The Grinding of the Land

The SCP Zoom mass yesterday was challenging in ways these things always are - sudden changes in volume between one voice and another, a row of faces confronting you in a way they never would in life (I turned my video off, nobody wants to look at my face), clunks and knocks and audio wobbles and tinniness coming and going. I get absolutely nothing out of these experiences and still don't understand everyone else's enthusiasm for them. In fact they leave me agitated and unsettled, the exact opposite of being in touch with the divine. I think.

It was interesting, though, to hear about other clergy's plans for reopening their churches. The Cathedral will be aiming for a couple of weeks' time, Fr Donald at Elmham is going for this Sunday (as we are), and others are scattered in between. 

Who knows who will come. Everyone I speak to says they are anxious to get back into the church to worship, but I'm not convinced. 'Will we ever get back to normal?' people ask. I think we will, because the likelihood is that like every other disease of its kind COVID will become one of the things we deal with every year, eventually becoming milder until the next infection comes along. The permanent changes won't be those, they won't be the social-distancing and communion in one kind. Those will, eventually, be forgotten. Instead the changes will be - I suspect - the breaking of faith as people find they can get on well enough without church, without God, or that God has let them down; or find they can't walk to church as they did a few months ago and there is no one in a weakening and shrinking church community to give them a lift, even if precautions allowed them to.

The closest COVID has got to the congregation was a former member of the church who'd moved elsewhere, and the son of a pair of faithful worshippers. Yesterday the latter's mother told me that while he was in intensive care she 'held a little service' at home and randomly opening the Bible for a reading found John 11, the Raising of Lazarus. She took it as a message that Nigel would recover; and he didn't. She struggles to incorporate his death within a faith that's always rested on the idea that 'God has a plan': it's been the key that has unlocked unbelief, and Pat becomes another in the list I now have of Christians who have been propelled towards faithlessness by losing someone they love. I don't know whether this will be permanent in her case, or something that passes. How complex we human beings are: we all know that death comes to everyone, yet somehow we manage to think it will avoid us, and create ways of believing so. We succeed in looking across a world that orbits around arbitrary suffering, and imagining that we're not part of it. 'We have made a covenant with death,' Isaiah reminded me this morning, 'When the overwhelming scourge passes, it will not touch us'.

Perhaps some people will discover faith as a result of the last few months, but I expect more to lose it: the virus has swept over us like a glacier, and like a glacier will grind the land beneath it. And I don't think the coming time will be easy.

Unfinished Business

When public worship was ended in the middle of March, there was a period when weddings were still permitted in a minimal form, with only the legal minimum of five people allowed to be present (the priest, the couple and the witnesses). As Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths - how grand a title that sounds! - I had to deal with a sudden flurry of enquiries as couples struggled to get across the line before the gates closed, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, needing to swear affidavits for a licence to be married, given that banns could not be read in church services. Some managed it, some didn't.

This week, to my surprise at least, the government permitted both weddings to resume from July 4th, and public worship. This created an ambiguity. Would the Registry allow marriages to be solemnised by licence, or insist that when church services could be held, banns must be read? As not all churches will be reopening for worship next week, the former would be the sensible solution, but as I found myself saying on more than one occasion, the sensible option doesn't always happen.

I still haven't had any word direct from the Bishop's Registry, but the Diocese, at least, has said that all marriages for the foreseeable future must take place by Common Licence (unless they're unusual cases that proceed by other means) - a surprising instance of reasonableness. And, my mind dizzy whenever I think of the couples in their kaleidoscopically various circumstances who have contacted me, or whose proposed churches of marriage have, over the last few months, I have asked everyone to email me with their details: who are you, where are hoping to get married, and when. And we'd take it from there. 

This afternoon I sat going through the messages, working out what information I'd had from who, what I still needed, who was the priority (two couples are hoping to marry as soon as they can, meaning next Saturday), and by the end I was wincing a bit. These days my brain feels like it's fragmenting most of the time, so it was an encouragement that I could still get through it without having to stop for a cup of tea. Now for the easy bit - actually seeing the young people themselves. Details, details.

A Prophecy

The chapter of the Bible I read in the morning was Isaiah 22. As so often, I found something my eye must have skated across innumerable times without really registering. 'Look away from me,' says the prophet, not apparently to God but to others:

Look away from me - 
Let me weep - 
Do not comfort me
For the destruction of my beloved people

My first thought was how well that related to our times: how I dislike the attempt to pretend that everything is all right, that nobody has suffered over the last months of restriction, that death is not a threat, that faith means loss is not genuine. If you think that, you aren't paying attention. You must weep. Only then can you advance to hope, once the pain has been accepted.

Then later I sat with a bag of bits and pieces Cora's husband passed to me. Cora, one-time Pastoral Assistant at Swanvale Halt church and Chair of the diocesan Mother's Union, has been dead nearly two years now: the bag in question contained packets of photographs of the Spring Fair and a flower festival at the church, letters, news sheets, and flyers. I sat and looked at the faces of so many people who have died over my ten years at the church, from long before I knew them. The beloved people of the priests before me, and myself, because they are Christ's first.

The phone rang. Brenda had 'some devastating news', and so it was - her granddaughter Sasha had taken her own life by walking in front of a train. I don't know her that well. But the savagery and waste is something I know very well indeed. We human beings need sensitivity and imagination, but the price is that sensitivity and imagination will kill some of us early. In my mind's ear I hear Job's comforters and I throw the words of Isaiah at them, with some anger.

I send a card to Sasha's parents and include what Isaiah said twenty-seven centuries ago. His feelings are not theirs, but they are cousins to theirs. They are part of the great and terrible inheritance of being human. 

'Phantoms: the rise of Deathrock from the LA punk scene' by Mikey Bean (2019)

At long last, I’ve finally made my way through this monumental volume. My friend Ms GothPotter put me on to it and knowing remarkably little about the development of Goth anywhere outside the UK I had to send off for a copy.

I’ll get into some of the meat of the text soon, but knowing where to begin with that is a struggle – there is such a huge amount to grapple with. Many books are labours of love, but author Mikey Bean has redefined the term. Over a decade or so he conducted more than 200 interviews with people who’d been around in the Los Angeles punk and post-punk scene of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and then, rather than present each interview sequentially, he cut them up into sentences and built the bits into histories of bands, clubs, and individuals, decorated with the odd photograph from someone’s shoebox collection and masses of reproduced flyers, gradually growing more sophisticated from their cut-and-paste punk origins. How he managed to keep track of all this is beyond me, speaking as someone who enjoys writing but loathes research. Some of his interviewees were no longer living when the book finally came out.

I confess that for a little while I was almost distressingly bewildered, until I worked out what the format was, and that the sections didn’t represent group interviews as I originally thought, but assembled fragments of individual encounters. Sometimes they do read like actual conversations as Bean makes his interlocutors comment on each other from a distance, as it were. Once you discover what’s going on, it becomes more relaxing to read! You begin by admiring the sheer industry, the overwhelming work, involved in Phantoms, but then realise how much Bean has rescued from the oblivion of memory. There is so very, very much in the book’s six hundred close-printed A4 pages (what a lot of text that is!) that I had to have a pencil at hand to mark the passages I most wanted to remember, and even extracting a summary is a challenge. But, well, how could we not try?

The thing that strikes me most, and which I didn’t know clearly before, is that what becomes Goth in the US – or least in California – was a parallel but independent movement from what happened in Britain. It quickly made connections, but had a different flavour from the start because of the materials it was working with (Natasha Scharf’s Worldwide Gothic gives a summary of what was happening but necessarily only in a couple of pages). Deathrock grew from the alienation some felt as a result of what was happening to punk – as Mikey Bean puts it in an interview from a few years ago, ‘the jocks who used to beat up the punks becoming punks themselves’. LA punk wasn’t exactly a tolerant landscape: punks referred to Christian Death as ‘fag music’ and Michael Ely of Red Wedding described the whole scene as ‘very very anti-gay’. Thrown out of seminal LA punk band Germs by its lead Darby Crash, Don Bolles joined girlfriend Mary Sims (who’d been in a radical all-female horror-punk group called Castration Squad and whose inspired stage name was, and is, Dinah Cancer) to form a band called 45 Grave; they, and other outfits, drew on horror-movie imagery (‘more Plan 9 from Outer Space than Hammer’, said Sims, though she also modelled herself on Ingrid Pitt and Barbara Steele) and became more obviously what could be recognised as ‘deathrock’. The more arty and less campy the music and the fashion grew, the more it could be thought of as ‘goth’, even though the term didn’t arise until at least 1983 or so.

In theory all these genres were separate and people on the ground could tell the difference. Bruce Duff of 45 Grave described how Mary Sims and Paul Cutler ‘went to the Roxy to see Bauhaus, which would have been the descent of straight-up Goth on LA as opposed to the harder-driving deathrock we were playing’. They were impressed by ‘how they looked all regal in tuxedos and whatnot’ while Don Bolles was scathing in terms I’m not going to repeat. When Bolles went to a club called Séance a couple of years later, ‘I felt really old [in his late twenties!] coz these were the younger kids who were more like modern Goths than deathrockers proper’. Goth – once people recognised what it was – was felt to be something foreign. One of the best lines in the book is Scott Maxson’s reaction on meeting Patrik Mata: ‘his face was white and he had lipstick on and this long jacket. He looked like he was British or something’! Steve Darrow succinctly defined the difference by stating that Siouxsie & the Banshees' music went better with acid than punk did.

In practice, though, the individuals involved moved around fairly freely from one band and genre to another. Mary Sims says ‘most of my friends kind of ricocheted between five scenes’ and there was even a significant overlap with metal – Steve Darrow states ‘we were all really into Alice Cooper and Sabbath’ (he left Eva O’s band Super Heroines to join Guns ‘n’ Roses so there you go) while Michael Ely remembers that Red Wedding ‘associated deathrock with lame heavy metal music masquerading as punk’. Mary Sims described 45 Grave’s outlook as not really deathrock at all but ‘existential nihilism with a comedic edge’, but look at images of her from the mid-1980s and you won’t see any difference from self-identified Goths. Pompeii 99, who joined Rozz Williams in 1983 to make up the second version of Christian Death, look in a photo more like Bow Wow Wow rather than anything identifiably ‘dark’.

Phantoms makes very clear a point I’ve always stressed, that Gothic is an extensive cultural tradition and once you make contact with it, it will start to draw you into its pre-existing world of references and identifications. In LA, there were local and universal aspects to this. You can see individuals responding to the same set of influences that European proto-Goths were discovering: Shannon Wilhelm of Castration Squad and Cloudia Wintermute of Die Schlaflosen both modelled their look on Theda Bara (‘I was a sort of Cleopatra vampire’, said Wintermute) while Margaret Arana of Kommunity FK ‘just loved Louise Brooks and the 1920s’ and in 1978 was the only person in the area with her hair bobbed. Red Wedding ‘often dressed up in vintage wedding attire … inspired by the Victorian-like vampires in The Fearless Vampire Killers’. The flyers and posters included in the book often ‘quote’ imagery from artists such as Harry Clarke and Aubrey Beardsley, from Weird Tales and religious tracts (as well as S&M pornography, which is another matter). All this is ‘universal’ Gothic, if you like, but living in California added other elements: the decaying glamour of Hollywood, memories of the Universal horror films of the 1930s, the great cemeteries, even locations such as the old Bela Lugosi estate with Lugosi’s spider-shaped swimming pool where scene photographer Edward Colver took 45 Grave for a photoshoot. This meant that the LA scene could develop its own distinctive flavour quite apart from anything that might have been happening in the UK: there was a history here which Europe didn’t have.

One of the very pleasing elements of the book is the way it draws attention not just to bands and their kaleidoscopic interactions but also to the clubs where people saw them and the shops where their stuff was sold. In Pomona, where Rozz Williams came from, there was an influential store called Toxic Records, run by Bill Sassenberger whose acidic commentary Bean very sensibly tends to let luxuriate down the page rather than chop it up. The store found ‘a niche catering to the local malcontents’, says Sassenberger. Williams and Ron Athey lived in one of his back rooms for a while but he tired of their challenging behaviour and ended up organising his own band in a parody of Christian Death, Moslem Birth. Along Melrose in Hollywood there were a number of businesses which catered to the scene such as the clothing store Poseur. Jwlhyfer de Winter summarised the problems for anyone trying to look good: ‘if you thrift-stored for black clothes you were as likely to find some horrific polyester night-gown as anything else and a lot of people ended up taking that kind of stuff and fiddling around with it, because … you couldn’t go to Hot Topic and buy a Goth dress’. Clare Glidden set up a club called Brave Dog ‘to make a safe place for some of the people to perform and hang out … It was a pivotal time in my life and it changed my whole life’. Other clubs included Fetish whose owners eventually tired of the scene, held a ‘Death of Deathrock’ funeral event and turned it into a glam-rock club. Lhasa had an angular, Cabinet of Dr Caligari aesthetic and a black and white epoxy floor, and projected silent movies on the walls (and sometimes the bands). This all makes the important point that creativity isn’t only found in musical form.

I learned less salubrious stories: about Radio Werewolf’s totalitarian-themed Satanism which may or may not have been that tongue-in-cheek after all, or Mephisto Walz’s awful experience in Europe in the early 1990s which led to two band members being unable to get home and subsisting on bread and alcohol for weeks; about Rozz Williams and Ron Athey crucifying a cat at one of their art performances, which they always claimed was dead when they found it, though not everyone believed them. ‘I, for one, failed to see what the artistic statement was in this exhibition of depravity’ remarked Bill Sassenberger icily. I was glad to discover ‘lesbian Jewish deathrock artist’ Phranc writing a song called ‘Take off your Swastika’ after she got fed up with every second punk in town wearing one (Siouxsie did that, remember). I marvelled at the description of the mid-teenage Rozz Williams: ‘there was this guy with peg safety-pinned pants, a clear Mickey Mouse children’s raincoat, and thrift store men’s pointed slip-on shoes, one painted pink and the other black’. And I noted, sadly, the pervasive influence of hard drugs on the scene and the shocking number of times Bean notes in the text that somebody referred to has died.

And most of all I was glad to meet the late Jwlhyfer de Winter, arguably the most creative individual in the whole book. De Winter’s mother was, Gothically enough, a medical illustrator who was often mistaken for Carolyn Jones, the actor who played Morticia in The Addams Family, but that didn’t necessarily make for a comfortable home life and as soon as she could de Winter ran away to live with her grandmother. Influenced by Caroline Coon’s 1977 book 1988: the New Wave Punk Rock Explosion which covered UK punk (including Siouxsie & the Banshees), she began absorbing elements of universal Gothic culture – art, movies, poetry and literature, Salome, Beardsley, Bara, Nosferatu. She began showing silent movies at home with partner Vaughn Thorpe, and wearing veils, antique gear, crucifixes: friends accused her of emulating Rozz Williams but she’d reached her Gothic identity independently. She became a regular performer at club nights, not in a band, but reading poetry and dramatic monologues, and devising a vampire character who had been a Sibyl in ancient Rome, presenting her experiences in a theatrical piece called ‘Theosomorphia’. The band Die Schlaflosen, who had a similar range of interests, provided the musical accompaniment for that, and for ‘Masque of the Sirens’, a tribute to Theda Bara. Jwlhyfer de Winter’s Gothic creative work never stopped, though the rest of it falls outside the scope of this particular book.

In years to come – should life ever resume! – Phantoms will provide enough jumping-off points to keep writers in this area busy for ages. And they will need to keep returning to what is an unchallengeable sourcebook for a dramatic, creative, and not always comfortable moment in subcultural history. Now it can go back on my bookshelf and add to the weight considerably!

One final fun quote, from Magie Song about Eva O of Super Heroines and other projects: ‘Eva became a Goth for Christ. I reckon the only adjustment to the costume was to turn the crucifix the right way up’.

You can buy the book via Lulu.com, here.

The Gift of a Rose

A friend of mine has a big birthday coming up and the garden was kind enough to provide me with something to put on her birthday card. I'm not very good with roses, and should really look up how to manage them. In the front flowerbed there's a tiny one which, in a good year, produces one pink bloom; and to the rear of the house is this lovely orange example. Deo gratias!

Parochial Concerns

The last Clergy Study Day hadn't left me very enthused. The advantage of doing it over Zoom is that you don't have to go anywhere, and when the clergy colleague who was talking about sports ministry began lecturing us on the connections between bodily and spiritual strength I was able to turn him off until it was safe again. I don't want you to get the impression there was nothing interesting, but - well, I was relieved not to have to engage any more than I did. 

This afternoon's 'webinar' I'd completely forgotten about. Marion the curate 'went' and reported that the question 'What is God telling us in the COVID crisis?' was apparently mainly answered with 'To use Zoom more'. People talked about the 'productivity and creativity' the restrictions had brought. I asked her whether anyone had mentioned the tens of thousands of people who had died, the colossal economic damage we will be living with for years, the families suffering, the businesses going bankrupt, the impossibility of many of the things that make human life worth living, and whether God was trying to tell us anything from those things? Nary a word, she related. The Church of England's use of technology is clearly more important than all of that. What do we have to say to the world at large, beyond our own tiny, miniscule interests - the practices of a small Church in one historical moment?

In fact there was a bibliography attached to the webinar which does include some weighty theology examining the way God works, or doesn't work, through calamity and disaster, but it doesn't seem to have poked its way into the discussions themselves. I find myself thinking more about the nature of apocalyptic, the revelatory motion of truth which draws creation forward to whatever consummation God has planned for it, and I will say more about this some time. It's a word nobody seems to want much to deal with.

Open Door Policy

Notices on the church door, red arrows delineating entry points on the floor, big red round dots showing you where you can sit safely to pray - the parish church of Swanvale Halt is open for business again! Or open for piety, in any case. Much to my surprise the advice from the Church nationally (which seems to derive from former Chief Nurse Bishop Sarah Mullaly, a 'dove' in this respect) has not specified that we need anyone on duty to supervise those who might come into the building to pray unless we deem it necessary for security or other practical reasons, so I was quite happy to set everything up this morning and walk away. The main consideration was not losing our hand sanitiser, and so Jack who does so many small construction jobs around the church knocked up the little box you can see in the picture. Somehow it seems only appropriate that we should have a wooden hand sanitiser dispenser. I wonder whether there's an appropriate saint whose image I can put on it.

I came back to lock the building again after three hours. I don't have any evidence that anyone actually came in ...

Dib Dib Dubious

Before doing my Museum Studies course at Leicester, I spent a summer volunteering at the Museum Service in Poole. The first job I was given to do was cataloguing a box of objects that had been sitting in the office for a couple of years. They all related to a recently-deceased Poole resident who'd been, among many other things, heavily involved in the Scouting movement. I went through the programmes, tickets, badges, and other bits and pieces, and found a medal: a brass swastika in a circle stamped on the back HitlerJugend 1934. Actually I can't swear to the date, but you get the idea. It caused quite a jolt. But if you were a 1930s Boy Scout leader without that much political awareness (or just enough to make you a Conservative), the Hitler Youth looked like a parallel organisation. Young fellows went out into the woods and tracked animals and lit fires. Mr Hitler will be a breath of fresh air for the Germans. Don't go along with him on everything, of course, but they probably need a bit of that sort of thing over there. That's what the Germans are like. 

I do feel a bit bad for Baden-Powell: he was hardly the only prominent Briton to be taken in by Mr Hitler, and his dreadful hierarchical views were no worse than a lot of his contemporaries'. His Poole statue strikes me as rather a humble object, as these things go: he sits looking out at Brownsea Island and passersby look down at him. As for Mr Gladstone, his fall from grace on the grounds of the origin of his family's wealth seems more than a little unfair. Not only do few lives stand up to that kind of scrutiny (a truism we all know), but dig beneath the surface of virtually any well-off individual's background between the late 17th- and early 19th-centuries and you'll find some connection or other with the Triangular Trade. Picking individuals for public obloquy beyond those most directly involved in it is a bit invidious.

But there lies the problem. For a century and more we British have told ourselves a story that begins in Tudor maritime exploration and derring-do, and continues through the Industrial Revolution into progressive modernity. I certainly remember that from my distant childhood. In so far as slavery comes into it, as soon as the Trade was abolished we spent our time congratulating ourselves for having done so and castigating any nation that was tardier than we were; the fact that it needed abolishing was apparently easy to forget, as was the way its colossal profits underwrote the investment that went into mines, textile factories, railways, and everything else that made Britain the world's first industrial power. Racism wasn't the point of any of this, really. Notions of racial hierarchy, and the appropriateness of one category of human beings owning members of another, or ruling over another, were justificatory veneers laid over the economic and geopolitical competition of European powers. That was what it was all about.

We can't extract this from who we are: it runs through the whole post-Reformation history of this country and has brought us here, to this point. There are public monuments to the people who made this history happen, surviving from the time when we we had no suspicion of the self-serving ideology that underlay the business of Trade and Empire, and their survival amounts to a denial in stone and bronze that it happened, or that it mattered. Removing them, though, I suppose might also be a form of denial. We've only just begun facing who we really are, and that's the real task.

(Photo snipped from the Dorset Echo)

You Have Encountered an Irretrievable Error

Telling the tale more often won't make it any the less true, though I suspect that buried at the back of my mind is the thought it might. 

Over the last few days I've been doing reasonably well in my aim to turn the computer off before 11pm. Last night I thought I would do one more job, watch twenty minutes of the film I've got on the go, and then power down (myself as well as the machine). But the job proved impossible as Word wouldn't open. Very soon I discovered that no Microsoft product on my computer would open. 

As my renewed credit card had only just arrived I wondered whether having the old details would have invalidated my Microsoft account all of a sudden. Even validating the new card wasn't straightforward: the bank website wouldn't 'recognise the card', though the automated phone line did. But it made no difference. 

'Repair the application', suggested a help forum. I tried, and that didn't work either. Finally I surrendered to uninstalling and re-installing the whole Microsoft Office suite. That was no swift process, and was still going on near 1am, at which point I left it to its own devices. In the course of this, I'd managed to sit on my glasses - the pair I'd only had two months - and snap an arm. 

This morning Office was reinstalled, in a vile new version. That seemed like the end of the affair - until I tried to edit a photo in Corel PhotoPaint. That didn't work either. At the end of a long process involving various Corel Corporation employees I concluded that I will need the new version of what I already had. Corel has reorganised its products recently, and it will cost over £300. Ow.

Grappling with technology sends me into a tailspin. I can never get used to the fact that it takes ages and ages to do anything, and things happen apparently for no reason. The amateur is left powerless looking at a screen which appears to be doing nothing, and this amateur, at any rate, pleads, cajoles, and weeps absurdly at an indifferent machine. Once upon a time I would get Ms Formerly Aldgate to deal with this as she never seemed to be fazed at all, but this is no longer an option. Admirably she viewed new technology and even new versions of the old technology, produced by the children at Microsoft paid well to fiddle and noodle with code, as an opportunity for learning, whereas I see it as a potential abyss into which all my efforts and endeavours are about to be sunk.

The new Office doesn't allow me to turn off email notifications jabbing into my side, metaphorically, from the right of the screen. That tells you all you need to know!

Three Rowans

When my mind isn't in a fit state for much detailed musing (and it's not) I turn to the garden. A couple of years ago my beautiful rowan tree had to be felled. The rowan is one of my favourite trees - I'm moved by its delicate leaves and red berries - and I was so sorry to lose mine, which soared gracefully up at the side of the Rectory. So I was anxious to replace it - and replaced it has very much been. The tree surgeon who removed the previous one, along with the great eucalyptus, brought a sapling he'd grown. It was a few encouraging feet high, but then the foxes stripped off all its bark. Thankfully it failed to die, and has come on healthily this year.

But not as healthily as one that I discovered soon after, that had just happened to seed itself in a convenient pot. It has positively rocketed, and I hope next year might thicken up a bit!

Finally there is a tiny rowan, currently in a little pot. It's only about six inches high so far. It already has the profile of a miniscule tree, and after seeing some lovely bonsai trees at Wisley Gardens with Ms Brightshades last year (the second photo you can see here is a bonsai) I thought that eventually I might have a go at bonsai-ing this one. I could take it with me, eventually.

St Catherine with the Spindle

Years ago an eBay shop called Putuco's Alpaca Warehouse used to sell Peruvian colonial religious art - they still do, though not in the exciting variety of those days. I bought two pieces from them, my wooden retablo of St Catherine and an image of St Jude, the patron saint of the church at Goremead which I looked after for a few months, because it didn't actually possess an image of him. I liked the naivety and gaudy joyfulness of the images. They revelled in life.

The other day I found this picture of St Catherine, apparently from 19th-century Spanish California so a bit north of Peru but still originating in the same cultural milieu. Although the blessed Saint is the patron of wool-workers because of the wheel which is her emblem (and therefore also of unmarried women, whose main occupation is of course spinning), I've never seen any reference to this aspect of her work in representations of her, so this picture is unique as far as I know. I'm not sure whether Catherine is being shown as a child here - that would be equally unusual. Hard to tell, isn't it?

I'm not going to buy it as the antique store wants $2500 for it!

UPDATE: It isn't St Catherine at all! It is in fact an icon of the Virgin, 'The Child Mary Spinning', a very unfamiliar image to most of us now, but not so in 17th and 18th century Peru, apparently.

Escape!

Now we are allowed to meet someone we don't live with in a private garden, I felt emboldened to visit my mum for the first time in months. She sat in the conservatory and I was outside. We had shop-bought sandwiches and I brought a flask. Typically the blazing sun of recent weeks is now gone but it wasn't too disagreeable. Afterwards I popped down to Sandbanks and sat on a wall for a few minutes. There were quite a few souls about, but all keeping apart from each other. Some ventured out into the water to do so. Look, it's the sea! Well, Poole Harbour anyway.

Public Service Broadcast

It has always been my custom to ring the church bell before Morning and Evening Prayer (concluding the latter, towards 6pm, with the Angelus). Of course that didn't happen during the two months no prayers were said in the church building, but now I am glad to be adding the tintinnabulation once again to the Swanvale Halt soundscape.

Lots of people have told me how comforting it is to hear the bell ringing again. Among these is Clarrie who is mother to Rob, our sort-of-under-verger when he is around (he used to be verger at another church before they moved to us). 'When I hear the bell in the evening', she told me a couple of days ago, 'I always know it's time to begin our tea.'

The unexpected sense of responsibility was one I found very disconcerting and I stressed that she shouldn't rely on me, because especially in the evenings I am sometimes late. 'That's all right', she assured me. 'If you're late, then it's really time to begin our tea.'