Lincolnshire: Museums

It's time for an annual slew of posts about thing seen on my holiday, this time in Lincolnshire, an area I only knew from a very brief visit many years ago when applying for a job in Barton-on-Humber, the end of the line in ways literal and metaphorical. My museum-visiting didn't go as expected. Lincoln City Museum was closed for refurbishment; Grantham Museum in the process of being reorganised though the general public could still come in and wander about while the staff tripped over each other moving display cases and the only objects were some old bottle fragments, a mocked-up apothecary shop, and Mrs Thatcher's coat; and Stamford Museum, while still shown on my map, closed permanently in 2011. That left Louth, Grimsby, and Boston.

Louth Museum rams a lot into a very small space thanks to some creative layout decisions which lead the visitor up and down a mezzanine which allow you to view properly some of the exhibits mounted on the walls. You have to do some work as you occasionally come across artefacts whose significance is only explained later on, such as the amazing products of a Louth woodcarver which you meet before you discover who he was and what these things are. But it's good fun.

In Grimsby I eschewed the well-known Fishing Heritage Museum in favour of the Time Trap Museum. This is a decidedly odd experience. The Time Trap is underneath the old Town Hall, and you have to ring the bell and be buzzed in by a member of staff who points you down a corridor lined with portraits of mayors and cabinets of municipal regalia and to a staircase which leads into the Stygian depths. 'Creative layout decisions' is barely an adequate description as the visitor ascends and descends stair after stair through a variety of sections illustrating the history of the town - or, as so often happens in these cases, the history of the town between about 1860 and 1950. And a riotous, weird, disreputable history it is, almost as though the designers are making the point that this is the dark reflection of the respectable municipal world of the Town Hall above. There aren't many objects, and what you will remember is the bizarre dioramas of raucous Edwardian theatre audiences, rioting pubgoers, and drunken policemen accosted by ladies of the night, like cartoons rendered 3D, as well as the overall effect. Part of the building was the old police cells, and one of the artefacts is a wall of bricks from the prison exercise yard, scratched with inmates' graffiti.

The closest Boston has to a museum is the Old Guildhall, the home of the medieval Guild Merchant of St Mary, and after the Reformation to the Corporation and magistrates' court. This makes for a rich history, but whereas I normally lament the lack of attention museums play to the buildings that house them, Boston's focuses on it to such an extent that you get little sense of the development of the town beyond, and certainly nothing of its contemporary identity. It's also quite fragmentary, and really needs a guiding hand to bring it all together. 

But the trip renewed my sense of how important museums are, or at least should be. It was striking that when I visited friends on the way home who are liberals, Liberal Democrats, and liberal Christians, on being told I'd been to Boston they volunteered that the town 'gets a very bad press' which didn't surprise me. I expected a nice little market town which it sort of is, but when, amongst the sadly boarded-up shops every town centre is defaced by, you come across a 'Bulgarian Shop' that, a sign tells you, has been closed by the police due to 'criminal activity' being carried out on the premises; and yards away there's a 'Bulgarian Food Store' which seems to have no more than three loaves of bread and half a shelf of canned soup in it; and there's a surprising number of young men standing next to shiny black cars talking into phones in Eastern European-sounding languages; then it isn't really shocking that my friends called it 'the most Brexity town in Britain'. Something has happened here that hasn't happened elsewhere and you wonder what it is. This is not a place at ease with itself. A bold museum with a commitment to interpreting a community to itself might be able to tell something of that story - of how so many Poles and Lithuanians came to be here - without expressing an opinion about it. There are, funnily enough, not that many Bulgarians in Boston, so the story behind the Bulgarian Stores might be one to treat with great care.

Go Tell That Fox

The Borough Deans gathered for lunch yesterday. What the role will mean exactly once the local governmental structures of Surrey go through the solve et coagula of reform over the next couple of years we are not sure. Nor are we sure what the elections to the ‘shadow authorities’ next year will bring, but expect a significant number of Reform councillors to emerge whereas there are hardly any at the moment. And Reform is a new and untried quantity: will it be, and be committed to being, a constitutional party of the Right which operates within the boundaries of the liberal-democratic order, or will it recklessly lay the groundwork for something worse later? How are we to engage with this new situation?

A couple of weeks ago two members of the congregation here who are local councillors were accosted by a member of the public at an event who told them ‘When Nigel becomes Prime Minister there’s a short rope with a long drop waiting for people like you’. Now on one level this is the kind of loose-tongued rubbish people say when they are angry and resentful, but on another it’s part of a worrying violence in public discourse in a country where two MPs have been assassinated in recent years, where such acts are not theoretical and people ought to be careful about what they say. Presuming my congregants' accuser was referring to the leader of Reform rather than a random Nigel we knew nothing of, I ended up writing to Mr Farage, arguing that though he was not in any way responsible for the words of a random supporter, nevertheless he was responsible for the perception of his party and for not using violent rhetoric or allowing it to be used without comment. That seemed to me a reasonable action. This was a situation that came close to home as far as I was concerned, and there was a principle involved that wasn’t exclusively tied to that particular exchange, but to the whole of our public life. I am very reticent about this kind of involvement but I felt a certain weight on this occasion.

Christ got as far as calling King Herod a fox, but his main concern was to probe beneath the surface of what people said and did to the assumptions and deep spiritual structures that produced those words and actions, and in the same way the Church now should not be partisan but try to get people to step back from the noise and think about what is going on and what their responsibilities are – not to expect change from others, but from themselves. How many will listen is another question, but it’s our best hope and our urgent task. 

Branding

For some perverse reason the diocese always arranges the institution of new incumbents on my customary day off of Thursday, so on a Thursday evening recently I made my way to Hornington for the formal welcome for the incoming rector there. Hornington is one of those churches recently designated a 'minster' despite the ambiguities of that term: it now means whatever the authorities in a diocese want it to mean, it seems. Maybe it can be best summed up as 'this is a church we trust to take on extra responsibilities'. 

As I found my way inside through the throngs I was greeted by the usual group of welcomers, most of whom I know by face if not by name, and later on was plied with sweetmeats at the compulsory bunfight after the ceremony - and they were all wearing tabards emblazoned with the legend 'Team Hornington Minster'. I was put in mind, I'm afraid, not so much of a community of disparate souls committed to a common search for an encounter with God, but a corporate entertainment venue, or a conference centre. Although tabards are usually found at music festivals and the like (I am informed). At entertainment venues and conference centres, too, they would normally be worn by attractive young people rather than older folk trying not to look awkward. If I was a layperson and I came randomly to check out a church where this was the practice, I'd never go back again. 

Now I know what's going on here. It isn't just about identifying people who are acting in an official capacity: in the first place, there are indeed circumstances where you might want to do that (our congregation members at Swanvale Halt who take entry money from visitors to the Spring Fair wear hi-vis jackets to do so), and in the second, there's no need to do so in this instance, as it's obvious what someone giving you a service leaflet or offering you a sandwich is there to do. It's more about trying to foster a sense of corporate identity in a new venture which brings together four separate and distinct places of worship within one structure (in theory, the 'minster' is the whole parish, not just the old parish church in the town). 

At Swanvale Halt we had our own version of this once; a cross, so the rector in the early 1970s claimed, ‘inspired by the ancient symbol of St John the Evangelist, a chalice and a serpent. Containing within itself the monogram S J E … it also suggests the Church spiralling outwards, growing to meet the needs of the growing population of the parish'. All that needed a bit of imagination to see: have a go yourself, I've added it at the top of this post, I have always referred to it as the 'Nuremberg Rally Cross', but even it didn't appear anywhere but on stationery and a couple of bits of decoration. Nobody had to erase their personality by wearing it, nor was it 'gazed upon or carried about'. I still don't like it and am glad it disappeared in the time of my predecessor-but-three. 

And such corporate identity is not the new self we find in Christ, which gathers up and transfigures our natural (and fallen) selves and turns them into something that reflects not the ideology of an organisation, but the nature of Christ. I mentioned this to Fr Donald at Lamford: 'I always think of the disciples as a group of people all with their own divergent personalities', he agreed, joining me in harrumphing, a comfort coming from the incumbent of a considerably larger church than mine. But maybe we are the unusual ones now: maybe laypeople think this is normal, which is a little bit tragic. 

Rainbow Bridge

My journey towards thinking about animals differently didn’t start with Professor Cotillion’s cavaliers, as it really began years ago with my dealings with Christine and her boxers, but since dropping in on online groups such as the charity Bliss Cavalier Rescue’s LiberFaciorum page I’ve become aware of a phrase, an idea, that Christine never used, that of the Rainbow Bridge. ‘Run free at Rainbow Bridge’, grieving pet owners and their comforters will say of their lost animal.

The idea – a beautiful one – is that dead pets go to a meadow landscape where they are restored to health and wholeness, where there is always water and food, and where they play. They wait for their owners to arrive and, when they glimpse them on the edge of the meadow, leave the other animals and run to meet them. Human and pet then cross the Rainbow Bridge together into eternity. Sentimental, maybe, but as I age I'm more reluctant to dismiss sentiment.

The motif of Rainbow Bridge comes, improbably, from a scrap of paper written in 1959 by a 19-year-old Scottish girl who’d just lost her Labrador. It, and she, were chased down by Paul Koudounaris whose book about the spectacular ‘catacomb saints’ distributed across Catholic Mitteleuropa in the 17^th & 18^th centuries, Heavenly Bodies, I have. She was Edna Clyne (later Clyne-Rekhy), and when Mr Koudounaris found her in 2023 she had literally no earthly inkling that her words, originally handed to a few friends in typescript, had, via a 1990s US magazine advice column, found their way around the world - handed to grieving pet owners in vets’ surgeries, shared between friends, carved into stone and placed in pet cemeteries.

Edna disclaimed any direct spiritual influence on her imaginary picture, but the imagery of the rainbow as a sign of hope and its link with animals seems subconsciously to link to the story of the Ark. The rainbow now carries additional meanings, of inclusion and togetherness. But can the motif be accommodated within orthodox Christian thinking in any way?

Even within its own terms, Rainbow Bridge begs questions. What happens to animals humans have wronged, and whose relationship with us is marred beyond repair? The picture clearly imagines dogs as the beloved pets, not surprisingly, though it can easily be extended to cats; where do other animals fit in? And dogs and cats are carnivorous. As far as Christianity is concerned, the idea of Rainbow Bridge is clearly based on popular misconceptions of Christian views of postmortem experience, one of spiritual survival (‘we die and go to heaven’) rather than the resurrection to a new, physical life. Traditionally Christians have shut down discussion about what happens to animals when they die by saying that they have no souls – no soul, no survival – but that seems to fall into the same error. More to the point, the question of what happens to animals is linked to what happens to humans. We participate in the resurrected life not because some immortal part of us survives, but because we acknowledge our sins and turn to Christ; animals have no sin, and so are not redeemed.

But Edna Clyne was only inventing an image, not devising a theology, and if that’s true of her, very substantially the Bible is little different. You’d struggle to define a clear idea of what the soul means – other than being ‘not the body’ – from Scripture, and nothing about the process of what happens to us after death is very clear either.  The greatest clarity we are given, the vision of the Heavenly City, comes in the form of an image, not details about how we get there or what we will do when we arrive. And we know that animals are part of it, because it was part of what Isaiah glimpsed seven centuries before Christ, a renewed world where the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the child place its hand in the adder’s den and not be harmed. None of the ambiguities are insoluble.

You can’t offer a requiem for an animal which has no sin, but you can say as much as that, and maybe that’s all you need to say. We humans have black vestments and unbleached candles to commend us to divine mercy, the tremor of knowing what we are: the beasts, bold and unaware, have the rainbow.

Competition

When Emily's family first came to Swanvale Halt, they arrived at our Toddler Group before they'd even moved into the area. They were looking for a church, they said. Unfortunately when they came with Emily as a babe-in-arms to a Sunday service she bawled her eyes out whenever any music started (everyone's a critic) and so that was that until she was about eight and she became quite enthusiastic, especially when she could bring along her little sister and make a fuss of her. She and her dad were on the serving team for a while, him carrying the cross splendidly and Emily herself making an angelic acolyte. 

Now Emily is in Year 7 and as well as the usual lethargy which I gather creeps over tween/teenagers for physiological reasons she has taken up jiu jitsu which inevitably takes place on Sunday mornings. Her dad has had a few health challenges making carrying a heavy cross around not a good idea, while her younger sister now gets dragged to multiple toddler groups and nurseries during the week as her mum has had to work as a childminder, and going out again on a Sunday to something which doesn't feel very different is less of a draw than staying home and playing with her own toys, thank you very much. 

I mention all this not because it is anything new or results in groundbreaking reflections, but precisely because this is a really quite well-disposed young family which has been very well embedded in the church in the past, and, in an ideal world, would want to be again, but just finds it a challenge. Emily is interested in the putative youth group we want to start later in the month, which is just as well as she's our best prospect of anyone coming at all. It shows that sometimes, perhaps, in the world as we find it, the bits of church life we think of as add-on extras could well be the best way of keeping an entire group of people in contact with God. 

San Flaviano Montefiascone

This time it's Madame Morbidfrog who has photographed St Catherine abroad, at Montefiascone in the Lazio region of Italy. The basilica of San Flaviano there is oddly composed of two churches, one on top of the other; it's the older, lower one that boasts a range of frescos including a nice Triumph of Death and several crucifixions. There are two depictions of St Catherine as an iconic figure, one damaged and the other full-length and very unusual as it has clear Byzantine influence but shows the saint holding her wheel, which wasn't customary in Byzantine images in the 14th century. That's the one Madame captured, and it led me to discover the others.

But there is also a set of images of episodes from St Catherine's legend, which are hard to find online and difficult to interpret as they have suffered over the centuries. The painting of the saint strapped up between the two terrifying flaying wheels (in fact there are even more behind, which I've never seen before - they may represent the wheels breaking apart and crushing the torturers) is pretty clear, and I think we can see Catherine being beheaded too, but it's not obvious what the others depict. In one, gruesomely, the saint appears to be having her breasts cut off, which comes not from St Catherine's legend but St Agatha's, so how did it end up here?

For He Spoke With Authority

I’ve known Fr Embridge for ages: he used to be on the team at Lamford when he worked in the secular world, and now looks after a parish while continuing to write about how the Church can manage the business of change. He is a deep-thinking soul. He often posts about politics on LiberFaciorum; I’m not sure how outspoken he is from the pulpit. You will know how I am very, very reluctant to run my own political preferences up the flagpole (literally) for all sorts of reasons. I don’t believe detailed comment about policy is the Church’s role, at least not unless we have made a definite study of a particular topic; what do I know, after all? What gives me the right to opine out of no greater knowledge than anyone else, just because I have a stole round my neck? Am I not in the position of holding the whole of my parish before God, and holding God before them, souls who have a great variety of attitudes? Looking across the Atlantic, I also see the danger of a society devolving into two non-communicating camps, competing for the control of the space they are both forced to inhabit: a healthy democracy, where you must assume that you will never have a final victory over the people who you disagree with, has to have spaces which nobody controls, where signs and symbols of allegiance and commitment are absent. In our current epoch where it’s absolutely possible to assimilate everything we do into an ideologically-coded identity politics, neutrality is a positive virtue that we have to cultivate, because the pressure is all in the other direction.

Even Mr Farage’s latest pronouncements don’t quite cause me to breach my self-imposed guidelines, although the idea of deporting people to circumstances where they might face torture and death without any investigation treads over one of my own lines and it’s hard for me to see how any Christian might feel different. Instead of denouncing this or that, I strive to think about underlying ideas or attitudes and probe around beneath the surface, which is what I see Christ doing in the Gospels. I might talk about our absolute moral obligation to reduce suffering; the moral danger of polarising language, eroding our ability to share social space with those we disagree with; the inescapable reality of our sinfulness, meaning any idea we can make ourselves generally safer by getting rid of a category of person is a damaging fantasy; and the corrosive effect of developing habitual indifference to the suffering of some groups of others. These seem to me to be legitimate subjects for clerical comment, and perhaps very necessary ones.

St Catherine in Dijon

Yet another friend - Miss T in this case - has recorded an image of the Great-Martyr while on holiday. This 15th-century wall-painting is in Dijon Cathedral. It's definitely St Catherine (her name appears), though the wheel is not easy to see. It might be in the damaged area of the image beneath where her left hand should be, behind the kneeling figure (a Beguine?).

Haslemere Revisited

Haslemere is only a bearable train journey away so on my day off I went there today. It's an odd arrangement: the station lies in a no-man's-land in between the old town clustering around the crossroads leading to Guildford, Midhurst and Liphook, and at the other end a new bit where the supermarkets are. These are very distinct, witnessed by the differences between the artisanal ciabattas and loose-leaf teas served by the café in the old bit and the basic sandwich and mug of best builder's I got in the one in the new. 

The Museum is in the old town. Again, it's an unusual place, set up in the 1880s by Sir Joseph Hutchinson who used his collection of natural history to create a little version of the national Natural History Museum on the grounds that, pre-railway, most denizens of Haslemere would never make it to South Kensington and they really needed to know about whale sharks and lemurs. Over the years, for complex reasons, the Museum has acquired an Egyptology collection (including a mummy) and a range of European folk art: I don't think I've heard the word 'treen' used in earnest since I left Wycombe Museum in 2003. 

I've seen Haslemere Educational Museum (its title) once before, in 2012, but I discovered that I only really remembered it through the photographs I took at the time. I recognised some of the artefacts, but I'd made startlingly unfamiliar images of them, and it was rather pleasing to find that most of the displays came as a surprise. 

I began working in museums because I was inspired by the idea that they could do social good, interpreting a community to itself. I had before my imagination the example of Elspeth King at the People's Palace in Glasgow, a kind of history-from-the-bottom-up heroic socialist-realist model of the museum world. 35 years later I think about them differently - I see their treasuries of objects and stories as revealing, not a master narrative, but the interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory complexity of human lives, and that that's really the point. Some of those lives, in fact, aren't even human. We are brought together with experiences which are not our own, and made to reflect on them. Isn't that amazing?

Word from the Pulpit (if there was one)

The readings today were from Jeremiah 23 where God lambasts prophets who prophesy their own fantasies, and Luke 12.49-56, in which Jesus talks about bringing a sword on the earth rather than peace, kindling a fire, and waiting to be baptised with a baptism which is not of water. At the main service I preached a rather rambly sermon which began with God’s rhetorical question through Jeremiah, ‘Am I not a god close at hand, and not only far away?’, and would have ended with the violent imagery drawn from both readings – ‘fire, and a hammer breaking the rock, and a baptism of blood’ – had I not at the last minute veered away to stress how the Cross stands in judgement over us, over the Church and over the world, but the point is that it leads us somewhere better. Somewhere in the middle I touched on the doctrine of the Real Presence – ‘in that cupboard with the gold curtain is the most important thing in your life’ – my own failings (not enumerated in detail), the possibility of some wrong arising in our community which must be named, say a corrupt Council operation, and imagery of angels. There was a lot in it, but I thought it held together, just about.

Over the years I have struggled with understanding the relationship between the pastor and the congregation. What exactly does it mean? Why does the Lord want it to function in this strange way, if indeed he does? I can get my head around the idea that it creates an inescapable relationship (inescapable unless either the minister is driven out or the laypeople leave) and that training in relationship is at the heart of the spiritual life, but why have one person set aside to take this role? You can drag in the traditional Catholic explanation, that ordained people exist to provide the sacraments, but that’s an unsatisfactorily circular argument.

As I was contemplating finishing the sermon with that brutal statement about fire and hammers and blood I imagined myself saying to Giselle the lay reader, ‘Of course you can’t say that’. My feeling would be that it wouldn’t be right for Il Rettore or Marion, when she was with us, or Ted the public school teacher who preaches occasionally, to say it either. I think this is because it is risky. Not only is the expression slightly extreme, but it’s also very directive in a way I rarely am. This is partly what an ordained person sent to a Christian community to speak with the authority of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is for in a way a layperson (even an authorised one), a retired priest or a curate is not. That status both protects the minister in that they are commissioned to say such things, and also raises the stakes when they do: they’re still going to be there next week (probably), and the congregation’s relationship with them is ongoing and not easy to escape, as we’ve said. The possibility of a strong and directive statement grating like grit in an oyster is part of the point, it seems to me. 

A Relic

Many years ago, during my time looking after the church at Goremead, I took part in a joint Anglican-Greek Orthodox wedding, or it may have been the one I did when, for legal reasons, we went through the Orthodox ceremony straight after the Anglican one, a picturesque but protracted occasion. It may also have been the time the bride was referred to throughout as the servant-of-God-Irene because that was the closest saint's name to her actual one of Rianne. Anyway, at the end of the second service, after the exchange of crowns and the little dance around the altar singing a song about martyrdom, the celebrant Bishop Gregorios gave me the bottle of sweet Cypriot Commandaria wine the couple had had a sip out of. For some reason I never really drank very much of it, though it got put to other uses (now I would welcome it as an addition to/substitute for my usual treat of port). Eventually I reckoned that, even with its high alcohol content it probably wouldn't be all that good to consume after all that time, and I have instead been using it as the thank-offering at my little wall-shrine that inaugurates my day off, just a little bit each time. Yesterday it finally ran out. We use all sorts of things to encapsulate memory, and every time I have picked up this squat brown bottle my mind has gone back to those funny experiences in Goremead, but nothing endures forever, neither the memories nor the items that embody them. I could buy another one, I suppose!

L' Ecumenisme en Plein Air

As nobody else had volunteered with just a few weeks to go, I ended up organising the Churches Together annual open-air service at Hornington Bandstand, which mighty demonstration of divine love and ecumenical togetherness took place last Sunday. The main issue was that almost everyone was away. Not only were most of the ministers who took place last year absent or had moved on, we would normally rely for musical accompaniment on the musicians from Tophill, who were also away. I was steered towards a gentleman from the Baptist Church who gathered a range of friends, so that all worked out OK, even if it took us close to the wire. Then someone asked about sound production and I realised the Tophill folk had always brought that with them. The minister at Tophill (one of the many who wasn't going to be around) arranged to have a gigantic amp/mixer available which I picked up and somehow manoeuvred in and out of my car several times, and then got it down to the Bandstand by 9.10 on Sunday morning long before anyone else arrived. We didn't even use it in the end.

One of the absences was the entire staff of the local ecumenical Christian youth work team who would normally deal with any children present. I emailed round the ministers to see whether some other children's or youth worker could do it - 'You don't want me doing it', I warned, but the world was deaf to my admonitions and when the time came I gathered a group of five bewildered children around the steps of the Bandstand and had a rather stilted conversation with them about the story in the Bible reading. One of my colleagues later sent me an email congratulating me for 'so wonderfully and enigmatically engaging with the children' which I have to assume is an autocorrect quirk. At one point an angelic little girl of about three turned to her dad and said 'I don't like this bit'. I wonder whether the mic picked her up.

I was also thanked for 'moving all the chairs' which normally reside in a tiny shed belonging to the Council just on the edge of the field. In fact I didn't as there were others helping, though the gentleman who enthusiastically ran off with the parcel trolley and deposited a towering stack of chairs in the nearby car park was less help than he intended to be.

I will never, ever, ever do this again even for Jesus.

Of Course I Didn't Say Anything

... at the meeting this week when a clerical colleague due to leave his role the day after described the frustrations of his prospective retirement. 'I've slipped a couple of non-religious funerals under the radar over the years', he said, 'and I'd like to carry on doing funerals, I enjoy them. But if you have Permission To Officiate in the diocese I'm going to they keep the fees. I'd prefer to do non-religious funerals anyway but that would still be the case.'

Embarrassment and inarticulacy silenced me. I'd never met him before and there would be limited point in protesting even if I could have speedily recovered from my surprise and worked out what to say. It would never occur to me that I would carry out any religious act except as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ. Although, as we always say, the priest is ordained by the Church in response to and in recognition of the call of God on that individual, nevertheless I am ordained in order to do, and only in order to do, the things the Church is charged by God with doing. It's not a declaration of what a fine fellow I am, and whatever I might do only has value not because I do it but because it's done within the context of the promises of God expressed in the sacrament of Orders. Dear me. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

The Spiritual Bounds of Satire

Lately, Death stalks the halls of Euterpe: Ozzy Osbourne, Cleo Laine, Connie Francis, and now Tom Lehrer. I was introduced to the oeuvre of Mr Lehrer at university by Comrade Tankengine; 35 years after that, and up to 70 after the songs were written, I think I can appreciate their bold savagery more than ever. Far from being blunted by time, they get sharper as you can perceive how they must have landed at the time. Drug-taking, pornography, venereal disease, nuclear annihilation, inter-community prejudice, and cruelty to animals: no target is beyond their scope, all wrapped up in razor-sharp and inventive rhyme and meter. For a slightly less sulphurous way of making the point, listen to Lehrer’s introduction, and his audience’s reaction, to ‘The Vatican Rag’, a 1965 song about the Second Vatican Council. His phrases about the Church becoming more ‘commercial’ and ‘selling the product’ sound shocking (as I think they should be) rather than the commonplace cliches they now are; once the song begins, as it converts solemn ritual into absurd pantomime without any actual, definite abuse, the audience responds with whoops and gasps, simply unable to believe that anyone is saying this stuff.

And you wonder whether anyone would say it now. On the one hand, Tom Lehrer was always the first to point out that satire changed nothing: ‘it’s not even preaching to the converted, it’s titillating the converted’, he believed. On the other, just a little bit further down the road of eroding the rule of law we currently travel, and the ivory-fingering academic would surely run the risk of being shot up against a wall. Tyrants have notoriously poor senses of humour, even if the joke doesn’t really threaten them. In The Libertine John Malkovich’s Charles II watches in fury as Johnny Depp’s Earl of Rochester savages him theatrically as King Bolloxinion: ‘This is very funny’, says a beaming French ambassador to the King, ‘if this was Paris, the playwright would already be dead by now’. Thank heavens for the Civil War.

But does satire do us any spiritual good? Back in Oxford days I collaborated with Comrade Tankengine and others in a gossipy weekly political newsletter which was occasionally witty and always scabrous, directed at the University society we belonged to. For me, it was a kind of continuation of some of the things I’d done, or, more often, imagined doing, at school. We told ourselves that it was all about catharsis, about carving out a space for ourselves and those who felt similarly alienated which at least kept us within the bounds of the Party. But we couldn’t half be cruel sometimes. There is a strain of self-congratulation and contempt even in the best of satire – and you can argue Tom Lehrer’s is that, as it’s the cleverest. ‘If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while’, he said. The Roman Catholic Church was given lenient treatment in the light of that.

I will still flick to Lehrer on my creaking, steam-powered iPod from time to time, but part of me will always feel I should apologise to the Lord. And I will not visit the park to poison a single pigeon.

Farewell RRM

The River & Rowing Museum at Henley opened the year after I arrived at Wycombe Museum. We were local authority, they were independent, but broadly speaking still within the 'social history' sector, and immediately we sort of looked to them as one of the more prestigious, grander vessels within the great fleet of British museums. The year after opening, its building won a major architectural award and it was declared National Heritage Museum of the Year. Yet despite attending a couple of events there I'd never actually done the basic thing of looking round the galleries. This holiday week I decided to remedy that - and discovered that my resolution was just as well, as in February the RRM announced its intention to close. It's been losing about £1M per annum for years and has reached the end of the road, or the river if you prefer. 

A visit reveals why, really. The place is enormous: the galleries alone are vast, and attached to them is an array of ancillary rooms for school groups and meetings which have never been fully used. It's gorgeously and imaginatively designed and considering the mainstay of the place is a sport I have minimal interest in, even I could just about see the point. Also, the extreme heterogeneity of the displays might be considered an advantage: as well as all the actual rowing stuff, there's a 'Wind in the Willows Experience' which recreates the illustrations in the book in 3-D form, an array of artworks from John Piper's time at Fawley Bottom round the corner, a gallery of contemporary riverine art, and local history material about Henley itself. But although the Museum seemed quite busy to me on Thursday, parts of it I wandered around without meeting another soul, a bit like the minerals rooms at the Natural History Museum. Nobody seemed that interested in the great John Piper, while the huge Henley Gallery, isolated from the rest of the displays by the long, narrow corridor that was the art gallery, I had entirely to myself. There's a whole room devoted to one painting - I can see why, as it's a photo-realistic image showing Henley town by a 17th-century Dutch artist full of architectural, social, and environmental information, but even so, it's a whole room devoted to one painting. Ironically, if anything survives of the RRM it's likely to be just that collection of artefacts, forming the basis for a new Museum of Henley. But what about the rest of it? Museums think of themselves as permanent, but of course they are as much a part of the flow of history as the communities or subjects they curate on behalf of the rest of us. 

St Catherine in Henley

I'll write more about aspects of my visits today, but just for now here are the representations of St Catherine I found in Henley-on-Thames. Two, predictably, come from the parish church, a stained-glass one and a a detail (a bit indistinct, the church is quite dark) from the chancel arch's great mural of the Adoration of the Lamb; but the third is more unexpected, a pub sign from the street outside. 

Evensong At Binsey

My week off has coincided so far with an attack of sciatica which hopefully won't stop me doing too many of the things I've planned. Those began with a prelude on Sunday, in which I zoomed from Swanvale Halt as far as appalling traffic along the M25 would allow to Binsey on the west side of Oxford, where, MissT had alerted me, Evensong was to be celebrated on the feast day of the chapel's patron saint Margaret, and a ceremony of blessing held at her well in the churchyard. The tiny lane to Binsey also leads to The Perch, one of the area's most popular pubs among the class of people who can afford its prices, and tends to be lined with cars. I parked at some distance and despite my discomfort found myself running towards the chapel as the bell rang, only to discover I could have left the car quite close by. I arrived panting seconds before we began. There were ten of us including the Rector of Osney and two students, one of whom was studying the ecological role of churchyards and the other doing a DPhil in mining including the possibility of lithium extraction in Cornwall. Amazing the people you meet. 

The holy Office concluded (and my obligation fulfilled) we moved out into the churchyard to the well. Although it's dedicated to St Margaret, the well is supposed to have arisen at the prayers of St Frideswide, Anglo-Saxon princess and founder-abbess of Oxford Priory, now the University's patron saint. By the mid-1800s there was nothing remaining, until 1874 when the perpetual curate of Binsey, TJ Prout - a classics lecturer, university reformer, mountaineer, and, according to legend, so prone to fall asleep in meetings that his friend Lewis Carroll turned him into Alice In Wonderland's Dormouse - rebuilt the well. He may have tapped the original source of the water, but on Sunday after weeks of dry weather there was so little remaining (and you wouldn't have wanted to be aspersed with what there was) that Revd Clare brought some finest Thames Water tap fluid in for the purpose. The Baptismal blessing of water, the Collect for St Margaret, a modern poem inspired by the churchyard and a blessing concluded the ceremony. 

Unlike some holy wells, St Margaret's Well operates in a predominately Christian context, but all sorts of people visit it. On a previous inspection in November I found rosaries, saintly prayer cards, and a candle bearing the image of the Indian Roman Catholic devotion of Our Lady of Vailankanni; on Sunday there were more pagan feathers and stones, a few coins, and a little pair of china shoes from somewhere in Holland. 

V&A East Storehouse

Alerted by a friend, I found my way yesterday to the new V&A Museum Storehouse halfway between Hackney Wick and Stratford, a slightly otherworldly area of rebuilding, new estates, and gigantic square structures of which the Storehouse is one. The marketing is that this is a new, radical approach to museum display, a warehouse of open storage through which visitors can wander at will, forming their own connections and stories as they look up details of the artefacts they're interested in via QR codes. This is not quite the case. Much of the cavernous space, which really resembles a cross between a cash-and-carry store and the entrance atrium of some vast company office, is out of bounds, and I rather would have liked to inspect, for instance, the five-foot-high plastic anime pandas I could glimpse through the shelves and gantries, but couldn't. There is a rational storage scheme, but operating at the level of 'chair' or 'cabinet' it's less than helpful. 

But it's an interesting experience even if it doesn't do quite what it promises. As well as the artefacts there are some charismatic set-piece displays, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office from 1937 (an oppressively soporific space you can't imagine anyone doing a stroke of work in) and the Moorish Torrijos Ceiling, or the frontage from a Robin Hood Gardens flat demolished in the 2000s (we like a bit of Brutalism, we do). Here and there you can peer down a corridor and glimpse a conservator at work. Quite the most startling experience lies around a corner I wouldn't have found without some staff pointing visitors in its direction - a gigantic darkened space with nothing in it but a seat, and a colossal stage cloth copy of a Picasso painting. And I found alabaster panels of the Imprisonment & Martyrdom of St Catherine (very poor photo).

Entry is free, and I wanted to go before the David Bowie archive arrives in September and the whole thing becomes impossible. However, part of the cost may be recouped through the café, where I gibbed at paying £8 for a very small bun made with what looked like burned bread but which is probably artisanal. I had better stop before I start sounding like a member of Reform UK and stress that I went round the corner to a café called Badu run by a Mr Badu and staffed by a polite young woman in a hijab where I had a spicy veg pattie and side salad with a cup of tea and it was very pleasing indeed thank you very much.

For the Record, from Gozo

My friends Lady Wildwood and Captain Jackson were in Malta the other week and visited the Cathedral Museum on Gozo. As well as a mosaic skull wearing a biretta and a range of episcopal buskins in liturgical colours, in the background of one of the Lady's photos I spotted a painting of what was unmistakably St Catherine. Here it is, bent and twisted into proper perspective and sharpened up a bit. I can find out nothing about it - it's interesting that it follows the post-Reformation Iberian iconography of the saint in which wicked Emperor Maxentius appears as a disembodied head rolling at her feet, ironically as she was the who ended up with her head cut off rather than him. It has rather an odd look about it, almost as though it's a pastiche of a 17th-century image of St Catherine rather than the real thing. But it's hard to tell from an image this indistinct. Oh well, nothing for it but to go to Gozo myself : )

Pickled in Church

‘When we talk about the Mysteries of the Church’, I told the congregation on Sunday, ‘we usually mean baptism or holy communion. But there are more local mysteries too. We have recently solved some, such as where the electricity meter is (in the cupboard at the back of the church – I was looking for an old-fashioned spinny-roundy one when in fact it’s digital), or who puts out the bins on Wednesdays (it’s Chloe the bookkeeper). But the other day I noticed that next to the electrics cupboard is a jar of pickled onions. I have no idea where it has come from. If it belongs to you, or if you want it, your name is on it, and do remove it’.

Nobody has decided they want the jar of pickled onions yet. Its continued presence causes me to reflect on something not entirely banal, which is the issue of how laypeople interact with the church building they use and inhabit. To do something that they are helping with or organising, people will happily take matters into their own hands: they will seize the initiative. They will move heavy wooden chairs from the church space where they normally sit into the hall so a particular person can sit on those rather than a plastic one. They will shift the dial on the thermostat if it is cold. They will open the hall windows if it is hot. They will almost invariably forget, or not think it necessary, to restore affairs to the status quo ante, to move back the chair, to reset the thermostat, or to close the window, because the circumstance that engages their commitment, the particular event, is past, and they’re on to the next thing. In contrast, something that is not their direct concern can be screened out. A jar of pickled onions can be indefinitely left next to a cupboard, or a cafetiere full of four-day-old coffee left on the kitchen worktop can be deftly manoeuvred around rather than tipped down the sink (‘Oh that was here when we arrived’). The wonderful example I always quote, even after 14 years, is Mr and Mrs Bowdry, now both long gone to their eternal reward, putting their faulty service booklets back on the pile at an 8am mass in 2011 to confuse the next person to pick them up. I suppose people do this out of self-defence, to conserve their resources for the next important challenge they will actually need them for. I suppose I do, too.

Transcendent Moments in Clerical Life #983

Swanvale Halt church was refurbished in 2012, as some may recall, as part of which we installed a handsome range of new furniture, benches and chairs made from light American oak. They are light in colour, not in weight; they are substantial bits of kit. When first placed in the church, each had beneath every foot a small plastic roundel holding a felt pad, so that they would move smoothly across the floor when called upon to do so.

Thirteen years have taken their toll and those felt pads that remain are now compacted, but still just about doing their job. But many have disappeared and in some cases even the plastic roundels that held them have also vanished. There is one point in the church, the runnels into which the folding doors that close off the entrance area sit, where if you are not careful they will tear the little fixings off the feet of the chairs and benches, but the latter are moved over them so rarely that it surprises me it's happened at all. 

I love the smooth oak floor of the church building. I remember, when it was newly laid down and before the furniture arrived, Peter the then churchwarden and his wife Paula the pastoral assistant went waltzing across its shiny surface. It is always a moment, then, of horrible distress when I move a bench ready for Toddler Praise or the Pilates class on the second Wednesday in the month only to hear a scratch and realise a tiny fragment of flint caught beneath a leg where a pad should be has just scored a white gouge across the wood.

It takes organisation to move from the pained regret of these moments to actually doing anything about it, as I managed to yesterday, replacing the missing pads with squares of felt cut out of sheets supplied by the local ironmongery. Moving the kneeling-screens and benches back to their places and feeling them slide gently across the floor was more delightful than I know how to tell you.

You think this is banal? Wait until next time when I post about the significance of pickled onions to Church life.

The Most Beautiful Dogs in the World No Matter What Anyone Says

Since Professor Cotillion's amazing Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Bartle and Brindle, captured my heart I have discovered more about these impossibly cute dogs than someone who doesn't own one needs to know. I now find them everywhere. As the conclusion of my Oxford Holy Wells project appears in the distance I wondered what to write about next and the Holy Wells of the New Forest occurred to me. I looked up the Abbot’s Well at Frogham which I haven’t seen in 35 years and what should come up but this picture of a beautiful tricolour Cavalier. His name is Merlin and his owner Nicky took him on a walk around the Abbot’s Well. She founded the Dog Friendly Dorset website so I considered all those links providential. Nicky has a rare cancer so hopefully with enough fundraising for her treatment she’ll be around to look after Merlin as long as he needs. Then my local community board highlighted an ex-breeding stock Cavalier called Betty who needs adoption, and I found that it’s because of a rescued Cavalier called Lucy that third-party pet sales were banned in England as a step towards eradicating puppy-farming. Poor Betty wasn't house-trained (unsurprisingly as she had never lived in a house), and had never been walked on a lead: these are dogs that are bred to interact with humans, and they find their greatest joy and contentment in human company, so there's a particular cruelty to keeping one in a cage away from human beings. 

No wonder people fall in love with them. Dr Cotillion's Brindle is a bit of an exception being an only pup who is extremely protective of his owner and barks at anyone else who approaches, but almost every other Cavie treats any human they come across as a friend (they are not good guard dogs). They will let their humans do anything to them, dress them up in everything from crowns to sunglasses and take it completely in their stride. They are almost completely hopeless at anything other than looking cute. A nice Youtube video from Canada entitled 'Why our Cavaliers would not survive in nature' includes as reasons 'they need weekly manicures', 'they wear snoods to eat', and 'we are their emotional support rather than the other way round'. If you are their human, they will love you to distraction.

And this is partly the cause of their major problem. Cavaliers descend from the toy spaniels that have been known for centuries before modern breeds became recognised and established. Over the years these dogs were cross-bred with flat-nosed animals such as pugs and became what we now know as King Charles Spaniels, with domed skulls and short faces. Then in the 1910s breeders began to reflect that these dogs didn't look like the ones they could see in old paintings, and it might be nice to breed them back in that direction again. This was all going well until World War Two intervened. My very battered copy of The Observer's Book of Dogs from 1945 which I was obsessed with as a child describes the breed as 'the latest of these attractive spaniels to have come before the public eye' which was an optimistic account as at that point the entire breeding stock had been reduced to six animals. Maintaining a lap dog which was effectively useless at anything but being cute wasn't a high priority for a nation fighting for its life, and the breed almost disappeared. Every Cavie in the world now descends from those six dogs, meaning that whatever health problems they had, are now found through the whole breed. Among a host of common conditions, the most serious are the heart murmurs that virtually every Cavalier suffers from by middle-age, and syringomyelia, the formation of pockets of fluid around the spine caused by a skull malformation which Cavaliers inherit from the brachycephalic dogs they were bred from, and which can cause extreme pain. I told you I know too much.

Cavalier owners' groups often campaign for better breeding standards so that only healthy dogs are bred from, and if you're buying a puppy you're advised to get proof of good health from its ancestors for at least a couple of generations, but evidence from places such as Denmark which have had very strict quality control for some years suggests that the breed's genetic stock is so restricted it doesn't really make much difference how careful breeders are. Some vets argue that the whole Cavalier breed needs to be 'rebooted' by being cross-bred with (say) Cocker spaniels for a couple of generations, and then bred back towards the Cavie. That could help; but nobody wants to lose these dogs. They're too beautiful, and too loving. They reflect the best of us - until they have a toy-destroying party, or (as Bartle and Brindle did recently) have a competition as who could wee over the other the most, necessitating two baths in one day. 

I can't have one, at least now. They fixate on their humans so much that they require training to be left alone for a few hours, and I couldn't give one the time and attention it would need. Instead I have a china one I picked up via Ebay which sits on my windowsill, and it demands hardly any attention at all. That may be the closest I ever get.

Warming Up

From the vaguely theological and definitely pastoral we venture today into the realms of the severely practical. Back in the Old Days once an incumbent had been inducted into the real and legal possession of the temporalities of his [sic] benefice, he was responsible for it until such time as he left it, including any improvements or making good such dilapidations might have occurred to the parsonage house during the time he was there. The only thing he couldn't do was sell it. Such times are long past, and the diocese now takes a far closer interest in its properties, even if, some clergy find, they have to be persuaded actually to do anything practical.

The diocese has been telling me my boiler needs replacing since I moved in fifteen years ago, and has finally got round to it. I have been sceptical: the last time any change was made to the system was after I got help for a leaky pipe, when the visiting plumbers looked at the valves on my radiators, sucked in their breath, and informed me they would all have to be replaced to bring them up to modern standards. This was done, and a lovely silent heating/hot water system was changed in a trice into one that hummed, hissed and rattled no matter what was done to it, requiring careful management so I wasn't woken up at inconvenient hours. Now, I was warned that a new combi boiler would have to be mounted on an outside wall, requiring additional exposed ducting and pipework. At first I was horrified, thinking this meant vast industrial-size pipes leading round the kitchen, but was assured they would just be standard copper ones.

The actual work was done pretty efficiently even though the contractors discovered that a wall they had to take pipes through was in fact composed of plasterboard over about six inches of void space before they hit good Bargate stone. But when they were all gone and I turned everything on there was a noise like the thundering of mighty waters, as the Psalm says. Such noise persisted. I put this down to air in the system but bleeding my bedroom radiator for two hours didn't seem to stop it. The morning after a second contractors' visit to fix that, I got up to find there was no hot water at all. That fault turned out to be caused by a failed thermostat on the cylinder. Everything now seems to be both quiet and effective.

How expensive this would all have been I dread to think. I'm glad it's not been me paying for it. The new boiler sits unobtrusively on its wall, but the carcass of the old one is still in its cupboard. There is no getting it out, not least because the chaps were concerned there might be asbestos in it. You'd also have to take the cupboard apart. The works required my fridge-freezer to be moved, so I now have a kind of demarcated 'utility area' I didn't have before. It's as though the house is larger!

Through the Garden Gate June 2025

Although I'm no longer posting updates for the sake of it (posts about boilers and dog-friendly churches may follow), the heat will keep me indoors on this day off until I venture down to the steeple house for Corpus Christi and then to Malham church where the new incumbent is being installed; so thought a few garden snaps cheer up everyone, including myself. 

I thought this might be a new arrival, but in fact it seems just to be the Biting Stonecrop flower. It's just that the plant has never bothered flowering before!

Meanwhile, just above it, the bonsai-ed rowan is starting to look convincing and in very healthy leaf (provided I remember to water it). 

The same could be said of the slightly spindly rowan and the lovely red acer along the bank, which have to be watched in this hot weather. The acer was almost burned to death two years ago.

Meanwhile I can't work out how the old damson tree, with its split bark and powdery wood, survives from one year to the next. What's still alive? But yet again what's left of it is fruiting very well. Lady Arlen suggests I should save some stones and try to plant them, which I will. Meanwhile the roof of the Temple is rotten and needs replacing but finding somewhere that will supply the board seems less straightforward than one might hope! I can't fit a big sheet in my car, nobody will cut one in two, and delivery charges are steep.

The wildlife pond inserted into the midst of the big bramble bank is a great success, especially now I've managed to rig up a little pump fed by a solar panel on top of the damson, which circulates the water a bit. I often disturb a bird taking the water when I go to check on the pond. 

I am very glad to have seen off another incursion of the box-moth caterpillars - at least I haven't detected any for a couple of weeks - but the beautiful cinnabar moth caterpillars happily chomping the ragwort are far more welcome guests. 

Finally here is some hedge woundwort - stinky if you break the leaves, but fun to have.