Viva La Muerte ...

... was how I greeted the two Catrinas I shared the train with as we disembarked at Waterloo on Saturday and got a big skeletal grin in reply. Later, while I and the others were at the Hoop & Toy not far from the V&A on Saturday afternoon I could glimpse a little anomaly on a picture frame next to our table: it turned out to be a very tiny ghost.

It's the season of the dead. I normally expect about 40 attenders at the annual Memorial Service on the afternoon of the last Sunday in October, and as the number of funerals we take declines, I always wonder how long this event has got to go, but this year roughly 60 souls turned up. The candles went up to the high altar to burn down as usual. 

Because of how the dates fall this year, there will be a number of occasions to mark the season at Swanvale Halt church should anyone feel inclined. We normally have a midweek mass on a Tuesday morning, joined on this occasion by a eucharist for All Saints tomorrow evening and then the All Souls Requiem Mass on Thursday. I wonder how many will venture out as Storm Ciarán gets going. But the swede lanterns are ready for action, even if they get blown out (as they often do). 

Coco Chanel at the V&A

Unlike the Diva exhibition, which I'm keen to see at some point if only because it includes PJ Harvey memorabilia and Theda Bara's spangly Cleopatra bra from 1917, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the V&A's show about Coco Chanel (who they insist on calling Gabrielle) had I been paying to get in. As it was, I went with Ms Mauritia and the Snappers (that's not a band, the Snappers are a couple) and because they have two Museum memberships between them that was four of us admitted for nothing. 

If nothing else, Chanel has to be celebrated for her colossal success in building a business that survived so long, and remaining actively designing clothes into her 80s. But it's that very commercial success which I think is possibly the more interesting story to be told, as opposed to the nature of her clothes as design artefacts, and of course it's that which the V&A necessarily focuses on: get a group of social history curators to plan the same show and they'd come up with something completely different. At first it seemed this exhibition didn't have much of a 'story' at all: it was only when we emerged from the War and dealt with Chanel's counterattack on the Dior style that things seemed to move forward at all, even in terms of design. But the show has a couple of dramatic visual set-pieces which will linger in my memory a long while. A turn from a dark corridor of jewellery leads to a vast space lined with a parade of airborne dresses which are slightly intimidating - haute couture doesn't get much higher than that - and the exhibition culminates in a mirrored staircase which recalls Chanel's final show in 1970 (I think). Rather a triumph of the curator's art, that.

Nouveau, Arabesque, Gothic

Time ticks on and the next Goth Walk approaches fast: on Thursday I traced the route, discovering that we would be going past the houses of both Noel Coward and Bram Stoker: now what a double-act that would have been. We will (all being well) finish at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, the one-time home of Ruth Baldwin. Socialite and prodigious drug-taker, Ruth was the girlfriend of heiress and motorboat racer Marion 'Joe' Carstairs, and died from an overdose in the flat of Oscar Wilde's neice Dolly in 1937. I didn't realise the house would look like this: built in 1913 for a Danish aristocrat and stained-glass designer, it's a startling block of Art Nouveau sensibility in a Bohemian portion of London. It's not the only example in the streets nearby, either.

I had enough time to return, after an initial visit twenty years ago, to Leighton House in Kensington, reacquainting myself with its startling neo-Moorish decor. Frederic Lord Leighton's actual art was superb and empty, its classical dullness enough to make me forgive Watts who at least put some soul in his soporific allegories; but his house is another matter, a tiled jewel. Nobody at all mentions the great green-painted iron girders and pillars to its rear, which are just as striking in their own way. 

On the Tube back home I found myself sitting next to a gent who was flicking through what I later discovered was ES, the Evening Standard magazine. He wasn't interested in an interview with Marina Abramovic, and eventually settled on a piece about holidays in Greece, but not before passing a series of photos of young people in what seemed like Gothic outfits. What was it? The paper exhausted the fellow's interest and he stuck it behind him, but although I tried to attract his attention before I left the train to see if I could have it, he was embroiled in Candy Crush and big headphones and so I abandoned the attempt. It was only through a friend that I found out the ES was profiling Slimelight, the veteran Goth club in Islington, and the whole article is on Slimelight's Instagram. It's gratifying to have such favourable coverage, though it does rather give the impression that Goth fashion has been taken over by a fetish aesthetic which, though it does seem quite prominent at the moment (rather like Steampunk was a few years ago and Cyber a few before that), isn't completely hegemonic.

Getting Together

Two single mums get talking at the Messy Church tea, just when we were despairing that it was our worst-attended Messy Church ever. They decide it would be great to create an occasion for single mums generally to get together and Sheila who organises everything to do with families at Swanvale Halt church agrees to book the church hall and be there as a responsible person. At 5.15 on evening last week they turned up and began. Sally our Pastoral Assistant baked a cake: it was huge but all disappeared. There were eight young women and ten children. One bought board games and three women sat with a Scrabble board for two hours. 'I didn't have to do anything apart from buy some food' said Sheila. Something to serve a group of people we don't normally reach, spontaneously arising out of our contacts: it's the kind of thing I've waited fourteen years to see happen. 

You Can Do Without That Kind of Excitement

The church was full for the main service on Sunday for a baptism, which is an infrequent event as most of ours happen separately. But this was the baby daughter of Allie our Treasurer, a birth from within the congregation and thus a great delight. Lots of children came with their families and with all dad Danny's friends from the Swanvale Halt Rugby Club.

So that was exciting. Forest Church should have been a complete contrast, quiet and contemplative. Usually Allie, her mother and sister, would have been among the attenders, but obviously they had other things to do and so we were seven human souls and one dog making our way into the woods where we'd begun our Forest Church explorations in the summer of last year. I was relieved to discover that it wasn't quite as boggy as when I'd done my usual recce on Saturday afternoon. We had read from Geoffrey Grigson's Englishman's Flora about the folklore and properties of the willow tree (did you know that aspirin was developed from a chemical isolated from willow bark?) as well as the Bible, and sung a slightly eccentric hymn, and were just getting into a time of prayer when Derek, an elderly gent who lives not far away from the woods, keeled over and fell on the ground. That rather put an end to contemplation. It seemed like a transitory faint, and guided by a paramedic over the phone we got Derek out, and into the only car close at hand belonging to Jean the sacristan. Another congregation member accompanied them, and stayed at the hospital until Derek's son arrived. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, but unsurprisingly the doctors kept him in overnight much to his chagrin. 

As we'd made our way along the path through the woods, I'd glanced aloft at the sunlight glinting through the canopy of trees. When we stopped and took in our surroundings I encouraged us to look up as well. I've an uncomfortable feeling that Derek looked up a bit too long.

Up in the Rafters

The most striking event in the parish this week has been the opening of a new fast-food outlet on the row of businesses which already has two, and the main happening in the life of the church has been an internal glazing area being cleaned for the first time in about twenty years so it no longer presents a canvas of spattered swift guano, but these are fairly pedestrian occurrences. So my mind turns to times past. The alma mater St Stephen's House has just reorganised the Founder's Chapel, the little worship space that crouches beneath the roof of the old building opening off Oxford's Marston Street that was the original home of the Society of St John the Evangelist, and very handsome it is too to judge by this photo on the College's LiberFaciorum page. That's not Comper Pink, but most agreeable nevertheless, a nice contrast with the black.

When I was there it didn't have the little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, nor was it a space where people spent a great deal of time. We students were discouraged from holding any events there at all, allegedly because it would have been a death-trap in the event of a fire, but somehow that didn't appear to prevent Compline happening there once a week. It was dusty, alternately freezing or suffocating hot according to the season, and occasionally worse, as during the several days when it was invaded by the College's resident colony of pigeons who made it part of their festering empire until it was recaptured.

There were people who found the Founder's Chapel spooky. We were once treated to the local diocesan exorcist recounting some of his stories, and he referred to the unseen denizens of the Marston Street building, though he wasn't at the House to talk to us about that at all. He was quite a peculiar character, the most uncanny thing about him being the mysterious way his toupée moved around his head. He and colleagues had, he told us, been called in to clear out the whole place spiritually, but by the time they got to the Founder's Chapel there was one presence they decided to leave alone 'as it had more of a right to be there than anyone living'. We all knew who that meant. 

So there were certain physical challenges to spending time in the Founder's Chapel (not least getting up the steep stairs to the very pointy pinnacle of the building) but I never felt that Fr Benson or anyone else posed any kind of threat to my spiritual wellbeing. Instead the Chapel was my retreat of final resort when I was too distressed or disillusioned to go anywhere else. I wouldn't go to the House Chapel: that was where we repaired morning and evening for the Office and, like all my fellow ordinands, I even had my own allocated seat. The House Chapel was too much official Staggers for it to be anywhere I wanted to go at the worst of times. St John's Iffley Road, the old monastic church we looked after and which was open to the public for services, was a vast, empty space that I never had any sympathy with. Instead I would ascend those steps to the slight dereliction of the Founder's Chapel and try to pray there, if praying was allowed to mean throwing my anger in front of God and asking him to do something with it. If I felt he was there at all. Like my old schools, I don't have any great desire to revisit Staggers itself: I was 'clapped out' at the end of my time there, went out the door, and that was it. But the Founder's Chapel is, perhaps, one place I would be happy to be teleported back to. 

Radio Vicaring

It may be - I forget - that the Reverend Alan Franks has been vicar of St Stephen's, Ambridge (and its linked parishes which The Archers refers to but never covers, for even longer than I've been at Swanvale Halt. This would be unusual but it fits with the way the Church of England in the show works. The local diocesan, the Bishop of Felpersham, appears so occasionally that it took a while for the writers to realise it was stretching credulity for the Rt Rev Cyril Hood to occupy the position for nearly 30 years as they dragged the same actor, Peter Howell, back in to the studio every time they needed episcopal input. Bishop Cyril would have been about 90 by the time he retired, and that's even older than Eric Kemp.

A few days ago Revd Franks was confronted with the appalling Rob Titchener asking to be baptised. Even though Mrs Vicarage Usha saw this instantly as one of Rob's mind-games, one can understand Alan (who's only spoken to the wretched man a couple of times) feeling obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even he could see the ructions that baptising Rob might cause among the other members of his flock who he had deceived and harmed, yet it took his wife to remind him that he had a responsibility to protect them. To any of us who might imagine ourselves in a similar position the answer was blindingly obvious: to get a neighbouring colleague to deal with the matter. In reality people move around between parishes for baptisms all the time because they have pre-existing links with this or that church (or occasionally because a church makes demands on the families of baptizands that are simply impractical, and are sometimes designed to be). We all accept this happens and the polite thing is to inform the home parish when it does; it's no big deal. But Revd Franks tied himself up in emotional knots before calling the Bishop who told him to do what anyone else would already have decided days ago.

Alan Franks, it seems to me, invariably gives the impression of being hunted around his parish and always wanting to be somewhere other than where he is, and talking to anyone other than the person in front of him. It was understandable that he didn't want to speak to the dreadful Titchener, his brother, or anyone else who wanted to refer to the matter, but unless he's beaming pacifically at people leaving the church on a Sunday morning Alan never seems to want to talk to anyone. While all this was going on he got into a conversation with another character about ghosts which he clearly couldn't wait to escape from. This is odd because he seems able to come up with quite concise and convincing answers to questions in a far more ready manner than I ever can. A parish priest, it's true, spends a certain amount of time talking to people they'd rather not, but most of us I think learn quite quickly never, ever to let our impatience show on the surface because anyone other than the thickest-skinned souls will be very hurt by it. Perhaps the Vicar of Ambridge just isn't having much fun and needs to move on. I wonder when his next Ministerial Review is? Mine's next month.