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!

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.

Dorset, and Chelmsford 2023

In our family Badbury Rings is the go-to place for a picnic, and Wednesday found me, my mum and sister there, reliving long-ago times and wandering the windy ramparts. I think the mysterious features we could see on the skyline that looked like a row of gigantic solar panels and a tower of some kind are associated with a sand quarry on the hillside over toward Corfe Mullen. Later on I made it to Blue Pool on the Isle of Purbeck, somewhere I haven't seen for forty years; the colour of the clay-infused water varies greatly, but it had its customary hue of turquoise on Wednesday. There were a few other visitors, but I had the woods almost to myself.

But today's excursion was very different and took me to Chelmsford, mainly to see the Cathedral as it's one I've never done. There isn't much to Chelmsford, nor to its Cathedral, a big parish church bumped up to cathedral status in 1914 and never altered much to look like it unlike some other parish-church cathedrals such as Leicester or Newcastle. It has also been architecturally cleansed a couple of times over the years and so very little of any antiquity remains. It is quite the most un-cathedral-like cathedral I've seen. The font, altar and bishop's throne look disconcertingly as though they are made of recycled plastic, but are in fact of Westmorland stone.

Chelmsford City Museum, though, is a delight: clear, arranged with quite a bit of visual flair, and done with a genuine passion for the history of the area. The story of the building housing the museum is covered, and even the military bit about the Essex Regiment is good. There's also a completely uncontextualised reference in the Roman display to a certain locally-relevant 1980s TV sitcom, and I do appreciate curatorial jokes. And it's still run by the local council, and free to go in!

Thanks to the Museum, I know that Moulsham Street marks the course of the old Roman road to the waystation halfway between Londinium and Camulodonum that was the original settlement here, and it was on Moulsham Street that I found the Little Café, a small eatery which - like Tyfu Café in Caerphilly - I added to the list of nice places I've had sandwiches in. Let's not call them 'greasy-spoons', but good basic cafés. Always look for a place where old people go to eat, and where the staff know the patrons' names! 'Other cafés are available', but why would you bother?

Men Only, Supposedly

Edgar organised the Men's Breakfast for many years until he became too poorly and had to give it up and, as nobody felt able to take it on, the event fell into abeyance. On Saturday the members organised a special one-off gathering in Edgar's memory, close to his birthday on Candlemas Day, with his wife Jill at the head of the table. All very splendid though my venture back into carnivorous habits by partaking of a convivial bacon butty failed to convince me I was missing anything - unlike the leftover bits of ham and beef I took home after my mum's Christmas lunch (those were worryingly pleasurable).

When I went on the New Vicars Course many years ago one of my fellow sufferers had already been in his parish for a couple of years, and when he arrived there was a well-established Men's Breakfast. He went for a couple of times before noticing that while the chaps sat down to partake, as we too did at Swanvale Halt, of bacon butties, toast and cereals, in the kitchen the wives were doing all the catering. My colleague was outraged. 'If this is the Men's Breakfast, the men should do the work', he maintained, and insisted this should be the case. The members stopped the event rather than do it themselves. 

It was understandable and in fact very good that Jill was present on Saturday, but I was perturbed to find Susan and Renee in the kitchen doing the washing up. 'We don't mind, it's all for Edgar and just the one', they smiled. It had better be!

Adapting to Circumstances

The garden at Swanvale Halt Rectory is ill-suited for croquet. The lawn area is small so the customary pitch needs to be scaled down. It has two trees in the middle. It has a sunken path to one side, and a severe slope, front-to-back. This means that you only ever really play crazy croquet, a variant I have never heard of, but if we've invented it, then so be it. This includes extra rules, such as being able to retrieve your ball if it rolls down into the path, or legitimately stopping it if it is threatening to do so; and with every stroke you have to take account of the gradient. Or gradients. And the remains of molehills, pits and holes. And, in this year of drought and 'false autumn', the leaves. 

We started late during my Bank Holiday Sunday garden party yesterday, so the croquet had to be not just crazy but also carried out at some speed to fit in the evening meal: I expected some leftovers but did want to ensure some inroads were made into the lasagne. It was such a pleasure to be able to have friends over to share my home for a little while, as I haven't done since 2018: it's always a lot of work, but I get my reward. 

I've learned to prepare as much in advance as possible, making food and freezing it. On Thursday evening the task was to cook the lasagne. Most of my friends are, or at least prefer to be, vegan, so I'd bought some soya milk, but contemplating the pan I was going to use I was pretty sure I'd need more than I had, so set out as the sun set to find some. The Co-Op had none, neither did the corner store nearby. Neither did Sainsbury's. Waitrose was shut. So was the convenience store on the corner. So was Corbett's back in the village. I eventually found some the following morning at the newsagents that contains the post office. They've come to my assistance before when I needed an emergency aubergine.

The Ministry of Hospitality

Some of my friends regularly post pictures of food on LiberFaciorum which I rather scorn to do, but I am breaking my rule here to show you a Dorset apple cake. It isn't made with Dorset apples, I fear, but Surrey ones from my garden. I'd unexpectedly found myself hosting some of my colleagues from other denominations, Fr Jeffery of the Catholic parish, Revd Alan of the URC, and Paul, the new Baptist minister, for our regular ministers' lunch. We were supposed to be at Revd Marlene's up in Tophill, but she was away at a funeral. She and her husband invariably provide us with cake when we visit and I felt somewhat shamed into furnishing my colleagues with something a little bit nicer than just chocolate biscuits from the Co-Op. Perhaps this might rouse me from my catering torpor: if Fr Jeffery can cook a huge meal for four of us at the start of Lent, can't I be at least minimally hospitable and bake a cake? It's not as though this version of Dorset Apple Cake is hard to do - just flour, butter, some defrosted cooked apple, and a dash of sugar. 

Among my Anglo-Catholic researches I have been writing about Revd John Chandler of Witley today, one of the very first priests who took Tractarian ideals in the parishes, and almost definitely the first in Surrey. In 1870 as Rural Dean he hosted his colleagues for a Christmas dinner provided with nothing less than a haunch of venison sent by the then-recently-retired Bishop Sumner of Winchester, to whose gratitude he replied in verse:

Thanks, my Lord, for your venison, for finer or fatter

Ne'er ranged in a forest or smoked in a platter.

I at once ascertained from the basket and label

That 'twas none but your Lordship who furnished my table.

His eighty hymns were in quite a different mode!

War Scenes

By the time I got to the ecumenical Prayer Breakfast at the Baptist Church in Hornington on Saturday, breakfast was over and prayer had long since begun. Naturally there was only one subject on people’s minds and Patrick, the retired Baptist minister leading the reflections, did a sound job bringing out the ramifications of events in Ukraine and the world’s response to them, including the effects on the poor both in Russia and here as sanctions cut in and prices rise. Yesterday I was in school to do assembly with the year 1s, and decided not to talk about war but about Lent: but Alison the headteacher told me the diocese had already sent through a bundle of resources about ‘how to talk to children about war’, not inappropriately as there is one child in the school of Ukrainian extraction.

I doubt the diocesan material includes anything on ‘how to talk to children about the potential end of civilisation’, but my prayers at the moment focus on the war not escalating beyond poor Ukraine. I’m a little calmer about this than I was since reading up a bit about what the situation actually is in respect of the global stock of nuclear weapons, and observing how moderate the Americans are being, but still think there’s a fair chance none of us will make it as far as Easter. It’s not just Mr Putin whose mind seems full of illusions: tyrants rarely fall in single, catastrophic events, tyrannical political systems even less often, but our liberal media love the idea that massive demonstrations will storm the palace and pluck the despot from his throne, or ill-conceived foreign adventures lead to his downfall as plucky small nations defy him. It’s the story they always tell, and it’s fanciful. Hope isn’t a strategy.

Cylene the Goth got in touch to ask how they should address St Olga: I boggled a bit as they’re a pagan. They were treating St Olga of Kyiv in the way they would a pagan deity, gathering things that the entity might like as an offering. ‘I’ve got blue and yellow candles for the Ukrainian flag’, Cylene said: ‘Should I offer vodka, or mead? What would have been around in her time?’ we had an interesting discussion about how the invocation of saints in the Christian tradition differed from pagan approaches. I was quite moved that Cylene even thought of it.

Father Jeffrey of the Roman parish offered the ministers a Shrove Tuesday lunch, and once we were safely through a discussion of clerical shirts and the game casserole I raised the topic of the war. How were my colleagues assimilating all this? Alan from the United Reformed Church admitted that he was so unsettled he was procrastinating about almost everything he had to do ‘because part of me thinks there’s a 5% chance none of us will be alive by Sunday’. Marlene from Tophill just felt fazed and anxious. Jeffrey got us back on a spiritual level by reminding us of the traditional triad of spiritual weaponry we emphasise in Lent – prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We may feel powerless, but we are not: these things are ammunition in the Lord’s hands and, while they may not affect the surface of things, they operate against the deep roots of evil which causes so much pain in our world. I found that very helpful.

Finally Gisele, our new Lay Reader who has shifted her allegiance from Tophill, alerted me to the Diocese in Europe’s call for churches to pray about the war at 6pm this evening. A late email rounded up a dozen souls who sat in an intense silence in front of the blessed sacrament. Several of us had Russian or Ukrainian connections and Sylv our Pastoral Assistant brought in some photographs from the Ukraine gathered by her husband who worked there in the 1990s. I even mentioned St Olga in the summing-up: I hope she, and the angels, heard. Holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal, have mercy on us.

Village Show

In 2020, of course, there were no community events, and yesterday was the first resumption of that sort of Swanvale Halt normality with the Village Show, a cornucopia of flowers, fruit and cake, and other things besides. The weather thwarted my intention of having some of the stalls outside and thus to show that we were still taking covid semi-seriously, but we cleared the whole interior of the church instead and that provided plenty of space for people to move around without too much proximity. The team managed extraordinarily well, adding to the event some of the things we would normally have at the Spring Fair; I am not sure that will ever return, and I think even the church members who are assuming it will are mainly concerned with getting rid of the boxes of secondhand books which currently stuff the choir vestry. Adam, who usually plans the whole thing along with his wife Jill, managed to suffer a minor stroke a week or so ago while driving at speed along the A3, an event from which he emerged with nothing more serious than bruises and temporary confusion, but it meant more of the work devolved on Jill. The burger stand had to restrict itself to hot dogs only as it was discovered our usual supplier of gas bottles had decided to close on Saturdays. I nearly had one before remembering that I wasn't eating meat: it's not a foodstuff I relish overly but hot dogs or burgers are part of the occasion more than anything else. Ms Formerly Aldgate was basically vegetarian but I once caught her at the Spring Fair with a hot dog decorated with radioactive sauce. 'I think that the actual meat content is probably minimal', she said.

Announcing the prizewinners at the end, I was delighted that 'Best in Show' was won by an amazing Gothic Windsor chair which someone basically knocked up in their shed, as it took me right back to my days working at Wycombe Museum which had many such items in its collection. However, it was when I scanned the list of winners and saw that the Fruit Category had been won by 'Pamela for her melons' that I thought I might have been set up. Suddenly I'd been catapulted into an episode of Benny Hill. But, when life gives you melons ...

Thoughtless

The Western Church reduced the Eucharistic Fast to an hour before reception of communion in the 1960s and I imagine (though I have never looked it up) that this applies to a home communion as much as to an actual celebration of the Sacrament. It is at least seemly to avoid wolfing down food soon before consuming the Body of the Lord. It was, however, a couple of hours before I was due to take communion to Hilary the other day, so it was perfectly in order for me to have lunch. It was only partway through my repast, however, that it suddenly struck me that very garlicky garlic mushrooms was perhaps not the kindest choice. 

'Milk, Meat, Forbidden'

My purchase of cheese on our recent trip to Castle Cary was a sort of temptation. I told myself I was supporting local suppliers, which I was, although the Calverley Mill Scorpion here pictured is local to Cheshire, not Somerset, but since discovering that soy milk and coconut-based cheese – vegetable fats – behave in pretty much the same culinary ways as, and produce not dissimilar results from, their animal equivalents, my dairy intake has been reduced to a splash of cow juice in tea and on cereal, as the vegetable milks are much less pleasing for those purposes. So I shouldn't really have done.

Generally, people seem to assume that you put a cow in a field of lush grass and it will automatically turn it into milk, which it won’t. The cow (or whatever) has to be pregnant or nursing, and in modern farming cows and calves are usually separated very early on, the calves being then fed artificially while their mothers’ natural milk is retained for human use. Modern cows are bred to maximise their periods of pregnancy, and very rarely get anywhere near a bull: insemination is usually artificial too. You don’t have to express this process in emotive and inappropriate human terms such as ‘theft’ and ‘rape’ to get the point that it isn’t a very natural life for an animal to be living; you can do it in a more natural way, but it’s very cost-inefficient and rarely happens.

The last time I bought any meat it was part of a cow I am pretty sure I would have met. Our Swanvale Halt butcher takes its Aberdeen Angus beef from a local herd which is sometimes pastured on the meadowlands around Hornington, so you can see the cows every time you walk along the main road during the season, or at a farm in Shintleham where I happen sometimes to go for meetings of a local charity. The butcher even tells you where the animals are slaughtered, a small, family-run slaughterhouse a few miles away. This is about as animal-friendly and environmentally-acceptable as modern meat production gets. When I bought it, I looked at my tiny, expensive steak and hoped I wouldn’t ruin it in the oven.

Most of our meat and dairy produce doesn’t come from farms like the one at Shintleham. It’s produced by vast agribusinesses, some of them international ones, the expression of an industrial farming system making cheap food out of specialised forms of animals designed to do one thing out of the many a given animal might do, at maximum efficiency. And, though I know that 1) an animal ending its life by becoming food is hardly an unnatural or unjust fate, and 2) you can’t have traditional, holistic, what is in modern parlance called regenerative farming without the poo of animals to fertilise the land where you grow your crops; despite all that, even the Shintleham cows are being bred so that I can eat them, when I really, really don’t need to. I can, with care, get my protein and vitamins elsewhere; and so, I have concluded, I should. My romantic attachment to the ideal of small-scale holistic farming, the sort my grandad would have been familiar with in the second quarter of the last century, is basically fed by delusion. That’s not what farming usually is in the first quarter of this one. I don’t like animals and wouldn’t share my home with one, apart from the insects I can do little about, but I can’t justify eating beings that have been created for me to eat by a colossal global industry, whose five biggest companies pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than Exxon, when it isn’t necessary.

The other evening The Moral Maze on Radio 4 was discussing proposals to enshrine the sentience of animals in law. Roman Catholic commentator Tim Stanley came out with the following extraordinary statement:

There is a practical consequence of an all-out war on abuses against animals, and that is the decimation of industries around which human beings have built their lives, leisure, food etc. … Imagine if we woke up tomorrow and really confronted what eating meat means. We would be appalled with ourselves, we would regard ourselves as genocidal maniacs. It has a huge impact on our moral view of ourselves, not just our treatment of animals but our entire moral identity. That’s why it’s right to be cautious, because there are huge consequences for doing something that seems so obviously benign.

Mr Stanley finds his way to reconcile knowing what happens to animals in the meat industry with his belief that they should be treated justly, through the Christian idea of dominion, a God-ordered structure of relationships which includes humans within a natural order of killing and eating. My question is whether what actually happens in the 2020s genuinely reflects that. Instead I have found myself (as Christian does in the Pilgrims Progress) living in the City of Destruction. ‘Arise, Peter, kill and eat’, it says in the Book of Acts; but now, it isn’t the animals that are unclean, it’s our human usage of them. 

(I didn't spoil the wee steak, but I didn't enjoy it that much either). 

The Lion in Summer

My trip to Somerset with my mum last Tuesday solved one mystery: the building we always referred to in my childhood as 'Lady Hobhouses' is in fact Hadspen House, or rather (brace yourselves) The Newt, so named since the Hobhouses sold it and it reopened as a hotel. But that was an aside. We were aiming instead at Wyke Farm just north of Castle Cary. My granddad once worked at Wyke Farm and my sister has a painted Wyke milk churn in the garden; now you need more than a couple of dozen cows to provide enough cheese for every supermarket in the country, and when you pull into the site at Wyke Champflower its vast silos and silent warehouses look, I always think, like the menacing industrial sites Jon Pertwee spent a lot of time running around as Dr Who in the early '70s. How iconic of modern farming. This opinion has led to my sister referring to Wyke Farm's produce as 'Dalek cheese' which I think they are missing a trick not to make. But my mum just bought the sort of standard cheddar you can get anywhere though she maintains it adds something to buy it on-site. I am cutting my dairy intake, but it being a special occasion it was back in Cary itself that I picked up some cheese at the market, Cricket St Thomas Camembert and spicy Calveley Mill Scorpion; though I steered clear of one labelled starkly 'Hard Goat'.  

I also found this little figurine in a junk shop in town. At first glance it seems to be a finial from something larger but then you realise it has a base and was always intended as freestanding, so I suspect that while it may look old but it's in fact been copied from something else. It will go ... somewhere.

Fieldwork

South of Hornington is Toslam Farm. I hadn't walked the footpaths that lead across the farmland in several years; when I first arrived in the area there was some controversy over the planning permission for Toslam Farm's polytunnels, and now there are hundreds of acres of them. The farm produces soft fruits - raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries - on a vast scale. Possibly smarting a bit from the criticism it endured a decade and more ago, the company that runs it has opened its own footpaths leading across the land to add to the public ones, and positively encourages people to wander.

So this was where I was walking on Thursday: it's a strange, somewhat bleak landscape in the early Spring, with stretching rows of budding plants and flapping polytunnels that need a bit of repair before things get going in a couple of months. The time will come when these fields are busy with work, but barely a human being is to be seen at the moment.

As I walked through the rows of plants just coming into bud I saw these little slips with QR codes stuck on the poles. My first thought was that the names were varieties of whatever-it-was the plants were, and then I realised they referred to the workers and that the slips are something to do with crop checking or harvesting.

Farming has always been hard work but this environment is a new kind of hard and I admire the people who work in it. Spare a thought for Marilena, Emiliya, Akile, and all the others whose names I read pasted on the poles.

Playing With Your Mind

Years ago I and Il Rettore attended a diocesan event at a benighted church elsewhere in the diocese. As we left the then Archdeacon - now a bishop in some far-flung part of Christendom - made a point of rushing over and fulsomely shaking his hand with a big smile. Il Rettore turned to me with a look which veered between incredulity and disgust. 'Did you see that?' he grimaced, still holding his hand out as though it needed a wash. 'He's trying to be nice to me!!' 'The bastard!' I offered, 'Is there no villainy to which he will not stoop?'

This Sunday I toiled up the hill from the 8am mass and found our current Archdeacon on my doorstep. He is a far cry from his predecessor and has no apparent desire for a pointy hat, but nevertheless an unannounced archidiaconal visit conjures up images of many, many scenes in the series Rev and is not at all what you want. In fact, as it turned out, it wasn't unannounced, though an email at 23.48 on a Saturday night is not something most clergy are likely to see - not too far off 'on display in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"', as Douglas Adams described. 

On the doorstep were three bottles of wine, one for me, one for Marion the curate, and one for the headmistress of the Infants School. They had come from the Lord Bishop of Guildford and every clergyperson and Church school head-teacher was in receipt of one. If I could deliver them that would be great, the Archdeacon said from his car, and zoomed (but not Zoomed) off somewhere else.

Now, one understands and appreciates the gesture but. Guildford is not a large diocese and I suppose there are about 160 parishes. Let's be conservative and estimate that on average, excluding retireds, there are two clergy per parish, plus about sixty Church schools. That makes 380 bottles of Sea Change wine. Even if the diocese has got a good deal on them they'll be at least £5 a bottle: that's the better part of £2K. I can't imagine the Bishop is paying it, and I do wonder whether it's quite the best use of the time of two members of the senior leadership team to shuttle round eighty parishes apiece handing out drink. I'd've been content with a Christmas card and even more perhaps a phone call.

'Well', offered Marion, 'You could argue that it counts as a pastoral visit. Although if they're delivering the wine on Sunday mornings it does imply they don't actually want to catch any clergy in.' She and her husband drank theirs almost instantly.

Pentecost Triptych

Like the Paschal Liturgy, Pentecost Day presents another challenge - at least it does at Swanvale Halt, where I've adopted the practice of transferring the full-scale Blessing of the Font from the Easter Vigil to Pentecost Day, celebrating the Church being equipped for its mission by the coming of the Holy Spirit. Of course at the moment, as with everything else, I'm doing it on my own and so the 8am mass required me to carry my phone through the church from its now-customary station near the high altar to the font where the ceremonies took place. At least the journey presented fewer trip hazards than my adventures on Easter morning. Instead of a homily I described what I was doing and why for the benefit of the video and those bold souls who might be watching it - the Litany of the Saints, the scattering of the water, the Sufflation and infusion of the Oils, dipping the Paschal Candle in the water, and the Commission of the (absent) People. Apart from the phone slipping and so not being exactly positioned where I wanted, it all went fine.

It couldn't last. Having put my potatoes in the oven to roast for lunch, after about twenty minutes I was disturbed by a mysterious odour whose nature I couldn't quite tie down. I then remembered I'd been trying to get grease off the roasting dish, and had left it to soak, so the aroma was the combined perfume of heated vegetable oil and washing-up liquid. I prepared new potatoes. A shameful waste, I know, but I couldn't think of them in the same way. 

For What We Are About To Receive

One of the legacies Ms Formerly Aldgate left with me has been at mealtimes. She had a fascination for Japanese culture and we ended up watching a variety of variously silly but in their different ways delightful TV shows on Netflix, hailing from the Land of the Rising Sun, which one way or another revolved around food. I noticed characters saying something before and after eating, usually with a little bow, and asked her what it was. ‘It’s itadaki masu,’ she explained, ‘it's a sort of grace. It roughly just means “thank you for the food”.’ So that has become my grace. It has no explicit religious content, but if you’re a Christian it inevitably makes you reflect who it is you are thanking.

When I and Ms Brightshades went to Brighton a little while ago, we ate in a vegan pizzeria (apart from the little greasy-spoon I ate in on my previous visit, I shouldn’t think there’s much else in Brighton). My pizza came with some vegan cheddar, a gloopy substance which was tasty enough in its own right but which clearly wasn’t cheese. Several of my friends are great foodies but also want to eschew meat and dairy, and so they swap reports of the latest available vegan cheeses (for instance) and how close they may be to milk-based Stilton, or Cheddar, or Brie, or Halloumi.

I am not sure that I see the point of trying to imitate animal-based produce. I have used meat substitutes in the past, mainly because I was too mentally lazy to rethink my repertoire and work out more vegetable-based meals, but to me they never seem to get that close to the experience of meat. The various plant-based milks I tried some time ago were nothing like cow juice, though I would very much have liked them to be.

Not that how food feels should be the final deciding matter. I have had some very agreeable meat meals, and occasionally when I get a steak from the butcher even I manage to cook it properly so eating it becomes delightful; but it’s a sensual pleasure I could easily live without. I continue to consume meat now and again, not particularly because I like it, but firstly as part of what I tell myself is ‘a balanced diet’, and perhaps even more importantly as a sort of ritualised symbol of my belief in sustainable farming. Far from what I think some non-meat-eaters imagine, I know exactly what that lamb chop, for instance, is. It’s a section from across the back of a lamb, chopped with a cleaver: it comprises skin, fat, muscle, nerve, and bone. My minute or two of consumption is also a time of meditation on where it’s come from and the processes that brought it to my plate. But perhaps I am wrong.

As far as dairy is concerned, it’s more a matter of what animal fat does in culinary terms: I could manage with my fridge empty of Stilton, or Cheddar, or Brie, or Halloumi, or my pint of milk or pat of butter, but cooking without them would require quite some reorganisation, and I’m not sure vegetable fat behaves in the same way. Again, perhaps I should work at it a bit more.

Thinking about this, I realised that the pleasure I derive from food is in fact a variety of different pleasures. I like cake and ice cream, but they are both a long way removed from their constituent materials, and the delight I draw from them is mainly sensual. They are nice to eat, and something that’s plant-based but trying to behave like cheese as a result of a lot of technical ingenuity might fall into the same sort of category. If I make a cake, or someone I know makes one for me, the pleasure that comes from eating it is mixed with satisfaction at what I’ve done or gratitude for someone else’s kindness. But when I sit and dip a piece of bread in a bowl of olive oil, and cut apart an apple, the simplicity and relative proximity to the natural products generates a sort of spiritual pleasure, a thankfulness and receptivity. It takes me away from myself, and into a world I have not made. There is a glory in a plate of roasted vegetables, for the same reason: they have not had that much done to them that removes them from their natural state, so they remind me of my own nature, my own limitation. And I think that’s there, albeit with some ambiguity, even in the bloodiness of a lamb chop and the miraculous quality of an egg. Itadaki masu.

(The UN IPCC's report on food and land use is here). 

The Chips Are Down

It’s a good thing that Swanvale Halt isn’t just residential, but contains a variety of businesses, from a small supermarket right at the centre of the village, to a tattoo studio, including along the way a butcher and a baker. There are of course also the two cafés which make it a more sociable place.

But do we need so many fast-food outlets of different kinds? The same small row of businesses near the church includes, in addition to the cafés, a kebab shop and pizza takeaway of long standing, and now, joining them, a chicken outlet. I don’t know how else to describe it, as chicken is apparently the main selling point. ‘Shack’ doesn’t seem the right word, because it isn’t.

I have a conflicted attitude to these businesses. It’s good to see any commercial activity going on rather than every available property being converted into flats, no matter how welcome dwellings might be. Every business where people have to stand and wait to be served offers the chance of social contact which might not otherwise happen, and contributes to the development of a community conversation which would otherwise be poorer. I try to combat my snobbish dislike of the way they look (bright orange shopfronts in two cases) and concentrate on other factors such as the healthiness of the fare – the kebab shop has one of those rotating cones of unidentifiable meat which hasn’t been anywhere near an actual animal for a long time – or what the prevalence of such businesses implies about society, which is people having time neither to prepare their own meals at home, nor to sit and eat them somewhere else. And the kebab shop, even though it may be smarter than it once was since a minor refit and the new uniforms issued to its staff, produces the little polystyrene food boxes you find discarded remarkably widely across the parish, including in the churchyard and occasionally in the church itself, complete with the odd ketchup-daubed chip. Once, when we had a particularly troublesome set of youngsters hanging around, I had an angry encounter with a neighbour who threatened to ‘close the church down’ if we didn’t make more efforts to keep the teens away. Why us? I wondered. If it wasn’t for the kebab shop they’d be loitering somewhere else.

But of course, returning to a theme of my previous post, if there wasn’t a market for fast food outlets they wouldn’t exist, and if Chicken Empire (that’s not its name) doesn’t find one it won’t last. It’s social circumstance that produces them. When the supermarket opened, as long ago as 1930, the various grocers, greengrocers and other little shops around the parish were probably horrified, quite rightly in a way, but now we regard it as a cornerstone of community life and would rue the day were it ever to close. Perhaps the time may come when we will look back on the memory of a row of bright takeaways and shed a tear for things past.

Gin Friendly

When Lady Wildwood, late of London Gothic, decided to throw a party to celebrate her birthday at the weekend she settled on calling it Gin Frenzy, and asked friends to bring along examples of gins to taste. I was all set to purchase a bottle from our local Surrey distiller, Silent Pool, until to my utter dismay she posted a picture of her drinks cabinet and there was a bottle of Silent Pool already. Disaster - but I was able to discover and source a bottle of Dorset distiller Lilliput's output instead. I found that there are two Dorset gin-makers; the other is Conker, but Lilliput has the nicer bottles.

I like the odd gin. I don't think I ever partook of it at the Vicarage in Sands years ago, where Fr Bombaysapphire plied all his guests with a variety of drinks and where the gin flowed freely; instead it was in Lamford that a friend who served the most lethal gins as an aperitif got myself and Dr Bones into such disastrous habits. Now it sometimes fortifies me against an evening of meetings when that has to happen. It's astonishing to see how gin has become so hugely fashionable in the last decade, to the point that supermarkets now have a whole display of the stuff where they would once have had only a shelf. Every part of the land has its artisan distillers, so I was fairly confident I would find one based in Dorset.

Lady Wildwood's party was lovely, a chance to meet up with friends old and new. We ended up discussing 18th-century garden hermits, royal titles, and the links between architecture and spirituality. Driving, I never had the chance to taste more than one gin and it seemed impolite to broach the bottle I'd bought, so I may have to buy some for myself, just for patriotic reasons. 

Dublin 2018

'Well, you're barely up before you're down again', the taxi driver who took us from Dublin airport to our rented apartment on Monday commented about the flight we'd had from Gatwick, which was true. Flying still seems an entirely unreal and hallucinatory thing to me, and I am glad when it stops!

I enjoyed Dublin. I found the city centre has an exciting mixture of building styles, mainly on a fairly small scale apart from the grand civic buildings, which are mainly Georgian. Modernism is done very well and on Rathmines Road (where I found myself wandering) I found the only bit of Art Deco I saw:

Christ Church Cathedral is rather a High Victorian jewel with the added benefit of some gloomy monuments in the crypt. Charles I and II are frankly zombified here:

The National Gallery has a dark room full of the painted glass work of Poe illustrator Harry Clarke, sumptuous and charismatic:

The sun shone for our walk around the cliff path on the Howth headland and on the heron I saw on the Dodder River near our flat:

At Dublin Castle I learned that the Order of St Patrick was founded in 1783 by George III at the request of the Earl of Buckingham, the Viceroy, so he could dress up in blue satin and a cocked hat with massive plumes. 

On our last evening we ate at L Mulligan Grocer in Stoneybatter, and persuaded by the ethical and local sourcing of the meat I had a slice of ham cooked so spectacularly I am tempted never to eat animal flesh again. And the sun set along the Liffey as we made our way back.

Right and Meat So To Do

Last year I gave up meat for Lent - not that I eat very much anyway - though I'm not sure I will do the same this year. I was invited to dinner by a couple of resolutely carnivore friends and forgot to tell them my decision, and had to be served the only vegetarian option they had in the house, a tiny and hastily-defrosted supermarket quiche.

A number of my resolutely non-carnivore friends could be found a few days very vocally approving the decision of the Danes to ban ritual slaughter of animals . 'Animal rights come before religion', commented the Danish minister of food and agriculture, and as far as many people are concerned virtually anything comes before religion, let alone animal rights. This has suddenly found an echo in this country as the new president of the National Veterinary Association has called for religious slaughter of animals to be banned here too.

At the weekend, while preparing Sunday lunch (incorporating the leg of a chicken, in case you wonder) I found myself not bothering to turn off the Food Programme on Radio 4, a broadcast which annoys me as much as it occasionally interests me. I partly blame this on the lingering memory of its former presenter Derek Cooper whose near-recumbently laid-back delivery brought on, I found, a experience of mingled rage and somnolence. They do also go on a lot about artisan cheeses, and how the poor should go out and shop at farmers' markets and it would be so much better for them, and that sort of thing.

Anyway, on this occasion there was a feature on the astonishing Dario Cecchini, a Tuscan eighth-generation butcher and evangelist for traditional butchery. Here he is, as displayed on italianfinedining.it, in the middle of his 'act' - for act it very much is - in which he butchers a pig while quoting Dante. Sr Cecchini says that butchery is 'an ancient art, an art which in ancient times would have been practised by priests because it was their role to resolve the terrible dilemma of killing so that people could eat. They were the ones who carried the heavy responsibility of slaughter, but it came with a respect for the animals that provided the meat. Butchers are the link between life and death'.

I had never thought of it this way. The ancient ritual regulations on the slaughter of animals were intended to provide for the most humane death possible at the time, hedged and controlled by structure and form and only entrusted to technicians who, dedicated as they were to the God who controlled life and death, were supposed to approach slaughter with humility and care. That's what religious slaughter was supposed to ensure, for which any strictly ritual concerns with, for instance, draining the animal of blood, were just dressing.

But seeing it like this opens the possibility of change. Ritual forms of slaughter are no longer the best human beings can manage and, in the same way that we no longer expect religious professionals to be experts in the identification of infectious disease (as the Torah specifies), so we need no longer entrust animal welfare to religious regulation either. Banning ritual slaughter could be seen as a victory for the principle it was invented to safeguard.