Clearout

My computer, like most people’s I suspect, is clogged with irrelevant stuff. In the time I’ve been at Swanvale Halt I’ve changed laptop three times and have meekly and unthinkingly copied everything across from one to another. Now I’ve decided to dispose of everything that doesn’t seem useful – all the duplicated photos, the outdated downloaded documents, the superceded liturgies, the items that are far better off on the church office computer than mine – and the sermons.

I preach a great deal, on average three times a week, perhaps (at least that seems like a great deal to me, perhaps it’s not). It’s probably, in fact, my major form of creative output. When I started out at Lambourne I used to write everything out longhand, but when I arrived at Swanvale Halt this seemed too onerous to keep up and for 8am and midweek Masses I got into the habit of scribbling notes and then preaching from them. But when we reopened after the first Covid lockdown I began preaching from a brief outline as part of the attempt to be as brief as possible. I preferred it: it felt more lively, if less polished. It’s not a disaster if I stumble in my search for the right word (as I often do), but I have to steer clear of the hazardous waters of repetitious waffle and be very clear how the sermon is going to end! For one-off occasions – funerals, weddings, and special events – I still write everything out. But there were between four and five hundred written sermon texts remaining on the machine.

I felt a bit of a pang deleting them, as I suppose they represent a significant part of my creative energy, but the fact is that I have never, ever looked back at a single one of them. What would be the point in keeping them? Once upon a time clergy were in the habit of publishing books of sermons, but unless you are John Donne this would seem to be a decidedly otiose activity in this day and age. I remember once picking up a book of ‘Best Sermons of All Time’ and turning to the offering from the mighty Charles Spurgeon: it was turgid and lifeless by our standards. If any of my efforts have ever touched anyone for the good, it will have been for that moment, that time and place, and a sermon lifted into another context from the one in which it’s preached is likely to be baffling and hollow. Getting rid of these files is a small act of liberation. 

The Geography of Contemporary Crises

At the Rectory, the mains water supply returned late on Tuesday evening and it was very welcome when the kitchen tap sputtered back into action. On Monday, getting a little nervous about how long the water in my pipes and tank might last, I did go to one of the distribution sites and collect a package of bottles, and carried on using these for drinking until Wednesday morning, as, to judge by what others had said their first return of supply was marked by flows of brown, green, and cloudy water. It all depended where you were, I suppose, because mine seemed fine; apart from my bedtime glass of water last night which emerged from the tap completely white. That was just fine water bubbles, though: if your water clears from the bottom there's no problem, it's only if it settles from the top that you need be concerned. I'd tried to flush the toilets with rainwater, and was surprised to see how mosquito larvae seemed unfazed by having to swim around in my wee when I would have thought that was an uncongenial environment even for them. They're all gone now, I fear: I try to exercise compassion for the whole of the mute creation, but I see little point in mosquitos unless you are a Dengue Fever bacillus when you do, indeed, have cause to praise them. 

The last time we had a local utility-supply crisis of this kind was ten years ago, when floods and recurrent power cuts afflicted the whole area over Christmas. That was hideous, and more so, because quite a number of parishioners had to be evacuated from their homes, but there are other differences between 2013 and 2023. Then, we didn't have the various rival community message boards on Facebook and other platforms, allowing us all to be constantly updated on what was happening in different postcode areas, and to compare the statements of our local MP with those of the leader of the Council (MP: optimistic; Councillor: sceptical). As the water supply returned through Monday and Tuesday, you could track its progress and contrast what people were actually saying with the confident declarations of Thames Water who, at one point on Tuesday, claimed that only 11 houses were yet to be reconnected, only to be met with a barrage of dozens of Facebook comments any one of whom represented more households than that. The water company's comms failings are one of the complaints everyone seems to have. I tend to think that more information is always better: when a train, for instance, doesn't do what it's supposed to, it helps to know why you're stuck in the middle of nowhere rather than imagining the crew don't think the passengers matter. But, as always, doomscrolling does nobody any good, and you have to exercise some conscious distraction and tell yourself you're not going to be more anxious than you need; and the endless updating did seem to make each day feel longer.

One thing Thames Water did well was managing the water distribution centres, even if many people would have preferred more of them. As well as going on my own account on Monday I collected a couple of packs of bottles for Mad Trevor on Sunday and it all worked very smoothly, especially for me as I could zoom past the waiting cars on my bike. The water came from Elm Spring in Staffordshire, though I'm sure other bottled water enterprises are just as good. The distribution points were set up by Sunday morning. Do the water companies have pallets of bottled spring water just hanging around in case something like this happens? Does Thames Water have a contract with Elm Spring? One online drinks supply company describes it as 'a fantastic-value brand bringing some much-needed humour to the party'. Frankly, for me jokes aren't a priority from my water supply.

Litter & Liberty

Wednesday was a varied day: communion at Widelake House, a funeral where everything went wrong including a downpour at the cemetery which left us all drenched, and Church Club at the Infants School. Somewhat wearily I got to the church, ready for a walk to the supermarket to do my shopping as it was too wet to cycle, and found the porch full of trash.

There's a certain amount of research examining why people litter, most of it (quoted, for instance, here and here) concluding that it mainly relates to the availability of bins. This can't be the case with the youngsters who hang around the church, as, every adult who comments on the matter points out, they leave rubbish about despite being directly alongside a rubbish bin. There must be something else going on. 

Imagine being a teenager, especially a teenage boy, in a group sitting outside Swanvale Halt church, or in the porch, with a bottle of radioactive sweet pop or a horrible spicy sausage in a packet with a strikingly low actual meat content. You're certainly not going to put the remains into a bin if nobody around you is - but the likelihood is that you won't do it even if you're on your own, and I know this is exactly what happens. It's not just group dynamics. 

Think of it like this. Putting your rubbish into a bin, provided for the purpose by a public authority, would show that you accepted a constraint on your behaviour. It would mean recognising that you are not completely free to do whatever you like, that you have to take other considerations, other people and their feelings and ideas, into account; that you are not utterly autonomous, absolutely the master of your own destiny. Trash is freedom. It's more than that, it's a symbol of freedom.

Imagine, again, being in a place where leaving a crisp packet on a paving slab is what it means to be free. Great.

Tech Milestone

There was a baptism at Swanvale Halt church on Sunday, the younger daughter of a family whose older child was baptised a few years ago. She is already 3 and a bit, and missed out her original baptism date because of the pandemic. She took it all very seriously.

One of her godmothers gave a reading, as families occasionally do. 'Remind me what it is', I said to the little girl's parents before we started: 'ChatGPT wrote it', they told me. This is the first time this has happened here, at any rate. It was wordy and repetitious, though no worse than anything else a family might look up online and then adopt for their own use. Had it been me I would have cut it down a bit. What surprised me was that, in contrast to the absolutely vapid stuff I've read in various places that's very clearly AI-generated, it did have some content, talking about the 'limitless possibilities' ahead of little Amelia. Was that the brief they gave the system, or did it lift that from somewhere else? I can see that this might be very helpful for people who are not used to articulating their own thoughts and writing them down (and that means most of us) but ultimately it might be better if they did. 

Travel Mode

It would have been nice to have gone to Robbie and Freida's housewarming, but it was in Bedfordshire and the rail strikes made the whole thing rather inconvenient. I could still have battled my way round the M25 for a couple of hours, but others such as MaisyMaid, Lady Wildwood and Ms Mauritia didn't have that option; Her Ladyship lives not far away, so I could conceivably have given her a lift, but the others have to come from central London. Had they been able to go, I would have braced myself for the drive; had they not but had the trains been running anyway, I would have got there that way. The combination of both, however, meant I elected to stay home. 

When my current vehicle gives up, I'll probably replace it with an electric car, but I'm not quite confident of the charging network and technological efficiency yet, and so for now I try to avoid driving if I can. Yesterday morning Churches Together had a Prayer Breakfast at the Baptist Church in Midbury, and I thought that really I ought to cycle there if I could. It's only about 3 1/2 miles and should take about twenty minutes. They turned out to be twenty long and arduous minutes although, as is curiously common, the return journey was noticeably less trying. Ironically as I wasn't going to Robbie and Freida's after all I used part of the time by taking some trash to the tip, which journey takes me along exactly the same route I'd done on two wheels earlier in the day.

I have a lot of driving to do next week, when I am off, popping down to Dorset and hopefully to Cambridgeshire. I'd rather go there on the train, but even though the Tube strikes have been called off the journey turns out to be off-puttingly expensive. A visit to Oxford looks feasible, though, although as the line down from Swanvale Halt is closed due to engineering works I'll have to go to the next station to catch it. I ought to cycle there, I suppose.

Trading In A Name

Except it’s not any more. I hadn’t looked in on the Louise Brooks Society website, pandorasbox.com, for ages, and when I did a couple of days ago found it had been taken down. And this sad fate had befallen not just the website, but the LBS presence on a variety of social media platforms too. Back in 2019, it seems, a gentleman in Florida managed to get the words ‘Louise Brooks’ registered as a trademark and since then has been increasingly active in making sure that nobody else makes any sort of money out of the use of the name of the actress, who died all the way back in 1985. The LBS took subscriptions for its fan club, in operation, as the banner suggests, for quite some time, and that counts, of course, as commercial activity, so down it came.

The story of how the trademark was registered is quite strange. At first the US Patent & Trademark Office apparently turned the application down, as the applicant’s mark ‘shows a false suggestion of a connection with the famous actress, Louise Brooks’, but reversed its decision after the applicant argued that Brooks had not left an estate to assert rights to her name. It obviously wasn’t in the interests of the applicant to mention that, whatever might be the situation with the actual words ‘Louise Brooks’, a company called Louise Brooks Estate did exist at the time in Kansas, founded in 1998 and since 2014 overlapping with Louise Brooks Heirs, which is still going; both entities were run by Brooks’s nephew Daniel, who is 76 and still lives in Wichita. Louise Brooks Heirs has a supportive relationship with the LBS, but unfortunately it never seems to have occurred to Daniel Brooks to do something as weird as copyrighting his aunt’s name.

Craftslaw.com uses this case as a way of talking about how trademarks work generally, especially in the online world. Most of the crafters who might use Brooks’s image, and even her name, aren’t claiming that their goods emanate from any kind of official source, only that a ‘Louise Brooks t-shirt’, for instance, is a t-shirt with Brooks’s face on it. That’s not a trademark, just a descriptor, and the law deems that ‘fair use’; but as Craftslaw points out, most online platforms such as Etsy or eBay (not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) will just play safe and take down any contributor complained against, leaving it to the parties concerned to sort it out through the law. Who’s got the money for that?

The founder and organiser of the LBS is Thomas Gladysz. A couple of years ago I bought his book Louise Brooks: The Persistent Star, a compilation of many of his LBS blog posts. Like a lot of fans of a lot of celebrities, shows, or activities, Mr Gladysz comes across as amiably obsessive and the book is a work of delightfully loopy scholarship. I really don’t know how he manages to find out the things he does. My favourite example was this post, concerning billboard adverts on various suburban streets in Kansas City for the 1926 comedy A Social Celebrity, in which Louise Brooks took a prestigious second billing to the then major star Adolphe Menjou. This is, of course, nuts, and yet it does tell you interesting things about the way movies were marketed in 1920s America. A lot of the blog is like that: it explores times, places and manners through the medium of this one actor, and she becomes a prism for an entire world. It’s niche, but it’s genuine and even useful work.

This makes it all the more galling that the entity attacking the LBS is embodied in a slick-looking but horrible website whose articles are either weird, general stuff lifted from easily accessible online resources mentioning Louise Brooks from time to time, or personal attacks on Thomas Gladysz; and a ‘shop’ consisting of t-shirts or ‘art prints’ emblazoned with public-domain pictures of the actress run through a Photoshop filter. If you want to spend your money on that, think of it as charity. There is no sign that it will contribute much to what we know about Brooks and her times – to put it as mildly as I can. I'm not going to link to it.

I hope that, if the trademark holder had an intention to remove the LBS blog as well, he would have done so by now. It’s there that the most valuable aspect of the LBS survives, the astonishing corpus of work Mr Gladysz has amassed over the course of 28 years of study, and for that to disappear would be a tragedy indeed. 

Two Out Of Three

My shoes were, I think, the only brogues in the tiny, tiny downstairs performance area at the Hope & Anchor in Islington on Monday night. It's a long time since I've seen or rather heard any music live, the timings that evening seemed to fit, and I knew one member of one act and the partner of another, so I decided to go. Madame Morbidfrog's husband (I ought not to call him Mr Romeburns, as that isn't his musical outlet at the moment) had the cheek to come on on time and so I missed his entire set ('I'm sure you can catch it on Youtube', he reassured me), but I did manage to see the others. I liked Last July most, and will look up some of their stuff. 
Since when did Goth acts (a more suitable word than 'bands' when you're only talking about a single person) record all their keyboard and percussion work at home and then play live with just a guitar and vocals with the recording accompanying them? My goodness!

Resident Not Available - a Pastoral Episode

A freezing Swanvale Halt afternoon: I went to the church to collect the reserved sacrament to take to Alison, who lives in the block of sheltered housing flats adjoining the churchyard. I should have seen her in the week before Christmas, but she'd been in hospital and this was the first time we could set something up. I keyed in the number of her flat and waited a minute while the keypad beeped. 'Resident not available', the machine told me. So I tried to phone her, and found the line busy. I had a leaflet to drop round to a new resident around the corner, so did that, returned, and tried again, with the same result. I popped to the Post Office before coming back, and yet another attempt to make contact brought no further success. It was now 25 minutes after our appointment, cold, and getting dark.

I went to the church office, and happened to mention the situation to Sandra the office manager. She sings in a community choir with one of the other residents of the flats, and before I really knew what was happening called him: he wasn't at home, but gave us the number of another neighbour. This all seemed to be spinning a little out of control: I didn't really have any reason to think Alison was lying incapacitated on the floor of her flat and we were now only one over-excited misinterpretation of a sentence away from the fire brigade turning up. Sandra's friend's neighbour pinged me in to the flats and I eventually found Alison's door open and Alison herself contentedly watching the TV with the sound turned up so loud it obliterated even the residual chance she might have had of hearing the intercom when I called. The phone was still hooked up to a call from 2 1/4 hours earlier, explaining why the line was busy. The number was displayed as 'withheld', so possibly Alison had been unwittingly saving any number of other people from nuisance calls from the same source. 'It's lovely to see you', she said, having completely and blissfully forgotten our appointment.

You Cannot Go Back

During the pandemic I was able to book an appointment with my GP via their online system and I assumed that would be the same today. Not so: the sequence went as follows, more or less:

  - The GP's website relocates me to Patient Access

  - Patient Access tells me I do not have a GP registered on my account

  - Having selected my GP I must now prove my identity and I am relocated to NHS Login

  - My first photograph of my driving licence is unacceptable

  - My second photograph, exactly the same as the first, is acceptable

  - My face must be scanned to make sure it's the same as the person on the driving licence

  - It doesn't seem to be similar enough no matter the angle or arrangement of spectacles

  - I am offered the chance to record a video of my face instead, during which recording I have to repeat a code of four numbers

  - Despite making sure NHS Login can access my laptop camera, the video doesn't work

  - It is made very clear that I can't go back and try another driving licence photo

  - I give up and in the afternoon visit my GP so I can be issued with an access code

I suppose such obstacles are one way of putting people off making appointments!

Straight to the Door

More days in covid incarceration beckon, and I have engaged in yet another personal first by ordering a grocery delivery online. Just like my past experiences of joining the kind of modernity everyone else has long since embraced, this feels like something of a defeat and I wish I understood quite why. Dr Abacus says his family find online shopping far more convenient and I suppose it is. In this instance, there may be some reprehensible pride lurking at the bottom of my reaction, as I would rather go and do my own shopping than have someone else do it for me - a minimal sort of independence, which I might be better off shaking free of. But I have no choice at the moment, and I was able to buy some lentil soup which seems to have disappeared off the shelves a long while ago. I can probably be reassured that I won't be making a habit of this because it was a tough job finding enough things to make the minimum shop: a packet of razor blades, which I don't really need yet, got me halfway to the magic £40 in one go. And that felt like cheating. 

Radical Traditionalism

'You know I don't go in for liturgy,' Emily wrote in an email, 'so I don't know why it's Compline that gets to me'. Emily turned up with her mum (all the way from South Wales in her case!) at our first Zoom Compline on Sunday evening. As I may have mentioned I have fought shy of simply shoving our ordinary worship online once the progress of the pandemic allowed us to meet in person again, partly because our kit isn't very good, partly because a standard Parish Eucharist isn't really a very involving business if you're watching it on a screen, and partly because I don't want it to get into people's heads that online worship is any replacement for the real thing, the real thing being Christians actually being in the same place where they stand a chance of forming relationships that lead them on in their spiritual lives. But I still felt I wanted to do something that allowed those at a far distance to access our worshipping life. Compline, the Night Office, once a month seemed an ideal thing to try.

And so I sat in the Lady Chapel with a candelabra lit having put the link and an order of service on the website. There were seven of us in the end, which I thought was fine. I greeted everyone and then muted them: my experience is that online worship where you can hear everyone else is horrendous as attempts to speak in unison inevitably mean the pace gets slower and slower until you can't see how you're actually managing to move forward at all. There was a space for people to chip in with their own prayers, but nobody did (perhaps they will eventually). We sang Te Lucis Ante Terminum, the antiphon and Nunc Dimittis - at least, I did, I don't know what everyone else did - and at the end I snuffed the candles: 'very evocative!' Emily reported. 

Apart from practicalities such as trying to read and simultaneously keep an eye on the Participants list for stragglers, and having the camera elsewhere than my computer screen, there was one unanticipated issue. As Compline is the conclusion of the liturgical day, worshippers are supposed to leave in virtual silence; but in our online lives since March 2020 we have begun accustomed to waving goodbye to each other as we leave a meeting, to the extent that not to do so feels strangely uncomfortable and rude. Worshippers physically in the Lady Chapel wouldn't have felt the need to wave to each other, but that is now an engrained part of our social etiquette, and so should probably be retained!

Gone Shopping

'It's busy', the manager at the Co-Op told me, 'we have lots of new staff though the empty shelves take less time to fill ... Yes, not enough lorry drivers, problems with suppliers, all that's going on.' Not much is being said publicly about shortages in shops, possibly sensibly given what tends to happen when people think there are. 

Meanwhile I have something to transform my shopping experience, a pair of bike pannier bags. I consulted Dr Abacus over the purchase as I knew he would be the right person to go to and as predicted he came back with advice within ten minutes of my email. I think what I will do in future is pack my shopping into separate bags - probably those hemp fabric bags we all seem to acquire these days but whose provenance is often mysterious - and pop them in the panniers. They make the bicycle somewhat less racy-looking but it was never that racy with the basket on the back anyway.

One of my amendments to my life prompted by climate concern has been not to use the car if there is a viable alternative, and that means cycling to do my main shop if possible. The panniers allow me to carry more and bring other benefits. There have been times when I have teetered about with a heavy bag in the basket and another on my back, balancing on the really quite small area of tyre actually in contact with the ground. Lowering the centre of balance makes the whole journey feel slightly less perilous.

Road Stress

It looked such an easy win. The vicar of Goremead phoned to tell me Canon John, retired priest there, had died, and that his funeral was tomorrow, and that was partly why she'd phoned, but also, and this was a big ask she knew, but she'd been covid-pinged and could I, possibly, possibly, take the funeral? She'd done all the work and all I needed to do was read the words and everyone in the church who remembered my stint there in 2008-9 would be delighted to see me. Well, I was planning to be out in that bit of Surrey anyway, so magnanimously I would donate a chunk of my day off for the sake of John who was so good to me while I was playing being incumbent of Goremead. It wouldn't take me long to look round the Ashtead churches, and if I was early at Goremead I could buy a sandwich and eat it in the churchyard.

Ashtead, indeed, did not delay me long, and more of that on another occasion, perhaps. I had seen the appalling state of the M25 so thought I'd be better off taking the A-roads to Goremead; an hour and a half to go 20 miles. A sandwich beckoned. 

Then the road between Leatherhead and Cobham was closed. I set off on a diversion to Oxshott, which was jammed with traffic for no readily apparent reason. Cobham was OK, so, a bit flustered but not yet discouraged, I was on my way again. Lunch could wait. Then I hit the roundabout on the A245/A3 junction; from there, thanks to roadworks, all the way to Byfleet, was solid, virtually stationary traffic. That must have taken half an hour, or more, to get through. By now it was necessary to make a frantic call to the undertakers. Janet the isolating vicar could be called in but that would obviate the whole point so I pressed on. 'Let us know if you're going to be more than 15 minutes late', the undertakers said soothingly. At least all the ceremony was going to take place in the church so there was no special time to make at the Crem.

Finally through the roadworks and it seemed as though we were moving. There was no tractor, horsebox, or caravan awaiting me, but all the way through Addlestone I followed an elderly man wearing a kaftan who insisted on cycling so nobody could pass him, painfully slowly and at intervals insouciantly freewheeling, or perhaps it was insolently. 

I arrived that fifteen minutes behind time, barely able to remember my own name, after a journey at an average speed of about 11 miles an hour, at over 30 degrees. Everyone was most understanding. I discovered from his daughter's eulogy that Canon John's wedding started late after the clergyman taking it failed to turn up; there was no indication his baptism had been late starting or that would have made the whole set. 'It happened to me once', Janet told me on the phone later, 'and I was filling in for someone else as well. It's a wonder I didn't have a stroke on the journey'. I suppose I should have more faith in the Lord that everything will be all right, but I am not sure how far to push that. I was reminded of a funeral I once did at Goremead, when I forgot the CDs for the music and had to drive back to Lamford to get them; the lights were in my favour all the way and I got back with a few minutes to spare before the service began. 'The angels were clearing the way', I mentioned to Vera, the sacristan. Vera, who has long since gone to her eternal reward, fixed me with her gimlet eye and stated definitively, 'If the angels had been doing their job you'd never have forgotten the CDs in the first place.'

Views of the Human

An email arrives from the rector of Ashlake, who is coordinating the local engagement with Living in Love and Faith. There will soon be an LLF introductory course to which all the Deanery churches are invited to send up to four people; the first date, typically, falls when I’m on holiday. Meanwhile it is the month of Pride and my LiberFaciorum feed is full of rainbow flags and declarations of support, especially for the surge in people self-defining as trans or non-binary (nobody ‘comes out’ as homosexual any more as this is a matter of no controversy or even note). I haven’t joined in and I wonder why: I try to dig beneath what, I must confess, is sometimes, just sometimes, a sense of irritation. Transphobe is currently the worst accusation that can be levelled at someone of would-be progressive opinions, but I don’t think I’m that.

I think it’s about how you conceive human identity. Some time ago, I was told that a classmate of my god-daughter changed gender identification from day to day; the name they used showed which pronoun they wished to be employed for that period. That may have been what this particular student needed at that time in their life. But it’s the extreme end of the kind of ultra-liberal individualism which I do think is odd. I consciously abandoned that way of thinking years ago, although I still carry shreds of it – I could hardly do anything else considering how it so totally dominates the culture I belong to.

Its first proposition is that individual choice trumps every other factor in life. Genetics, history and culture are minor elements compared to sovereign choice: I am, ultimately, whatever I decide to be. Now, honest liberal individualists have to accept this is an aspiration rather than a fact, but the assumption is that it should be made as much a fact as possible. Choice is right; ideally it is the only thing that should make a difference to a person. Certainly, it is not appropriate to examine the context of choices, to suggest that other factors may be in play than pure self-volition: merely to ask the question is an insult.  

Secondly, liberal individualism asserts that choices don’t have any real consequences, because that would limit the sovereignty of choice in the future. We can decide to be something one day, and the opposite the next, and these choices have no effect on us or the world around us.

Dare I suggest (I do!) that this ideology is seen so acutely at work in the field of gender and sexuality because those choices don’t matter in a capitalist economy. Individuals can be consumers and producers regardless of their sexual identity, and regardless of whether they choose to change it. From a capitalist point of view, breaking down gender roles is actually more worthwhile than maintaining them, as it allows individuals to be exploited in different ways as either workers or consumers. Liberal individualists barely ever talk about class, mind, because the whole notion of economic class opens up debates about money and power concerning which liberal individualism has nothing to say. Surely, you can wake up in the morning and tell yourself, ‘today I do not identify as a wage-slave’, but your sovereign choice will do absolutely nothing.

On a personal level, I became a lot happier, existentially, when I gave up this sort of thinking. I accepted that there is no ‘real me’ to be expressed, and that ‘I’ am a locus of negotiation between forces that exist outside me, some that existed millions of years before I did, and that will do millions into the future. The choices I make decide the direction I will travel, but that means that even if I decide to change trajectory completely I will be doing it from a different place from where I made the previous choice. Ceasing to be a liberal individualist was so very liberating, and life became much less of a surprise and much less angst-ridden as a result, presumably because my view of the world was more truthful than it had been.

One of the ancient, unfolding forces that shape who we are is sexual difference. Many of my friends are very anxious to claim that sexual difference doesn’t exist, because of all things it doesn’t fit with the ultra-liberal model of what human beings are; but there does seem to be some basis to it. Of course it’s a matter of averages and aggregates, of spectra and fuzzy boundaries: although I think that God has a use for maleness and femaleness, I can’t see that the actual content of either is very stable. Instead we all pick our way across that landscape working out how to manage, each of us a wavering, uncertain compromise between physical being, memory, experience, genetics and ideals. That makes us all unique, but unique in very similar ways to one another – variations on a theme, if you like – and it means that none of us owns who we are, in no way is our identity a fixed kernel of being that we carry around inside us. Instead, it’s truer to say that we are owned by energies beyond us. If that undermines the notion that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are stably expressed in any individual, it also means that labels like trans and non-binary don’t refer to anything stable either.

Here in Swanvale Halt I know a couple of gay people and if there’s anyone trans about it’s hard to tell. Even admitting that, their numbers are almost certainly vanishingly small. Things seem different in London where many of my more radical friends are based, and it's easy to see them as living in a very rarefied world. But I have to hold on to that idea of gender as being a landscape, possibly a scarred and pitted battlefield, which we all have to find our way across, and the excitable adoption of labels and identities as an aspect of just that, driven by the sudden liberation of possibilities which never existed before.

And the fact is that, at least for now, this is a secondary issue. The primary one is whether human beings are safe and free, or whether their lives are made hazardous and constrained by threats of violence made against them justified by their membership of particular groups, whether self-defined or socially-defined. And it remains the case that, however kooky and self-involved a lot of modern gender politics especially in Western liberal democracies seems to be, humans continue to attack and violate other humans on the basis of who they love, what they wear and what label they carry. Over recent years I have become much more concerned about illiberal politics in other places because I realise how fragile our liberty is: authoritarianism anywhere undermines liberty and fraternity everywhere, and in the same way regressive violence anywhere encourages bigotry across boundaries. So wave the rainbow flag and leave the philosophy for another day.

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.

Finding Your Place

NB. I discover I'd only saved this post as a draft, not published it!

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The PCC decided on Friday to resume public worship on Palm Sunday, a week today. When I did the newsletter delivery round that morning everyone I spoke to asked me when the church was reopening: one of our most faithful members positively begged me. ‘I need to be back in church!’ So I am working out how to celebrate the Triduum in a curtailed and Covid-compliant form: there won’t be a procession on Palm Sunday, and the Easter Vigil will be done by just me and Julie the sacristan and recorded. But there will be live-streamed Compline, and an Easter Messy Church via Zoom, and I will need to work out how (and whether) to do the Passion Service for families on Good Friday. There’ll be a booking system for the Easter services, as there was for Christmas though I will be very encouraged if we turn out to need it!

It strikes even me as contextually incongruous, this antique formulation of what I do, but in fact, the more I considered what to put on the census form today, the more it seemed like a reasonable and accurate summary. It would have been more pious to put something about Jesus, but harder to encapsulate in 120 characters or less. This is both open and precise, even if, to all intents and purposes, the bishop doesn’t take an obviously close interest in his share of the cure of souls here. It is, still, not a bad place to find oneself – physically and metaphorically.

Remote Access

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were certain areas of our computers where very few of us had ever been; under the stresses of the times intrepid souls have ventured into those unfamiliar hinterlands and have discovered - Microsoft Teams. From never having participated in anything of the kind before, yesterday I attended two meetings via Teams in the evening. I couldn't get the program to recognise my computer's camera, which seems thoroughly suspicious but appears to be due to a box not being ticked on the Teams website. The school governors' meeting was calm and orderly, marshalled by the school secretary who'd worked out how to manage the program and then tutored individually those of us who were a bit clueless; the ATC committee meeting, in contrast, was chaotic as nobody knew quite what to do and everybody kept playing with the format. It was a bit like watching attenders at the Toddler Group battling over a favoured toy.

I could have attended a third meeting had I had the will, of the management board of our local ecumenical Christian youth work charity. That wasn't carried out via Microsoft Teams but Zoom, another application people have only just discovered. Unfortunately - having just mentioned the Toddler Group - I can't get out of my head one of the songs we customarily sing, 'Zoom zoom zoom, we're going to the Moon.' And now, friends, if you are familiar with that lyric, neither can you.

A Perfect World Where Everyone's Like Me

Over on another social media platform, Fr Robin Ward, the principal of my old theological college, decided boldly to wade into the matter of the ejection of Mr Andrew Sabitsky as a Downing Street advisor on the grounds that he knows him: Mr Sabitsky was at least at one time an habitué of various Anglo-Catholic churches around Oxford. ‘He would make a very good archbishop’ comments Dr Ward in response to one outburst, ‘there would be compulsory folded chasubles all round’.

As a result, there was much talk of the notion of ‘high-end’ and ‘low-end decoupling’, an idea I’d not encountered before. A high-end decoupler has a mental habit of considering a concept or proposition in isolation from its context, as an intellectual exercise, and surrounding that discussion with verbal disclaimers to make it clear, at least to other high-end decouplers, that any wider considerations are being put to one side. Low-end decouplers find it hard to examine an idea apart from its context and often react very badly to such examinations of controversial ideas. I am not convinced this entirely explains what happened to Mr Sabitsky.

In one of the original comments on Dominic Cummings’s famous blog which gave rise to all this fuss, Mr Sabitsky talks about the heritability of intelligence, and potentially of other characteristics such as compassion, things which genetic fiddling might encourage: the production of better humans. It’s no surprise that he concludes that it’s more realistic to manipulate intelligence because it is easier to measure than those other faculties – no surprise, because people who perform well in IQ tests always end up saying this.

Easy to measure, but less easy to predict. For instance, I know that I am not in the top echelon of intelligence: my mind works slowly and in a fragmented fashion, and I know plenty of people who are cleverer than me. I don’t believe I am stupid, although I can be very dim about some things; I take comfort in my one-time academic successes rather like an old soldier’s campaign medals, and like those they only bear a remote relationship to who I am now. I describe myself as being in the upper ranks of the second-rate. But I am the first person in my family to have any academic qualifications at all; had my ancestors taken the IQ test, would they have scored highly? Is it simply that they never had the chance, or are there other factors at play? Am I a mutant in my lineage?

The real problem is the use of intelligence, however measured, as the most important index of a person’s worth. I wonder when this started? Human society used to privilege other virtues. I’m put in mind of Song no.92 of the Carmina Burana, usually called ‘The Dispute of Phyllis and Flora’, or something of the sort, in which two medieval ladies debate whose boyfriend is the most worthwhile: Phyllis’s is a knight and Flora’s a clergyman (how naughty). Back and forth they reason, until they agree to submit the judgement to the court of Cupid whose assembled nymphs eventually conclude ‘By virtue of their learning and the customs they inherit/ We declare the love of clerics worthier of merit’. This poem is one of a category of medieval lyrics around the same theme and, as David Parrett, the author of the Penguin Classics selection of the Carmina writes, ‘that the clerics always win [is a bit of] a foregone conclusion in view of their obvious authorship’. In this and similar works, medieval clergy were a class based in education and learning, arguing for their precedence over the military virtues. In the modern world, however, eugenic fantasies, rather than those of courtly romance, form the nerd’s revenge.

I suspect we privilege intellect because of the progressivist vision of human history we’ve developed since the Reformation, or the Enlightenment at the very least. We have come to associate human progress with technological advance and scientific understanding, and see these as driven by the application of intellect; and even though we find brainy people often baffling and comic – or worrying – we cannot help but enthrone intelligence as the most important of human characteristics because of the advantages it brings us all; as opposed to, say, courage or kindness, which are admirable but don’t move the world forward, or so it seems.

The truth is that as very few people fortuitously combine in their single persons the necessary virtues to greater-than-average degrees, we need all sorts of human beings in a society. Even sociopaths sometimes have a use. Predicting what sorts of human beings we might need and in what proportions at particular times would require a level of superforecasting hard to envisage.

Misanthropy 2 - Worlds That Pass

My mind, still trying to process the attitudes I encounter online, turns to my friend Dr TransHuman who got into the newspapers a few days ago because of her latest book – ‘Goth professor says, Stop breeding to save the Earth’. While I come from a very different place ideologically, not only do I think nobody deserves the death threats she got, but I also suspect she has a bit of a point. There are a lot of human beings about, and we don’t necessarily need lots more. Then again, yesterday I shared a table at the café opposite the church with a lady who told me her large brood of five daughters reflected a fear of loneliness that had dogged her for many years. Many of the people I know have experiences of life which are more marginal than they realise; but so, to a degree, are mine.

In a way, I live a life which is more similar to the way most people once did. Swanvale Halt is not just the place I sleep; I spend the great majority of my time in it and I know some hundreds of its people to some extent: the congregation and their extended contacts, business owners and workers, teachers, schoolchildren, and their families. They behave pleasantly to me and I strive to do the same, and often I get some insight into their habits, struggles and thoughts. They are very varied, apart from sharing the same geographical location. This used to be quite close to common experience, when people lived surrounded by a network of acquaintance, work and family, but now it’s almost wildly off-centre. This is especially so if you’ve moved halfway across the country, and perhaps changed countries, to come to London and work there; but even if you haven’t, the stability of communities and the opportunities for casual interactions of the kind that generate fellowship are much weakened from the way they used to be. It’s my bizarre position as parson which opens the possibility of something different, an older way of living, and which allows me to move between different sub-groups within my community and interact with them all. It is true that my relationships with most of these people are, necessarily, relatively superficial. But they are not nothing, and when interacting with the people I don’t know that well, I tend to extrapolate from the experiences of those I do know something about, and to extend the love and generosity I try to have for them.

Now, many people I know don’t have experiences which are anything like this. If they are remote from family, geographically or emotionally (and many are), they will perhaps interact with a relatively small group of co-workers, and for the rest of the time move past a mass of anonymous souls about whom they know nothing apart from fleeting impressions. They have no idea who they are, where they have come from or where they are going, what stresses they may be under or what they may be looking forward to. They are unknown.

If your life is like this, your main relationships will be with friends (including partners) and pets. The latter in particular are very likely to bias you against the anonymous human beings who rush past you in your daily life. They will make no demands on you except very obvious physical ones, and will never have any needs that you will struggle to meet. They will never tell you you’re wrong, and never have a disagreement with you. You can project anything you like onto them, and say anything to them; you can insult them or coo over them, and they will react to you the same way; the basic nature of their existence will never challenge you or your ideas. They are utterly uncomplicated and that’s their appeal, though the idea leaves me a bit cold. I am very sceptical about human beings’ ability to read animal thoughts and emotions: most of the time (and I know I do this as I watch and occasionally talk to the cats in my garden) we judge them according to models of human behaviour that we then impute to them, barely recognising that that’s what we’re doing. We underestimate how remote their mental lives are from ours.

Friends and lovers, of course, you select. You gravitate towards people who share experiences and outlooks. They will almost universally reflect back at you exactly the same reactions and understandings you have. They will reinforce your impressions and back up your conclusions about the world, and when they don’t – which is what we’re talking about here – it can be very painful and you are more likely to dispose of them than to incorporate the fact in your life, as you would to some degree have to if you lived in an old-fashioned organic community and couldn’t escape them. You can maintain the sense that your friends are distinct from the rest of humanity, because they are like you and think the things that you think. You can place them in a separate conceptual category. Of course everyone has some relationships which are closer than others, but some don’t have much to give a broader perspective on them.

So if people find themselves expressing anti-humanist ideas, those ideas come from experience and probably pain, anger and disillusionment. That doesn’t mean they can be dismissed as merely personal bias: ideas have a life of their own and should be dealt with on their own rational terms. But understanding where they come from is a counterbalance against the anger that might bubble up in us when confronted with ideas that challenge us very deeply. We have to work very hard to see through the opacity of our own experience to understand those of others; we are not, sadly, the Son of Man, whose unfailing sight had the clarity of the Spirit. And I’m not sure who has the more oddball life, or whose is more representative of modernity – me, or my friends.

The Trouble With Humans

At some point I'll be able to write something upbeat here - but not today! A few months ago I put together a short pamphlet on the relationship of the Church to the climate emergency and the theological issues it raised, mainly because nothing I heard tackled it the way that concerned me. In it, I thought about the danger the politics of climate change seemed to pose of anti-humanism, of falling into a misanthropic rhetoric which viewed human beings as a polluting presence, a disease that nature would be justified in wiping out.  That wasn't very present just a short time back, but it seems to be now. My LiberFaciorum feed is full of it: often brutal and violent, accusatory, angry not with categories of human being (like the Brexit debate), but with humans as such. The Earth would be fine if they weren't around. It's hard to read, and often comes from people I care about and who are even, in at least one case, engaged in work which concerns saving people's lives. 

One of my favourite little stories involves Metropolitan Anthony of Sourezh who, on his first trip back to the Soviet Union from which his family had fled during the Revolution, was welcomed at the airport by a commissar from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. 'Do you believe in God, my child?' asked the archbishop. 'Certainly not,' replied the official firmly, 'As a member of the Communist Party I believe in human beings.' 'Good!', said Anthony, shaking his hand, 'So does God!'

There is a misanthropic strain in Christian spirituality, with disgust at the depth of human sin as its justification, but it's marginal. Rather, we are used to the tension between the fact that human life cannot be radically bad if the eternal Son came to share it and we are to carry on his work, and on the other hand the inescapable truth that humans' response to the arrival of absolute goodness was to turn on it and attempt to destroy it. The liturgy consistently rehearses both. I don't know whether the atheistic sort of misanthropy, released by the climate crisis, has long roots in people's thinking - was it always there - or whether it results from being surprised at how humans have failed? Christians have always known we are Fallen; perhaps non-believers are only now really finding out.

There's a more philosophical question below this, which is how far we should think of humans as part of the natural order, and how far we are separate from it. This is a complex matter for both Christians and non-believers. Traditionally Christians could maintain that humans were set radically apart from the beasts, but accepting evolution muddies those waters: we become both, part of a natural continuum but also endowed with something else, something which makes us capable of great good and also great evil. Our animal nature can be bent in either direction. However, if you're an atheist, everything we have is part of our genetic inheritance, and the way we behave must also derive from it. Whatever selfishness and short-sightedness we display must come from there. If we act badly, it can't be because we are too distinct from nature, but precisely because we are part of it: not because we are insufficiently like your pet cat, but because we're like it too much. If that's true, there's no great sense in castigating humans for being what they can't help. 

The conclusion a Christian must draw is that, if our imagination, the aspects of us that are 'the image of God', can be used positively or negatively; though it be ever so hard, we can choose to exercise the better side of what we are. And we must, for disaster lies otherwise. And without us, Creation returns not to a state of goodness and grace, but to chaos, to inarticulacy, to nothingness; beauty, perhaps, but with nothing capable of discerning, describing or enjoying beauty. Try Romans 8.19-22, which our holy mother the Church made us read last Sunday, if you don't believe me. Blessed Paul, of course, got there ahead of us.