Looking at it Again

There is some evidence that people did come into the church to mark the National Day of Reflection, a year after the Prime Minister loomed into view on our television screens (not having a TV, I was spared this particular trial) and told us all to stay indoors. Candles were lit and some prayer sheets disappeared. But nobody was there when I ran down the hill to ring the bell for the noon act of remembrance, and then ran back again for a consultation with my spiritual director. Most of the first part of the conversation consisted of him relating how many chasubles they’d managed to find in the drawers at St Mary Bourne Street. ‘I do my best to distract you, as I think this helps’, he said, before adding how he was recently slated to appear at a Zoom-facilitated book launch and, summarising the contributions of the other contributors, was stumbling with slight anxiety at the format of the whole thing when to his horror he noticed Rowan Williams’s face appear at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen: ‘Yet another of my Rowan Williams moments’.

As we spoke I remembered getting used to Rick the Verger turning up for Morning Prayer again. One morning just after he resurfaced I was a bit late and as I crossed the road he began ringing the bell. My first instinct was to regard it almost as a personal reproach before I realised this was ridiculous: he was being helpful and my reaction was really a result of surprise. I am now doing my best not to immediately think everything is a reflection on me: it’s a common sort of paranoia, but neurotic nonetheless.

That was a bit of a shift in perception, when it happened. In the same vein, I was thinking yesterday about vaccine provision. Some of my left-er friends advocate the suspension of patents to increase the supply of vaccines worldwide, especially to the poorer nations. I wondered why I was sceptical about this without knowing much about it. Mr Johnson characterised the vaccine developments as a triumph of private enterprise, but it’s not clear it would have been so triumphant without the colossal sums of public money that have been poured into the research, so you can argue that either way. Thinking about my own reaction, I realised it was really a sort of intellectual inertia: this system has come up with the goods, so the argument that removing the keystone of the system – competition between private businesses – would be dangerous the next time we hit a pandemic sounded reasonable. But our experience is full of examples of publicly-funded bodies whose staff work just as hard for the public good as private businesses do, so this is hardly a knock-down argument. In any case, a market economy is good at coming up with solutions to problems, but sometimes needs to be told what problems to work on. When I was researching the history of High Wycombe one of the surprises I uncovered was the role of government in shifting the town’s industrial base during WW2 by moving furniture factories over to making munitions, relocating engineering companies from London, amalgamating small, less efficient businesses and refitting antiquated factories. It did the local economy a power of good and if anyone complained that it was socialism there was no trace of it in what I read. Another sort of shift in perception.