Christmas 2023

It was pretty similar to last year in terms of numbers, the Cribbage and Midnight very much the same, 8am a bit down, and 10am a bit up. The fact that it was one of those years when the Fourth Sunday of Advent magically transforms into Christmas Eve at mid-day didn't seem to make that much of a difference to anyone except me and the team of souls who staff the services, who were spread a bit thin between six services, not to mention Carols by Candlelight last Friday night. 

After last year's experiences, I rethought the Midnight: rather than attempt a grandeur we can't manage, we went for intimacy instead, abandoning the old high altar, not having anyone in the choir (two choristers were present but sat in the congregation), and having subdued lighting and lots of candles. I was just thinking that for the first time I could remember the service had gone without any mishap at all when Margaret who was one of the eucharistic ministers knocked one of my huge pillar candles over and sent wax spinning over the dais the altar sits on. At least it hadn't been Tim the crucifer as, in his polyester robe (we still use the ones a churchwarden made in 1975), he would have gone up like a candle himself. 

On Christmas Day I attended the Churches Together Christmas Lunch, ending up giving three of the guests a lift after various people went down with a norovirus. I ended up sitting with a Nigerian gentleman, a woman from Sierra Leone and her small daughter, and a Sri Lankan nurse working in one of the local care homes. Somehow we began talking about Reformation history, and it was quite agreeable to explain about Lady Jane Grey and Henry VIII's wives to people who wouldn't have been able to pick me up on the bits I'd forgotten about. They still knew more about the history of the British monarchy than I do about those of West Africa or Ceylon, though. They had no idea about the UK Christmas tradition of the monarch's speech. The Lunch organisers had some trouble with the audiovisuals and so we ended up watching Chucky Boy on the TV while his words were played through a mic off someone's phone, with a delay of about 3 seconds which was most disconcerting.

Down in Dorset for Boxing Day, I, my sister and elder niece went for a little walk over Turbary Common, that charismatic landscape of my childhood. As I and Lady Arlen discovered last year, there are cows there now, and they were there today. I can't tell you how odd it is to see these bovine presences so close to a very suburban environment I am very familiar with.

Lay Led

'The thing about the informal service pattern', Giselle the lay reader said to me, 'is that what's informal for Swanvale Halt would be very formal in most other places'. That's nothing more than the truth, I thought, and there and then I determined that we should work towards having a team of laypeople planning and leading one of these non-eucharistic first-Sunday-in-the-month services. Giselle was the obvious person to organise it. We are not used to services here that aren't led by clergy: a Family Service in the month before I arrived back in 2009 was taken by Paula the Pastoral Assistant (who is used to speaking in public anyway), Lillian occasionally led Compline in Holy Week when she was lay reader, and the last time I was down with Covid Jack the retired former teacher did the talk at Messy Church. But that's about all. Part of me knows that to break things open a bit I need to be willing to step back and let others take a lead, but another part suspects I am selling the church short if I don't give them their money's worth out of me.

I certainly couldn't have stomached going so heavily on the Coronation theme as Giselle's team did this Sunday (not that there was anything sycophantic about the service - it focused on heavenly kingship as earthly), and it all went fine though Matthew who led some of the responses was a bit quiet (his microphone seemed to be working OK, however). I knew that the people involved were normally quite reticent souls with a genuine spiritual life who I could trust. In fact it was me who got things wrong. I'd managed to run off some copies of the service leaflet with two pages out of order, thought I'd junked all those, but hadn't, and so we began one hymn with half the congregation singing the wrong thing and had to stop. Shades of the 1727 Coronation - but there the resemblance ended. 

And All The People Rejoiced

'We do pageantry better than anyone else', you often hear as a verdict on royal spectaculars, and it would be churlish to reply to anyone who might say so that you might rather we did cancer screening better than anyone else. We never used to, of course. Struck by how magnificent and simultaneously manipulating Handel's Zadok the Priest is, I looked it up and discovered that when it was first performed at George II's Coronation in 1727, the Westminster Abbey choir got it in the wrong place, having forgotten to sing one anthem completely, and mangled another so badly that the choristers couldn't finish anywhere near together. Famously at George IV's Coronation his estranged Queen Caroline ran round the Abbey knocking the doors and shouting to be let in, while Queen Victoria had the ring jammed on the wrong finger before the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to hand her the orb when she'd already had it. 

So we might legitimately ask when we began to do it better than anyone else, and why. Even at Edward VII's Coronation (which had to be delayed after the King fell badly ill) the Archbishop put the crown on the monarch back to front, but it was around that time that royal events became carefully-managed spectacles that aimed at perfection. This must have been for two reasons. Before the early 1900s, the only way of recording Coronations would have been in paintings and prints, rather than photos and film, and ritual howlers could be safely erased. Secondly, they only matter when the audience isn't the aristocrats and grandees for whom the ritual was originally devised, who know what to expect, but the mass of the population. Errors and blunders may lead them to find their betters ridiculous, and learn to hold them in contempt, whereas the point of the thing is that they should become accustomed to revere them. Because no matter how fine a person Charles III may be, and however much he may believe the moving words about service and humility embedded in his oaths, the institution he embodies locks together and renders more palatable the way things are. It makes them look eternal and natural, and at the same time as it radiates 'history', it obscures the actual historical processes which have led to our current moment.

Some lovely musical moments, especially, aside, I found the Coronation service looked curiously cheap. This sounds like an absurd thing to say given how expensive we know it all is, but the merciless clarity of television made it look like The Mikado done by a ropey travelling theatre. Take the Crown of St Edward, a lavish, grandiose, charismatic object if ever there was one. Under the camera it might as well have been plastic. As it was, it rested on the head of a tired elderly gentleman who very clearly was anxious it didn't fall off (a reasonable worry as he apparently isn't allowed to touch it). Even for me it was hard to discern the mystical action of the Holy Spirit in this.

I wonder whether the issue is to do with what we expect. Any liturgical function has to work with the human as well as the inanimate material to hand, and I think we may have come to expect that such events should be managed by movie directors and carried out by beautiful or at least impressive thesps. Everything should look like Game of Thrones, and it just can't. The basic bonkersness of the whole thing becomes unavoidable, and it will interesting to see what long-term effect seeing it all will have. 

In the same way, watching a eucharist online is a strangely weird and unaffecting experience even if it's done perfectly. You are supposed to be there - and a Coronation is designed for those present too. But the British establishment wants it to be a moment when they can persuade the whole population to buy into their continued dominance. Can it do so the next time round?

No Use Crying

Never was anything so rightly characterised as a mixture of triumph and disaster as Christmas 2022 at Swanvale Halt. The chief instance of the first was the Crib Service, the first time we have followed the old pattern since 2019. I say 'the old pattern', but in fact this was the pattern devised by former curate Marion which we'd only actually done once anyway, and which I cobbled together from her notes. The keynote is the children bringing up the crib figures - nice, robust wooden ones - to form the crib scene. The children were led by Poppy with robe and candle, and that all went pretty swimmingly with a couple of hundred souls in church. But the Midnight - the Midnight was another matter. Now I have always regarded the Midnight Mass as one of the high points of the liturgical year and have worked to set it as a marker of proper Catholic practice, so I already feel a bit pressurised to get it right, not least because there are always going to be people there making an occasional, or even once-a-year visit to church. It's important. This year the choir could muster only two voices, thanks to illness and absences, and we had as organist Corinne who has only just begun playing again after a long gap. She wasn't the most confident of presences and the music was hesitant and a bit inconsistent. There were very few people there anyway - no more than 40 - and I was on edge enough by the time we got to the high altar for communion. Then I noticed Gordon the head server had managed to lose the new charcoal from the thurible, and it lay smoking on the Victorian tiles. The thing now only contained a charcoal that had long gone out, and so though I went through the motions of putting incense in it I knew it wouldn't burn. The altar itself was an inch or two too far towards the wall meaning it was awkward to lean over. And then, somehow, unaccountably, I managed to spill the wine - a big, significant spillage of already-consecrated fluid. I hadn't knocked anything, or caught my sleeve or anything like that: instead it felt as though something unseen had knocked my arm (demons, presumably). It took some time to recover. The tiny miracle was that, although I'd registered to my horror that there was no plastic sheet under the altarcloth and on top of the superfrontal, and although the cloth was soaked in wine, we discovered at the end of the service that none had gone through to the superfrontal. Washing winey linens is one thing; getting consecrated wine out of a piece of kit you can't wash is another. So I went home a little less horrorstruck and shakey, and clutching an armful of linens. 

It all makes me reflect that I may have to retreat from my ideal of how the Midnight works. We seem not to have the resources to run an event on the Lamford pattern, or even how we did it at Goremead that one year I was there. It needs a confident musical lead and if we can't find that, and have to scrape around to find servers and singers, we need to rethink.

The Christmas Day services were fine, thankfully!

Peace Be With You All

Returning to work after a fortnight’s break in the Autumn is always a bit of a rude awakening for me: no matter how much activity I may have packed into those two weeks, they very soon recede into the mists of memory. The last out-of-the-ordinary event of my holiday was attending a Goth night at Aces and Eights in Tufnell Park: I was glad I did, but the transport system has now made it very hard for me to manage nights out like this, as the last train for Swanvale Halt leaves London well before midnight. On Saturday I parked in Kingston and caught the train there, and even the Kingston trains ran no later than 0.42 unless I’d wanted to catch the one an hour after that culminated in a bus journey from Surbiton. I managed to make it to an 8am mass the next day, but the church I first tried was shut leading to a mad rush to the Cathedral. I’m not sure which edition of the Prayer Book the celebrant was using, but their prayer that the Lord might ‘so rule and govern the heart of thy chosen servant George our Queen’ suggests they’d been up late as well.

So Monday morning began with Bible reading. While I was away various things had gone slightly awry, people not being where others expected them to be, and allegations of unhelpfulness by some parties against others, and I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them (I shouldn’t have looked at the emails in advance). My eye was drawn to Christ’s instructions to the disciples in Luke 10, ‘First say, Peace be to this house’, and that seemed like a clear instruction if ever there was one. We mustn’t allow a high value placed on the Peace of God to obscure real problems in a Church community, but it does no harm for it to be the first word the pastor says to it. It reminded me what I am here to do, and I thank God for that.

Hearing is Believing

Once a year, the church I used to worship at in Chatham was graced by the presence of the Guild of the Servants of the Sanctuary ('Oooh, the Serpents!' I can hear Father Barkley declaring) who held an elaborate mass at which something always went ludicrously wrong. One year, it was the thurifer banging the thurible into the pulpit to the accompaniment of sparks and scattered charcoal; and another, it was music coming mysteriously over the sound system because it had somehow connected with the radio. In my memory I have turned this into the theme tune from The Archers but sadly I think this is a false recollection. That would have been even funnier.

I have had to battle with audio systems too. At Lamford I was always getting nasty crackling interference: Il Rettore maintained it was due to my insistence on wearing a trad cassock-and-alb, too many layers mucking up the signal, while Dr Bones argued it was the Devil trying to stop my sermons being heard. I was not completely sold on either explanation, I must admit.

Here in Swanvale Halt we sometimes get a horrendous rasping buzz which comes out of the speakers at the worst possible moment in a service and makes everyone gasp: it's a wonder nobody has ever gone into cardiac arrest (at least, not because of that). The company who installed our sound system can never identify any cause, of course: my car mechanic Dad always said the words any engineer dreaded most were 'intermittent fault', and I suppose sound technicians are no different. But it only seems to happen on weekdays, leading to the suspicion that somewhere nearby in a shop or something is a bit of kit that interferes with our system, which on Sundays is turned safely off. 

This Sunday the sound wasn't working at all. I flicked the mute switch on my mic set on and off, checked the little set of lights stationed high up in the rafters, and during the Gloria at the 8am nipped back into the Vestry to cast an eye quickly over the audio system, but nothing happened. For some reason any problem with the sound system makes me unspeakably anxious, and I find myself concentrating less on what I'm saying in the Mass than the way I am saying it, having to project and enunciate to maximise the chances of people hearing. It's massively distracting, and I am not really sure why I find it so distracting. It turned out that a crucial switch obscured by the edge of the cupboard holding all the kit in the vestry had been turned off when the PAT testing was done this week. 

Another little aspect of church life that you don't get warned about at theological college!

Spotted Sacrifices

What a lot of church there has been this Easter Day. All the services had similar gates to last year, though there were fewer communicants at the main 10am mass, with lots of infrequent attenders (including one family making what I think is their first visit in about seven years) who received blessings at the altar rail instead. We sang the Regina Coeli, blessed two new icons, and Roy the verger rang the bell 93 times for the Supreme Governor's birthday. I'd thought he would do it as we were finishing the service, but to my surprise we all stood and listened. It took quite a long time.

Months ago we managed to dent the old Victorian silver flagon we use for communion. It was sent for repair to the jewellers, and though we received it back in great excitement we quickly discovered it leaked. The jewellers were most apologetic and had another go. The leaky joint is now repaired, but for a couple of weeks there have been mysterious spits and spots of wine appearing on corporals, and at the Dawn Mass this morning the linens looked as though they'd been used to staunch a wound: it seems there's something wrong higher up the flagon, so that when it's full an upper joint is now leaking. Jill our sacristan sadly bundled up the soiled altarcloth she'd only put on the altar the day before, and arranged for Gordon, the head server, to collect her tall glass ewer as a stopgap later on in the morning. 

It was the glass ewer I used to prepare the table at the 10am service. The last chalice was filled when a drop of wine, just one tiny drop, fell from its lip in what seemed to be slow-motion until it spattered onto the pristine linen of the nave altarcloth. Jill wasn't there. I waited until the church was empty and took it away to launder in penance.

Easter 2018

This closeup picture of the Maundy Thursday Altar of Repose makes the candles look crazier than in fact they were. The flowers, as usual raided from the Rectory garden, don't amount to the spectacular displays you might see in some churches, but it was done with devotion (and some weariness). Most of the services were roughly parallel in numbers to last year, though the main 10am service today slumped by about a third from its seventeen-year peak of last year. You can't read too much into that as it's usually due to where in the week, and in the case of Easter where in the year, the big days fall. The 8am Prayer Book service was a thing of chaos. I forgot the order of events, which differs quite significantly from the modern service, and then wondered why Rick the verger hadn't brought up the offerings. I went to investigate and found there weren't any, which threw me even more.

I'm not sure I achieved much spiritually over this Lent and Easter: it remains to be seen, perhaps, in reflecting on the various things that have happened including my op. But today I finally waved goodbye to Julie's car, which has sat under a hedge at the side of my drive for well over two years. A friend of hers wanted it and took it away. I am very, very glad at this. 

Toe in the Water

A day of snow wasn't the time I would choose to venture back to church again after my enforced absence, but when I got up this morning that was what I found - not quite what was expected, but not a very severe fall, and already going slushy on the roads. I didn't have to head out early, as a visiting priest was managing the 8am.

In fact I was in church yesterday, but acting in a supervisory capacity as the preparations were made for the beginning of Passiontide - veiling the images, and putting up the Stations of the Cross. I also had a couple of baptism bookings to make.

We were going to have a baptism this morning, too, but the godparents couldn't make it from far-flung parts along the snowy roads. The young baptizand's family still turned up - they're fairly regular attenders and only live around the corner - bearing his cake which they shared around after the service was over. It was an odd morning. I expected to preach and in fact Lillian the lay reader was down to do it, and then when she started the Gospel reading it turned out to be the wrong one. The best bit was Junior Church making 'prayer pretzels'. I didn't get one. 

I get the impression that the older members of the congregation (that is, the majority) have rather enjoyed me being poorly, in the nicest possible way. They get a chance to comiserate with me rather than me with them, and they now know that I have a better idea what they're talking about, given that so many pastoral or parochial conversations revolve, one way or another, around operations. 

Palm Sunday Scenes

On a gorgeous Palm Sunday morning we gathered at the Recreation Ground to process along the main street to church. The sky was a perfect, undifferentiated blue, so that the café opposite the church was busy with breakfasting customers who gawped rather satisfyingly as the Swanvale Halt parishioners made their way past singing ‘All glory, laud and honour’.

At Mass I was about to begin the prayer of consecration when a wasp plopped onto the altar in front of me. That could be distracting, I thought, I’ll be constantly looking at it to see what it’s doing. So I popped a ciborium lid on it until I could dispose of it, which I did as soon as communion was over, slipping a bit of paper under it and taking it out of the church. Apparently some people assumed it was an obscure liturgical action specific to the day.

At noon a baptism, with three little girls handing me the necessary kit from the table – shell, towel, oil, candles. Amazingly once they’d told me their names I managed to remember.

In the evening I took a member of the congregation being confirmed to a service at a modern church building in Woking. The font amazed: a wee glass bowl supported by three pillars (one steel, two wood, for some unknown reason) set into concrete feet below a strange boxy structure. The whole thing reminded me subliminally of Robbie the Robot. The communion bread came in the form of rolls which resulted in bits spraying everywhere: the vicar of a neighbouring church to Swanvale Halt hissed to me ‘Our Lord is all over the carpet’. I waited until the throng left for cake and coffee, borrowed a dustpan and brush, and swept Him up. There wasn’t as much left as there should have been, trodden, I assume, and taken elsewhere on people’s shoes. I took the remnants home and buried them in the garden.

And a post-Palm Sunday scene: I went to the Cathedral to make my confession, and found the duty canon, the vergers and volunteers all sat on the grass outside because the refurbishment works had closed the building due to ‘unacceptably low air quality’. And that was before I’d even started. 

All Over Again

Attendance at the indefatigable Crib Service was down a bit this year, although part of that fall may have been due to ‘accounting error’ – two different people doing the counting, one of whom tends to err on the side of generosity, and the other regularly underestimating. The other services were all up a bit, enough for them all to feel upbeat and encouraging rather than threadbare, even the 1662 Prayer Book service this morning at 8am, and a high proportion of the congregations weren't regular members of the church.

Every year I tell myself I need to revise the order for the Midnight Mass, and every year I forget as soon as it’s over: I must do it this year. The benefit of celebrating the mass facing east was revealed at the Midnight as the thurible came open while I was censing the gifts and sprayed ash over everything. The choice was whether to empty everything out and start again, or soldier on and cope – given that time was ticking I picked the latter, and scooped the ash out of the chalice with an extra host. Clearing up, I got to the bottom of the hosts in the ciborium and found a little pile of ash, which having again screwed up my fortitude I ate in case there were fragments of bread in it (rather than go to the palaver of burying it). I’m still here so presumably no harm done. Of course all this was entirely hidden from the congregation and you are not to tell anyone, especially not if they are wearing a pointy hat or a purple shirt.I am filled with gratitude for all the lovely people I am privileged enough to have around, the players who act out the Nativity at the Cribbage with such gentleness and sensitivity (especially when this year a collection of small girls came up impromptu to inspect the baby), and the servers and helpers who make everything work so smoothly despite me mucking it up now and again.

At four-ish, having been to the local lunch for those who would otherwise be alone (I escaped before Citizen Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor's speech), I got down to the church to say Evensong. I sat and prayed through the prayer slips left at the candle stand and the stars written out at the NCT nativity service and the Blue Christmas extravaganza a few days ago. A strangely child-like hand relates a prayer ‘to help me get rid of my fear of death’. Someone else prays for their father with dementia and their mother who cares for him. There are a scattering of memorial prayers for lost loved ones: one says ‘blessed are the broken-hearted, for they will be reunited’. A child I know thanks Mary for having Jesus. And so they go on, all the way through the pile. A few I can’t read at all and just commend them to God. For being able to take part in these prayers, ‘privilege’ is hardly the word. Merry Christmas, one and all.

Playing Host

Before 2013 it had been back in the 1990s that Swanvale Halt had hosted a confirmation service. Apparently the 2013 gig went so well that our Area Dean asked us to do it again last Sunday. It was a somewhat smaller affair because the whole Deanery could only rustle up four candidates as opposed to the 16 we had last time, but our new suffragan bishop was happy to come for that many, or few (she is 'keen to get out and about' according to the diocesan newspaper) and apart from asking to change one of the readings acceded to everything we would normally do here. That meant a touch of smoke and wearing my old gold Roman set to preside.

Bp: What do you want me to wear? I've bought my cope.
Me: Well, we'd normally use a chasuble.
Bp: Ah good, wearing a cope at the eucharist is really hard work. Have you got everything?
Me (opening drawer): Yes, it's all here.
Bp: What's that?
Me: It's a chasuble.
Bp: I've never seen one like that!

Considering the bishop is married to a prominent incumbent in the City of London this is quite a surprise, but doubtless when she does the New Bishops Course they'll explain the differences between Roman and Gothic. If anyone running it knows. I didn't mind at all, as our former diocesan positively blanched when I showed him the Old Gold Set whereas our new suffragan was blithely unconcerned. 

St Rita of Cascia made her presence felt during the proceedings only in the fact that our visitors from other churches of course had no idea what to do at communion (next time I will prime everyone what to expect), and that I, acting as thurifer, and the bishop had great fun with the business of passing the thurible to one another. She'd told me she was left-handed, so I tried to pass it the opposite way round to usual, but we got so confused we both ended up crossing our arms over in all sorts of bizarre ways, biting our lower lips to stop ourselves giggling. Jesus would have done the same. 

As ever Swanvale Halt did itself proud and provided a wonderful spread after the service. The bishop and everyone else who expressed an opinion were fulsome in their praise of the building, the service, the food, and the general ambience. It was a lovely party to celebrate four people's faithfulness. 

How Many Churchwardens Does It Take to Open a Door

It was the Advent Service of Light yesterday evening. I'm still not sure how this got transplanted from Salisbury Cathedral where I think it originated to little Swanvale Halt in the mid-1980s; now quite a number of churches do something similar, although I think in those days we must have been virtually unique. 

The service consists of seasonal readings and carols, starting and finishing in candlelight, with every candle we can muster lit around the building. It culminates in a procession out of the church and round the side of the churchyard into the hall, attempting to sing in something like unison. Yesterday the hymn at that point was the old Advent carol O Veni Emmanuel - albeit in English rather than Latin. 

There were about 80 of us. The wind blew out all our candles almost instantly but we were prepared for that. We were singing the verse that begins

O come thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heavenly home

just as the crucifer arrived at the hall door - and found nobody had unlocked it. Marion the curate could hardly contain herself. The churchwardens rushed inside to locate keys and discovered they didn't know their way around the bunches as well as they thought. I like to think the surrealism prompted extra gusto in the singing.

No Use Crying

Marion the curate felt thoroughly rough on Sunday morning, having clearly caught The Cold from her son and husband. 'Could you preside?' she asked, so I did, while she croaked and sniffed through the deacon's role. It was the third of my year-long(!) series of catechetical sermons, in which I was talking about the creeds; after the service we were due to celebrate the 95th birthday of a member of the congregation, and finally I was doing a baptism at noon. 

At Communion I reached across the altar to rearrange the vessels to a more convenient configuration and managed to knock over one of the chalices: wine everywhere. I told everyone to sit down while I and the servers removed everything from the altar, fetched clean linens and then carried on (thankfully this happened before anything had been consecrated - otherwise it would all have been more complicated). During Communion Janet, who admitted to coming to church without having had breakfast (which in principle of course you should do, though I think if you are, like Janet, an elderly lady with balance problems and mental health issues, you should probably be excused fasting), dropped her Host and in trying to pick it up broke it into pieces, which I gathered up and ate once she'd finished treading on them. 'Thank you for the service,' Andrew, who works for a big national construction firm, said to me afterwards; 'it was enlightening in so many ways.'

I stumbled and tripped my way through both birthday and baptism; the latter was of an adult so I had to reorganise what I'd usually say on such occasions and with my brain only partially functioning I didn't do it very convincingly. Coming up the hill I saw an ambulance driving off, never a sight one welcomes. Going a little further a car went past me, and on finding myself hailed, I turned back to discover it stopped and Peter and Anna, two young teachers who are members of the congregation, attracting my attention. It turned out that the ambulance contained Marion, who had fallen over on the way up the hill, and her son, whisking them both off to hospital. 

Peter and Anna took me to hospital, and back home when it was clear that Marion probably had nothing more serious than a cracked rib, and an hour or so later I went back again to check the situation. Peter and Anna had gone and I took Marion and son back home when she was discharged (with nothing more radical than Ibuprofen, I was surprised to find). Marion's husband got home from a school sailing weekend he was leading in Portsmouth in time to take their son to a concert he was singing at in Guildford (what complex lives we lead, not enough redundancy in the system). 

Did you get all that? I'll be asking questions.

Confirmed!

We hadn't hosted a confirmation service at Swanvale Halt for years; nor had we had many people to offer as confirmation candidates for years, I think five since 2000 to be precise. So I was very keen indeed to secure a Deanery confirmation service for the refurbished church, regardless of how many people we actually had ourselves to offer forward. As it turned out, there were eventually five of them, all adults - a civil servant, a school caretaker, a plumber, a mum and school assistant, and a civil engineer - and we had a really good series of sessions in preparation. They joined another ten candidates from across the area, and enough of their families and friends to fill the church. The only elements over which St Rita of Cascia made her presence felt were the thurible coming open and spilling incense and charcoal over the floor (thankfully during a hymn so the frantic scrabbling around after bits was possible to disguise) and the bishop's microphone going haywire so that, from behind at least, it sounded as though he was doing a passable impersonation of the late Norman Collier. It was, however, lovely. I insisted that we not water down the service to the usual middle-of-the-road common-denominator and instead give everyone something to remember, which is just what happened. I also insisted we put on a really good spread after the service was over, and that happened too. Heaven knows how much that cost, but I can think of few things better to spend money on than a party to celebrate fifteen people making a public declaration of faith.

However once upon a time this wouldn't have been anything much to get excited about. The modern custom of confirming people (and baptising them if need be, as two of ours were) and them taking communion at the same time has only arisen because numbers are small enough to make this feasible, whatever the Church may argue in terms of this being the right way of doing things, which is of course true as far as it goes. I checked back through the old confirmation register in our strong box, and discovered that Swanvale Halt had on its own produced 48 confirmation candidates in 1960, 18 in 1961, 40 in 1962, 34 in 1963, and 48 again in 1964. Of course the majority of them were aged under 16, but not all - the number of adults being confirmed was never below 7 in any year. Equally striking was the gender imbalance: the figures hovered around one-third men and boys and two-thirds women and girls, except in 1964 when 83% of the confirmands were female. That tells you a lot about the sociology of the mid-century Church of England.

We Shall Remember (most of the time)

At 9.20am on Sunday I opened up the computer file containing my Remebrance Sunday sermon, to find there were only two paragraphs of sermon there. God alone knows where the rest of it was; I'm now unsure I even wrote it. Consequently I had to busk it from a quarter-page of scribbled notes, not that it seemed to damage the occasion too much.

As I've said before Swanvale Halt doesn't have an outdoor war memorial and some of the congregation (including the children who are in uniformed organisations) were away taking part in the great civic extravaganza in Hornington. That notwithstanding, we had 100 people there yesterday morning; I don't know where they came from. Actually I do and none of them were there solely for Remembrance Sunday, though I've no doubt people made a special effort to turn out. Very good, anyway, and a good few children to lead our Act of Remembrance complete with Last Post. The organist played Crown Imperial as the recessional which really gave the instrument a going-over. Jocelyn's organ-ising always sounds magnificent but it only ever blows a gasket when he's playing it, too.

On Not Being Able to Tell

The Family Service always worries me: even if the subject is heavy the children need to be involved in some way and it helps if it’s something people can’t remember us doing twenty times before. The games or illustrations usually involve me making something rather frantically on a Saturday afternoon after a trip to the art shop in Hornington.
This Sunday I began, got a couple of children up to the front to help me, and realised having got part of the way through that I’d left part of the stuff at home. This was after having had to start the service late because I thought I’d sent the reader the text being read, and discovering I hadn’t. There was no rescuing it: I had to send the youngsters back to their places and carry on as best I could. The congregation found my discomfiture very amusing – ‘It makes you human’ was the kind remark though when Mad Trevor referred to my talk, a very sketchy and knockabout take on the history of interdenominational relationships, as ‘the entertainment’, I felt I should have torn my alb. I really don’t like the idea of worship, even the more informal and unstructured kind, as ‘entertainment’ rather than something which directs us towards God.
Yet during the talk I mentioned how all human organisations can split and divide, from political parties to knitting circles, and how the fact that churches usually manage to keep going despite all the differences between their members is little short of a miracle. One lady told me her parents were nearly in tears having just begun re-attending their own church after a particularly acrimonious and horrendous falling-out. There’s no predicting where and how what you say is going to hit.

Bring on the Sub

There were only six of us at the 8am Mass at snowy Swanvale Halt on Sunday morning. The curate was presiding, and having got to the end of the prayers looking increasingly pink choked at the peace and lost her voice completely, so I had to step in. I'd been so weary, under-the-weather and generally pissed off when I got up that I nearly didn't go at all, there being no actual need for me to be there. Lucky I did, and got the experience of presiding at the Holy Sacrifice in an overcoat and wellingtons.

Something similar happened to me when I was looking after Goremead a couple of years ago. There it was the midweek service when the bout of food-poisoning that had been threatening me all morning finally sent out a conquering wave of nausea. Luckily a) the congregation included two retired priests one of whom stepped in from the Creed onwards and b) there is a toilet adjoining the vestry where the other retired priest found me a minute later with my head down the bowl. Fully vested in fiddleback and maniple too.

Another instance: at the confirmation service in November the bishop managed to choke and only recovered slowly and with a great deal of concentration. The trouble with a confirmation service is that nobody else can do it. Churches tend to have rather few retired bishops lying around for this sort of emergency.

Thin Ice for Harvest

The infants' school began assembling for their harvest celebration about twenty-five to nine on Wednesday. I had an order of service, which had my name prominently next to the bits I was doing. I wasn't doing the 'talk - God's Harvest Gifts', obviously, because that didn't have my name next to it.
In troop the children and assorted teachers, parents, grandparents and tiny siblings. All goes wonderfully as they present their gifts and do their little turns. Then comes the 'talk'. The headmistress beams expectantly at me. Ah.
I then go into five minutes of complete insanity tearing round the church asking the children about their favourite foods. They rather suspiciously all seem to like vegetables although one says pasta. I realise that I am starting to descend into lunacy as my discussion of trout becomes far too detailed and curtail the madness.
Do anything in church with enough authority and you can get away with it. But it's not a habit one should get into, I suspect.

48 Hours In

I had a super induction service at Swanvale Halt on Monday evening, even though I hadn't twigged that I was supposed to give the dismissal at the end and nobody had pointed it out: the Bishop had to call me to the front. So St Rita of Cascia, blessed patron saint of liturgical cock-ups, is right there with me from the start. I was whirled around from one smiling person to another at the bun-fight afterwards, fuelled by nothing but champagne and mania, to discover in the dying moments that the ex-Lady's dog had escaped from the upstairs bathroom where he'd been confined, scaled the roof, jumped the gate and was wandering around the road outside greeting the cars with a friendly bark.

On my first day I was only made incandescent with rage the once, largely because slightly too many things were being framed to me in the terms 'this is what we do' rather than 'this is what we've done till now, do you mind carrying on?' which would have got my back up rather less. To a degree this is mutual insecurity: I'm especially sensitive to being told what to do because I'm unsure of my ground, while some people are unsure of me and so sensitive in the other direction.
I went to see my spiritual director whose house I'd been staying in before the move. 'Everyone said you were very untidy,' he informed me, 'I think we need to work on this. Of course in the old days the answer would have been to get a tidy wife, but that's rather frowned on these days'.
He told me two things I found interesting (three if you count his being denounced by the Bishop of Rochester as 'a very dangerous man', which I suggested should go on the cover of his forthcoming book). There was the story of the former vicar of St George's Bickley who covered all the windows of the church in black velvet so it was pitch-dark inside and replaced all the altar furniture with silver stuff. It must have looked like something run by the Church of Satan. In a similar vein, S.D. recently conducted a house-blessing using the full-works Rituale Romanum form with separate exorcisms of salt and water before they are co-mingled and then blessed again to make the holy water for the blessing itself. The lady houseowner was very pleased. 'I do so love the Book of Common Prayer', she said. Curiously she opened all the cupboards in the house to be blessed but not the fridge. We concluded that it must now be positively throbbing with demons.

This afternoon at my new Deanery Chapter I heard another good line. One of the parishes is facing the decision not to use one of its two churches, naturally a very controversial question among the non-churchgoers of the village concerned. 'But that's the church they don't go to,' said the priest in charge of one of the neighbouring parishes, 'It just wouldn't be the same not going to a completely different church'.