Monday, 30 April 2012
So It Begins
Saturday, 28 April 2012
Additions
Three small accoutrements acquired from the antique warehouse today: a vaguely St Catherine wheel-shaped horse brass, an old chemist's bottle (Tincture of Rhubarb seems a highly appropriate dose for a clergyman) and a small figure of St Dunstan gripping the devil's nose in a pair of pincers.
I've also finally managed to frame and get onto the walls three pictures that have been waiting for attention for months. Zoe Monday's icon of St Catherine is now in the hall:
Ms Francis's Christmas card with her lithographic version of a William Morris angel is now in the "childrens' room" upstairs:
And the headache cure advert I got from a North Welsh antique shop last year is in the dining room. I cracked the glass but I was in no frame of mind for that to make any difference.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
The Gothic Valley WI
I know some of the people involved in this, and it's just wonderful beyond words.
"Gothic Valley developed slowly as like-minded people came together in North London. What started as an inside joke became our way of identifying our local neighbourhood within the Goth scene. You won't find Gothic Valley on a map, but, as they say, home is where the heart is. Our hearts and homes tend to be off Holloway Road, reaching from Highbury and Islington to Crouch End.We have no geographical restrictions on membership and some of our members travel in from other parts of London.
"The Gothic Valley WI was started in early 2012 by a group of friends and like-minded women in London. The founding members are a mix of professionals and students, who in our spare time like baking, jam-making, crafting and wearing lots of black. We include some award-winning bakers and a few professional costumiers and seamstresses. ... Our first meeting featured a talk by one of our members, a professional costumier, who shared her experiences of literally running away with the circus. This month we ran a practical workshop on how to get the best results from your digital camera ... One of our first community events will be a 'bunting' party on 5 June to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.
"Come and help us put the 'black' in blackberry jam!"
More information here.
"Gothic Valley developed slowly as like-minded people came together in North London. What started as an inside joke became our way of identifying our local neighbourhood within the Goth scene. You won't find Gothic Valley on a map, but, as they say, home is where the heart is. Our hearts and homes tend to be off Holloway Road, reaching from Highbury and Islington to Crouch End.We have no geographical restrictions on membership and some of our members travel in from other parts of London.
"The Gothic Valley WI was started in early 2012 by a group of friends and like-minded women in London. The founding members are a mix of professionals and students, who in our spare time like baking, jam-making, crafting and wearing lots of black. We include some award-winning bakers and a few professional costumiers and seamstresses. ... Our first meeting featured a talk by one of our members, a professional costumier, who shared her experiences of literally running away with the circus. This month we ran a practical workshop on how to get the best results from your digital camera ... One of our first community events will be a 'bunting' party on 5 June to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.
"Come and help us put the 'black' in blackberry jam!"
More information here.
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
In Other News
In amongst all that nonsense, I was out on Monday visiting Highgate Cemetery with Ms Philligrew from the LGMG. I'd been to the eastern half before, but not the West, which is closed to all but visitors on guided tours because of the fragility of the monuments. It was an atrociously damp and disagreeable afternoon, and it would have been good to wander, but even so this was a visit to a strange and unique landscape, as Highgate is not laid out on flat ground in wide, generous avenues of tombs, but narrow, clambering paths and terraces with some features, including of course the Egyptian Avenue and Circle of Lebanon, which are absolutely unique in British cemetery architecture. Much has been cleared since the cemetery's utter dereliction in the 1970s, but the Friends of Highgate Cemetery are sensitive to the need to maintain the lovely gloomth which pervades the place as well as to make it accessible.
After that (and recovering with tea) I scooted to the West End to meet up with some of the other LGMG folk to visit an exhibition, 'Broken Stones' at the James Hyman Gallery in Savile Row. This was a tiny tiny display of photographs of ruinous landscapes by great photographers of the 19th century (Roger Fenton, Eugene Atget etc.). It was very small indeed, and I would have been severely disappointed had I not been forewarned by another LGMG member that there weren't any captions. No captions! Such a thing is virtually unthinkable to a former museum curator, so I'd printed off all the details from the gallery website so we had a catalogue. Still, it was one of those Meetups where the apres-meetup (spent at the Yumchaa tea rooms in Soho) was longer than the event itself. It's a useful insight into the way commercial galleries tend to puff themselves.
More Moaning
I did something very foolish at the weekend. To cut it down only to the most relevant details, I did what you're always told not to do and let someone stay in my house because it seemed uncomplicated. I have a ridiculously large house with only me in it, and here was a person who seemed to need peace and security for a while. I even thought it might do me good spiritually.
She turned out to need more than that, and it wasn't uncomplicated. She never caused direct trouble - in fact, was ingratiating - but wasn't telling me the truth, at least, not all of it - for instance, that the rector of Hornington had already paid for her to stay in a B&B the previous week. I was out on Monday (it's my week off) and was increasingly frantic all day with the knowledge that my house was no longer a place of safety for me and I would have to confront my guest in the evening. I did this, and said we'd have to look for alternative accommodation the next day. This was the cue for denials, pleading, questioning. Given what's happened the last few weeks, I underestimated my own fragile mental state and couldn't cope, and fled. I returned to get a bag and go to stay with friends in Lamford, all the while with my guest calling 'Don't do this, let me make you tea, let's pray about this'.
Luckily one of these friends, who counsels me from time to time, has a lot of experience of dealing with homelessness issues and came with me the following morning. We tried to find accommodation for my guest, whose answers to questions were evasive and vague. We tried to get her in at the YMCA locally, who refused when they heard the name, while a local guest house where she'd stayed before very clearly tried to work out by questioning who she was. She refused to deal with any of the statutory housing agencies, and became positively hysterical when my friend was about to call the HOST team. In the end we basically dumped her in Hornington with a bit of money. She called me over the remainder of the day using a variety of different numbers, though that seems to have stopped.
I'm bitterly ashamed of myself for so many reasons in this: for having been so stupid in the first place, for breaking down and dragging my friends into the business (even Il Rettore was summoned for moral support), for having not realised how weak my mind is at the moment. I thought it would be all right. Perhaps for a different person it would have been.
I don't know what's happened to the woman. Of course all my friends are predictably sympathetic (though Cylene the Goth didn't think there was anything prima facie wrong with someone being in my house, as she's done the same), but the essence is that I've pushed on to the streets somebody who is in need even if they're not completely truthful or open, because I couldn't cope. Nevertheless it's clear I can't. I've always been haunted by the possibility of it being incumbent on me to take people in to my home, even before I was ordained; when I lived in Chatham I did let one of my neighbours' adopted son stay in the flat one night and it was one of the hardest things I ever did. Now I know I can't do it. Some can, but not me, no matter how big my house happens to be.
You can't rest content with your incapacities in the Christian life, it's true: you always have to accept and investigate the possibility that God wants you out of your comfort zone. If there is something we have a particular ability in, something we're good at, perhaps something we haven't yet discovered, that can help others, we do indeed have a duty to pursue it to the hazard of our health and welfare. But that doesn't mean going against the fundamental tenor of our individual nature. If we have a particular vocation God will make it known to us; conversely, breaking down and having to seek help to resolve a mess we've caused is surely a clear enough sign that we shouldn't be doing that thing after all.
She turned out to need more than that, and it wasn't uncomplicated. She never caused direct trouble - in fact, was ingratiating - but wasn't telling me the truth, at least, not all of it - for instance, that the rector of Hornington had already paid for her to stay in a B&B the previous week. I was out on Monday (it's my week off) and was increasingly frantic all day with the knowledge that my house was no longer a place of safety for me and I would have to confront my guest in the evening. I did this, and said we'd have to look for alternative accommodation the next day. This was the cue for denials, pleading, questioning. Given what's happened the last few weeks, I underestimated my own fragile mental state and couldn't cope, and fled. I returned to get a bag and go to stay with friends in Lamford, all the while with my guest calling 'Don't do this, let me make you tea, let's pray about this'.
Luckily one of these friends, who counsels me from time to time, has a lot of experience of dealing with homelessness issues and came with me the following morning. We tried to find accommodation for my guest, whose answers to questions were evasive and vague. We tried to get her in at the YMCA locally, who refused when they heard the name, while a local guest house where she'd stayed before very clearly tried to work out by questioning who she was. She refused to deal with any of the statutory housing agencies, and became positively hysterical when my friend was about to call the HOST team. In the end we basically dumped her in Hornington with a bit of money. She called me over the remainder of the day using a variety of different numbers, though that seems to have stopped.
I'm bitterly ashamed of myself for so many reasons in this: for having been so stupid in the first place, for breaking down and dragging my friends into the business (even Il Rettore was summoned for moral support), for having not realised how weak my mind is at the moment. I thought it would be all right. Perhaps for a different person it would have been.
I don't know what's happened to the woman. Of course all my friends are predictably sympathetic (though Cylene the Goth didn't think there was anything prima facie wrong with someone being in my house, as she's done the same), but the essence is that I've pushed on to the streets somebody who is in need even if they're not completely truthful or open, because I couldn't cope. Nevertheless it's clear I can't. I've always been haunted by the possibility of it being incumbent on me to take people in to my home, even before I was ordained; when I lived in Chatham I did let one of my neighbours' adopted son stay in the flat one night and it was one of the hardest things I ever did. Now I know I can't do it. Some can, but not me, no matter how big my house happens to be.
You can't rest content with your incapacities in the Christian life, it's true: you always have to accept and investigate the possibility that God wants you out of your comfort zone. If there is something we have a particular ability in, something we're good at, perhaps something we haven't yet discovered, that can help others, we do indeed have a duty to pursue it to the hazard of our health and welfare. But that doesn't mean going against the fundamental tenor of our individual nature. If we have a particular vocation God will make it known to us; conversely, breaking down and having to seek help to resolve a mess we've caused is surely a clear enough sign that we shouldn't be doing that thing after all.
Friday, 20 April 2012
Babygoth
And on the train heading up to Waterloo there was a family seated behind me all the way from Swanvale Halt. Included was a young girl all of 13 in eyeliner, big boots, gappy black and purple leggings and a black crushed velvet skirt,who sat reading a book whose title I couldn't see but was all black with a skull-and-crossbones on the cover. She did my old heart good, could she but have known. If only I'd been able to say some encouraging words.
A Tale of Two Libraries
Yesterday and today I was in the shocking and unprecedented position (since leaving college) of being able to go to libraries two days running. Yesterday it was scooting off to Oxford to visit the Bodleian and look up the recent volumes of the English Place-Name Society. I found myself in the same position as when I did this last year, that of being unable to remember which ones I'd looked at and which had been published since. However the question was rendered irrelevant by the discovery of the last volume of The Place Names of Dorset,whose previous section had emerged in 1989!
Now it is a rare day indeed that a previously-unknown holy well comes to light, and previously-unknown saint's wells whose names are recorded in the Middle Ages appear as often as the pheonix. Yet this book had one: in the obscure parish of Burstock (I can't even remember what the church looks like, yet I must have been there) in a 13th century document there appears the fontem s'cti Dunstani de Herstonehegh, the Well of St Dunstan at Hursey (as the hamlet now is). It's horribly geekish, and a horribly outré form of geekery, to get excited about this, but I did. It's a very odd well, though. 'Dunstan' appears to be the name of a local family in medieval Hursey, but how the well and the people are related is anything but clear. If the family are prior, why would they have 'sponsored' a holy well? If the well came first, how did they take their name from it?
Then today I was at Lambeth Palace Library looking at the remainder of the papers of Reginald Somerset Ward, the great Anglican spiritual director (to Michael Ramsey, Evelyn Underhill and other luminaries as well as hundreds of lesser figures), in whom I have an interest. That was quite fun too. RSW's writings are often a bit austere but there is a great sense of the living Spirit in them and I never fail but feel refreshed by reading them. Part of the reason RSW seems so stern to modern audiences (in so far as anyone knows him at all) is because of this picture which appears on the front cover of the little book compiled in his memory by his friend Edmund Morgan, the Bishop of Truro:
In the files I came across another photo, very obviously taken on the same occasion as this one, in which the great man has managed to forget to look like a grumpy old git and actually has a bit of a smile. A revelation, in its way, as momentous as a new holy well in my home county.
Now it is a rare day indeed that a previously-unknown holy well comes to light, and previously-unknown saint's wells whose names are recorded in the Middle Ages appear as often as the pheonix. Yet this book had one: in the obscure parish of Burstock (I can't even remember what the church looks like, yet I must have been there) in a 13th century document there appears the fontem s'cti Dunstani de Herstonehegh, the Well of St Dunstan at Hursey (as the hamlet now is). It's horribly geekish, and a horribly outré form of geekery, to get excited about this, but I did. It's a very odd well, though. 'Dunstan' appears to be the name of a local family in medieval Hursey, but how the well and the people are related is anything but clear. If the family are prior, why would they have 'sponsored' a holy well? If the well came first, how did they take their name from it?
Then today I was at Lambeth Palace Library looking at the remainder of the papers of Reginald Somerset Ward, the great Anglican spiritual director (to Michael Ramsey, Evelyn Underhill and other luminaries as well as hundreds of lesser figures), in whom I have an interest. That was quite fun too. RSW's writings are often a bit austere but there is a great sense of the living Spirit in them and I never fail but feel refreshed by reading them. Part of the reason RSW seems so stern to modern audiences (in so far as anyone knows him at all) is because of this picture which appears on the front cover of the little book compiled in his memory by his friend Edmund Morgan, the Bishop of Truro:
In the files I came across another photo, very obviously taken on the same occasion as this one, in which the great man has managed to forget to look like a grumpy old git and actually has a bit of a smile. A revelation, in its way, as momentous as a new holy well in my home county.
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