accounts presented by someone you are very unlikely to know. I will have to apply thumbscrews and other persuasive mechanisms available to incumbents by Canon Law.

Adornment

Many months ago, long before the world changed, my friend Archangel Janet sent me from Glastonbury a postcard in the form of a beautiful watercolour-and-pen painting, a blue-green landscape with wintry trees. I have only now got a frame for it and put it on the wall. It sits in the smallest bedroom next to a framed Christmas card I had from her a few years ago, a block-printed angel elaborated with gold leaf. I've been accustomed to call this The Children's Room, but it's been so very, very rare that any children have ever used it that I wonder whether it should be named after her instead! How lucky I am to have friends who can produce such lovely things.

Life and Stories

What is James Blandford doing these days? I can't find out, not that I am inclined to spend much time trying. I've always resented the fact that the only sustained piece of prose written about my great idol PJ Harvey is, as I think of it, so substandard. Published in 2004 with a slightly updated edition in 2006 (PJH produced a new album in between the two), Siren Rising does its best to offend anyone from Dorset from the get-go, and, while it's as comprehensive as anyone could have managed at the time, you don't the impression that the author is doing it for love. By the end it's very much Polly-by-numbers: in August she went here, 'September saw her doing that', and so on. He wrote a biography of Britney Spears a couple of years before (now, if he'd taken on Diamanda Galás, that would have been more of a challenge). Now and again fans plead for an updated biography of Harvey: but not by Mr Blandford, please!

During the current restrictions I decided to write my own account of the maestra. Now, over the last couple of years we have seen something of a mild lifting of the omerta which has shielded her life for so long; we all suspect that Island Records demanded she start an Instagram account and post personal playlists on Spotify as a quid pro quo for doing no interviews at all to promote The Hope Six Demolition Project (apart from two sentences exchanged with Andrew Marr on BBC TV one Sunday morning). But, miraculously, PJH seems to have got into it, posting on Instagram some lovely self-mocking images during the tour and some much more revealing ones around the time of her 50th birthday in October and afterwards. As well as this, the unimaginable expansion of the internet since 2004 has made it perfectly possible to write a respectable nearly 100,000 words without having to visit a single library, so it was an easy lockdown and nearly-lockdown project. Yesterday I printed it all off and popped it into a ring-binder. Of course, I will never do anything with it, and I will ask you, gentle readers, to keep it to yourselves; even though every word in it is derived from material in the public realm, its subject would not be happy and I still cherish fantasies of bumping into her one day at St Catherine's Chapel, or a second-hand bookshop in Bridport, without too much guilt. I might let loose a reflection or two from it, but that will be all.

The exercise has taught me a number of things. Firstly, aside from my parochial duties it does me good to write history in some shape or form, and I should build that into my life. Secondly, it won't be biography. If concentrating even on someone I love and respect was maddeningly dull at times I will not want to go in that particular historiographical direction again. Thirdly, I discovered, much to my mortification, that two of my favourite PJH stories were actually the result of me conflating in my memory entirely separate incidents and therefore were entirely fictitious, or at least half-fictitious. How did I manage that? Beware the same trap, brethren, beware.

We're On - a Bit of a Cliché

Years ago I heard, and have always been haunted by, a radio play called (I find) The Tree of Strife which dramatised the Icelandic saga known by various titles, but often named The Story of Burnt Njal. I remember the august Bernard Hepton playing Njal, the eleventh-century jurist in Iceland who watches helplessly as the society around him degenerates into blood-feud and violence, and ends up burned to death in his own farmstead, refusing to leave it as a sort of protest against what has happened.

People often underestimate the extent to which human society relies on trust, on assuming that most of the people around you are mostly honest most of the time, and will mostly try to do what they have said they will. Law is vital (though secondary) because it underpins the expectation that if people step outside these norms in a way that harms others, something will be done about it, no matter who they are. Doing anything, anything at all, that erodes this subtle and delicate nexus of truth, trust and socially-agreed rules is dangerous. Ultimately it will liberate the worst about us, and put property, security and life at the mercy of anyone who is willing to act cruelly and brutally in the expectation that they will get away with it.

Rich people can shield themselves from this basic social truth in ways that most of us can’t, because they can pay others to get what they want. As a result they can come to believe that such interactions are all there is to human society. This is the cost of electing to public office rich, immoral people who don’t care about rules provided they get the result they’re aiming at: they don't understand how dangerous it is, and we should name the danger for what it is.

I don't think Mr Johnson is a fascist, a word some people I know are wont to toss about. He isn't even an authoritarian, in the way Mrs Thatcher was inclined to be. He wants to be liked too much. But like Mr Trump, his carelessness and dishonesty may well be clearing the ground for real, on-the-ground evil. Once you lose the social bedrock of honesty and trust, the legal institutions of a society will start to be corrupted as well, and then we're all in trouble, ultimately even the people who think they can buy their own security and welfare. In a society run by criminals, not even the rich are safe. Safety only comes from the dull, unglamorous soil of trust, truth, and law.

The Oil in the Wheels of Commerce

... is, in some ways, coffee. Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist talks about coffee quite a bit, because the supply of this product, as a drink, can be used to illustrate all sorts of economic themes: pricing, the location of businesses, scarcity and abundance. When lockdown began I was very concerned about our two lovely cafés in Swanvale Halt which have made such a difference to the atmosphere of the centre of the village; both, thankfully, have survived, operating now on reduced hours.

Revisiting Past Haunts

This green lozenge is one of the landscapes of my childhood, Turbary Common on the north side of Bournemouth. Today I was visiting my mother and after a bit of garden tidying went out to drop off a prescription form at the doctor and then buy fish and chips at the new-ish shop on Kinson Road, and the 'top path' over the Common was the quickest, and most interesting, way. The Common was a fun and slightly foreboding place where, Mum always reminds me, I once mis-stepped and sank into mud over the top of my boots. A fair would visit over the summer; in later years there was a model car racing track there, succeeded by horses grazing after the Council declared the Common a Nature Reserve and grubbed up the hard standing. The change in the Common's legal status was the beginning of its regeneration. It was a scrappy, disorganised landscape once, but is now ringed with trees and the bewildering network of tracks which crossed it have been resolved into a few major ones from which it's now virtually impossible to deviate. 

The Common was a world in itself, and though it looks much better than it once did, it has shrunk! So have the surrounding streets which once stretched away in my mind, connecting places whose geographical relationship with each other I wasn't really aware of. At the end of the row of businesses containing the fish-and-chip shop used to be a second-hand shop where I used to pick up copies of Dr Who novelisations which shouldn't have been as battered as they were given their age. On the corner opposite was a detached house which an even younger version of me always found forbidding: it was surrounded by trees but for a drive in and another out, each leading onto a different road, and only the gables of the building looming over the top of the vegetation. The trees have long been cut back, revealing a very modest and not at all Gothic Edwardian dwelling. Today there were even children's drawings of rainbows in the windows. How much more friendly could it be? Unless the residents are lulling us into a false sense of security.

Hiding Your Light

 
Yes, I know they do. But it would be so very encouraging if the diocesan website described them as doing something vaguely spiritual before that. They'll say it's implied, of course. 

Sitting It Out

Marion the curate presided at communion for the first time since March this morning, at what is now our standard time for the main service of 10.30. I wasn't sure whether I should stay given that I didn't have anything positively to do, but there was a notice to give out about the forthcoming Annual Parish Meeting, so I sat at the back - it's also the closest Sunday to the date I became rector, now 11 years ago, so it was good to be there. In other years I have renewed my ordination vows with the churchwardens, but didn't this year as it would be an unnecessary addition to the mass. As it turned out, the person designated to read the first Bible reading forgot so I stepped in, and there was nobody to ring the bell, so I did have some function after all.

I realised that this is the very first time in eleven years that I have sat out a Parish Eucharist in my own church. Despite the weirdness of receiving the Host and taking it away, consuming it either en route to one's seat or once there, I had a great sense of being upheld by a network of prayer all around me, which was rather lovely.

Reacquaintance

We are able, with cautions, restrictions and risk assessments, to take communion to people at home now, and so I made an appointment to go to see Harriet who, once upon a time, we could be sure would be at church every week. Harriet is a priest's widow whose Parkinson's has galloped away over the last year, reducing her mobility hugely and making every conversation hard work: it's that which she finds worst, she says, trying to make herself understood. Funny or intelligent interventions in conversations are now a thing of the past as both speaking and listening have to be deliberate and determined. 

Harriet wanted to make a confession so we had to ask her home help to go into another room, without actually saying she wanted to make a confession. I then found that despite all my COVID-specific precautions including washing the pyx in hot soapy water and carrying it in a sealable plastic bag, I'd basically forgotten how to take communion to someone at home. I had to look up the collect on my phone (slightly less awkward than making one up) and it was only by chance that I had my Bible in my bag and was able to pick two readings at random. 

In Monsignor Quixote Graham Greene's protagonist priest goes through a phantom mass in his final delirium, gabbling the Latin rooted in his memory and which the Church around him had abandoned. I will never be Monsignor Quixote.

Letters from Lockdown

During the depths of the lockdown I picked a book off the study shelves as my spiritual reading, and at the time didn't twig how appropriate Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison would be. The thoughts arising from one great Christian mind out of the experience of separation and confinement were of course relevant, especially as I grappled with the attempts of the Church to respond with remote means of worship and, it seemed sometimes, to resist recognising the inevitable inadequacies of doing so, a debate which seems to have disappeared like mist a couple of months later. On the contrary, Bonhoeffer insists

we find the very idea of substitutes repulsive. All we can do is wait patiently; we must suffer the unutterable agony of separation, and feel the longing until it makes us sick. For that is the only way in which we can preserve our relationship with our loved ones unimpaired. ... There is nothing worse in such times than to try and find a substitute for the irreplaceable. It won't succeed anyhow, and can only lead to even greater indiscipline, for then the power to overcome tension, which can only come from looking the longing straight in the face, is used up, and endurance becomes even more intolerable. 

This is Bonhoeffer's more puritan side coming through, and in other places I find it hard to go along with, as when he warns against admitting that you are afraid of things: terror, he says, 'belongs to the pudenda', things to be ashamed of and hidden. I am sure there is something to be said for this if you are a Christian minister in a prison caught in a bombing raid, and in general a degree of reticence (which Bonhoeffer discusses a lot) about the inner life is always in order, but the tendency of people to pretend they do not feel problematic emotions also needs to be counteracted by an honesty which is not, in his terms, cynical. 

Virtually each of the fragmentary thoughts Bonhoeffer shares with his parents and friends could open into an entire book's worth of reflection and discussion and so we will not have a deep investigation of them here. Let it rest with his advice, 'this day of loneliness need not be a lost day, if it helps you to see more clearly the convictions on which you are going to build your life in time to come' - even if, we might add, that time isn't destined to be very long.