I Do Like to Be ...

Five coachloads of more mature people from the parishes of Swanvale Halt and Hornington set off last Wednesday to Worthing on the annual Day Out. Thankfully my experience of the Day Out in Poplar, where I was on placement, wasn't repeated - being on the coach on that occasion was like being trapped in an episode of Eastenders. Did they actually sing 'Roll Out the Barrel'? It felt like it. Anyway. There was none of that this time.

After we all dispersed, I headed off to find a church to light a candle in on behalf of a friend. I found what I assumed was the old church in the middle of the town, a grand Classical portico behind which the 'St Paul's Centre' now shelters, a café and a music venue. It must have been quite a place at one time:



... but no candles (there is a 'chapel' at the west end, consisting of a semicircle of chairs facing a wall behind a glass partition, very spiritual, but I didn't know that then), so off I traipsed. I thought 'Church Walk' might be the location of a church, and indeed it was - St George's - but that was full of children on a holiday club. At that point I decided to go and talk to the Lord on the seafront, and had I not been accosted for a forty-minute conversation by a drunk it would have been ideal.

Later I went past St Paul's again and noticed another church a few hundred yards away at the other end of the street. This turned out to be Christ Church, built, as its history leaflet tells the visitor, 'to meet the spiritual needs of the lower classes'. It's a vast Victorian flint-covered barn of a place with an old-fashioned Low Church tradition, which means that Prayer Book Mattins (to me possibly the dullest act of worship to emerge from the centuries of Christian history) is still the main service on Sunday morning. I met a gentleman who was repairing the front door. He was trying to encourage people to come into the building, he said, and thought of having a candle stand. With the agreement of the Vicar and Wardens, this was arranged - and then removed after two members of the congregation denounced it as 'Popish'. How quaint to think such places still exist.