Rerum Novarum

Even a couple of hours beforehand, I wasn't convinced about setting out to London to see the New Year in at Tarantella. It wasn't just the usual Sunday services in the morning, or even preparing for my week off to come (in fact today Il Rettore warned me he has covid, so I'll be doing the Tuesday mass after all), but I was a bit weary. It didn't help that I came to lock up the church at tea-time and found Carly on the Lady Chapel step surrounded by bags and charging her phone. Only on Friday I'd given her a lift from the shared alcohol-recovery house ten miles away where she has a room to Swanvale Halt, because she said she'd been beaten up there and her money stolen. She was going to stay with a friend and see her family for Christmas. This didn't go well: the friend also beat her up and stole from her, and she got into a row with her brother who hit her for good measure. Could I take her back to the shared house again? At least it being New Year's Eve the roads were quiet. 

Well. I set my teeth and drove to Guildford to catch a slow, late-running train that got me to The Albany on Great Portland Street at 10.45. And it was rather fine: the couple of hours I spent there were in the company of friends expected and unexpected and I learned a little about what's going on with them, in so far as you can grab some intelligible words in an environment of loud music in a dark, enclosed space. After the customary countdown to midnight, whoever was DJing put on 'Heroes' - most of the time I can't abide Bowie, but the song's melancholy defiance was most apposite and brought a bit of a tear to the eye. Back at Waterloo and dreading the usual exhausting diversion around the massive pedestrian gyratory system that, one time I and Ms Formerly Aldgate braved it, took us as far as Blackfriars, I found there wasn't one. I went straight up the escalator from the Tube and onto the concourse. I was so surprised and pleased I had to find a member of staff and congratulate them, much to their confusion.

I think I will be posting here a bit less in 2024.  I began this blog way, way back in 2009 because I found that clergy blogs essentially told you nothing interesting. I was especially thinking of someone who was at Staggers at the same time as me and whose posts on a blog that was supposed to be about hs parish essentially described whatever feast day it was according to the Roman calendar and then out of the blue announced he was crossing the Tiber, and that was that. I wanted to give at least a flavour of what looking after a small and unremarkable parish church is like, and after a couple of years settled into a discipline of posting basically every other day as all the advice in those days suggested that was how you built up an audience, even if I ended up showing readers pictures of the garden or some dimly-lit club as I am today. But all these years later, a blog of this kind is something of an anachronism - hardly anyone does anything like it now. Sometimes it's been a helpful mechanism for settling my thoughts on a particular topic, and just now and again I've posted something which people have been specifically interested in. 

Far and away the most popular of these has been my examination of fringe churches, as the algorithms pick up on David Farrant, Sean Manchester and the saga of the Highgate Vampire very readily. The runners-up are:

- My account of Chapel House, Blackfen, an East London folly;

- My speculations on the real identity of Witch House musician Hvcci Gvcci;

- A description of what happened to the burned-out church of St Saviour, Poplar;

- A post about a handful of holy wells in Norfolk;

- A few words about Anglo-Catholic artist Thomas Noyes Lewis; and 

- My visit to the Hascombe Dragonstones in 2020. 

Presumably this is because there's not much else online about any of them! Anyway, a little while ago I passed the symbolic milestone of 2000 posts and as themes and ideas begin to repeat themselves it's time to slow down a bit. I will still post when something occurs to me, but be driven more by events and concerns than by that alternate-day discipline. 

Every blessing in 2024 to any reader I may have!