Goth Walk 37: Cocktails With Elvira

Curiously I found out about the 1932 Elvira Barney murder case through my investigations into Surrey Anglo-Catholicism. The Sisters of St Mary at Spelthorne once ran the only sanatorium in the UK for women alcoholics, and one of their celebrity patients was an actress called Brenda Dean Paul. Through her I discovered Elvira Barney née Mullens, a knighted stockbroker's daughter acquitted of murdering, and even of manslaughtering, her lover Michael Scott Stephen at her apartment in William Mews, mainly, it seems, because nobody liked him very much. Her defence counsel, the former Attorney General Sir Patrick Hastings may have had a bit to do with it;  she may, so one story goes, have repaid the debt by nearly running him down driving on the wrong side of the road between Paris and Boulogne later in the summer. She definitely did crash into the wife of the ex-Hungarian Prime Minister Count Karolyi in Cannes, a sentence which could only be written in the 1930s. These events all have a dark humour about them, but there's no fun to be got out of Elvira's own death in a hotel room in Paris in 1936 from an apparent cocaine overdose. I did find myself, for the first time ever, quoting Barbara Cartland: her novel A Virgin in Mayfair describes the milieu of Elvira and the Bright Young People, and includes, in a description of a Soho nightclub, one sublime line: 'everyone kept saying how thrilling it was to be there, and how they ought not to have come'. As Mr Gloommovie said, how good a quiz night question would that be - Who wrote this, Oscar Wilde, PG Wodehouse, or Barbara Cartland?

There were very few of us on the Walk, fewer than half the people who'd actually confirmed they were coming. I picked up doing the Walks from the Young Lord Declan back in the old days when we might get thirty or forty participants, and the old London Goth Meetup group used constantly to get new blood (as it were) passing through. Now it seems as though I'm doing them for a loyal but tiny group of people I've known for years and that's not as fun. I don't have another topic immediately in the pipeline, so perhaps it's time to call a halt. 

Even my one photo was rubbish! Instead I took this along the King's Road in Chelsea.

Nouveau, Arabesque, Gothic

Time ticks on and the next Goth Walk approaches fast: on Thursday I traced the route, discovering that we would be going past the houses of both Noel Coward and Bram Stoker: now what a double-act that would have been. We will (all being well) finish at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, the one-time home of Ruth Baldwin. Socialite and prodigious drug-taker, Ruth was the girlfriend of heiress and motorboat racer Marion 'Joe' Carstairs, and died from an overdose in the flat of Oscar Wilde's neice Dolly in 1937. I didn't realise the house would look like this: built in 1913 for a Danish aristocrat and stained-glass designer, it's a startling block of Art Nouveau sensibility in a Bohemian portion of London. It's not the only example in the streets nearby, either.

I had enough time to return, after an initial visit twenty years ago, to Leighton House in Kensington, reacquainting myself with its startling neo-Moorish decor. Frederic Lord Leighton's actual art was superb and empty, its classical dullness enough to make me forgive Watts who at least put some soul in his soporific allegories; but his house is another matter, a tiled jewel. Nobody at all mentions the great green-painted iron girders and pillars to its rear, which are just as striking in their own way. 

On the Tube back home I found myself sitting next to a gent who was flicking through what I later discovered was ES, the Evening Standard magazine. He wasn't interested in an interview with Marina Abramovic, and eventually settled on a piece about holidays in Greece, but not before passing a series of photos of young people in what seemed like Gothic outfits. What was it? The paper exhausted the fellow's interest and he stuck it behind him, but although I tried to attract his attention before I left the train to see if I could have it, he was embroiled in Candy Crush and big headphones and so I abandoned the attempt. It was only through a friend that I found out the ES was profiling Slimelight, the veteran Goth club in Islington, and the whole article is on Slimelight's Instagram. It's gratifying to have such favourable coverage, though it does rather give the impression that Goth fashion has been taken over by a fetish aesthetic which, though it does seem quite prominent at the moment (rather like Steampunk was a few years ago and Cyber a few before that), isn't completely hegemonic.

Rotherhithe at Night

Katrin my god-daughter shares a house with two friends not far from the Thames in Rotherhithe, commuting from there to the Treasury where at the start of the year she began working in a department so obscure that even Dr Abacus hadn't heard of it despite working in the same building for many years. Monday was my first chance to see her since she started. She took me for a meal at the Mayflower, a clambering old hostelry overlooking the river which plays on almost certainly non-existent connections with the Pilgrim Fathers and contains the scrapings of several junk shops scattered over the walls, shelves and windowsills. The food was good but it was just as well Katrin had booked. 

Katrin led me around the area pointing out as much of its history as was visible in the dark: a pavilion in the park which had been located in several places before ending up where it was, a former workhouse now inevitably converted into a café, streets on the sites of wharves and docks, one lonely Art Deco building soaring upwards in amongst the converted warehouses and modern developments along a side street. We bought ice cream at her favourite gelateria but were thrown out as they were about to close, and finshed our desserts looking along the river. 'I think this is the best view of the river in London', Katrin said. 'I'm lucky to be here'.

Goth Walk XXXVI

It would be churlish to point out the paucity of deep black among the Walkers yesterday, pictured as we paused for a group photo at the fountain opposite the Old Bailey. After all, temperatures were in the mid-80s, and as we followed our route we took advantage of as much shade as we could find at the stopping-places, winding from Lower Marsh at the back of Waterloo, over the river and then up through Covent Garden and Holborn before finishing at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge. Our subject was the Gordon Riots, the few days in June 1780 when the Government lost control of the capital, a series of (some argue) proto-revolutionary disturbances which began with religious prejudice and ended in an all-out if disorganised attack on the 18th-century legal system. London seemed unusually loud as well as hot, and at various points I found myself competing with trains, police sirens and rickshaw drivers belting out Queen at enormous volumes, and we battled with crowds on both north and south banks of the river. The capital strikes back.

No News

Unless something goes dramatically wrong tomorrow or Monday - say, as my friend Ms Mauritia suggested, the London Marathon runners find their way through the capital impeded by people glued to the pavement - you won't see much in the news about the latest Extinction Rebellion events in Westminster, which have been specifically designed as big-tent traditional demonstrations rather than direct-action stunts designed to cause disruption: nobody's much bothered by even tens of thousands of people doing legal things. They were the focus of the last day of my break yesterday. I arrived in the rain to listen to someone from XR Cornwall talking about their experience of getting the Council there to work alongside citizens' panels: he struggled boldly against the lack of a working microphone and the better-amplified efforts of other attractions against the railings of the Palace of Westminster along Abingdon Road. For no very good reason I'd decided I would join the picket outside the Department of Transport, and found a crowd being led by a gentleman from Greenpeace in the cry 'We're from South Yorkshire and we want better buses!', while across the road a similar mass blockaded DEFRA (though not so much the staff couldn't get in or out, obviously). After about 45 minutes in which my most active contribution was helping someone get her cardboard placard pinned to her backpack, I decided to go and seek lunch, and found that someone I knew from London Gothic and who I last met at a birthday gathering had been standing right behind me. All the protests in all the world ...

A visit to the Astral Café as recommended by Comrade Tankengine (all the clientele, including me, being grumpy old chaps until a couple of schoolgirls came in seeking chips and broke the uniformity) and a call at Westminster Cathedral later, I found myself again at the Citizens' Assembly Hub outside Parliament. this time the speaker was a fellow from Reboot Democracy who described the group's plan to refashion our political system by replacing parliaments and councils with randomly-chosen Agenda Groups and Consultative Assemblies, although I was sceptical how this could cope with the short-term crises which are the lot of government most of the time. 'We aim to put up candidates in every council seat and every parliamentary constituency, who will have no policy but to introduce this system', he said. 'Unfortunately when a friend of mine did this in a local council seat, her intervention let the Conservative candidate in, so we have to work out how to avoid that'.

As always, it's XR's commitment to imagining, and in so far as possible, enacting, an alternative vision of society that impresses most (especially on the day when the UN stated that, effectively, saving the world's glaciers is no longer feasible). If only that vision didn't involve so much drumming.

Moonbathing and Other Adventures

My visit to London yesterday had three purposes: to plot out the route for my proposed next history walk; to pop to the Victoria Library for the show of art by the late Paula Hibbert Lewis, who I didn't know but various of my Goth friends did and I'm sure I've been in the same space as her at various points; and finally to meet up with Lady Wildwood, MaisyMaid and Ms DawnStar to Moon-bathe, which I will explain shortly. The first obstacle was a signalling failure at Waterloo which basically closed the whole south-eastern rail network: 'What should we do?' I asked the helpful fellow at Swanvale Halt station, to which his answer was 'Go home and forget about it'. I thought that instead I could catch the Tube at Morden, the most accessible station on the Underground network to me. The most accessible - until it came to parking the car. That took about 45 minutes, longer than it did to drive there, and involved deleting the RingGo app account I didn't know I had, and setting up a new one. 

Anyway, I eventually got there. The route I'd worked out for the Walk was a bit too long: we will have to lose Carlton House Terrace, for instance, one of the more charismatic locations on the original plan. Together with my diversion to the Victoria Library I ended up traipsing about six miles at some speed and so it was no surprise I felt a bit footsore and achey at the end. Ms Lewis's pictures included some beautiful portraits and small, colourful collages, so it was worth the walk to pay a silent trubite to a soul from the Goth world. I even finished, amazingly, a bit early so I was able to have a tea at a little café in front of Kings Cross Station. Very oddly, the barista insisted to me that not only did they have no decaffeinated tea, but that such a thing didn't exist, so I gave in and had a full-fat one.

Lady Wildwood currently works at Kings Place, the Kings Cross arts venue which not that long ago hosted PJ Harvey discussing poetry with Don Paterson, and she alerted us to the Moonbathing event which is one of a series of sound installations. You lie, or sit, in a darkened room while a big inflatable Moon hangs impassively above you and your fellow audio explorers, gradually changing colour or lapsing into entire darkness, while noise goes on around you which I would describe as a kind of sonic massage. Like massage, it isn't always gentle and the floor vibrates and pounds before everything shifts a gear and the industrial noise is replaced by tinkly bells and the like. It rather reminded me at times of being in an MRI scanner, something which I have only done once and which I quite enjoyed but I know not everyone does. I felt it teetered on the cusp of the relaxing and the disturbing. This might be because of the images you end up thinking about - Lady Wildwood, who has done it before, found herself imagining 'alien creatures running across the ceiling and preparing to abduct you ... giant spiders scuttling at the edge of the room' while I was reminded of someone going through a drawer trying to find a pair of scissors. On the other hand, my sense of 'disturbance' came from the slight worry that all this aural pounding might not be doing me all that good. Has this been tested on mice first, I wondered? Anyway, it was worth doing (once).

The floor slabs at Kings Place have ammonite fossils embedded in them. Lady Wildwood had never spotted them before! I don't think they're Dorset stone, so I wonder where they come from?

London Revelations

Following on the recent theme of not doing work, some time ago I was invited to pop out to London with Lady Wildwood and Ms MaisyMaid as they both liked the idea of visiting the Transport Museum in Covent Garden. The stuff I immediately needed to do could be compressed into the morning, so yesterday I went. My first discovery was Adelphi House in John Adam Street off The Strand, an amazing 1930s Art Deco block I had no idea existed.  

The Transport Museum had a long queue outside. We had anticipated neither the effect of the start of half-term nor a go-slow by the ticketing system, not helped by the TM's insistence that all its tickets are annual passes so they have to take your email address and details so you can come back in should you want to. I doubt I will unless I find myself at a very loose end: it was fun (though not cheap), but I think you have to be very interested in the topics covered to want to find out more. Now, as a former museum worker I like to go in to a museum, and be welcomed with a big sign saying 'Hello, this is X Museum, this is what it's about, and this is where you go next', as I can then choose to disobey if I wish. Yesterday we went round the whole place the wrong way, as we missed the small sign telling us to start on the second floor and work downwards. That added an extra chaotic element to the visual and aural chaos, as small children ran heedlessly around us until we felt like targets in a pinball machine. But there was a lot to enjoy. I especially liked the Brunel Thames Tunnel Peepshow, a paper concertina you can look through to see the three-dimensional scene, like a tiny toy theatre. 'You can see it more easily just by looking at it from the side', pointed out Lady Wildwood, and of course she is right but what's the fun of that?

We were exhausted after a couple of hours and set off on a slow amble along The Strand and Fleet Street to the Cheshire Cheese where we were dining with two more friends. As we drew closer to St Mary-le-Strand we could hear bells ringing, before realising that the strange glowing pentagonal structures on posts lining the road were a sound installation. But then we worked out that they were producing ambient ringing noises and not the bells: those were coming from St Clement Danes along the way. Was it a practice or being done for a particular event? Lady Wildwood was delighted to be hearing The Bells of St Clements - though that lyric may refer to a church in the City instead.

Fuseli at the Courtauld

Although getting to London yesterday was more problematic than usual, requiring catching the train at Woking rather than anywhere further down the line, I made the journey so I could visit the Fuseli show at the Courtauld along with Ms Mauritia. Henry Fuseli has a relationship with the Gothic tradition especially via the various versions he painted of The Nightmare, but also his treatments of scenes from Shakespeare, and other fantasies - including his fantasy women, who are on display in this exhibition. In fact, they are not complete fantasies, but I'll come to that.

I was already familiar with most of the images, but hadn't seen them in the flesh before, and gathering them together creates a slight sense of oppression as Fuseli obsessively repeats poses and ideas, using swirly dress to experiment with form and movement. He hardly ever drew from life: the story went that he would mark a paper with four random dots and use them to dispose the limbs of his figures. Many of his subjects are (imagined) sex workers, but far more erotic and striking than the exposed breast or six is what seems to be the main object of the artist's obsessive interest, hair. During the earlier part of Fuseli's life, wealthy women did indeed have towering hairstyles, but he creates weird, geometric and elaborate shapes for his figures to wear, curls, fringes, sculptured structures, decorated with beads and papers, which must often, surely, be completely unreal. Ms Mauritia remembered the 20th-century fetish artist John Willie who drew women in impossible high heels - another way of simultaneously depicting women as powerful while defusing that power with disabling dress, shoes you can't walk in, or hairstyles you can't move without disarraying. 

But the ladies in this show aren't entirely unreal. Gazing from many drawings, the dramatic features of Fuseli's wife Sophia are unmistakable even when she's not acknowledged as the model. Her hair is the most fantastic of all, but she, the young English model who became the artist's spouse, is real enough, and there's something very odd going on psychologically in the way her husband depicts her: he adores her and fears the fact he does. He shows her next to a head of the Medusa; he draws her making the corna gesture that signals cuckoldry. What kind of a person was she? Of course you get no clues from this art: Fuseli wasn't interested in showing real people, just moments from his own imagination. She's supposed to have had quite a temper, but perhaps that was just from being married to him. 

Horror!

A week last Saturday I went with Lady Wildwood and MaisyMaid to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House, a bit nervously as it was my suggestion we should. We all quite liked it though my friends preferred the first bit with its nostalgic glimpses of punk, New Romantic and early Goth ('My memory isn't wrong, people really did dress like that', MaisyMaid mused at the blownup footage of early-80s club nights, being a few years senior to her Ladyship and myself), but I thought all of it was good fun even though a couple of bits were a little queasy: the artist who'd sculpted himself as a hyperrealistic drowned corpse under an archway admitted in the captions that even he'd found it thoroughly unsettling to make. I was almost overcome being brought face-to-face with Sue Webster's Banshees jacket: 

The premise of the show is that the mode of horror has been used to analyse society since the breakdown of the hopes of the 1960s in three broad phases, that the curators categorise as 'Monster' - figures and institutions of power are made monstrous, and to oppose them nonconformists construct spectacular selves that are also monstrous; 'Ghost' - the sense of reality collapses into nostalgia and pastiche, paranoia and hysteria, fragmentation and the uncanny; and 'Witch' - narratives of power and authority are deconstructed and reconstructed into new expressions of self-determination and connection. There are multiple ways of arranging even the specific art of rebellion across five decades, of course, but this is as interesting as any.

Notwithstanding all the horror, the artwork that caught me up most was Susan Hiller's Homage to Joseph Beuys, which is 86 bottles of holy well water collected from a variety of sacred springs and sites between 1969 and 2016. I couldn't quite see what was uncanny about that. Lady Wildwood suggested that the healing capacities of the water were there to counteract the fractured and baleful material around it: nice try, I thought.

'The Music of Gothic' at the Wallace Collection, 28th October

Oh dear, I should have posted about my trip to London on Friday 28th to attend this event: a combined lecture-cum-recital hosted by Dr Emma McEvoy at the Wallace Collection, discussing, and illustrating, 'The Music of Gothic'. Dr McEvoy's case is that Gothic literature is full of music, and stage adaptations of Gothic works are too - but at first such orchestration was quite lighthearted, drawing on the conventions of comic opera. It was only from about 1820 that melodrama took over and 'The Music of Gothic' started to turn into 'Gothic Music'. A chamber ensemble conducted by the organist of St Cuthbert's Philbeach Gardens played a variety of pieces by now-forgotten composers to make her point. Funnily enough I have been reading a book about Henry Purcell at the moment - I say 'reading', but there are quite a few bits which I have no greater chance of understanding than I would a programming manual, so I skipped over them - and that mentions a number of pieces from his theatre work that would seem to go against Dr McEvoy's case, but she is, of course, planning a book, which will doubtless deal with all of that. I can't promise I'll be prepared to take out the loan necessary to buy it!

Goth Walk 35: Chasing the Golden Dawn

It finally happened: my Goth Walk about the history of late 19th- and early-20th century London occultism was originally going to take place as part of my 50th birthday celebrations in May 2020, but of course other events intervened. Even when pandemic conditions allowed us to proceed (and get into the Main Quad of UCL for the last stop), the first date was stymied by a rail strike, the second by a heatwave (Goths die in hot weather, as the joke has it), and yet another rail strike put paid to a third. I began to think it might never happen, but it did, and yesterday. I did think it might have been nine years since the last one, but on checking find it's a mere seven. 

We started at one of our favourite old haunts, the cavernous Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, and then wound our way up through Holborn and Fitzrovia. Here we are pictured on the steps of St George's Bloomsbury: some of the stops were directly relevant to the Matherses and other characters and events involved in the story, and some were just convenient places to take a breath, like the rather nice find of Whitfield Gardens off Charlotte Street, culminating in front of the Slade School of Art where Annie Horniman and Moina Mathers - or Mina Bergson as she then was - I suspect rather fell for each other without really recognising what they felt. A tale of odd personalities, beliefs and events, and, to my thinking, some startling talents diverted from their true vocation; which even applies to Aleister Crowley, who by all accounts was a pretty good cook and probably should have run a restaurant rather than an occult society.

We realised how long it had been since some of us had seen one another. Archangel Janet was visiting from Somerset in the company of Lady Wildwood, down from Herts; Sir Goingpostal made it in from Essex; Lady Metalmoomin complimented Janet on her elegant undyed grey: she has now gone undyed herself. Apart from the entertainment and information, I hope, this is of course part of the point of the whole thing. I have some inklings of subjects I might try next: 'Mew Pussy Mew', 'Lud Heat', 'Taking Liberties', 'No Popery', 'Cocktails with Elvira', or 'Tap'd in Bunhill'. That's enough work to keep me going awhile.

Photo by Archangel Janet.

Nunhead Revisited

My first Nunhead Cemetery Open Day was in 2008, although I claimed here it was a year earlier. Last year, of course, nothing happened, and even this time round it's been pushed back from its usual May date to this weekend. The chapel is fenced off, with no information as to whether this is due to Covid or general dilapidation; and I get the impression that the Friends of Nunhead (who are still restoring the East Lodge as they have been for several years now) would really rather you didn't put your life and their funds and perhaps liberty at risk by going wandering around the overgrown parts of the cemetery in search of picturesque monuments, so several entrances to the woods are blocked with brambles or stacks of wood. These are no serious barrier if you are properly equipped, but I wasn't. Still, I was surprised that I still managed to find things I hadn't seen before. Just behind the chapel is a house-like mausoleum with its pitched roof on pillars, surrounded by tumbledown tombstones; and a few yards from that is an area scattered with small monuments each about nine inches square, and clearly moved there in a group. You could, were you so disposed, abscond with one, which of course I wasn't. 

Follies and Funerary Art

Despite declines in Covid levels a visit to London still seems like a risky adventure and if yesterday's experience is anything to go by it will remain that way for a while, so I may not repeat it very soon. Being outside, even sitting in the chilly wind with Dr RedMedea at a café in Lower Marsh, was fine, but the afternoon trains became busier than I might have liked and I was glad to avoid them when I could.

Tempted by some images I'd seen I wanted to visit Gunnersbury Park. This is a delightful and amusing landscape but illustrates very neatly the difference between a true Gothic Garden and a garden which just has Gothic follies scattered around it. There is nothing awe-inspiring about Princess Amelia's Bathhouse constructed over its grotto, the arched walls of the Kitchen Garden, and even the Tower at the far south end of the park, even though that does a fair stab at looming over the pond (it shelters, rather dilapidatedly at the moment, a boathouse); they are all simply appealing decorations, added to the fine Orangery and the Temple beside a lake near the house. It's the smaller of the two houses which provides perhaps the most Gothic experience, thanks to its ruinous state.

Next to the park is Gunnersbury Cemetery, with its memorial to the victims of the Katyn Massacre and especially numerous Polish and eastern European graves:

And a short walk brings us to South Ealing Cemetery, older and more umbrageous (or perhaps that was just the weather).

A moderate risk taken, then, for the sake of Art!

Rebellion!

Before I set off for Warwickshire last week, the first act of my Autumn break was to stand very awkwardly in the drizzle outside the Council office in Hornington at 8am with a sign expressing my support for the Extinction Rebellion action beginning in the capital that day: 'I'm not at the Rebellion, but people I respect are.' At that point not only did we not know that anyone would be daft enough to obstruct Tube trains in Stratford and, as some XR members said, put at jeopardy everything else the movement was trying to do, but I wasn't at all sure that the action would last the full intended fortnight, given the harder line the police were almost sure to take compared to the event around Easter. For all I knew, everyone would have been driven away long before I could play any practical part.

Only two people spoke to me, a little girl who knew me from the Infants School and a gentleman whose opening gambit was to ask me what the Church thought of XR and its tactics. He then said he was a plant biologist working for a company advising on the growth of trees and crops, and in his opinion it was irresponsible to spread alarm about climate change when nobody can be sure what's going to happen: 'I remember watching An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore said that all the Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2012, and that wasn't right, was it?' I agreed that it was rash to be very definite about dates, but that the overall direction of movement was fairly clear. He then told me carbon dioxide 'isn't a greenhouse gas anyway', that because conifers evolved when atmospheric CO2 was twelve times what it is now the climate could easily absorb similar levels without anything bad happening, and that his greatest fear was that someone would invent a way of extracting all the CO2 from the atmosphere and kill all the plants. At that point I decided not to worry too much about his ideas, great though I'm sure he is at growing trees. I did only last a few more minutes before the rain got the better of me and I cycled home.

By the end of this week, of course, the protests were still going, so I did travel up to London to join in. I don't mind admitting that part of my motivation is to support my friends Ms Trollsmiter and Lady Metalmoomin who are far more active in the cause: if they're prepared to take the risk the very least I can do is to back them up. There is nothing wrong in being influenced (in what you do, if not what you think) by people you respect. Quite apart from the climate issue itself, I felt the Metropolitan Police's blanket ban on all Extinction Rebellion activity in the capital was so sweeping (and has yet to be proved legal - opinion is that they were just chancing their luck in the hope that demonstrators would be put off) that for the sake of freedom of assembly if I was going to do anything, it ought to be this, and now. As I turned into Whitehall Gardens and found what was then a few hundred people but which became probably a couple of thousand I was extremely nervous at how I might be received but in fact nobody paid me any attention. I spotted a figure in a clerical collar who turned out to be from another Surrey church (though in the Southwark Diocese) and of course clergy always at least pretend to be glad to see each other. That put me a bit more at my ease.

It took ages to set off. Ms Trollsmiter turned up at 12.25 and warned she could only stay an hour: I said that at the rate we were going, we'd be lucky if we'd made it out of the gardens by then. As it turned out, the march was so slow that by the time we got to the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall and then turned round to head south towards Downing Street, she and I were able to go and have coffee and a sandwich, and when I emerged I could still catch the procession up along Tothill Street which was where I met Lady Metalmoomin ('Yah, apart from the end of the world, things are really good at the moment'). We halted in Petty France outside the Ministry of Justice for a couple of very short speeches and not long after that I peeled off to go home, via what turned out to be a most circuitous route as the police had closed off Westminster Bridge, presumably to stop anyone protesting on it: like the famed Vietnam War general who stated 'to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it', the bridge had to be closed to stop it being obstructed.

It was an odd occasion. Technically the whole thing was an illegal gathering, but there the police were, facilitating it, and talking perfectly amicably to the XR liaison people. Admittedly, they did seem to be picking demonstrators at random for arrest, just to make the point, which was why I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but it was all quite good-natured otherwise. I was struck by the levels of preparedness and organisation: this is not just a group of people turning up in a London street. Whenever someone was arrested the cry would be passed down the line 'Legal observer! Legal observer!', sometimes in call-and-response form: Legal Observer (Legal Observer!), Up the front (Up the front!), On the left (On the left!). And you know you're not in a normal political demonstration when, as the police lay hands on someone or other, everyone around the spot cries 'We love you! We love you!' to the officers of the Law. You could also tell because - in contrast to every other political demonstration I have ever taken part in - the obligatory couple of Socialist Workers Party activists making sure as many people as possible are given their SWP placards to wave were nowhere to be seen.

Of course I have my quibbles with the XR approach, both its style and aspects of its rhetoric, but I am also a representative of the Church of England and I don't go along with all of that, either. Wait until you find an organisation which suits you in every detail, and you'll wait a long time. Some people don't like XR's Red Brigade, who symbolise the destructiveness and suffering of climate change, but I find their sombre presence a masterstroke. Doing nothing but walk slowly and make simple hand-gestures, they manage to be an intensely powerful visual and emotional focus. But, watching them in the flesh for the first time, as an old Dr Who aficionado my mind flies back to The Fires of Pompeii, and I speculate whether there's a Whovian in the XR design department. Spot the difference.

Ex Sepulchro Dracula Surrexit

It looks rather as though my amazing friend Professor Purplepen has seen something shocking on the other side of the meeting room at The Rugby Tavern, Great James Street, Holborn, but this turned out to be the only clear photo I took from her lecture on (as you can see) 'Dracula and Classical Antiquity' to the Dracula Society yesterday. Red-papered and decorated with sporting prints and old caricatures by Spy and the like, it was a room which yearned to be smoke-filled, but of course wasn't: instead it was crowded with enthusiasts and at one stage piled with food. I ended up seated next to the remains of the buffet during the talk and it was all I could do to restrain myself from grazing from them to the point of illness.

We think it's the first time we have managed to meet in 11 years, though are not entirely sure: the last occasion seems to have been when the Professor and a friend succeeded in visiting me at The Ruin, Grewelthorpe, during my week there back in 2008. She drew my attention to a quotation in the lecture from Eusebius, a wonderfully Gothic peroration about demons, not strictly included for my amusement but which nevertheless could have been.

Every now and then there was a rumbling from the hallway outside as though a tumbril of heads was being transferred, but was probably only a trolley of glasses, and on two occasions I went through the bar downstairs they were playing Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The Dark Side of the Abbey

Around the back of Westminster Abbey is a maze of passages and courtyards formed from the buildings of the former monastery of St Peter. I found my way through this environment on Monday to see my spiritual director, who was house-sitting in Little Cloister for one of the Canons having agreed to take on his duty as Canon in Residence for that day. We sat in the garden which used to be the abbey's infirmary chapel, dedicated, coincidentally enough, to St Catherine, and listened to the sounds of pro- and anti-Brexit protests wafting over the wall from Parliament Square. How the residents of Little Cloister manage to concentrate on anything with that going on all day I can't imagine. 'Ah, perhaps that's why Dr Haskins has gone away,' mused S.D., 'so he can actually get some work done.' 

Although parish life can be a bit of a slog, I do have a greater sense of purpose these days even if I can't always discern an easy way ahead in detail. The general sense of slow collapse, strain and impending chaos makes the role of the Church all the more vital, it seems to me, and S.D. agreed. 'The trouble with liberal Christianity is that we tend to assume everything is basically all right, and times like ours reveal that everything is not all right, and that you have to work to make sure they are. A sense of slight perturbation is instructive.'

Then we started to discuss why the Archbishop of Canterbury seems so grumpy a lot of time, how closely the Bishop of Chichester resembles Pope Pius XII, and on what grounds the incumbent of St Magnus the Martyr in the City styles himself 'Cardinal Rector'. All very deep.

Little Cloister has a somewhat overwrought statue of St Catherine by Epstein. I'm not sure I find that very spiritual, either: