Dramatic Chromatic

There is no reason to share this photograph of our amazing and towering rhododendron bush in the church grounds other than its beauty, dramatically placed against a perfect blue sky yesterday. Of course the splendid weather comes with a slight tremor of worry at yet another near record-breaking temperature (though not quite), but put that to one side and enjoy the stunning sight.

The Royal Banners Forward Go Albeit Not Very Far

It may not look like it from this snapshot but there were nearly 60 souls (living ones) at our Palm Sunday mass this morning as we resumed public worship for the first time since mid-January, which is not far off capacity at the moment. We had a smattering of refugees from Tophill who are not yet open and a handful of newcomers to the parish trying us out for the first time - not sure Palm Sunday is the most representative occasion to do it! - so we may not be as full again but I have asked people to book in for the main service on Easter Day so we will see what happens. No Palm Sunday procession this year and no full-scale reading of the Passion: it was just me and Marion. At one point I lost concentration and carried on into her next line, but we recovered. I was going to preach a tiny, tiny sermon, but in the end decided not to; I think rightly, as you can see the whole service took fifty minutes what with that long Passion reading, and that's right at the top end of what I think is advisable at the moment. Our Holy Week diet includes some remote worship and some in-person stuff and everything that is normally done, will be done - if in a somewhat truncated form. No champagne and pain-au-chocolat on Easter Day but there's always next year, we pray.

Fieldwork

South of Hornington is Toslam Farm. I hadn't walked the footpaths that lead across the farmland in several years; when I first arrived in the area there was some controversy over the planning permission for Toslam Farm's polytunnels, and now there are hundreds of acres of them. The farm produces soft fruits - raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries - on a vast scale. Possibly smarting a bit from the criticism it endured a decade and more ago, the company that runs it has opened its own footpaths leading across the land to add to the public ones, and positively encourages people to wander.

So this was where I was walking on Thursday: it's a strange, somewhat bleak landscape in the early Spring, with stretching rows of budding plants and flapping polytunnels that need a bit of repair before things get going in a couple of months. The time will come when these fields are busy with work, but barely a human being is to be seen at the moment.

As I walked through the rows of plants just coming into bud I saw these little slips with QR codes stuck on the poles. My first thought was that the names were varieties of whatever-it-was the plants were, and then I realised they referred to the workers and that the slips are something to do with crop checking or harvesting.

Farming has always been hard work but this environment is a new kind of hard and I admire the people who work in it. Spare a thought for Marilena, Emiliya, Akile, and all the others whose names I read pasted on the poles.

Avian Friends

There are no special treats for the birds in my garden. It's always seemed perverse to me to strafe your lawn and borders with pesticides and then put out specially-grown nuts for the birds when, left to its own devices, a garden - particularly one like mine! - should provide enough to sustain a reasonable community of feathery visitors. So my avian fauna aren't usually very diverse. But just over the last couple of days in addition to the great tits, blue tits and shouty robins I've seen goldfinches where they have never been before and, today, what seemed to be a blackcap in the distance. 

And the leucistic blackbird has reappeared! Below is an old photo as I wasn't organised enough to snap it. Blackbirds don't live more than a few years so every time it's absent for a while I wonder whether it's still around. But not only did it reappear, it was scrapping with another leucistic blackbird: the one I'm familiar with has a white patch at its shoulder, whereas the newcomer sported white tail feathers and a patch along its side. Which raises the question of the levels of leucism in the bird population: are they increasing? What are the chances of two birds of the same species with the same mutation turning up in the same garden?

Looking at it Again

There is some evidence that people did come into the church to mark the National Day of Reflection, a year after the Prime Minister loomed into view on our television screens (not having a TV, I was spared this particular trial) and told us all to stay indoors. Candles were lit and some prayer sheets disappeared. But nobody was there when I ran down the hill to ring the bell for the noon act of remembrance, and then ran back again for a consultation with my spiritual director. Most of the first part of the conversation consisted of him relating how many chasubles they’d managed to find in the drawers at St Mary Bourne Street. ‘I do my best to distract you, as I think this helps’, he said, before adding how he was recently slated to appear at a Zoom-facilitated book launch and, summarising the contributions of the other contributors, was stumbling with slight anxiety at the format of the whole thing when to his horror he noticed Rowan Williams’s face appear at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen: ‘Yet another of my Rowan Williams moments’.

As we spoke I remembered getting used to Rick the Verger turning up for Morning Prayer again. One morning just after he resurfaced I was a bit late and as I crossed the road he began ringing the bell. My first instinct was to regard it almost as a personal reproach before I realised this was ridiculous: he was being helpful and my reaction was really a result of surprise. I am now doing my best not to immediately think everything is a reflection on me: it’s a common sort of paranoia, but neurotic nonetheless.

That was a bit of a shift in perception, when it happened. In the same vein, I was thinking yesterday about vaccine provision. Some of my left-er friends advocate the suspension of patents to increase the supply of vaccines worldwide, especially to the poorer nations. I wondered why I was sceptical about this without knowing much about it. Mr Johnson characterised the vaccine developments as a triumph of private enterprise, but it’s not clear it would have been so triumphant without the colossal sums of public money that have been poured into the research, so you can argue that either way. Thinking about my own reaction, I realised it was really a sort of intellectual inertia: this system has come up with the goods, so the argument that removing the keystone of the system – competition between private businesses – would be dangerous the next time we hit a pandemic sounded reasonable. But our experience is full of examples of publicly-funded bodies whose staff work just as hard for the public good as private businesses do, so this is hardly a knock-down argument. In any case, a market economy is good at coming up with solutions to problems, but sometimes needs to be told what problems to work on. When I was researching the history of High Wycombe one of the surprises I uncovered was the role of government in shifting the town’s industrial base during WW2 by moving furniture factories over to making munitions, relocating engineering companies from London, amalgamating small, less efficient businesses and refitting antiquated factories. It did the local economy a power of good and if anyone complained that it was socialism there was no trace of it in what I read. Another sort of shift in perception.

Finding Your Place

NB. I discover I'd only saved this post as a draft, not published it!

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The PCC decided on Friday to resume public worship on Palm Sunday, a week today. When I did the newsletter delivery round that morning everyone I spoke to asked me when the church was reopening: one of our most faithful members positively begged me. ‘I need to be back in church!’ So I am working out how to celebrate the Triduum in a curtailed and Covid-compliant form: there won’t be a procession on Palm Sunday, and the Easter Vigil will be done by just me and Julie the sacristan and recorded. But there will be live-streamed Compline, and an Easter Messy Church via Zoom, and I will need to work out how (and whether) to do the Passion Service for families on Good Friday. There’ll be a booking system for the Easter services, as there was for Christmas though I will be very encouraged if we turn out to need it!

It strikes even me as contextually incongruous, this antique formulation of what I do, but in fact, the more I considered what to put on the census form today, the more it seemed like a reasonable and accurate summary. It would have been more pious to put something about Jesus, but harder to encapsulate in 120 characters or less. This is both open and precise, even if, to all intents and purposes, the bishop doesn’t take an obviously close interest in his share of the cure of souls here. It is, still, not a bad place to find oneself – physically and metaphorically.

Journeys in Anglo-Catholicism

My current dilatory researches into Guildford Anglo-Catholicism led me to this snippet of footage from the 1920 Anglo-Catholic Congress in London, which I’d somehow never seen before. There’s a splendid parade of mitres on show here, not least the gigantic cranial rocket sported by Bishop Mowbray O’Rorke, visible a second or two from the end.

The hardline Anglo-Papalists held somewhat aloof even from the Congresses of the 1920s and 1930s, which were never quite extreme enough for them. ‘Modernism is the problem, Rome is the remedy’, they were once fond of saying. I never really felt that, and while the Papalists’ concerns for Union with Rome is now read as a sort of ecumenism, which it wasn’t, so many of their hopes and fears seem a long, long way in the past now.

So do a lot of my own early enthusiasms. I was led to my conversion by the imagery and spirituality of the Middle Ages (among other things) and so it was the version of Anglo-Catholicism that stressed the Church of England’s continuity with its medieval identity that captured my imagination. While reading up on holy wells years and years ago I came across Fr Herbert Dale’s history of St Leonard’s, Hythe, whose chapter on the Reformation is titled ‘The Schism of the Romanists’, as though it was the Catholic Church that broke away from the CofE rather than the other way around. I was not so far gone as not to see the humour in that, but there was a naughty part of me that found it rather thrilling.

It was somewhat to my surprise that I ended up concluding while I was at Lamford that Roman vestments and birettas were rather smart. Il Rettore insisted I would soon get fed up with trad-albs and amices, but I haven’t and now regard them as a way of maintaining my faltering links with the trad-Catholics who are my friends.

The links – not so much with my friends, but with trad-Anglo-Catholicism – falter because I care remarkably little about the things I used to, and the things that animated earlier generations of my spiritual forebears. Authority was what haunted them, and what drove Newman towards his own crossing the Tiber: the search for certainty and security, something that might be conceived in intellectual terms, but which is rooted deeper in the human soul. I have spent my time in Christian communities which have come from traditional Anglo-Catholicism, but which have long ceased to understand it beyond a certain sort of worship that they know they prefer to others, and in the process of trying to interpret and explain things that people no longer understand, to translate Catholicism into terms that they can grasp, the instinctive appeal of authority and continuity has faded far into the background. What is authority in a Christian body for? What is the worth of continuity? I eventually decided that the point is not to defend an ancient deposit of ‘faith once delivered to the saints’, because it is clear enough – as even Newman concluded once he’d been a Roman Catholic a while – that we grow towards understanding God, not begin with an eternal understanding which we are constantly in danger of losing and which only the right structures can defend. It is instead about community, about maintaining the conditions for the discernment of God’s will and the training of souls in holiness to take place.

The business of actually living in a Christian community with its struggles and joys brings other priorities. Living the spiritual life seems to have little to do with who consecrated your bishop: the real meat of Christian existence is prayer, service, charity and holiness, the work of the Spirit. The Spirit flows through the Body of Christ like electricity, and he doesn’t seem to need particular patterns of wiring in order to work: he can act in the unlikeliest of places. Like the Spirit, God’s absolute and final self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth is ultimately independent of our ecclesial structures.

But not completely separate from them. I remain enough of a Catholic to remember that it was the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church that established the canon of Scripture; that developed its life of prayer and worship; that leads it into all truth. These things have to be done in community, in fellowship with the Body of Christ: we interpret them together, we develop interpretations of what we do together. Anything that disturbs this fellowship is a danger, and schism is a terrible sin. But it is primarily a sin against charity rather than truth, and while it stands the risk of obscuring our sight of God, it never quite hides it, and he works to re-establish it.

My differences with my Church are well-rehearsed enough, but along with seeing its own failings I see more clearly those of its rivals. Though I may sniff at the sayings and doings of the Primate of All England, I have never been so far away from breaking communion with him!

Jabbed

Well, since you ask, so far all I feel is a little bit thick-headed but that could be due to a variety of causes. Mind you, it hasn't quite been twelve hours since I attended for my first vaccination, and there is plenty of time yet for some symptoms to kick in. 

The theatre in Guildford, adapted for the purpose, was impressively well-organised, the volunteers and staff thoroughly drilled in what they had to say but with the air of people who were buoyed through what otherwise might have been a boringly repetitious experience by the knowledge that they were making a difference. In fact, it struck me that there might have been slightly more there than strictly necessary, but at least you knew that you were never going to get lost and end up wandering around the wrong side of the building as you were never more than about twenty yards away from someone in a hi-vis jacket, smiling behind a face mask. Given my enviable ability, proven over long years, to misinterpret signs and instructions, this was probably all to the good.

I only know one vaccine-sceptic among my acquaintance, a warm-hearted gentleman I met through Ms DarkMorte and who believes - in so far as I understand what he believes - that the provision of vaccines is part of a long-laid and determined scheme by governments and tech companies to control our lives. He doesn't doubt that covid-19 is real, as he has had it himself, but is adamant that we are better off fighting it naturally rather than handing our futures over to those who mean us no good. He has sent me a link to a video on Youtube which I am reluctant to click on as it will be something that at first sounds reasonable until you check and realise where it's coming from. A few months ago it was the former Pfizer employee Michael Yeadon and his long-discredited arguments that the pandemic was over, that herd immunity had been achieved naturally and that there was no need for vaccines; now it's a personable young New Zealand doctor who rubbishes everything you think you know in great detail, and you find yourself rubbing your chin in doubt until you follow up the independent UK news website she recommends and discover it's a far-right fantasy network with links to Infowars in the States. 

It all sounds like it's driven by not wanting to accept the patent truth, and hunting round until you find the evidence that justifies the decision you made long before. It's a little different from such lockdown-sceptics as Lord Sumption who simply maintain that the damage done to our lives by measures taken against the pandemic is worse than a few hundred thousand people dying, and who am I to disagree because there is no answer to the point, as I wrote nearly a year ago. 

I rather wanted to be a lockdown-sceptic: not in the sense of believing that they don't work (how can reducing contact between human beings not reduce the impact of a disease that spreads by human contact?), but wanting to think the one here hadn't. For a short period in the late Spring of 2020 it looked from the figures as though that might have been the case, but it clearly wasn't, and I faced the fact that my scepticism, in this instance, was driven more by what I would have preferred to be true rather than what obviously was, and so I had to discard it. There's no suppressed truth, no great thing that we could have done, no secrets, no hidden agendas. Certainly there are people making the monetary best out of the conditions we all labour under, but such profiteering is pretty open, and always happens. No alternative story. There is only this, and getting through it as best we can.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: 'Prix de Beauté' (1930)

According to the film’s director Augusto Genina, star Louise Brooks mostly spent the time making Prix de Beauté drunk. If so, it doesn’t show, and even at the time (he maintained) the crew marvelled at the fact that she could look so good given that her cure for a hangover was three swigs of gin. Brooks moves luminously through an awkward, neither flesh-nor-fowl movie: her character’s name is Lucienne, but the first time she’s addressed she’s called Lulu, the sacrificial victim she played in Pandora’s Box the year before. Genina was enspelled by her smile, and in the finished result we can see why. 

In so far as what we get is the finished result. It’s a strange, transitional film, made in 1930 as the new sound technology was stamping and smashing its way through the movie industry, and was intended to be shown in both a silent and a sound version depending on what equipment any particular theatre had available. I saw the latter, which is – I think it’s not unfair to use the word – disfigured not only by the badly post-synchronised sound but also by a score which is so mismatched to the action it feels as though composer Wilhelm Zeller must have written it without actually watching the movie. In the early 2000s a silent version was reconstructed using an Italian silent print and a French sound one, and that – apparently, it’s only ever been seen at festivals – rearranges the scenes as well as introducing some elements which aren’t there in the relatively accessible sound version. That suggests that perhaps what I saw has been mucked about with a bit.

What remains is intermittently beautiful, and not just because of Brooks’ preternatural loveliness, but because of the use of light, the naturalism, and the still-silent-style supremacy of the visual image. It concludes, famously, with Lucienne dying in a screening room, her profile filling the bottom of the frame while her recorded self carries on singing above, an unforgettable and justly renowned image. But while Brooks fans try to rave about Prix de Beauté, the jealous-husband-kills-runaway-beauty-queen story is quite silly, even if the treatment, however mangled from what it might have been, raises it above the level the narrative warrants. And even then it doesn’t always succeed: close to the beginning Lucienne sings ‘Je n’ai qu’un amour, c’est toi’ on the beach to sullen beau André in a most unlikely fashion, a weird intrusion into a naturalistic scene (there was a tale that Edith Piaf did the voice-over, and one reviewer on imdb.com states ‘I recognised the unmistakable voice of Josephine Baker’; in fact it belonged to a barely-known singer called Hélène Caron, who recorded the song).

But I find the power of the film is something that Brooks’s beauty only heightens. When André murders Lucienne, it’s just the culmination of the misogyny and male violence that swirls around her from the film’s start: as she’s lusted over by André’s colleague Antonin and their friends on the beach; as she parades around at the beauty contest; as her image is passed along a row of newspaper editors; as she’s jostled and manhandled at a fair while men stuff their faces and test their strength, and Antonin wanders off to molest a girl in a skimpy costume advertising a peepshow, who knows she can’t move and whose look of suppressed disgust is perhaps the best performance in the film; as she dies watching herself on a screen, surrounded by rich men who have bought her. Her look of rapture at her own image becomes pitiful, and not just because she doesn't know her murderer is watching too: her only choice in life, it seems, lies between the domestic drudgery and imprisonment André offers her, and the more glamorous captivity, the furs and jewellery paid for by the moguls and aristocrats who, you know full well, will discard her one day. I don’t know how much of this was really in the minds of the movie-makers in 1930, but here in 2021, Prix de Beauté seems to be not only a film for our time, but even for our week.

Easy Enough In Theory

"Shall we give out flowers for Mothering Sunday like usual?" Rick the verger asked. I reckoned we couldn't do it in person, as he wanted to, but there would be no problem with having a tray of posies outside the church. Jill who usually coordinates them was willing to make them ("it'll give me something to do") so that was all under control, wasn't it.

I thought there ought to be a little prayer slip to go with them and knocked one up. I got to the church this evening ready to sort them all out and found that the posies - well, weren't quite what I envisaged. Materials seemed to have been a bit limited. But for no very apparent reason there was an unused bunch of supermarket tulips so I reduced the number of posies, made use of the tulips, and got some more greenery from the church garden to bolster them a bit. 

If the posies were to be left in water overnight, the little prayer slips might get damp. They would be better laminated. Within five minutes I had broken the laminator and even with the aid of the only, very small and awkward, Phillips screwdriver to open it up, there was no rescuing it. Argos is not far away but this was turning into as unexpectedly costly a venture as it was a time-consuming one. The whole episode ended up taking about three hours rather than the one I anticipated. Mighty works for Jesus, as Fr Gooley would say, or something like that.

Wedding in the Garden

The Young Lord Declan and Lady Minster were married twice. The first occasion was a mildly pagan handfasting ceremony some time before the civil marriage I took part in – just to do a reading. They have always regarded the first event, which of course had no legal status at all, as their ‘real wedding’.

Since the news came out of what the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did in a garden with the Archbishop of Canterbury, my priest friend Cara at Emwood has already had two couples ask whether they can do what they did, which they can’t; or at least that can’t be their ‘real wedding’. I carry no great brief for Justin Welby, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be him in that situation. The Area Dean of Paddington posted on Fr Thesis’s blog a very severe and definite account of why what the Primate had done was dreadful, but I can’t see very many couples we might deal with being able to grasp what he’s on about and why this event has opened a very smelly can of worms. In fact, I doubt most modern people will even be able to see the worms. At root what we have here is a clash between the individualism which characterises the modern world and the inclusive, objective account of human identity embedded in Christian thinking.

Why shouldn’t a couple devise their own vows? In fact, it became clear as a result of a discussion on LiberFaciorum that many people think they do, and that led me to recall a radio comedy where an Anglican vicar character described exactly that happening. Isn’t it all about the couple, and their happiness, and what they mean to each other?

Theologically, the couple are indeed 'the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony' in a Christian marriage, i.e. they do it to each other. But that doesn't mean they can do and say anything they like, any more than as the minister of baptism or communion I can make up my own ceremonies; when I do those, I speak for the whole Christian Church across the globe and two thousand years. I can only do what the Church does, or my acts have no real meaning. If I do something else, it's not the sacrament, and the Church has done hundreds of years of thinking about how far I can stretch the boundaries of one of these acts before it stops being what it is supposed to be - a human event that expresses and enacts the saving work of God in time.

Just as you can't make up your own vows in an Anglican wedding, you can't have a 'private wedding' in the sense that nobody else apart from a clergyperson is there. The whole human community is involved in a couple vowing to serve, honour and be faithful to each other, which why the witnesses are present: they don't just have a legal function, but a theological one too. They represent humanity.

Finally, when the couple use the words that millions of people have used before them, and will use afterwards, they are becoming part of something bigger than they are - the whole history of the human race, and (in Christian terms) of God's interaction with it, written into their specific relationship. When in the Orthodox marriage rite the couple are called 'the king and queen of all creation' it isn't just a nice phrase, it means what they are doing has an eternal and cosmic significance, way beyond themselves. Ultimately, your individual identity, even your identity as two individuals, is less important than what you are becoming, recipients and ministers of divine grace through being married.

I suspect that for most modern people, an individually-tailored marriage sounds more meaningful because it’s about the couple; in Christian understanding, the words that everyone says, and the things that everyone does, are more meaningful because it’s about the divine story, because our small human identities, struggles and joys are assumed into the great framing narrative of creation: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Can we really expect anyone outside to grasp this?

Perhaps there’s something in them that still responds, though. Although Christianity bolts us into the story of the Christ, every religion points individuals to something bigger, connects them to something beyond themselves: it would be a poor religion that did not. For pagans it means the pattern of the seasons, the rhythm of the earth, the soaring cycle of the heavens. Lord Declan and Lady Minster couldn’t bring any of that into their civil ceremony, not even a reference to its being Imbolc that day; so their more individual handfasting was in fact a more inclusive, collective event too (and it wasn’t something they did alone, either). It was, maybe, a bit closer to the Christian than they imagined.

Richard Harris Barham: A Gothic Tale

Next on my bookshelf, and not even yet finished (far from it! it will entertain me a while yet) was my creaky old copy of The Ingoldsby Legends, a book once much better-known. I think I bought it subsequent to discovering its author. Back in 2008 I led a London Goth Walk about the City churches, kicking off at St Paul’s Cathedral, where, I had discovered, one mid-19^th-century canon had been, in his day, a famous writer of ghost stories. The urbane Revd Richard Harris Barham had grown up in Kent and incorporated elements of the county’s folklore into his stories and poems, published from 1837 onwards in Bentley’s Miscellany. They were extraordinarily popular, and carried on being popular when gathered into volumes of their own. Once upon a time, everyone knew the Ingoldsby Legends.

Barham beckoned his readers into a world slightly askew to our own: he wrote as Thomas Ingoldsby, and created an entire fictional family history of the Ingoldsbies which, very neatly, emerges only in fragments, centred on the hereditary seat of Tappington where the Barhams were based in real life. Villages and towns were real enough and even though, as the writer teasingly admitted, there was the odd anachronism in his renderings of what he insisted were genuine tales from the past, his pastiche fantasies were composed from convincing materials. The fun mainly comes from the fact that Barham is parodying the Gothic fiction of a generation or two before, and pulling off the feat of making it ridiculous and atmospheric at the same time: you can read Ingoldsby and both shudder and laugh several times in a page. For a 19^th-century priest Barham can be surprisingly risqué, as when he describes the denizens of Tappington Hall being turned out of their beds by mysterious nocturnal goings-on, and notes that a footman and a maid ‘cause a minor scandal/by appearing with a single candle’. And that brings us to his outrageous rhymes which must have caused him as much amusement as they do us.

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are more humorous than often credited, though in a different vein to Barham’s; he got going a few years earlier, and I wonder what connection there might have been between the two. We know that Barham owned a volume of Bentley’s Miscellany from 1840 which contained both one of his own ballads (‘Bloudie Jack of Shrewsbury’) and the first British appearance of two narratives of Poe’s – ‘The Duc de l’Omelette’ and, wonderfully, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, both illicitly printed by Richard Bentley without the slightest reference to their author. This book carries one of Barham’s bookplates, including his slightly weird coat of arms that incorporates a cardinal’s hat: at St Paul’s, he was one of the Cardinal Canons.

Not long after buying my copy, an adaptation of The Ingoldsby Legends appeared on Radio 4, written by Robin Brooks. It starts with a woman visiting Tappington Hall in search of the Revd Barham to find the source of his stories: the man who greets her takes her to look for him, while relating some of the tales he can remember. He is, of course, the author himself, and his teasing fits in well with the fun-poking quality of the work. But gradually over the course of ten episodes the tone darkens. Where is Barham’s family? Why is the church bare and empty so close to Christmas? What gave rise to his interest in ‘dismemberment and devilry’ and who is the woman? Mr Brooks noticed that there is one narrative in Ingoldsby which stands out strangely and uncomfortably. The other pieces are often silly – a ghost that steals trousers and an errant husband chased over a moor by a haunted grandfather clock – while remaining macabre and ghoulish. But ‘A Singular Passage in the Life of Henry Harris DD’ is different: alone among the several dozen pieces it has no leavening element of humour.

It relates the account of a clergyman who is called to the bedside of a gravely sick young woman, whose student fiancé has left for the University of Leyden, and who insists she is the victim of some devilry: twice she has been dragged in spirit to a mysterious room where two young men are carrying out occult rituals, and there she is made to participate in something she will not define any further than to express her shame. The good Dr Harris reflects that his own grandson is a student at Leyden and ponders whether he knows the mysterious fiancé. Well, you can work that out. No good comes of it all, and the story is told without any of the amusing atmospherics of the rest of the Legends: it is unrelievedly grim. It was also originally published not in Bentley’s but in Blackwood’s Magazine, somewhat earlier than the other stories, in 1831, before even Poe really got going in the genre.

In the radio adaptation, the woman knows that there’s something wrong with ‘A Singular Passage’, and wonders whether it is not told as a confession, a sideways penance for something the author has done in his youth. ‘This is your story, isn’t it?’ she accuses him, ‘You tell it from first hand’. ‘Not all stories are jokes’, he admits. She points out his sister’s death at the same age as the young woman in the tale, and other aspects of his background he might have preferred to keep quiet. This is of course just a fancy, like the Legends themselves: the story is not that far from Blackwood’s usual sensational fare, after all. But it piques our taste to speculate whether, like that other clerical teller of Gothic tales Montague Summers, Richard Harris Barham might not have had something to regret.

The Menace of the Border

This monstrous being, dominating its region of the border of my garden along the old wall, is a pampas grass. I ought to have known before, as it's common enough, but I I asked my gardener friend Ms Quercus to identify it for me. To call it 'grass' seems inappropriate: no element of it coincides with one's (British) vision of what grass normally is. I don't clearly remember having done anything to this plant since I arrived here more than ten years ago, though I may have moderately restrained its insistent encroachments on the path once. 

So over the last couple of days I've attempted to tackle it as the RHS suggests, removing the dead flowers and 'combing out' the dry leaves. You'd need quite a comb: even the rake isn't really up to it, and I found I needed to employ my favourite garden implement of all time, the billhook. Under the upper layers of fresh green growth were columns of curling, dry, and ultimately, when you got deeper, rotting vegetation well on the way to becoming compost: that needed to be pulled out. That done and the pampas reduced to the bits of it that were actually alive, I cut some of it back. We finished the process with the shrub's appearance much improved, but I didn't get away unscathed: pampas's razor-like leaves are designed to inflict damage on predators, and my interaction with this one resulted in wrists that looked like I'd had a desperate episode of self-harm and a cut on my forehead when a stray leaf had slapped me like a Triffid.

Worryingly, there is an urban legend that the plant used to be installed as a signal that the householders were into swinging. I don't want to imagine which of my predecessors might have thought along those lines, but if they did they would only have had about three sets of neighbours along one side to choose from. 

It Really Is St Catherine's Well

Only able to visit places I can comfortably walk or cycle to (and at present nowhere is comfortable to cycle to) I've found myself going more often along the canal to St Catherine's Chapel south of Guildford, with its allegedly holy spring at the foot of the hill on which the chapel sits, a place which never fails to soothe and elevate my spirits. You may remember that nearly a year ago a landslip on the nearby railway line revealed another feature of the sacred landscape of St Catherine's Hill, a tiny shrine carved into the perilously soft sandstone, most of which had probably been destroyed when the railway went through in the 1840s. 

The organisation which carried out the investigation, UCL's Archaeology Southeast, recently posted a video on Youtube describing the site and its context (I am far from convinced about the apparently very settled boundaries of early Anglo-Saxon petty statelets, but we can let that go).  And in the course of it Dr Michael Shapland happens to mention St Catherine's Fountain, referred to, he says, in the 15th century. 

Now, the spring was long reputed to cure sore eyes and in the late 19^th century was drunk by children with sugar, as elsewhere. It’s clearly been turned into a picturesque feature at some stage, possibly in the 1800s, with the addition of a tiny stone bridge over the stream leading to a stone seat. As Jeremy Harte mentions in English Holy Wells (p.417), the earliest references to this site don’t give it a name any more specific than ‘Artington Spring’, and only in the 1920s is there any suggestion that it had any holy properties. It appears in a list of ‘holy wells in Surrey’ in Folk-Lore in 1952, but still without the name it definitely had acquired by the 1990s. 

Dr Shapland confirmed to me that the document in which the well is mentioned is an addendum to a grant of 1328 confirming the church of St Nicolas, Guildford’s ownership of the hilltop: the addendum lists the boundaries of the land in question, including the well. The document’s in the Surrey History Centre.

This is extremely interesting for three reasons! 

1. It shows that a late antiquarian or romantic guess that a well had a saint’s name can well be right.

2. It makes this is the earliest-attested well-dedication to St Catherine in England. There’s one in Exeter said by a Victorian author to appear in ‘ancient writings’, but we don’t know what they might be; and there are St Catherine’s Wells associated with chapels which are clearly medieval, but for which there is no documentary evidence.

3. It adds a holy well convincingly to a complex, layered ritual site, and opens up new questions about the chronology of St Catherine’s Hill. Dr Shapland also quotes the dedication of the chapel in 1329 by Bishop John de Stratford of Winchester which makes clear that the hill was already a site of popular devotion and ‘miracles’: this is precisely why the chapel is being built there. I think this suggests that the well would have been the focus of whatever miracles might have been taking place before the chapel was constructed; certainly there’s no other likely feature on the hill.

All in all, impressive for something we thought was just the result of early twentieth-century speculation!

Mobile Funds

A former parishioner with whom I Zoom from time to time makes mobiles as a hobby. We agree that the appeal of mobiles is that they're completely superfluous and innocent. There's something childlike and contemplative about them, probably because we think of them as things that hang over babies' cots. Mind you, he made one at a very dark time that was composed of black bats-wing shapes and spikes, and that was far from restful: very Gawth.

He was inspired to start by the mobiles of Alexander Calder and decided to see how much they cost. He saw one up for auction at $18K: that's ok, he thought, I'm not going to buy one, but it's not *impossible*. Then he realised he'd missed the decimal point and the work in question was on sale for $18*M*.

(I know this is nothing much as a post, but it was that or 'Vestments of Ebay'. It's quiet)

Telling People What To Think

I'm cheating a bit today, for the sake of time, by just copying-and-pasting my think-piece for the parish newspaper - but it encapsulates some things that have been going through my mind lately. I was set thinking about this not just by events in the world as a whole, but also by reading Tom Wright's How God Became King which points out, inter alia, that the preferred political form in the Holy Scriptures is not representative government in any shape or form, but a theocratic monarchy, something which I might consider again.

"The church is closed for public worship at the moment; the PCC (the church council) has met a couple of times to consider what to do and as I write we have so far decided to wait until the public health situation is clearer before reopening. Back in March last year and then again in November the Government told places of worship to close, but this time it’s been our decision to take (though I would rather it wasn’t).

"There are churches that have stayed doggedly open as long as they have been able to, and are quite proud of having done so. A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who looks after a church in another part of the country that hasn’t shut. He saw it as a matter of principle and there hadn’t been any discussion about it. ‘We’re not a democracy!’ he told me.

"People often like being told what to do by someone who seems authoritative and confident – provided either that they’re being told to do what they agreed with anyway, or don’t have any strong feelings about the matter in question. The problem with democracy is that you don’t get everything you want, or when you want it. It requires negotiation and compromise, and recognising that the people you may disagree with aren’t simply going to go away: they’re always going to be there, and will probably always see things differently from you. Most of the time democracy is dull and undramatic, which is why every society, even ones where democratic systems have been in place for a long time, can head away from it surprisingly quickly. The trouble with handing over your public decision-making to a charismatic individual or group is that it starts to corrupt the things that protect our well-being. Accountability disappears. The powerful get greater scope to enrich themselves and their favourites, and to protect their interests with violence. If this relationship of money and power starts to affect the legal system it’s very dangerous: eventually nobody has any security of property or person. We need to keep remembering this because it’s so easy to forget it and to let it slip.

"Most British Christians are nice, liberal-minded people who will find this easy to agree with, and to imagine that God thinks the same. But, if he does, it’s not because he is a nice, liberal-minded Western person. It’s because he cares about what happens to the poor and the weak (he tells us often enough in the Bible) and a free society is the best protection the poor and the weak have against the powerful and the rich. 

"I recently heard an American historian commenting on the state of democracy in the USA, and the spread of conspiracy theories and strange ideas. He thought a vigorous local media was one of the best protections against these things. Now, this publication doesn’t really deal with news so we’re not a major element in that! But I hope we help, from time to time, with the absolute basis of a free society – exchanging and listening to the experiences of different sorts of people, and understanding the truth about others’ lives rather than the fictions we might otherwise swallow. And that’s certainly what God wants, and is a bit of an adventure, and not boring at all."