For the Record, from Gozo

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

Spring Adventures

It feels as though I've been waiting a long while for this week off that is just coming to an end: the lateness of Easter has removed it far from my last break. I spent a couple of days in Dorset, taking my Mum to West Bay and my sister to Knowlton Rings; zoomed to South Wales to see my friend Rain who has been going through all sorts of trouble, taking them to an antiques emporium (their choice) and Llandaff Cathedral (mine); London yesterday to see two more friends, one for lunch in the amazing surroundings of Mercato Mayfair which used to be the church of St Mark North Audley Street, and the other at Pret London Bridge (probably less worthy of a photo), and two exhibitions, Tim Burton at the Design Museum and Secrets of the Thames at the Museum of Docklands; and a final excursion today to Leigh-on-Sea. Funny place, with one old street along the shoreline full of fishing-themed pubs and a more modern one at the hilltop where the shops are. I spent a good amount of my time in Leigh trying to find somewhere that would serve me a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch rather than fish-and-chips or tapas; I should just have gone to the church where they were offering community lunches!

I was also delighted to be shown a new and unheralded image of St Catherine at the Docklands exhibition - on a gold ring plucked from the Thames. Here she is, just visible, holding a tiny, tiny wheel, the last of a trio with St John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin.

Devotionally Challenged

On my great trip north I called in on my friend Clare (no point disguising her name) who is Chaplain to the University of Cumbria in Lancaster. It's a peculiar kind of arrangement: the University grew out of St Martin's College, a Church of England teacher-training college occupying the site of the old barracks in Lancaster. It gradually acquired other scattered sites and when it was finally instituted as a university in 2007, it couldn't call itself Lancaster University or the University of Lancashire as those titles were taken, so it became the University of Cumbria even though its biggest campus is in Lancaster. Clare describes it as 'very, very secular' but part of the foundation arrangements was that there should be a number of Anglican appointments on the staff, of which the Chaplain in Lancaster is one. So Clare finds herself something of what we would in other circumstances call a 'pioneer minister', sent to a group of people who don't have any longstanding interaction with Christianity (the previous chaplain had, let's say, not been particularly active and the Chapel, built in the 1960s to be a sort of parish church of the College, hasn't had much of a congregation for a long while). 

One of Clare's challenges in restoring the Chapel of St Martin to something like a devotional space can be found behind the altar. Here she is, then, displaying one of the Church of England's greatest artistic treasures, John Bratby's Me as Christ, Crucified by My Ex-Wives and Art Critics. 

I'm teasing you, of course. The mural doesn't have that title (if it has one, it's the tedious Golgotha), but it would be an accurate description. John Bratby's name has virtually disappeared from the story of twentieth-century British art but he was flavour of the day at one point in the 1960s. He was, by all accounts, a dreadful, dreadful man, but his portraiture in particular has a psychedelic verve to it even if, as Clare points out, he seems consistently to lose interest in his figures by the time he gets to their feet. 

The mural was acquired by the College's first Principal, Hugh Pollard, after a theological college in Manchester got queasy about buying it. It does present some challenges as a devotional image, in that it isn't intended as one but rather an unpleasant joke. I'm reminded a bit, in another mode, of Jean Fouquet's portrait of French royal mistress Agnes Sorel as a bare-breasted Virgin Mary, an icon of something else quite a long way from religious feeling. The story goes that when the late Queen Mother opened the College in 1967 and was shown the painting she remarked of the artist 'Do you think he has the slightest idea of what Christianity is about?' Taking a broad view of the doctrine of the Incarnation, you might reply Yes, but only just enough to get it wrong.

So, what is a chaplain to do with it? Clare's predecessor had it covered with a curtain which, she thinks, 'was worse - it means it's lurking unseen like a monster'. Given that hardly anyone comes to worship in St Martin's anymore Clare plans to reorganise the space so that there's a smaller liturgical area with its altar to one side while, for the considerable number of Cumbria students who are studying medicine and allied subjects, she will offer some sessions reflecting spiritually on pain, physicality and selfhood. Take the horror and work with it. It's a bit like the Parable of the Talents. 

St Catherine at St Cross

On the way back from having fish and chips with my mum and sister in Bournemouth I, Lady Arlen and her daughter stopped at the Hospital of St Cross, the medieval almshouses just south of Winchester, which I last visited in 1991. A lovely interlude aided by tea and ice cream, and I discovered at least one image of St Catherine and possibly two. The window, high up at the east end, is named, and seems to be medieval although St Swithun who is paired with Catherine is modern. The painting is the right-hand wing of what seems to be a Renaissance triptych behind one of the side altars, and I'm not entirely sure it's Catherine. It could be, but though she has a book and a martyr's palm, there's no giveaway wheel.

I also include a snap of a detail from the choir stalls, which were installed in about 1515 and look quite strange, with plenty of imagery which isn't obviously Christian!

Dover - a Long View

The last holiday post this time comes from a trip to Dover with Lady Wildwood, MaisyMaid, Ms DarkSeville and Madam GreenWitch. The town did not delay us long and instead we spent the entire day in the castle. I'd been there 35 years ago or more but had forgotten the sheer size of the place - the keep, or Great Tower as they call it there, is a match for several of the castles I visited in Wales on its own. I wasn't sold on the gaudy pseudo-medieval decor in the castle, but conceded that without them it would be a succession of big bare rooms. The thing that struck us all was how close France seemed to be: on this beautifully clear day the Port of Calais and the features of the cliffs were easy to see. I would have guessed they were ten miles away at best, rather than the twenty-odd they are. On the tour of the World War Two command centre tunnels we'd seen a blown-up photo of Goering and a row of Nazi colleagues gazing across the Channel in 1941, and it was easy enough to imagine them regarding us from the other side right now. A kestrel hovered over the ramparts to welcome us, while back at Waterloo waiting for my train I watched a pigeon savage a couple of chips, chopping them into bits and improbably gobbling the lot before trotting off with what can only be described as self-satisfaction.

Cambridgeshire, July 2023

Archangel Janet and Mal moved from Glastonbury to March a few months ago, and so this holiday I decided to pop up and see them. I stopped along the way in Huntingdon, where the parish church was just setting up for its drop-in café when I arrived, too tempting a chance to turn down. Huntingdon was clearly very smart at one time, though I don't think has that much to show for it in the 21st century.

Everyone told me there was nothing to see in March, though it has a grand church and market place, and a river with canal boats, and I thought it was fairly neat, albeit apparently under wholesale reconstruction at the moment, a bit like Janet and Mal's house.

My last appointment was to see Dr Bones, sister and brother-in-law at her father's vicarage in Ashambury near Cambridge, where he has been incumbent since Abraham was a young man. On the way I revisited Ely, its cathedral long and narrow before exploding outwards into the unique space of the Octagon - the closest medieval English cathedral architecture got to a dome.

The afforded me two contrasting museum experiences. Ely City Museum in the Old Gaol dates to 1972 but was refurbished a couple of years ago, and is now swish and stylish, designed to the hilt ...

... but some of the displays at March Museum look as though they haven't changed since about 1972, and it crams in more objects than you might think possible. It's every bit of slightly corroded farm equipment you've ever imagined, and then some more. Were I designing a museum nowadays, it would look like Ely; but I have a suspicion that March's model is more fun.

Trip to the Tip

... was the ritual cry of delight, repeated ad libitem by the staff of Wycombe Museum when a visit to the 'local amenity centre' beckoned to dispose of, not items from the collection I hasten to add, but broken bits of equipment, surplus display materials and the like. Unable, as I said last time, to make it to Robbie and Freida's housewarming, instead I indulged in a Trip to the Tip of my own. I seemed to come away with almost as much as I took there. 

I've been looking for a small glass bowl to use when we do external communion services at Widelake and other places since our last one got broken, so this is a welcome and useful find. My eye was caught by the little handpainted blue bowl, a small item which can happily sit on a variety of windowsills in my house. Thereafter even I admit my finds become a bit more questionable. I have no idea what the silvery thing you can see at the back of the photo is: it looks bizarrely like a metal pomegranate and has a little stalk to hang from. I ought to have known what the small object that looks like a titled eggcup was, but it took my knowledgeable friend Ms Brumneedle to identify it as, probably, a cigar rest. It's silver plate, even though it doesn't have an EPNS mark, and just needs a bit of buffing up. I now have a stand for the cigars I don't smoke to add to the ebony watch stand for the fob watch I usually keep upstairs, which Ms T gave me all of ten years ago. 

And then there is the La Virgen de la Candelaría key rack. La Virgen de la Candelaría is a particular image of the BVM (and a Black Madonna, too) who is the patron saint of Tenerife, and this stunning item is a prime example of the tat a tourist might bring home from a trip to that island. The icon is a bit of printed paper, the wood it's mounted on looks like it comes from an orange box, and everything else is gold plastic. How could I resist that.

'The Rossettis' at The Tate

To London to visit the Tate's exhibition on the Rossettis with Dr RedMedea and Ms Mauritia. It seemed on the pricey side and when the first room was full of Christina Rossetti's poetry and one painting I thought we'd been diddled, but in fact as we followed the route it was clear there was enough to justify the cost - even if art is always a bit exhausting, and art in one style more tiring than that, and when finally an artist is producing multiple versions of the same picture weary is not the word. The furniture made for a nice palate-cleanser. We liked Gabriel Rossetti's prints and drawings more than his lush and famous paintings which are technically stunning and emotionally empty: 'It's all about the hair!' said Dr RedMedea. Discovering that Ken Russell had made a BBC film in 1967 about the Rossettis full of Gothic nonsense means I will have to try to find it.

Tale of Two Castles

Thankfully Rian-who-was-Cylene and their partner Deri now live in a part of South Wales I can leave my car in and feel reasonably confident it will still be there in the morning - a town a local apparently described as 'tired but functional', which was rather not the case with their previous location - so that's where I was yesterday and today. On the way there, and on the way back, I visited two castles, one offering the real Middle Ages and one a pretend version. The former is Caerphilly, a colossal Marcher fortress with a bloody history of treachery and exploitation; the latter, Castell Coch, which hangs in the woods overlooking faraway Cardiff, built on a medieval site but designed by Victorian Gothic Revival nutcase William Burges for the Marquis of Bute as a fantasy of what might have been there before.

Aesthetically there's little resemblance between craggy Caerphilly and the psychedelic polychromy of Castell Coch, but they both represent engineering triumphs even beyond the usual involved in the construction of castles. Caerphilly is the biggest castle in Wales by area, but what impresses most in building terms is the massive curtain wall that dams the moat-lake, fashioned of huge buttresses flanking concave walls in order to restrain the enormous weight of earth and water behind it. Castell Coch required ridiculous investment in stone-moving and stone-working, artisanship and ingenuity. It used to have a chapel which Burges designed to hang off a series of corbels built into one of the towers and projecting out over the courtyard: it was taken down in the 1890s. Mass there must have demanded faith of a particular kind. 

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?

Poetry Reading

A little while ago Lady Arlen was kind enough to send me a copy of her first proper volume of poetry, Shouting at Crows. I put it in the lavatory. This is not a statement about its quality, because I make a habit of having one book of poetry there and consulting it each day. I've always enjoyed poetry, and have produced the odd lyric now and again which has even appeared here, but I generally think there is too much writing of poetry and not enough reading of it so I don't regard that as something I should spend time on.

The predecessor of Shouting at Crows in this respect was Colin Simms's Goshawk Poems, which I bought at the Post Office in Garrigill while I was on holiday last Autumn: it was one of a set of volumes in the window wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the damp. I boggled at the sheer amount Mr Simms has apparently managed to write over his career as a biologist and an observer of birds: this book alone runs to about 140 pages, and his oeuvre includes dozens of similar volumes. And I did find it quite hard to batter my way through: it strikes me, dreadful though it might be to someone who spends a lot of time watching them, that there's only so much you can say about goshawks, and I would really rather read about people. Lately, in fact, leaving PJ Harvey's baleful Orlam to one side, my poetic excursions have been a bit unsatisfying. The Collected Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, which Lady Arlen herself bought me years and years ago, was shocking old tripe and it was no surprise so little of it was ever published. Mary Barnard's lucid, Sappho-like lyrics were enjoyable but not quite as sparkling as I expected. I found Bedouin of the London Evening by the mythical Rosemary Tonks almost impenetrable. Revisiting Thomas Hardy increased my respect for his industry and inventiveness but I felt little warmer towards his work. My favourites remain Geoffrey Hill, who you may well have heard of, and Elisabeth Bletsoe, who you almost certainly haven't.

In this company, I rather liked Shouting at Crows, with its meditations on pain and loss in the small, domestic, hidden, and unstated. I wonder whether the next adventure, Jeremy Reed's Patron Saint of Eyeliner, will be as worthwhile?

A Year On

Yesterday Hornington Town Council was planning a Pause for Reflection at 10am to mark a year after the invasion of Ukraine, and I couldn't make it because I was doing a funeral. At the last minute, or nearly, the Government announced there would be a national Pause for Reflection, at 11am, so the Council hurriedly shifted theirs. I couldn't make at it the later time either, because I had Toddler Praise which didn't major on Ukraine, funnily enough. I did manage to get to the evening vigil organised by the local Ukraine Support Group, opening the door of the community centre just as everyone was blowing out their candles. They made me do impromptu prayers as a punishment. 

My friend Lara, kind, liberal ex-BBC employee who is half-Finnish by blood and all Finnish by choice, told me a long while ago the Finnish proverb 'A Russian's still a Russian even if you fry them in butter'. Yesterday she posted on LiberFaciorum that what she felt mostly was 'hatred ... I recoil whenever I hear Russian being spoken on the Tube or in a shop ... I am lucky, I left Russia forever before I became an adult because my Finnish mother dreamt of leaving that wretched country all her life ... For now I can only hate, and donate a bit of money, and feel heartbroken'. Talk to my other Finn friend, anarcho-syndicalo-eco-activist Lady MetalMoomin, about the Russians and she becomes a Scandi-nationalist ready to pull the pin from a hand-grenade with her teeth. It's no surprise: they have been bad neighbours. 

Back when I was at college my mum's cousin worked for Oxford City Council and he and his wife regularly hosted foreign students, a good number of whom were decorative Russian girls called Olga and Natasha and so on who I quite enjoyed being invited to dinner with. There's a significant chance that some of them may now have grown-up sons of their own who are in Ukraine right now, trying to kill and not be killed. It amazes me that I can still speak on the phone to yet another friend, Peta, who teaches English in Moscow with her husband. They are South Africans so they're pretty safe there at the moment, though they'd quite like to go somewhere else. 'Please pray for the young men of Russia', she asked me the last time we spoke. 

As well as the physical dangers in this as in all wars, there are spiritual dangers too. War arises from delusion and falsehood, and is powered by pride and often despair: it unleashes hatred even where it did not exist before (at least Lara names it, rather than pretend). The ancient Russian conviction that they are eternal victims now combines with a terrifying nihilistic despair to take the country to a dark place indeed: it's only fascists who go on about how great death is. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, occupy the ground of hope and humanism, but they face the temptation any combatant confronts: to chase victory by turning, in subtle ways, into your enemy. Prayers for them must include a desire to preserve them from such a fate. War does all of this; it is hateful, even when it's necessary.

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.