Obligatory Halloween Image

Well, it is, with my usual three lanterns, one to go down to the churchyard - I couldn't locate any suitable turnips this year and had to use swedes, which aren't half hard to hollow out. But there is also pictured a bunch of grapes from the garden: this autumn the vine has actually produced a small crop of fruit which are capable of being eaten without grimacing, provided you avoid the ones which still have a bit of a greenish tinge to the them.

Little Things Please

A small group of elderly ladies make their way from a midweek service at a not-very-remarkable Surrey church. They are all very happy, and not only because they have just met their Lord and Saviour in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The thing that has made them happy is that for the first time in about three weeks they have been able to go in and out of the church's main door. 

While I was on holiday, a pane of glass in the inner porch door was broken. Marion the curate took the photograph left, and thinks it wasn't smashed by a direct impact but by the door swinging to in a gust of wind (it was very windy indeed that day). The investigation revealed that the glass was ordinary plate glass rather than safety glass. 'I can't understand why it was done like that even if it was twenty-odd years ago', said the glazier. I can: it will have been a case of a PCC being told by someone, 'Oh, I know someone who'll do it cheaper than that'. Anyway, it's now all been replaced, and normal service is resumed.

Really, the ladies attending the midweek service shouldn't have been all that pleased about the restoration of Order. Going via the main door requires negotiating two steps rather than the gentle slope up from the hall door, which is the alternative access route, and that's a challenge to some of them. Years ago after a visit to a Sunday service, my friend Professor Abacus advised that we should switch permanently to using the hall door for just such reasons. But the mere restitution of how things should be is clearly enough to trump such minor concerns as convenience. 

The Lamford Oil Men

It was the annual Memorial Service today. Preparing for it I found myself reflecting on how I'd become aware while at Lamford that there was a little sub-group in the congregation of former oil men, all of whom seemed to have worked for Shell - no, silly, not as garage forecourt attendants, but as engineers and so on. I wasn't sure whether they were aware of one another's existence, or how they all ended up retiring to Lamford, but I took the funerals of at least three, I remember. Apart from being connected by their past work, they were of course different people and sometimes had had knocks along the course of life. One had received the Last Rites a total of six times and when I went to visit his wife to discuss the funeral service and asked how she was getting on, she answered 'Oh, it's such a relief!' which is more frank than most people are prepared to be.

I was reminded of the Lamford Oil Men when reading a recent report on the role of the fossil fuel companies in attempting to downplay and undermine the science of climate change over the last few decades. I doubt the perfectly decent gents whose funerals I took in Lamford had any knowledge of that policy or influence on it, but they were involved in it by being part of one of those companies. We're all implicated in the larger movements of history and society even when we play no active or conscious role at all: they move through us and shape us whether we choose or not. And when our awareness changes and a different perspective become the norm, what then? What seemed perfectly normal at the start of our lives may well beyond the pale of acceptability by their end: we start as lambs, and end as dinosaurs. The absolute impossibility of stepping back from our lives and assessing them objectively has to push us towards compassion and mutual forgiveness, and that perfect, objective view of who we have been and what we have done can only come from a place beyond us, a heavenly place.

Gentleman in England Now A-Bed

This seems like an appropriate heading for St Crispin's Day, although my post refers to yesterday, a feast day of nobody in particular. It was a day off: despite just having been on leave for a fortnight I do still jealously guard my times of recess, acutely aware as I have over the years become of how I absolutely need them. However they are sometimes unavoidably eroded, and so was yesterday's.

I had agreed to do a wedding, not at Swanvale Halt church, but at the grand chapel of a school not very far away. This is something which has happened a couple of times before but always makes me nervous: there is different paperwork to be done, the logistics of the service are not what they are in my humble church, and I feel much less at home. Yesterday was the rehearsal, that's all, yet I lay in bed very reluctant indeed to get up and face the day. It was far more congenial to spend time in that shadowy world on the boundaries of sleep and wakefulness not quite paying attention to the Today presenters quietly chuntering from the radio by my bedside, observing the strange and varied thoughts that crossed my mind, and putting off the moment when reality would begin. 

I often find that the anticipation of doing something is much more taxing than actually doing it, and in fact whereas I should get more confident as time goes on, I find my nervousness is growing rather than diminishing. I am less and less inclined to do anything out of the ordinary, which probably is not very healthy. At least I can recognise it. S.D. has encouraged me to keep a record of my passing moods and though I am very bad at doing it I manage it often enough to be able to observe how mobile and malleable they are. But knowing that my nameless dread is silly hasn't so far helped me stop it! 

Wide Ranging Discussion

By 7.40 nobody had turned up for the meeting. I knew Hannah the churchwarden was singing with a choir, and Daniel the Treasurer was away; I wasn't aware that Alan our friendly plumber had the lurgy and so wasn't coming. Then to my surprise the bell rang: it was Cal, one of the younger members of the church, who'd been delayed by traffic. Usually he's the one from this particular committee who has to be reminded of the meetings, if anyone is. I hadn't spoken to him for a while and big things have been happening to him so I invited him in for a short chat anyway, and he wanted to ask about a very vague plan which various people have mentioned to repair or replace the existing choir and servers' robes which date to the mid-1970s. In the course of this I very incautiously alluded to the fact that, as regards this matter, church members were quite likely to know what they didn't want, but not what they did, a bit like Brexit. Now, I had never given any thought to what line Cal might take on this matter - that of the UK leaving the European Union, I mean - but I am now left in no doubt at all. 

We spent quite a long time, in fact, discussing the absurdities of the situation Britain finds itself in and the various influences which have resulted in said absurdities, before moving on to the iniquities of the European Union. Back in the days of the Referendum Il Rettore relayed the quip of a member of Lamford's congregation that the country seemed evenly divided between those who thought the EU was awful and we should leave it, and those who thought the EU was awful and we should stay in it, so though I may have found myself in the latter camp I am not blind to the institution's failings. I imagine nobody is, even those most deeply involved in it. But it slowly became clear that Cal's attitudes were undergirded by a single basic assumption, that the British are self-evidently good, honest, hard-working, law-abiding, and fated by Nature to succeed, while everyone else - the fundamentally dishonest, shiftless, benighted nations of Europe - is motivated by jealousy of this happy state, and has devised the EU as a means of binding and frustrating the natural destiny of Britain. Of course he didn't state this straight out, or I could have discussed the history of the European Coal and Steel Community and how nobody ever imagined in the beginning that Britain would be part of it anyway; instead it emerged slowly through a catalogue of particular injustices, and it took me a while to twig.

This is a mental environment which seems so weird to most of the people I interact with a lot of the time that I rather appreciated the opportunity to be exposed to it. At least it's not immigrants that seem to be the problem. About an hour after he arrived, I saw Cal off, and poured a gin.

"A Society under the Magnifying Glass"

In contrast to most places you might stay, the Landmark Trust emphatically does not provide you with a large TV and a set of DVDs: instead you will find a drawer full of puzzles and a shelf of books. At the Bath House a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an especially interesting and relevant selection - a Shire album on bath houses and another on Georgian garden buildings (which I own, coincidentally), a biography of Sanderson Miller, and this history of the adjacent village, Wellesbourne. I should have read the whole thing, really, rather than dipping into it, because it probably ranks as the best history of a single place of its kind I can remember reading. 

It ought to be, I suppose, because the author describes it as the fruit of 30 years of research into the history of Wellesbourne across roughly the century leading up to 1920, plus a few codas extending towards the Second World War. It takes one subject at a time, 'Out with the Poachers', for instance, or 'In Debt at the Manor House', opening out of a story of an individual or family to consider a topic more widely. This would be remarkable enough, but it benefits too from the author's versatility in imagining his way into the lives of his characters - for that is what they are - and how they intersect with others in the village and the society beyond. At least, most of the time it benefits: just occasionally you wonder quite where Mr Bolton has got some detail from beyond his fertile speculation. Everything was changing by 1940, and by the time the Boltons moved into the village, he says, all that remained was the memory of the world that had been, for better or worse.

Every community could do with a book like this. 'Naples of the Midlands', by the way, comes from a Victorian newspaper report, and is far from being a compliment!

Rebellion!

Before I set off for Warwickshire last week, the first act of my Autumn break was to stand very awkwardly in the drizzle outside the Council office in Hornington at 8am with a sign expressing my support for the Extinction Rebellion action beginning in the capital that day: 'I'm not at the Rebellion, but people I respect are.' At that point not only did we not know that anyone would be daft enough to obstruct Tube trains in Stratford and, as some XR members said, put at jeopardy everything else the movement was trying to do, but I wasn't at all sure that the action would last the full intended fortnight, given the harder line the police were almost sure to take compared to the event around Easter. For all I knew, everyone would have been driven away long before I could play any practical part.

Only two people spoke to me, a little girl who knew me from the Infants School and a gentleman whose opening gambit was to ask me what the Church thought of XR and its tactics. He then said he was a plant biologist working for a company advising on the growth of trees and crops, and in his opinion it was irresponsible to spread alarm about climate change when nobody can be sure what's going to happen: 'I remember watching An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore said that all the Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2012, and that wasn't right, was it?' I agreed that it was rash to be very definite about dates, but that the overall direction of movement was fairly clear. He then told me carbon dioxide 'isn't a greenhouse gas anyway', that because conifers evolved when atmospheric CO2 was twelve times what it is now the climate could easily absorb similar levels without anything bad happening, and that his greatest fear was that someone would invent a way of extracting all the CO2 from the atmosphere and kill all the plants. At that point I decided not to worry too much about his ideas, great though I'm sure he is at growing trees. I did only last a few more minutes before the rain got the better of me and I cycled home.

By the end of this week, of course, the protests were still going, so I did travel up to London to join in. I don't mind admitting that part of my motivation is to support my friends Ms Trollsmiter and Lady Metalmoomin who are far more active in the cause: if they're prepared to take the risk the very least I can do is to back them up. There is nothing wrong in being influenced (in what you do, if not what you think) by people you respect. Quite apart from the climate issue itself, I felt the Metropolitan Police's blanket ban on all Extinction Rebellion activity in the capital was so sweeping (and has yet to be proved legal - opinion is that they were just chancing their luck in the hope that demonstrators would be put off) that for the sake of freedom of assembly if I was going to do anything, it ought to be this, and now. As I turned into Whitehall Gardens and found what was then a few hundred people but which became probably a couple of thousand I was extremely nervous at how I might be received but in fact nobody paid me any attention. I spotted a figure in a clerical collar who turned out to be from another Surrey church (though in the Southwark Diocese) and of course clergy always at least pretend to be glad to see each other. That put me a bit more at my ease.

It took ages to set off. Ms Trollsmiter turned up at 12.25 and warned she could only stay an hour: I said that at the rate we were going, we'd be lucky if we'd made it out of the gardens by then. As it turned out, the march was so slow that by the time we got to the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall and then turned round to head south towards Downing Street, she and I were able to go and have coffee and a sandwich, and when I emerged I could still catch the procession up along Tothill Street which was where I met Lady Metalmoomin ('Yah, apart from the end of the world, things are really good at the moment'). We halted in Petty France outside the Ministry of Justice for a couple of very short speeches and not long after that I peeled off to go home, via what turned out to be a most circuitous route as the police had closed off Westminster Bridge, presumably to stop anyone protesting on it: like the famed Vietnam War general who stated 'to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it', the bridge had to be closed to stop it being obstructed.

It was an odd occasion. Technically the whole thing was an illegal gathering, but there the police were, facilitating it, and talking perfectly amicably to the XR liaison people. Admittedly, they did seem to be picking demonstrators at random for arrest, just to make the point, which was why I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but it was all quite good-natured otherwise. I was struck by the levels of preparedness and organisation: this is not just a group of people turning up in a London street. Whenever someone was arrested the cry would be passed down the line 'Legal observer! Legal observer!', sometimes in call-and-response form: Legal Observer (Legal Observer!), Up the front (Up the front!), On the left (On the left!). And you know you're not in a normal political demonstration when, as the police lay hands on someone or other, everyone around the spot cries 'We love you! We love you!' to the officers of the Law. You could also tell because - in contrast to every other political demonstration I have ever taken part in - the obligatory couple of Socialist Workers Party activists making sure as many people as possible are given their SWP placards to wave were nowhere to be seen.

Of course I have my quibbles with the XR approach, both its style and aspects of its rhetoric, but I am also a representative of the Church of England and I don't go along with all of that, either. Wait until you find an organisation which suits you in every detail, and you'll wait a long time. Some people don't like XR's Red Brigade, who symbolise the destructiveness and suffering of climate change, but I find their sombre presence a masterstroke. Doing nothing but walk slowly and make simple hand-gestures, they manage to be an intensely powerful visual and emotional focus. But, watching them in the flesh for the first time, as an old Dr Who aficionado my mind flies back to The Fires of Pompeii, and I speculate whether there's a Whovian in the XR design department. Spot the difference.

St Catherine in the Autumn

My patron saint was largely absent from my holiday this year: there is apparently a statue of her in the Beauchamp Chapel of Warwick parish church, but of course I couldn't get into there. Instead she turned up at Compton Verney House, in the shape of a 15th-century altarpiece image, looking, if truth be told, somewhat ill-tempered.

Down in Dorset, I returned to the chapel at Abbotsbury on the first rain-sodden visit I can remember in a long while. I had never taken the footpath that leads south of the chapel towards the Chesil Beach, and did, finding it somewhat more hazardous than I thought: my splendid walking boots made traversing the mud I encountered no easier, as each step led to a slide along a worryingly steep incline.

But on the eastern margin of the county, in what was Hampshire until the mid-1970s, is another Catherine site, St Catherine's Hill outside Christchurch. I hadn't been there in positively decades, and had a memory that despite its rich history it's very hard to find your way around and discern what you're looking at. The recollection, it turned out, was still accurate. The hill is a mixture of pinewoods and heathland, some of which is encroached on by more trees and undergrowth. The crown contains an old gravel pit, now filled by a pond, and though it isn't that high - at 45 metres slightly more than half the elevation of its little counterpart at Abbotsbury - it offers wide views over the countryside around.

There is definitely something uncanny about St Catherine's Hill: I think of it as a sort of east-Dorset equivalent of Alderley Edge, that charismatic Cheshire landscape that features so largely in legend and fantasy. Its features include Bronze Age barrows, a Roman signal station, the site of the chapel of St Catherine (excavated to somewhat frustrating effect in 1968 - the finds are lost), gravel and clay workings, the remains of 19th and 20th-century military activity, sandstone bluffs, hollow ways, allegedly ruins of cottages, brutal concrete reservoirs, radio masts and a trig. pillar. I certainly couldn't locate the ruined cottage with a bell mounted in a gable that others have seen, so I will have to return and traverse more of its mysteries, remembering to take my boots.

Mostly Cathedrals and Would-be Cathedrals

On my way to the Bath House I made a rainy detour to two cathedrals I've never visited before, at Birmingham and Coventry. St Philip's Church in Birmingham was bumped up to cathedral status in 1905 and, while grand - arguably the grandest Baroque church in England aside from London's St Paul's - it's still a modest-sized building compared to its more venerable sisters. Outside the great statue of Bishop Gore dominates, but I was interested in the memorial inside to Bishop Wilson, 'Confessor for the Faith'. In what way, I asked a guide, and was told how, as Bishop of Singapore in World War Two, he conducted services in the prison camp at Changi and was tortured; he was a leading figure in the post-War reconciliation movement. 

Coventry's cathedral is of course very different, the overgrown-parish-church cathedral replaced after wartime bombing by the building of the 1950s and '60s. It was the darkness of the interior that surprised me, helping to generate that sense of reverent mystery which lends the fixtures and fittings a sumptuousness quite apart from their intrinsic quality. There are points of light, small chapels opening off the main axis, but they too are sometimes seen through darker passages and add to the mystery by contrast. 

Several of the other churches I saw on my Warwickshire trip rivalled the cathedrals in pretention and occasionally in size. First, Holy Trinity, Stratford. Here's the chancel, a late-15th-century lightbox:

Here I caused some consternation to the guides by expressing no great interest in William Shakespeare, which they must assume is the only reason why anyone would come in. Not far away is Warwick, whose parish church was inconveniently being set up for a graduation ceremony when I wandered in, hence the unusual light effects you can see of this photo of the east end. But it, too, is grand:

Stratford and Warwick's churches are both medieval, but the greatest surprises came at places where humble churches were rebuilt in the 19th-century and replaced by cathedral-model Gothic fantasy buildings. All Saints, Leamington Spa, is simply jaw-dropping in its size and grandeur, its Flamboyant-Decorated exterior and gigantic interior spaces surely more than even a growing spa town actually required in a place of worship:

But it was the tiny village of Hampton Lucy which had the greatest shock in store. Here, again, the tumbledown old parish church was replaced in the 1840s by the Lord of the Manor, the Vicar, and the Gothic Revivalist architect Thomas Rickman. Rickman at least knew what 'proper' Gothic looked like, and at Hampton Lucy provided something with the proportions of a French cathedral. As I walked around its chilly magnificence I couldn't help wondering what the villagers must have made of something so alien. It could seat hundreds. Could it ever have been even near-full on an ordinary Sunday?

There were different notes, however. Although you wouldn't call it 'humble', Stratford's Guild Chapel is very neat and tidy, in a different way from how the leading burghers of the town who built it would have experienced it.

Finally, I didn't get to see St John's Well, Honiley, which is on overgrown private land, but I did pop into the church nearby which also afforded a surprise. 'The church the Victorians forgot', as it describes itself, has a perfect little Georgian interior unaltered until the storm of the 19th century had passed and it could be appreciated for its own qualities. The glass is more modern, the deep colour contrasting with the gentle white of the walls. There is also a freestanding font, but below the tower is a strange marble niche built into the wall - it can't be a holy-water stoup so it must have been intended as a font. As even Pevsner commented, 'how very Georgian!'

The Bath House, Walton

It's been many years since my Autumn holiday has taken me to any of the more off-the-wall properties in the portfolio of the Landmark Trust. I returned to that fold this time, though, in the form of The Bath House near Walton in Warwickshire, a place I wanted to visit some years ago but wasn't able to. The Young Lord Declan & Lady Minerva went there, and in conversation with Caroline, a non-stipendiary priest who sometimes comes to our 8am mass, I learned she and her husband have been there too. I further learned to keep the door that leads to the grotto shut, or bats get into the living room (that happened to them). 

For the Bath House is just that: a very salubrious and shell-festooned octagonal shelter painted the most delicate blue (I know it looks green in the photo) over a 'cave' which shelters a cold bath, made for the benefit of the Mordaunts of Walton Hall. The architect was Sanderson Miller, no less, whose own small estate at Radway scant miles away was the first, as we might call it, 'Gothic Garden', a landscape tweaked to provide reflections on melancholy and mortality. It's another building that Landmark has rescued from ruin, and into which a bed, bathroom and kitchen have been crammed despite it never being intended that anyone should spend a night there. 

You approach half a mile or so through woodland, a journey which at least in the morning I found always fraught with pheasants (I wonder if Landmarkers ever run them over?), and come across the Bath House down a slope once you can drive no further. People very rarely photograph this view, so I did: it has a certain Vanbrughian solemnity. It looks very different from the other side, with a clear distinction between the upper bit and the grotto.

Inside, of course, all is refinement and delicacy. Except when you take the cold, damp staircase down to the pool ... In common with most guests, I did go for the full 18th-century experience and take to the water, gradually making my way down the steps into the pool until the pain receded. My feet even, finally, touched the bottom - though not for very long, and on a less sunny afternoon I chickened out of my intention to take a second dip.

Outside, Gothically, there is a small pets' cemetery at the front of the Bath House, but there are living beasts around too. The bats were not a myth.

Ex Sepulchro Dracula Surrexit

It looks rather as though my amazing friend Professor Purplepen has seen something shocking on the other side of the meeting room at The Rugby Tavern, Great James Street, Holborn, but this turned out to be the only clear photo I took from her lecture on (as you can see) 'Dracula and Classical Antiquity' to the Dracula Society yesterday. Red-papered and decorated with sporting prints and old caricatures by Spy and the like, it was a room which yearned to be smoke-filled, but of course wasn't: instead it was crowded with enthusiasts and at one stage piled with food. I ended up seated next to the remains of the buffet during the talk and it was all I could do to restrain myself from grazing from them to the point of illness.

We think it's the first time we have managed to meet in 11 years, though are not entirely sure: the last occasion seems to have been when the Professor and a friend succeeded in visiting me at The Ruin, Grewelthorpe, during my week there back in 2008. She drew my attention to a quotation in the lecture from Eusebius, a wonderfully Gothic peroration about demons, not strictly included for my amusement but which nevertheless could have been.

Every now and then there was a rumbling from the hallway outside as though a tumbril of heads was being transferred, but was probably only a trolley of glasses, and on two occasions I went through the bar downstairs they were playing Siouxsie and the Banshees.

No Pasaran

Leatherhead Church looked like a safe bet to visit yesterday: I could go there on the train, and provided I arrived before noon the parish office would be open and even if the church was shut they'd be able to let me in. Somewhere there'd be a café for lunch and then I could go home, all nice and relaxed.

The church website is all bright and shiny and tells you everything that's going on and there's a smiling picture of the incumbent describing the church's commitment to spreading the Gospel and serving the community, etc.

What it doesn't mention is the quite important information that the church is being rebuilt. It's a fenced-off, gutted shell without a floor. All the many events can't be happening in that building, but somehow whoever's put the website together doesn't think that's relevant. I stood slightly disbelieving and watched fellows in hard hats moving around within the barrier, in front of a huge screen of plywood closing off the chancel arch.

It was a gamble to walk from there the mile-and-a-bit to Ashtead to try to look at St Giles's, not part of my original plan but an attempt to salvage something from my train fare. A big red sign pointed off the main street to 'St Giles's Parish Church, 12th century', suggesting that entry might not be problematic. There'd been a midweek service at 11am and the very grandiose newish hall next door had a lunch club on. But the church itself was locked against all comers, 12th or whatever century.

Rood Returned

Mr Mahoney the glass restorer came back to Swanvale Halt yesterday to replace the damaged panels from the Rood Window. I greeted him, and went away to do other things - until anticipation, and the remembered warning from a parishioner, 'of course it's never as good as the original', got the better of me, and I headed back down the hill to see what was happening.

The repaired glass looks almost exactly the same as the old: there is one area which appears slightly cleaner, but that's it. It seems to my untrained eye to be a beautiful job. My relief could barely be described.

We would quite like to have guards installed over this particularly vulnerable window (as the green copper stains in the wall around show that it once had) but the price is eye-watering. Mr Mahoney says he might be able to come up with a less painful quote. Not far away is another church that recently suffered some vandalism and launched a Justgiving campaign to help with the repairs, and ended up raising enough to pay for a new CCTV system and exterior lighting as well. Apparently the incumbent was kicking himself for setting a £5K limit to the sum. I'm not sure Swanvale Halt can come up with that, but we could have a go!