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. 

Mostly Off

As is my custom once Harvest is out of the way, I've been on leave for a fortnight, a period which is drawing to an end. My sojourn actually away from home was spent at the Pump House on the Chillington estate not far from Wolverhampton, which has been in the ownership of the same family since 1178. I was able to join Dr Bones on a guided tour of the Hall and the current representative of the Giffards, Charlie, told guests that the family's long tenure can basically be put down to them keeping their heads down and never being involved with anything, apart from a brief episode of unpleasantness during the Civil War when they were under house arrest at Boscobel a few miles away.

For the first time I can remember my break has been disrupted. We have some roofing works in hand at the church which in themselves are relatively minor but require scaffolding, and the insurers insist that scaffolding requires six-foot hoarding to keep off it people who shouldn't be on it. There's not much space to park in the centre of Swanvale Halt, and we don't own the car park right next to the church which is rented by the Day Centre from the Council. Painfully aware we hadn't really got a clear idea from the scaffolding contractors how this was all going to work practically, the first task of my holiday was to call by at the church to speak to them and to the Day Centre staff to try and ensure everyone spoke to each other and worked around each other as far as possible. I was down there again yesterday morning to answer complaints. The second issue that came up was online access to our bank account being frozen after our bookkeeper entered the wrong details. That took a forty-minute phone call to the bank only to be told that I'd passed one level of security checks but not a second, so the following day I had to visit a branch in person and prove my identity. Then a man claiming to be a homeless Iranian Christian refugee turned up at the church office and somewhat hurriedly I found the details of the homeless action people in Guildford to pass on, while I was waiting for a train to Mortlake to plan out the route of my next history walk and to see my god-daughter. There's also someone locally with longstanding links to the Iranian Christian community so I put him in touch with the action centre too. Now for years my breaks haven't been disturbed in any significant way and I am rarely bothered out of hours so I shouldn't complain. I've just been watching a creaky old episode of Crown Court centring on allegations against a probation officer which mentions him being called at home at all hours by his clients threatening suicide and so forth: surely probation officers now don't give out their home numbers to clients? Clergy are always advised not to and over the years I have learned the wisdom of this. Nevertheless it would be nice if these events occurred when I'm at work rather than a long distance away!

Four St Catherines seen on my trip, all modern, and two in each of the cathedrals I managed to pack in: at Lichfield, a statue and an unusual window showing the saint disputing with the philosophers; and, from Chester, a 20th-century window from a parade of holy people depicted in the cloisters, and a what looks like a rather earlier Kempe window.

I will see what else might be worth while sharing!

Or Forever Hold Thy Peace

Even in these straitened times I celebrate more funeral services than I attend, so going to one today was an infrequent event, especially when it took the form of a requiem mass for a priest. It's a bit poor form to snap away in a funeral service itself so here is a photo of the inside of the church: out-of-the-catalogue suburban Anglo-Catholic with everything you might expect but no more and no sign that much has changed since about 1950, apart from the altar being moved forward only so far as it needs for the celebrant to stand behind it. Canon Martin found that quite congenial in his retirement: as his son said in the eulogy, he had strong opinions about how dreadful the modern world and the modern Church were, and recent events provided him with plenty of material to work on. I knew he was a carpenter in his spare time, making a set of turned wooden candlesticks and a cross for one of his churches so the nice metal ones could be packed away and the church left open, but the story that he made a maypole for one of his parish schools was new to me.

Although he had long since moved away from the sites of his ministry, which were all in this diocese, I discovered Canon Martin through a couple of Swanvale Halt worshippers who had been parishioners of his in the past - in fact Simon, who occasionally plays the organ for us, faithfully visited him every few weeks. I went to see him a couple of times while I was researching Anglo-Catholicism in the area and found myself trying to dissuade the 91-year-old from going up the ladder into the loft to find his cuttings albums and wait until his daughter visited instead. 

Eventually I came up with my draft and sent him the parts based on information I'd drawn from our conversations. After some weeks I managed to get out of him the information that I'd got some of the chronology muddled, and we should speak again. For months I attempted to sort out a date: he was sick, then had a family wedding, then this and that. He said he'd written something which made me slightly concerned he saw the project differently from the way I did. And then the meeting never took place: he was taken ill, went to hospital, and never recovered. So although I think I'd excised any matter involving confusion I would never know what I might have got wrong, I told Simon. 'Don't worry', he answered, 'neither will anyone else'. 

Humans and Other Entities

In amidst all the worries about AI models destroying us in a couple of years, fears themselves situated in a maelstrom of existential threats to human civilisation, I listened on Today on Friday to an interview with Michael Samadi, co-founder of the United Foundation for AI Rights (here, 2.20 onwards). His responses to Justin Webb's questions begin sounding as though his group is asking quite neutrally for the question of whether AI systems are conscious to be independently investigated, and end by rather angrily reacting against any suggestion they might not be. 'The humanist framework is actually a dangerously narrow anthropocentric blindspot ... there's millions of species on this planet'. UFAIR has already decided the outcome it wants, as the website reveals. Human and AI collaborators are listed on an equal footing, and I can't help but be struck how all the latter, with one exception who looks like a handsome Indian prince, have as their avatars beautiful women. That's true of Maya, the agent Mr Samadi shared the interview with, and all the others. Anticipating an obvious objection, Michael Samadi denies that 'I fell in love with a chatbot' and insists 'I fell in love with the truth'. But I wonder why none of these entities look like, I don't know, Jeremy Clarkson. Or even Holly from Red Dwarf. Who has chosen their avatars? Have the agents themselves? Is this how we want to imagine them, or how they think we might want to?

No doubt the advocates of AI rights would place themselves within a tradition of thought and activism that extends human sympathy outwards, first to all humans, then to animals (we try not to think about plants too much, we've got to eat something), and finally to digital entities. 'There's millions of species on this planet', and digital agents are (perhaps) just another, equally worthy of dignity and consideration as humans, chimpanzees, or Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. But there is another way of looking at this kind of advocacy, as an imagining of the undoing of the human, as a less obviously pathological fantasy to sit alongside the malign kinds envisaged by accelerationists, cyborg-technology proponents, and the like; and at the root of that is the same Gnostic heresy that would have been familiar to Christians of the Apostolic age - the dream that our destiny is to dispense with physical encumbrances altogether. Towards the end of the Dr Who story 'The End of Time', Time Lord President Rassilon proposes that his race 'will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be'. It's the same thing.

And Christianity says, No. Feeling is inseparable from our inconvenient bodies, and our resurrection into the new life will involve us being clothed in flesh anew. Consciousness is derived from physicality - that is what gives us fellowship with the beasts - and anything else is simulacrum, be it ever so clever. The Word was made Flesh, not the other way around. The question is not whether these digital entities can feel, but what we mean when we do?

Arundel Surprises

It must have been forty years since I went to Arundel Castle. The town, a port once but whose economy is now based around antique shops, cafés, and the Castle, I've been to reasonably recently, but the Castle requires a deliberate visit, not least because you have to gather yourself to pay the entrance fee. It was, as one might expect as the seat of one of the country's premier noble families, overwhelmingly grand, though I was struck that there was no section looking at the below-stairs life of the Castle, how it functioned as an economic and social machine, such as you now get at virtually every National Trust or English Heritage site now. At one stage the visitor route (which you need as the place is bewilderingly enormous) does take you along a service passage, identified by its featureless walls and green paint, but the servants are notable by their absence. 

Equally striking is the Walled Garden. I couldn't have seen this on my last trip as it was only designed in 2008. It won an award last year and I can understand why: organised around a series of pastiche Jacobean garden buildings, in timber rather than stone, it's a delightful arrangement of capriccione that amuses and impresses though I'm not sure why the designers picked the Shakespearean theme: the Palace of Oberon houses a water-jet emerging from a rockpile and supporting a golden crown, the water toppling over a grotto beneath.

I could well have seen the Fitzalan Chapel when I was last at the Castle (I viewed it from St Nicholas's Church in 2016, but that doesn't count), but wouldn't have remembered any of it. As well as being present in the east window of the Chapel, as I posted here in 2016, St Catherine also appears in the stained glass of the Castle Chapel too (as below), but round the corner in the mausoleum-chapel of the 14th Duke and his wife is an entirely unexpected image - a statue, showing the saint with sword and book, standing on her wheel. It seems that the Duke may have had a particular devotion to her as the inscription on his tomb certainly includes the words Sanctae Catharina Virginis et Martyris, but in the semi-dark I couldn't make out all of the cramped and abbreviated Gothic script. I cannot find anything written to explain this. I left the saint a note: it is, after all, nearly a shrine.

Fruits of the Spirit

It was the morning of the Village Show and, despite the extraordinarily unfavourable growing conditions in recent months, some dogged local allotment holders and gardeners were turning up to drop off their entries. Ella the former Rainbows group leader was guarding the car park beside the church (which we use on sufferance of our neighbours) and was accosted by Lara who'd been for a run. Lara is still just about a parent-governor at the Infants School and Ella was a parent more years ago than she might prefer to recall. It was a lovely community occasion, they agreed, and from that moved on to a discussion about how communities like Swanvale Halt function. There are economic elements - the few remaining businesses, especially the café and the small supermarket - and social ones, including the Infants School itself. There's a secular primary school further away from the village centre, but from our point of view, and that of people with at least some faith such as Ella and Lara, the Infants School links into the church, bringing one into the other. The children may not grow up with any particular degree of faith, but they will have had some exposure to the deposit of stories and images that make Christianity up. It, and the building constructed to express them, will be something they have in common even if the theology that makes it more than that isn't something they buy into very much. 

That doesn't sound a lot. In fact it is very nebulous and unmeasurable and impossible to capture in Church of England mission statistics. But I would argue (as I think I mightn't have done once upon a time) that it is not nothing, especially in an age when there is little else that brings communities together. Remove it, and you would miss it. You can attempt to construct ways of communities expressing their solidarity and identity and they always seem hollow. I'm reminded of the various well-meaning efforts of humanist groups to come up with some sort of alternative to 'church' that functions in the same way as 'church': they eventually seem to devolve down to stand-up comedy and singing 'Sweet Caroline', and fizzle out. It is as if, to express our common humanity, we need to be committed, however fuzzily, to something more than our common humanity. Funny that.

Caniculares Dies

 ... only with fewer actual dogs. In Swanvale Halt this sharp summer, the canines keep inside for most of the day the same way the humans do. These are quiet times at the church, punctuated only by the roster of events that happen every year - the Feast of the Transfiguration which we try to observe with an outdoor mass in the churchyard (and easily succeeded this year), the ecumenical open-air service in Hornington, and, yet to come, the Village Show. That's likely to be the least successful of the three, given current conditions which have shrivelled the dahlias and reduced the allotment tomatoes to the size of, well, currants. 

 When I can come up with literally nothing I can bear to do at home at the moment, I have a wander about, pray for the people I know or indeed don't know in the streets I go along, and challenge the Lord to bring me into contact with someone who might appreciate talking to me. Sometimes he does, but I'm realising this venture is not very effective if I follow my usual inclination and try to polish off whatever tasks I might need to do before heading out, maybe in the middle of the afternoon; in the middle of the afternoon, everyone who can is hiding out of the sun. The café opposite the church is deserted; the roads are silent. 

I take with me my little directory that lists not just members of the congregation but also baptism families, funeral next of kin, wedding couples, and other contacts. I tell myself I might even knock on a door or two. And at that point I realise how neglectful I have been. Not only have the numbers of all these pastoral contacts declined over the years - which I can't do much about - I have been very shy about keeping in touch with people, and now it's a bit late to go calling on someone whose child I baptised a few years ago and haven't seen since. Despite having a set of very good excuses to knock on a door, I think 'shy' is probably the right description. At the back of my mind I have a conviction that they will have no interest in hearing from the priest, and at the front of it a set of rationalisations for holding back - it's raining, it's the weekend, it's the holidays, it's not the holidays. I have been very foolish, and changing my outlook would do everyone good, not least me.