Canine Rites

The car park at the Pet Crematorium at Hartley Wintney contains, very very roughly, something in excess of half a million pebbles. I estimated that an area about 8 inches square included about a hundred of them, and that the car park was about fifty feet square; (50 x 12)2 /64 x100 = 562,500. Professor Abacus thinks the margin of error in this figure is too wide for it to be useful, and who am I to argue. But working it out helped to occupy the time, for someone not very adept at mental arithmetic, while I waited for Christine to finish saying a very emotional goodbye to her dog.This is the third of Christine's dogs I have offered to the Lord, in the faith that he does something we may not clearly know with the mute creation. She has stopped bothering overly about the helpful souls who, frustrated at their inability to share her passionate relationship with them, have told her 'it's only a dog' or asked whether she'll get another one. Her entire existence has been organised around them. To her credit she has never treated them as anything other than dogs: she recognises that they have canine thoughts and relations that are fundamentally a closed world to her. People say silly things because such extreme emotions are embarrassing enough to express about a human and they will say silly things in those circumstances too, trying to ward off the power of the feeling, to put it right, to restore calm. But this is what love looks like, even if I don't share it. I suppose the test of the love's quality will be what Christine does with it next.I read from Isaiah 11 - 'the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid ... for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea'. There are not many dogs in the Scriptures, and those that do appear don't play a very positive role. In 1Kings they lick up Naboth's blood and gnaw the flesh of Jezebel; they snarl around the author of Psalm 22; they eat the crumbs under their masters' tables, points out the Canaanite woman who confronts Jesus in Mark and Matthew, and in Luke they lick the sores of Lazarus. The friendliest Biblical dog is the one who accompanies Tobias in the Apocryphal book of Tobit, but nothing is said about him. So I settled on Isaiah's vision of the renewed earth in which the animals very clearly have a role to play, and later accompanied the dog on his last journey, a few yards along a covered walkway to the kiln.The cremation oven at Hartley Wintney is in a huge early-19th-century brick kiln. Its slightly disorganised brickwork and the fact that it's been clearly repaired and restored makes its sombre bulk rather gentle and welcoming. It has seen life. It's the kind of place a human might choose to be cremated, quite apart from an animal.

Mission by Music

The history of Anglo-Catholicism includes a variety of gloriously loopy initiatives that should not have worked, but which, one must assume by the grace of God, did. A couple of years ago I found out about the Christian bikers' group, the 59 Club; and I've just discovered another, amazed that I'd never come across it before. The website of St Paul's Church, Addlestone, includes some memories of a former choirboy at the daughter church of St Augustine. He refers to the 'terrifying' Fr Desmond Morse-Boycott, who occasionally took services at St Augustine's in the early 1950s, and who ran the St Mary of the Angels Song School in a big house at the top of the Woburn Road in Addlestone. This sounded interesting: Morse-Boycott appears very fleetingly in histories of the Anglo-Catholic movement such as Michael Yelton's Anglican Papalism, but that's all. The Choir School has escaped much attention. So I bought his 1972 retrospective about the School, A Pilgrimage of Song, which arrived very efficiently this morning.

Fr Morse-Boycott began working life as a journalist, and was ordained later, finding his way to St Mary's Somers Town where as curate he worked among some of the worst social conditions in 1910s and 20s central London; one of the other priests there was the much better-known Basil Jellicoe, the Missioner funded by Magdalen College, Oxford, who did so much to affect housing provision and policy in London. Morse-Boycott took groups of Somers Town boys ('who only knew grass as something "to keep off of"') on summer camps at Fr Jellicoe's family home in Chailey, Sussex, where his father was Rector: it was there that Morse-Boycott met his future wife, Marguerite, who'd come to help out at the camp one year and was shocked by the state of the curate's socks. Clearly marriage was the only rational answer. Once they were a couple, the Morse-Boycotts began a boys' club, first in their house, and then in a cellar room owned by St Mary's: the tenor of the work is shown by the fact that the boys got 'clothes, soup of the evening, and a hot wash in the sink'. They began to teach the boys a bit of this and that Church knowledge, and finally music.

The parish was already raising money to send some boys to Woodbridge School in Essex and when these youngsters came home for breaks in Eton collars and uniforms their fellows at the Room Under the Pavement club asked if they could dress the same. An appeal for cast-offs among the clergy's better-off connections (of whom there were many) produced enough clobber to kit the boys out and even more of a school atmosphere developed. The posh uniforms aroused the derision of other children but this lasted only a limited amount of time before they discovered that the boys at St Mary's hadn't lost their ability to fight when they donned starched collars and black jackets. The outfits also had the benefit of being unpawnable, unlike other clothes the boys were given. 

The great All Saints' Margaret Street, of course, had had a Choir School for over seventy years by this stage and its example was there to be copied and, in fact, exceeded. In 1931 a site for a residential School was acquired in Highgate and, of all people, GF Watts's widow Mary provided a foundation stone. A Trust was established and the School opened the following year. 

And yet very shortly after that, Morse-Boycott was out of his parish, ousted from St Mary's by a move to insist that all clergy serving the church were celibate. The Room Under the Pavement was still an important part of the Choir School system as boys used it when on holiday back at home and the Mothers' meeting that was based there at other times was the main source of recruitment of new pupils, but that was removed to other parish purposes. Morse-Boycott hadn't even been drawing a stipend since 1924 and it was a poor reward for his efforts. The School became, as he put it, 'Handmaid to the Church of England', at its disposal for any occasion it might require. 

And so it was: and gradually its reputation advanced to the point where it came to secular attention, too. High points were the bizarre occasions when the St Mary of the Angels boys were asked to replace the voices of the Westminster Abbey choir singing for a Coronation (perhaps the Abbey wanted too much of a fee), and even those of the choir at the Sistine Chapel. Similar institutions in Europe were intrigued. In 1938 the Highgate site was sold to the London County Council raising very welcome funds, and that was when the School moved to Addlestone. While they were away on a singing tour of Devon the house burned down, but miraculously the lease of a neighbouring house came up and the School again relocated, with a sojourn being evacuated to Devon (and being thrown out on New Year's Day 1942 when the landlord refused to extend the lease). The School stayed in Addlestone until 1952 when the death of a benefactor meant a mortgage fell due and the house had to be sold, necessitating a further move to Beaconsfield where it stayed until the end finally arrived in 1972.

As you can see, money was never far from the Morse-Boycotts' minds. The School had some money-spinners such as making palm crosses ...

... but apart from donations (and Marguerite's efforts in the embroidery department) a lot of its income came from singing. There were recordings and tours, and when the boys sang at a Church event, there was never a fee charged, but there was a plate put out. As Fr Morse-Boycott admitted, the education authorities took a dim view of this ('heresy and exploitation') and in fact of the School as a whole. His total lack of any formal teaching experience, or any qualifications to do anything, might not have been a problem in a London slum in the 1920s, but by the 1960s St Mary of the Angels was a relic of another age, as was the man himself. Anglo-Papalist he may have been, but his spirituality had something of the romantic medievalist strain about it: he filled out the register books at St Augustine's, Addlestone, in elaborate Gothic script (for which purpose he brought his own pen), never used any liturgy other than the Book of Common Prayer (and certain additions he devised himself), and while at Addlestone revived for the first time in the Church of England the tradition of the Boy Bishop who supervises his choir colleagues between St Nicholas's Eve and Holy Innocents Day. Investiture took place in the chapel and was a grand occasion: 

(Here you get another view of the blue smocks which were part of the boys' uniforms from the Highgate days). 

The Ministry of Education was not the only authority that disappointed Fr Morse-Boycott: the Church of England was never, on an institutional level, very kind to its self-declared Handmaid, though over the years the School produced dozens of priests (at least one becoming a bishop) and musicians amateur and professional. The Church, he complained, was 'a hard mother'. When the incumbent Boy Bishop reached the end of his tenure, he was ceremonially 'wipped out' by his fellows in what looks in the photo in the book to be not an entirely comfortable experience though universal self-interest probably made it a less than brutal one: 'How to deal with the Establishment', Morse-Boycott captioned it. Mind you, his insistence on his (quite remote) royal ancestry and gracing himself with a coat-of-arms might possibly denote the sort of nut who wasn't necessarily easy to deal with. I suspect that you need a bit of that to get anywhere. 

Missing the Bishops

What a shame that the Worldwide Anglican Cycle of Prayer now only includes the name of each diocese and not its bishop. Having a human name as well as a more-or-less unknown geographical area made the mention of the day's diocese at Morning Prayer a little more personal. It also used to provide us with all sorts of fun, after the following fashion: 

1. Strangulated English attempts at pronunciation

2. Our ex-lay reader Lillian got the chance to show off by pronouncing any Tamil, southern Indian or Spanish names properly 

3. Some of the bishops were inherently amusing to English ears. My favourite was the Archbishop of West Africa, His Grace Jonathan Bau Bau Bonaparte Hart. It was salutary to reflect that our names probably sounded just as amusing to people at Morning Prayer in Sierra Leone.

As If You Need Reminding

Three items of pastoral news came my way yesterday. Christine, who I shorthand 'the dog lady', lost her latest and, she has always maintained, final boxer dog. Her life has been organised around him and without him she is bereft. She isn't in a condition to talk about it. I am not a lover of animals but interacting with her over a dozen years has shown me how intense people's relationship with them can be. To others made uncomfortable by grief, Christine's intensity can seem exaggerated and unnecessary. But to love something is ennobling.

Before setting out to take Trevor some groceries, I thought I ought to make a call and selected Sarah from the congregation, who I haven't spoken to for a while. It turns out she had been diagnosed with depression and had a bad reaction to the prescribed medication. She still sounded jumpy and uncomfortable. 'I don't suppose you anticipated the conversation going that way', she suggested, accurately.

I had a message from a mother of three small girls two of whom are former Infants School Church Clubbers. She was treated for cancer a year ago and thought all was well; it isn't, it's inoperable. What can they have told the children. 

Regularly I commit myself to greater seriousness and dedication, but it's easy to let this drift. I suppose what I ought to do is faff about less, stop re-reading my own words, set myself realistic daily tasks and not tell myself that I won't do something because I haven't got the energy. Energy can always be dredged up, and it's not doing things that I regret. Time seems to pass with ever greater urgency and my great fear is that I won't have made the best use of it. 'Live lightly and intensely', a colleague said to me, which seems a helpful formula.

Spiritual Disciplines

Five years after its founding, and the Sodality of Mary, Mother of Priests has only really now drifted into my view: I was aware of the name, but that was all. The SMMS took its place among 'the Catholic Societies of the Church of England' in 2016 and draws together any priest of whatever tradition, sex or marital status, who wishes to structure their spiritual life around a form of Catholic devotion taking the Marists and Sulpicians as its model. The language is as outré as the most ultramontane of the old societies, if nothing else, and makes the Society of Catholic Priests look very beige by comparison.

Not being a great Marian, I can only watch beneficently from a distance the SMMS's intention to deepen the spiritual life of its members by meditating on the inner life of the Blessed Virgin, but there are other things I'd find equally hard to swallow. Members are not 'required', but 'expected' to pray the Office while on holiday, for instance. When I was a curate I did this, but when I became an incumbent I found I absolutely needed to vary my prayer life to mark the times when, while still a priest, I was not actually on show as Rector of Swanvale Halt. I had to build in a rhythm, and found that coming back to saying the Office after not doing so for a week or so - or even on my day off - made it sweeter to the mind, at least to a mind often dull and unresponsive. 

I do 'observe the season of Lent as a time of self-discipline' and 'Friday abstinence' in a very modest way. Of course I'm in the middle of this again at the moment; by the time I get to the evening of a Lenten Friday the pleasure of a slice of dry bread and a glass of water is surprisingly intense, and this year the mild hunger that arises from missing breakfast and lunch is reminding me more than usual of the involuntary hunger many others undergo. But again, once upon a time I fasted on Wednesdays in Lent as well, and eventually discovered that that was having no very beneficial effect on my soul at all. Fr Somerset Ward advised the Christian to have three rules of life: 'a rule of fasting, a rule of prayer, and a rule to have no more rules'. All spiritual disciplines are supposed to have spiritual effects, and while you absolutely need structure and order - otherwise there is nothing left but whim and the passing enthusiasms or indifferences of the moment - you must also be attentive to the way they interact with your changing circumstances. What brings you closer to God at one stage of your life may be an empty or even harmful habit at another. 

I'm glad the SMMS exists: I won't be joining them, but might add them to my prayers. If I can fit them in!

Writing Your Name In Stone

On my circuitous route around the parish on Monday something caught my eye: what appeared to be a marked stone block embedded in an old wall between two houses, one Victorian, one modern. 

'H MOON', it says. Now this rang a bell which was less dim and dusty than the bells things often ring in my memory: Mr J Moon was the local builder who constructed the church back in the mid-1800s, while H Moon won the contract for building the first purpose-built Rectory some twenty years later - presumably one of the Sons of 'J Moon & Sons'. H Moon, we must imagine, built the houses along this street (or at least the wall).

Well over ten years in the parish and I had never noticed this little facet of its history, perhaps because the great majority of the time I go down the hill here, when the block would be hidden behind the buttress on the wall, or up it on the other side of the road, when it would be too far away to spot. It's rather a delight that my built surroundings can still throw a surprise in my direction after all that time. Perhaps yours can, too.

Remote Resources

'What you should do', said Don, the American former member of the congregation who I sometimes talk to via the wonder of Zoom, 'is get a six-foot stick and cut a cross into the end and then stamp people with it!' He was very pleased at that, an idea for facilitating the traditional ashing to begin Lent in a socially-distanced age. I was less sure.

Then a colleague mentioned entirely in passing at a Deanery Chapter meeting that she'd spent hours laminating cards including an ash cross to send out to members of the church and I had my solution. There was a way of actually bringing the chief physical expression of penitence and forgiveness that inaugurates the Lenten season in front of people who wouldn't be able to come to church to do it. I could include not just regular congregation members but also Messy Churchers and a few others we know well but don't often see in church.

The task has dominated everything since Friday: constructing a distribution list and route, designing the prayer card, copying them (this time it took an hour on freezing Saturday morning for the photocopier in the church office to decide it was sufficiently warm for it to get on and do its work); addressing the envelopes, and making the cards. I eventually worked out the best way of doing it was to mark each card with a cross in glue, then press it onto a pile of ash. It was messy but that didn't matter. But the laminating took ages: the cards had to go through at least three times and occasionally four. 

Should the cards be posted, or delivered? Some had to go out by post, but the rest amounted to just over 120. That would have cost about £80. It was just about cost-effective for me to deliver them myself, following a wildly circuitous route which took me up hill and down dale and incorporated almost every street in the parish. I estimated it would take a couple of hours: it was, in the event, four and a half before I propelled my bicycle unsteadily back into the drive. I suppose I'd had some useful conversations on the way.

And I realised that there was one person on the list I hadn't delivered to. Even though, if asked, I would have sworn that I remembered writing his name on an envelope, I had, inadvertently and inexplicably, missed out the sole and only black member of the congregation. Instantly that episode of Father Ted flashed into my mind: 'I hear you're a racist now, Father'. Don't worry, I returned to pop one through his door separately.

Ice Scenes

Swanvale Halt is quiet presently - as everywhere is quiet - and on Thursday I forced myself somewhat reluctantly out of the house and around Widelake Park. It was a bit of a pastoral exercise too as I met a variety of people to have brief conversations with. I can't remember seeing the lake frozen over since I've been living here, but I'm told it froze several times in the 1990s and our former Clerk of Governors at the infants school said people would test their golf swing by trying to hit a ball from one side to the other. Which reminds me of reading somewhere that the distinction between a lake and a pond is that a lake is big enough for a swan to take off from.

Bookshelf: 33 1/3, ''Peepshow' by Samantha Bennett (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Siouxsie and the Banshees were the grandest of punk and post-punk bands, so grand that ‘Goth’ seemed a bit reductive as a label for them even while they defined it. They swiftly escalated in their career from savage primal noise and punk clatter to controlled, dramatic music that wasn’t extreme because it was hard to listen to but because it used cold intellect to explore the farther outreaches of human emotion and experience. Nothing in their output exemplified this better than the 1988 album Peepshow: in many ways it was the peak of their career. I finally got round to reading Professor Samantha Bennett’s analysis of the record as part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.

I ought to have remembered from Mark Paytress’s book about the band that the recording took place in striking circumstances: at Berry House, Ardingley, miles away from anywhere in the heart of the Sussex Weald, a couple of weeks after the Great Storm in 1987; Siouxsie and the others drove there through ‘a landscape ripped apart’ with uprooted trees and devastated woods. The band fuelled themselves with a variety of alcoholic concoctions while interrupting the process with trips to a fairground where noises were recorded that found their way onto the track ‘Carousel’, and the Bonfire Night festivities at Lindfield nearby which culminated in the burning of a fifteen-foot high effigy of Guy Fawkes. ‘It was as if we were doing the whole thing on the set of The Wicker Man’, said Sioux.

From that scene-setting, Bennett does something very clever and insightful: picking up on stray references from the band, she decides to analyse the entire record as a set of responses to different genres of film. You can see where this comes from: the album’s initial and most radical track, ‘Peek-a-Boo’, the song which more or less invented Dark Cabaret, whose video has Siouxsie in bobbed hair and her bandmates in top hats, Venetian masks and wing collars, Cabaret melded with Pandora’s Box in a bad dream of Weimar decadence. The publicity for the tour showed the singer as everyone expected, with massive backcombed Goth hair and carrying a skull-topped cane: but when she first stalked onto the stage at Lausanne in September 1988 she was in satin hotpants and stockings and a black bob, Louise Brooks by way of Sally Bowles. So ‘Peek-a-Boo’ is readable as an encapsulation of silent cinema – how could it be anything else? – and Bennett glosses every track on the album that way, finally alluding to over a hundred movies. ‘We might’, she concludes, ‘then consider Peepshow as a soundtrack to all the films Siouxsie and the Banshees ever saw. Or perhaps it was the soundtrack to the greatest film they never made’.

Bennett isn’t just a theorist about music: she produces it, and knows the technology of music-making in intricate detail. She listens to the ten pieces that make up Peepshow intensely, and it seems little short of overwhelming until you listen back too and hear the tiny, delicate shifts in sound she refers to, and which you would never otherwise have noticed. Thus the book brings together both broad emotional impression and focused technical attention, uncovering how those emotions are invoked.

I read (and told you about) one of the other books in the series, Kate Schatz’s novelistic response to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me: I don’t know what the rest might be like, though I see that there is a treatment of Nick Cave & the Bad Seed’s Murder Ballads so that will be on my list at some point. Over at TheGardenForum someone mentioned that an examination of Is This Desire? would be ideal, if Bloomsbury could be persuaded to accept it: but Bennett’s dazzling examination of Peepshow sets an intimidating bar.

Walking the Parish

Trevor asked for some groceries and I set out to deliver them, not on my bicycle as I normally would – it’s too close to justify using the car unless it’s pouring with rain – but on foot. The bike would have been an awful experience in the icy weather.

Just along the road from the church I met Jack and Nancy who I married several years ago. They have lots of children and not a great deal of cash. They now also have a dog – not a ‘lockdown puppy’ but a canine purchased just a bit before the restrictions started and which had been suffering from mastitis so they’d just been to the vet. They were all right, Nancy said.

And on the opposite side, I spoke to Natasha who has a son with learning difficulties. He’s in school at the moment and doing pretty well, but can’t engage with his post-school groups online: it’s just not something he can cope with. Natasha and husband Ken, again, are a couple without a great deal of extra resources to draw on, but she’d got a couple of things to put in the trolley outside the church where items for the food bank are left (admittedly goods that they’d been given and couldn’t use!). Natasha is taking an Open University degree, never having had the opportunity to study before, which was news to me.

I passed a block of flats where I’d been asked to pray about some unusual manifestations last week. A group of dowsers had identified a suicide from the mid-1850s who’d been unofficially buried in the garden and my contact thought this lady was still spectrally present: not threateningly, but sadly. We don’t know if this is true, but it’s not impossible. I offered a prayer again passing the garden.

A little further on I realised I was passing Rick the verger’s house. He has precious little verging to do at the moment and so was engaged on his main hobby of writing celebrity obituaries. He must have hundreds, all neatly arranged in ring-binders. He’s warding off the cold with a Christmas jumper and a scarf: but I find myself wearing a scarf indoors at the moment too, and sometimes an old cassock which I inherited from Il Rettore. Not today, though, as I am double-trousered to venture into the freezing world out of doors, and that’s enough.

Natasha may have been putting things into the trolley at the church, but I’d noticed a young man with a backpack apparently taking something out. I saw him again on the way into Hornington, reading an information board out loud to himself. A rough sleeper, presumably: what was probably a sleeping bag was poking from the zip of his pack.

Trevor had a carer visiting. I am very grateful to these support workers as he calls me far less than he used to! His social worker is securing him a new bed after the one I arranged to be paid for by a local charity several years ago finally gave up. He had nothing much to tell me so it was a pretty brief visit.

By the time I got home I had a clear idea of what both my weekend sermons are going to be – not, in fact, anything to do with all these observations and encounters, as the Gospel reading is the Transfiguration. But the light of Christ shines on them all, as it did on the mountaintop that day.

Invasive Tech

The picture of the church's livestream this morning was much improved on what I was able to achieve using my phone, and the sound was appreciably better thanks to the new microphone. Rejigging the signal meant there were no glitches or drop-outs, so it looks as though we've got this sorted now. The mike made its presence known by insisting on appearing in frame, as you can see bottom left. Just as well I don't work for the BBC.

I realised that there are now two lights in the church I instinctively check are on: the white light flickering in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and the blue light flickering on the blessed wi-fi booster.

Forms of Evasion

It’s becoming hard to keep up with the shifts in management in the Church of England. Just days after the Diocese of Chester announces the creation of two new Suffragan Bishops (there are already two) who, according to the advert which seems to have disappeared from the online world, would be prepared to ‘weep and sing with us’ and ‘as comfortable wearing wellies as vestments, at the colouring table as at the altar’, comes the Diocese of Sheffield, recruiting four ‘Associate Archdeacons’ to develop the ‘oversight model of ministry’. Here’s the advert, in case you wanted to apply. Sheffield’s little logos accompanying its slogan ‘Renewed, Released, Rejuvenated’ look suspiciously like the ones that go with Guildford’s ‘Twelve Transformation Goals’ which you will remember so accurately: I wonder whether the same marketing company produced them both. Coventry Diocese has a Reconciliation Enabler.

Such stuff doesn’t go innocently unremarked, and the resultant scorn which I regularly read is part of a tide of reaction against recent Church trends that encompasses both ordinary laypeople and clerical figures as varied as Marcus Walker, recalcitrant rector of Great St Bart’s, and Giles Fraser of Radio 4, sorry, Lambeth. Tangled up with simple distress at the invading jargonisation are a range of other concerns: the Church’s ham-fisted response to the epidemic, and the slash-and-burn approach the authorities are taking to ‘reform’ in the Diocese of Chelmsford, where 61 parish clergy are being disposed of while the Diocese appoints its first CEO. It’s a strategy Chelmsford's former bishop and now Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell seems to be taking to the national level, whereas once he wrote innocent little books about how to pray during Advent and that sort of thing: the parishes tremble as well as fulminate.

Sometimes the criticisms are a bit unfair. Fr Walker picks on Southwark Diocese’s ‘Director of Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation’; it is, to be sure, a ridiculous title, but the role seems to correspond fairly closely to Guildford’s former Director for Social Responsibility – a term which has instead a very 1980s stamp to it – and at least one member of the Southwark team, the one responsible for environmental issues, only works a single day a week. I may have expressed some annoyance when silliness surfaces in Guildford, but the truth is that out in the parishes we do occasionally want a bit of help when an issue pops up that we may not be that familiar with: we need someone at Diocesan House to give us some advice. In fact, rather than sacrificing parish clergy at the altar of resources, it’s just those people Guildford has got rid of, and it no longer has a Board of Social Responsibility. Even the Mission & Parish Enabling Department don’t seem that au fait with the kind of techy matters I’d often like assistance with. Reading back, the Guildford 'Transforming Church, Transforming Lives' strategy even sounds fluffless and realistic compared to some of the stuff that's about, perhaps because it's five years old now.

There is a hideous truth underlying the financial squeeze on the Church which the pandemic is likely to make much worse, and it's that, however painful Christians may have found it to be unable to meet together to worship, secular society has got on pretty well without us. A friend-of-a-friend commented on LiberFaciorum that the pandemic was just the wrong time for priests to become invisible: his father would have knocked on every door in the parish to check that people were all right. Had he done so in Swanvale Halt, I fear, he would have found either that they were, or whatever they needed he could do little about. Within hours of the lockdown in March we had a range of community action groups springing up: it took mere days for the Council to adopt and incorporate them into the official structure, and I quickly realised that the most efficient way of managing anyone who wanted ‘to help’ was to point them in that direction. Our congregation has about half-a-dozen able-bodied people to give lifts, and no money. If I come across anyone in actual need, the money comes from me. My church has lost a quarter of its income as lettings have stopped, and my stipend subsidises it even more than it did before. Most of the modest and gentle ways in which the church can support people (and, not forgetting how important it is, make contact with souls to introduce to God) are impossible in situations where we can’t meet, hold hands, and offer tea. The biggest problem the parish’s families face is managing children at home, which I can’t solve; the most regular complaint I seem to have from vulnerable older people is ‘My carers are trying to kill me’, and I can’t help that either, because they're not. Whatever may be happening elsewhere, this Christian community is not a powerhouse of action: it can’t be. The bell rings and the prayers are said and the Mass is offered but it’s a fond delusion to imagine that – except in the hidden, spiritual realm – the Church is anything other than marginal to the lives of most of the parish’s people.

You have to face this. I suspect that the heightened language the dioceses are increasingly using to describe their posts is a form of hysteria, a way of not facing it: because the things we believe pull our imaginations, rightly, into the realm of glory, we pull that vision into job descriptions and policy documents because what is actually happening to us is so uncomforting. And in our hearts we know it, we know that all this stuff is soul-sick and will not work.

Last night Lillian the ex-lay-reader was taken to hospital with blurred vision. She has, thankfully, not had a stroke or developed a brain tumour: she has nasal polyps which can be fairly easily removed. Sandra the Messy Church leader prayed for her and the next thing she knew by pure chance it was her own daughter who was caring for Lillian at the hospital. I think of the smiles and prayers of the laypeople of Swanvale Halt, and the children running on the pavements, and I look forward, oh how I look forward, to the time when I can bow with them before God once more as he comes in bread and wine.

Still Working Remotely for Now

 

Tuesday was Candlemas Day, which we would normally celebrate at Swanvale Halt by blessing candles and having a candlelit procession around the church. None of that this year, of course, but I live-streamed a short devotion for the day with lots of candles and the Office Hymn 'Quod Chorus Vatum' which I had spent well over an hour on Sunday practising having been aware I was getting it wrong for ten years. I did get it right; after the first stanza, anyway, which was all over the place.

Later in the evening the PCC convened to consider whether to reopen for public worship. The COVID infection rates in the seven statistical output areas around Hornington had fallen from over 500 per 100,000 people when we closed to 139 the day before, and the vaccination programme advances apace here as everywhere. However people had obviously been a little unsettled by the stories of mass-testing for the new version of the virus in Woking, and while the figures dropped suddenly in the middle of January for the last week the decline has been very slow. Seeing how readily the rates go up and down we were far from confident that further deceleration was inevitable and so decided, in the end, to keep public worship suspended for at least another fortnight. Not everyone is happy, but I feel more content.

Sitting Targets

You can’t see much on this photograph, but that’s the point, or the fishes’ point. A couple of weeks ago I noticed one of the fish lying on its own in a little gully next to a clump of reed which is where they tend to go when poorly. I popped it into the quarantine tank and thought it looked bloated, which is never a good sign – dropsy is often fatal in fish, as it means they’re retaining water because of their kidneys not working properly. Well, my fish hadn’t yet reached the stage of porcupining (when its scales stand out from the body as seen from above) and over the next few days, while it clearly wasn’t happy, it looked a bit less like a bream and more like a common goldfish again. More time in the tank didn’t change its sluggish and lethargic habits so eventually, with no clear sign of illness, I thought there was no reason not to replace it in the pond.

And that’s now where it is. Its sluggishness is, in fact, shared by the other fish: pond goldfish don’t ‘hibernate’ as such but they do slow down and stop eating apart from the occasional slurp of algae from the side of the pond. They also head for the warmest part of the pond, which in my case is under the pump. There’s just about enough room for all four, though you can sometimes see them jostling for space around the bricks which hold the pump up, including the fish that was poorly. I did read one online account from a koi keeper who described his winter-torpid fish lined up together 'like sardines in a tin', which struck me as a slightly insensitive analogy.

It is in fact just as well they are hiding: the other day I chased off a heron eyeing them with evil intent.