Shifting Sands

It's been a while since I last posted about the Queen of Dorset. Her latest project has been scoring the new production of All About Eve, starting imminently at the Noel Coward Theatre in central London. The director, Ivo van Hove, told What’s On Stage

when we started talking I felt she immediately connected with the characters. She is at a point in her life when she wants to go to another level, to the next step, and that is also what Margo – Gillian Anderson's character – is struggling with

This is more than she would ever say herself. Now, careful Pollywatchers have noticed suggestive things happening in the singer’s circumstances over the last few months. First, she sold the flat in Los Angeles (the 'holiday cottage') which she’s had since 2003. Then the private company established in 1998 to hold her income from touring was wound up. These moves released about £3.5M, not a colossal fortune but a significant amount of money: it may be that she plans to do something definite with it, or that she’s just disposing of parts of her life that aren’t relevant any more. Finally PJH’s agents revealed that she’d given them her old piano, which now adorns their London offices - not in itself an earth-shattering step but adding to a picture of transition. Something is happening, anyway.

The singer’s last great volte-face was in the mid-2000s when she hit that liminal age, 35, junked her existing musical style, started wearing virtually nothing but black or white (mostly the former), and began talking in a significantly different way about her work, pushing herself into the background. I’ve always thought the death of her grandmother had something to do with this. Now she approaches 50 and I suspect that the composition and delivery of The Hope Six Demolition Project has had a similar galvanising effect. The only public statement she’s ever made about the making of the album was that she found converting the poems she’d composed during her foreign trips with Seamus Murphy into songs much harder than she thought she would. For such a self-critical person this would on its own be enough to provoke a bit of introspection, but remember what else happened. During the research and planning stage, she deliberately exposed herself to human need and suffering and confronted her own inability to help. Then, when Hope Six emerged, she found herself criticised, not just musically (which she’s used to ignoring) but personally and politically, and not only by mayors and councillors but by people on the ground, from the very communities she aimed to speak for. She managed to effect a reconciliation with the good souls of the Union Temple Baptist Church in Anacostia, but that would have been another new and bruising experience. Perhaps when the long-awaited documentary about the Hope Six project finally emerges later in the year we may learn more. Perhaps!

You can quite understand some soul-searching might result from all that. I doubt it will involve giving up music, though she’s decided to do that in the past and had to be dissuaded by the closest of friends. Her sense of vocation is strong, though that can change (even the prophets often only prophesied for a time), and your understanding of what your vocation means can shift over the years, and send you searching somewhere else. We wait to see what emerges from Dorset next.

On its own, the age of 50 means no more than any other, but it has the psychological significance of being halfway to a century, and for modern western people I suppose it opens the second half of middle-age whereas 35 opens the first. My birthday will only be a few weeks behind Polly’s this Autumn (strange how that happens so often!) and so I face the same milestone.

A couple of weeks ago the bishop asked me to take on a position of wider responsibility in the diocese, a request which horrified me. I concluded that I was right to be horrified, that I wasn’t up to it and asked that the cup should pass from me. The bishop acceded and no more has been said of it. But if I am not to do that, what should I do? For the last few months people I meet around the diocese have been asking me ‘How long have you been at Swanvale Halt now?’ and come September the answer will be ten years, another essentially meaningless but thought-provoking moment. I asked the Archdeacon whether there’s someone I could talk through my ministry with and he has put me in touch with retired Bishop Colin. I don’t necessarily think any conversation will result in me concluding I should move on from here, but there must be change – because there must always be. ‘Here on earth,’ said Cardinal Newman, ‘to be human is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ PJH is an example to me in her restless commitment to transformation, as in much else.