"Lighting the Candles"

Should you click on this picture you will, I hope, be taken to the result of eight years of investigating the history of the Catholic Movement in the diocese of Guildford. Just a warning that it's 280 pages long! It's taken all that space to do justice, if justice has indeed been done, to the churches visited, the vestries poked through, the service registers scanned, the parish histories pored over, and the people conversed with. It's a tribute not only to the faithful departed who have served all those communities of believers but all the living souls who have helped in any way. How the time will stretch now! 

A Room in Stanwell

Almost inevitably when the Diocese puts on some training that I think it might actually be worthwhile to do it turns out to be on a Thursday when I am usually off: today's session at a small community centre in Stanwell about suicide prevention was organised not by them but by the County Council. The first challenge was finding the stairs and I was not the only person who ended up circling the ground floor before being directed towards an unmarked door that didn't open but slid to one side. That initiative test over the whole session turned out rather good, very coherently and clearly focused on how to respond to someone who has suicidal thoughts. The training came from the communities bit of the Council and was accordingly multiethnic and multifaith, but it was no surprise that the majority of us were white (welcome to Surrey) and connected to churches rather than any other setting.

The main points are to raise the subject very baldly and explicitly if you have any worries that the person you are talking to may be suicidally-inclined. They might say it themselves, but are more likely to talk around it, hinting that there is something very wrong and hoping - maybe against their conscious intention - that you will ask. The next task is to work out how immediate their plans are: lots of people battle with self-destructive thoughts and urges but never get further than that and never plan to. And then there are the agencies to connect them with, if you can: you should always presume that raising the matter, however covertly, is an invitation to intervene, even if the individual claims not to want it.

These are good guidelines for encounters that might take place in a professional or general social context, say, someone you may meet at work or another setting. Many years ago, though, I got to know someone who was a high suicide risk and, more by blundering luck than judgement, kept them alive. They were already under the care of the statutory agencies and I can only hope that those are more active now than they were then. I'm not sure a phone call to a crisis centre would have made that much difference - though with more knowledge I might at least have been emboldened to try.

Photo: view from the window. There were no distractions. 

That Money Was Just Resting In My Account

A few years ago I wrote about David Tennant's (or more accurately writer Steven Moffat's) TV portrayal of a priest at the centre of a safeguarding storm and how far it seemed from any remotely credible depiction of how someone in that position would react. Now I find myself able to add to the sequence of bizarre media depictions of clergy in crisis, as The Archers' Alan Franks seems to have managed to avoid all the safeguarding courses the rest of us have to go on in just the same way as Inside Man's Fr Harry Watling had. The incumbent of Ambridge is a man of long and challenging experience, and yet when he gave dying parishioner Carol Tregorran his own bank details so she could make a donation to St Stephen's Church for flowers, anyone but him could see where the storyline was going a mile off. Now he finds himself the next best thing to suspended, unable to handle the parish's money and chaperoned in every pastoral encounter by a churchwarden, after Carol, unbeknownst to him, transferred several thousand pounds his way the day before she died, and her daughter made a formal complaint after discovering what had happened. 

The Archdeacon turned up on Revd Franks's doorstep and in their awkward encounter played the straightest of bats, correctly insisting there was a process that now had to be followed. It was the supposedly experienced priest's reaction that made me boggle. 'But I'm innocent!' the scriptwriters have him cry, apparently never having given a moment's thought in all his ministry to how these things pan out. Even if I hadn't been included in several cases which have involved the Diocesan Safeguarding Department, I would have known what happens through training and Church news outlets. For heaven's sake, a quarter of the bench of bishops are signed off duty at the moment for irregularities of varying sorts, you can't avoid that. 'Ray, how long have we known each other?' Alan pleads with the Archdeacon, as though that could or should make any difference, as though 'Ray-how-long-have-we-known-each-other' doesn't reflect exactly the attitude which has got the Church of England and other once-trusted organisations into the pickle they find themselves now. Where has he been? How come all these media clergy never seem to have done the training I've had to do? Repeatedly? Or be subject to the Clergy Discipline Measure?

He has a bit of a habit of this, does Alan Franks. Not so long ago he seemed utterly bewildered by how to handle a contentious baptism request when the answer was obvious, and last year reacted so unclerically to a pair of local teenagers who were terribly apologetic for accidentally breaking a vicarage window with an errant cricket ball that listeners asked questions about his mental health. Now, as is his wont, he has decided that his accuser 'feels I have wronged her ... I have to try to treat her with grace', while it's Mrs Vicarage Usha's turn to be furious and make churchwarden Neil Carter thoroughly uncomfortable with what in court would be unconscionable attempts to influence someone who needs to maintain strict procedure - and Usha, remember, is a lawyer, who of all people should be aware of how the system has to work. All it needs now is for Alan's daughter Amy who we haven't heard from in about 15 years to take out a contract on his accuser's life. Or maybe the Archdeacon's.  

Poppy Incursion

Coming into the church this morning, my eye was struck by a bush in the garden which seemed to have flowered since I last looked at it. Closer examination revealed that these blooms were red wool made to look like poppies, hung on the bush from ribbons. Some were accompanied by laminated notes asking whoever might come across them to 'respect these signs of remembrance for the fallen in war', leaving them where they are.

My first response, to be honest, was annoyance. Nobody had asked us whether they could put them there. We manage the churchyard as a garden open to the public, but it's not a public space. And even if it was a public space, there's something objectionable about someone coming in and claiming a space they only own collectively with others for something they may think is important, which is just one of the reasons one might not like national flags being strung up from lampposts. Who do you think you are? Somehow the little notices feel more hectoring than had the poppies been left there with no explanation at all.

The person responsible may not feel that, though, I reflected. They may not be very conscious of how the garden is organised. They may not be intending to challenge anyone but just, indeed, remember the dead: crochet would be a pretty odd medium for a misguided 'patriot' to adopt. I wonder whether we will ever find out who they are. The weather is set to be relatively fair for a while, so the poppies are probably not going to end up offensively bedraggled: I will leave them there until Armistice Day and see whether anyone claims them thereafter. 

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Godland (2022)

To say that any movie with very little dialogue but lots of landscape always meets with critical acclaim may be a bit cynical but it does seem to be a general rule. I am not sure there is all that much skill involved in taking static shots of mountains, and I found the facility on the VLC video player to skip forward ten seconds very helpful, but the performances in Godland are impressive, especially as the actors have so little to work with. 

It may be true that we have little real idea why people behave the way they do, as we tend to know only small slices of their lives and experiences, but a movie that leaves us to make up almost everything about what might conceivably motivate the characters we watch is of limited help in developing our sympathy for others. The reviews of Godland show how people even seem to see something different from me. Anna the elder daughter of the leading citizen of the tiny Danish settlement on Iceland which is the destination and charge of young Lutheran priest Lucas 'seduces' the clergyman, says one: as the 'seduction' consists of him leading her into his darkened house and then her head and shoulders seen in red light, that doesn't seem like an accurate description of the event.

Why is Lucas such a disastrous priest? As his host Carl points out, he chooses to take the most difficult possible route to the village rather than just sail there, supposedly to get to know the country and 'meet people', which he doesn't. The experience of conflict, causing someone's death, and sickness on the journey, clearly break him before his ministry even starts, but he appears to have no spiritual resources to bring to bear on the experience. His prayers are muttered in private and we never see him successfully carry out a single religious act, even before he begins. Reviewers clearly want to read him as a naive, pious priest 'eager to save souls' (as one says) who comes up against reality in a far-flung landscape 'like so many colonial clergy'. But we never see any evidence of his evangelistic eagerness, and every time anyone actually seeks his spiritual advice, including the man who becomes his enemy, Icelander guide Ragnar, he brushes them away. When did this begin? We never gain any insight, just have it presented to us.

Late 19th-century Iceland may have been, in a broad sense, a Danish colony (though it had been granted significant self-government in 1874), but it was hardly any more a pagan territory than, say, Middlesbrough at the same time. The island had been technically Christian since 1000 and by the high Middle Ages was as thoroughly Christianised as anywhere else. Its patron saint, Thorlak, was a 12th-century bishop now retrospectively thought of as the patron also of people with autism. Until Lucas proves himself completely incapable of doing what he's there for, it's not as though the villagers don't want the ministrations of a priest. They co-operate in building the church, two want to get married there and when Lucas refuses because it's not ready and they have an informal sort-of handfasting the villagers still include him in the party, and they all turn up to worship on the first day.  No, this is someone who was broken before he started, but we never have a hint why in a film that exchanges spectacle for understanding. 

Wells - Staffs & Salop

While I don't want to try people's patience with all the holy wells I saw while away, there were some intriguing ones, so here are a couple. Nun's Well at Cannock Wood lies at the end of a footpath running west from Hayfield Hill. It's been photographed before, but I went straight past the old oak tree growing above it and ended up crossing a stile and wandering round some woodland before realising what I'd done and retracing my steps. The tree, on its own as the ground drops away to the south, looks different from all the online images (until now!) as part of it has collapsed and the whole thing is now isolated within a corded enclosure which you can just about cross to examine the well more closely. The basic structure is natural stone topped with a now very distorted brick arch which must be of some antiquity to have been covered by the tree. It appears on the 1884 O.S. map and may owe its name to a 12th-century land grant as there was no nunnery anywhere nearby.

Lady Well, Wombourne is a similar sort of site though harder to find. There's a steep path leading east next to 84 Orton Lane, and before it turns parallel with the field boundary at the top a small path partly obstructed by a fallen tree follows off to the right. The well is down a steep bank which would be very treacherous in wet weather, beneath the only yew tree in the vicinity which is the best way of finding it. Again, the basic structure is the natural stone, in this case a great limestone outcrop which has been added to by a couple of low brick walls to keep the mud out of the water (it was dry when I saw it, though fairly recent visitors have found it full and in fact water running down the rock into the basin). It has been claimed as a hermit's well: just above it you can see a few walls belonging to stone cottages which used to stand on this steep hillside, though those were clearly much later than the age of hermits.

Lastly I was keen to see St Catherine's Well, Eccleshall, which I only knew about from Andy Norfolk's holy well maps. This is a neat sandstone well-house with a pyramidal roof in a different stone, and may be related to the creation of the landscape gardens of Sugnall Hall in the mid-1700s or the time the Hall was rebuilt in 1777: either way, the name of the saint doesn't seem clearly connected to anything local. There is a path leading to the well through a nice wooden door in the wall on the eastern side of Sugnall Hill, and you can see very recent signage pointing the site out (laminated notices stapled to trees don't last that long), but a fall of tree branches has made it impossible to inspect the well closely. The water still runs but now past the well house rather than into it.

Autumn Museum Reports

A mixed collection, my recent museum visits. The Ancient High House in Stafford does have artefacts - and a range of mocked-up sets including a joke, pictured here, that only British readers will get - but the chief antiquity it offers to visitors is the building itself, a late-medieval-origin structure whose story emerges through chronological displays. A few streets away the Heritage Centre, located in a modern building with a doorway through into a Georgian town house, sets out to tell more of Stafford's history but has very little to go on in the way of objects. As is increasingly happening, I tried to buy postcards and really confused the staff.

One day I went into Birmingham to visit a former London Gothic friend who now works in the Jewellery Quarter, and while there called in at a place brought to my attention by another Goth - and ex-funeral arranger - namely, the Coffin Works. This is an industrial museum, preserving a single business site. Ironically coffins are the very thing not displayed, as Newman's dealt not with carpentry but with everything else to do with funeral kit, the plate, the shrouds, and so on. The volunteers wear brown overalls and operate machines of terrifying weight and danger, and as you enter you're given a signing-in time card to have punched. The tone of the whole place is not really a meditation about our relationship with death, but with work. 

The mighty City Museum & Art Gallery is of course not far away, is massive, and is free to go in. I've been there before, but a single visit can't do justice to its collections, from archaeology to pre-Raphaelite art (which I find more irritating the older I get), from relics of the Victorian City Fathers to the new communities that have made Birmingham their home. The Museum tries really hard, though I felt that one thing it could try harder on is visitor orientation as I found it very hard to negotiate my way around.

The Grosvenor Museum in Chester is the closest the city gets to a proper local history museum, though it really covers only Romans (inevitably), natural history, art, and whatever special subject is being displayed at the time. When I visited, that was a show of 'The Worst Album Covers in History' which are, indeed, very, very bad. Had they published a book of them I would have bought it like a shot, but all they had in the shop was a calendar, and that's just twelve horrors for your money.

Finally, despite working not far away in High Wycombe for seven years I have never really looked round the County Museum in Aylesbury, so while meeting up with former colleague Lady Quercus and her partner I went there. Now renamed 'Discover Bucks', this is a series of genuinely imaginative and charismatic displays which give museums a good name! Archaeology bulks large and currently they have a show of Anglo-Saxon burial goods: a recently-discovered 'sentinel warrior' from Marlow, finds from a cemetery uncovered during the excavations preparing for HS2, and finally the princely burial at Taplow - and those finds are not replicas, but the genuine ones from the British Museum. Quite something. Buckinghamshire is a disparate and centrifugal county and wisely the Museum does not attempt any sort of general narrative, but picks the stories of individuals to tell through objects, and any wider lessons emerge gently via those. I was so glad I went.