Tipping Point

The latest LiberFaciorum post from my friend Jasper, who as I mentioned a little while ago has advanced over the last year from lockdown-scepticism to full-scale covid-conspiracism, includes a Tweet from Dr Zoe Harcombe, alleging that nothing unusual is happening in India at the moment and that reports of covid deaths there are exaggerated by Western media. I don’t know what her expertise in this matter might be, as she is a dietician, and a much-criticised peddler of pseudoscience. But Jasper has reached the point where criticisms of someone’s integrity or expertise by the mainstream of their profession is precisely a reason to accept their opinions: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Not that I expect he’s checked her out.

It's interesting (if depressing) to speculate how individuals make this progress. Once you adopt a very non-mainstream opinion, for which there is, ipso facto, little evidence, you must cast around to find that evidence and before long every little scrap of overinterpreted information has to be pressed into service. The world in general isn’t going to endorse your opinion and you have to come up with an explanation why. As far as covid-sceptics are concerned, the most egregious manifestation of this is their approach to medical professionals. There has to be something that explains why the overwhelming majority of doctors across the world, trained in a wide variety of independent institutions and operating in very different political and professional structures, are all saying the same thing: they must have been brainwashed, or bribed. Following Jasper’s promoted links I have found myself staring on my computer screen at the most extraordinary statements of rage and hate against doctors – as the chief promoters of lies, dangerous medicines, and fake diagnoses and death certificates, it must be infuriating for sceptics to see them taken so seriously by the rest of the population.

Just in case there was any doubt, I do talk to a great number of people from day to day and find little evidence of the situation Jasper believes is prevalent. Most of our congregation, being older folk, have been vaccinated and a great number double-vaccinated, along with people I meet in the Co-Op, the cafes, the school, the streets in general. Nobody has had a reaction worse than a few hours of headaches, while Jasper believes ‘if you don’t end up blind or dead from your vaccine you’ve been lucky’; technically this may be true, but not very lucky as it was never all that likely to happen. He reports that ‘I am overwhelmed with the amount of people I am discovering daily, cowering in their homes, nervous wrecks as a result of the fear inducement in order to get onboard a clinical trial [ie, receive a vaccine]’. I, on the other hand, haven’t heard of a single one. We live in very different worlds, he and I.

Unless you’re going to do a volte-face and admit you were wrong, when contrary evidence grows, the only option is to double down, and that forces you further and further away from the surface. Jasper now seems to be veering off into climate-change scepticism as well, because anything there is a consensus over becomes suspect. It’s a strange alternative world, but a very beguiling one as it provides its residents with a sense of self-worth: look at the photographs of the last anti-lockdown protest in London and you can see a woman with a placard reading ‘We R the ones you failed to fool’. Jasper has been known to make references to sheep and other allegedly unthinking herd animals when describing the rest of us.

Just like the farther reaches of the climate change movement, there are similarities between covid-scepticism and Christianity, or at least the brands of it that take you far away from the worldview of most other people. There, you are also given a sense that you have a privileged insight into the way things really are beneath the apparent reality the herd accepts, but at the same cost. If your insight relies on denying the evidence everyone else accepts, and positing a hidden enemy who directs the deception, you’re inevitably pulled by the same current, forced to interpret everything you see in the light of that denial and polarising the entire world into facts which endorse your view and those which don’t (in short, lies). What a bargain to make.

Bish Mish

Before the webinar on Monday evening, I thought the Archbishop of Canterbury's visit to the Guildford Diocese scheduled for September was merely an opportunity for him to share with his clergy his opinions about cheese (I jest: had that been the case I wouldn't have minded going). But it is not. It is a Mission. It is Welby as John Wesley come among us again. There will be a launch for clergy and selected congregation members followed by a series of local mass meetings to which churches are supposed to bring along souls they have been praying for over preceding months. They will go away, enthused, to take part in enquirers' courses run in the parishes, and at some point in 2022 His Grace will return to confirm all the new Christians this process will produce.

I have, I'm afraid, questions to ask. I am not convinced that Archbishop Welby is as down with the kids as he imagines given what he has said in the past; I have never really conceived of him as someone who communicates easily with the world beyond the Church, but perhaps this is how he pictures himself. Are we sure that this is not the good primate trying, perhaps with some desperation, to make a contribution to the Church he heads and identifying this as a way of doing so - that it is more about bolstering his sense of mission than the Church's? 

Then I recalled the Talking Jesus report which also came out in 2015 and which shocked General Synod with its research suggesting that Christians talking about their faith to non-Christians was more likely to put people off belief rather than attract them. Clearly it wasn't the whole story, but have we actually engaged with it, or have we chosen simply to ignore it? I've never heard it referred to since it was published.

Finally I wish I could reformulate in some way my discomfort at praying for people to come to faith. If I had, say, a Muslim or a pagan friend and discovered that they'd mentally identified me as someone who might convert and were praying about it - or whatever it is a pagan might do - I could well feel a bit differently about that person, no matter how much they might simply be acting in what they thought was my best interests. I do know people who I have had conversations of a spiritual nature with and it might not be completely weird to pray for those enquiries to develop into something more, but such people will have identified themselves rather than being targeted by me. 

Of course we wait to hear more. In the meantime I try to work out what I can conscientiously ask the Swanvale Halt congregation to do.

The Last Wedding (like this)

It's not every wedding where the groom’s outfit gives rise to more comment than the bride’s, but on Saturday Adele’s gear was relatively standard (white dress, veil), while Cal’s included a leather top hat, black brocade jacket and pointy purple patent leather shoes. That wasn’t the only unusual aspect of the proceedings: as well as general covid-compliant considerations we were joined by Cal’s granddad in the form of a small wooden urn containing his ashes, were treated to his stepfather singing 'Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring', concluded the ceremony with 'Fly Me to the Moon', and, as Adele’s family were in sunny California, livestreamed the entire proceedings. For some reason the laptop didn’t recognise the external webcam so we had to make do with the integrated one but at least they saw something. In fact, as I mentioned, Swanvale Halt was probably as sunny as the west coast of the USA that day if probably not as warm.

Because Adele is a US citizen she and Cal had to be married by what is called a Superintendent Registrar’s Certificate, the legal preliminary you use for a church wedding where one or both party is a national of a country outside the EEA. They (ideally) get the agreement of a priest to marry them, then lay their case before the civil registrar who does all the paperwork; they take the said certificate back to the church as proof of permission to marry. Cal and Adele are the first couple I can remember doing this for in sixteen years, so it isn’t all that common though I have advised people marrying at other churches to go down that route. In theory a couple can get a SRC and just turn up at a church asking to be married, but in those circumstances a priest can tell them to swivel and any sensible registrar will want to know they’ve got that sorted out first.

Unless something very unexpected happens, Cal and Adele will also be the last couple to be entered in our marriage registers, because that entire method of marriage registration, in place since 1836, is coming to an end. Finally exasperated at having to harry parish clergy for their data, the civil registrars are now about to begin doing it all themselves. From the start of May, every couple marrying in a church will have a document filled in by the minister which will then be passed to the Registry as the basis for producing their actual marriage certificate. In the first draft of the legislation it was the couple themselves who were to be responsible for doing this: in a rare outbreak of sense which may be their most significant positive contribution to the life of this country in years, the bishops managed to argue that a couple who’d just got married were probably not the best people to arrange this and that even parish clergy were more likely to get it right, or indeed do it at all. There have apparently been some complaints about the inadequacy of the training we’ve been given about this quite serious change in what we do, and there is to be an online seminar in a couple of days’ time, but I didn’t think it was that bad – although I did do an executive summary for Marion the curate’s benefit which may have been a bit clearer. In fact I’d’ve been dismayed if it wasn’t.

Part Vindicated

Estelle is a Teaching Assistant at Swanvale Halt infants school; she has family history with the Post Office and when our sub-postmaster was caught up within the scandal which has finally made headlines a decade after it should have done she first took an interest, then raised a petition, then began working with Nick Wallis, the journalist who has pursued the case as it has made its way through progressively less obscure corners of the media and finally the courts (and who, it turns out, is the son-in-law of one of the Lamford churchwardens - it's a small world!). Estelle was outside the High Court a day ago to hear 39 sub-postmasters have their convictions for fraud and theft overturned. There is something deeply moving about these utterly ordinary people winning a victory against an institution which has been for so long apparently above the law, which has distorted and suppressed information, and which has lied so massively and shockingly to its employees, to official investigators, and to the Parliament to which it is in theory accountable. At last the media is referring to the Post Office scandal as what it is: the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

How was it, exactly, that Post Office Ltd managed to convince itself - if it did - that reality was something entirely different from what they claimed? How could Fujitsu, the company that devised the fatal Horizon accounting system, keep so silent throughout this whole event? Why did court after court never notice or comment on the apparent irregularity of a single institution being both complainant and investigator? I heard a former Conservative business minister on the radio yesterday regretting that she had never paid more attention to this matter while she was in office; why didn't she? Why did a succession of government ministers in both Labour and Tory administrations simply turn aside from the rising tide of complaints and claim they couldn't do anything? When our Swanvale Halt Post Office was closed, I wrote to doyenne-of-the-Corbynites Rebecca Long-Bailey as Labour business spokesperson to complain, and didn't get so much as an automatic email from her office (our own Tory MP was more forthcoming). Was everyone just scared?

Last year, as the original trial relating to Horizon was reaching its conclusion and Mr Justice Fraser issued what must be one of the most damning judgements ever laid down against a public corporation, Estelle was trying to find out the legal basis for the governance of Post Office Ltd. Discovering that as what is technically referred to as an 'Arms-Length Body' - a corporation which is not formally part of Government but related to it - it should be governed by a 'Framework Document' which lays out its precise relationship with civil servants and ministers, Estelle put in a Freedom of Information Request to see the document. At first she was sent irrelevant papers, and then was stonewalled by civil servants. Finally the Business Department admitted that there wasn't one. There was, in effect, nothing that described how Post Office Ltd should be run. This, presumably, was what allowed it to act as though it wasn't subject to the law and which made Government ministers so reluctant to tackle it.

Forget Mr Johnson and his text messages, or even his wallpaper: if there is not a public inquiry into these events it will be a dreadful shame: there are so many questions that need answering.

Water at Eastbourne & Fulking

I'd forgotten to mention my visit to the south coast last week to see Ms Kittywitch. We picked our way along the beach at Eastbourne to view the Holy Well. You may remember I have already visited this site, or what is now identified as it. The problem with this Holy Well is that every time there's a major storm that sweeps shingle onto the beach it gets swamped, and that was the case in 2017. Now, though, it has once again been cleared by local enthusiasts and given a new sign, and better repays a visit, its boulder-ringed basin filled with blueish water which has made its journey through the chalk cliff above. Sorry about my photo, I don't know why I ended up taking it so wonkily.

My journey home took me within reasonable striking distance of Fulking where there is another interesting spring - not really a holy well except by adoption, in the way that Victorian decorators of such sites often linked them with divine grace by means of improving Scriptural citations, a tradition which has not completely disappeared even now. In this little Sussex village, so the tale goes, the water supply was pitiful before regular visitor John Ruskin, who sometimes joked that he had missed an alternative career as a civil engineer, and local brewer Henry Willett set up a hydraulic ram at the source of the stream next to the Shepherd & Dog pub and from there pumped water all over the village, including to a fountain a couple of hundred yards away. This site has all the details. The well-house covering the ram is an appropriately Gothic little building and, like the fountain which is a memorial to Ruskin and his ingenuity, incorporates Bible texts in lovely encaustic tiles. 

Back to School

From toast to bread to an encounter with the Risen Lord: this was the narrative trajectory, yesterday, of my first assembly at the Infants School since September. I began by asking the children about what they'd had for breakfast, following which we discussed what you needed to make bread, and then I told the story of the Road to Emmaus, which isn't in the Lion Storyteller Bible which they are customarily read from so I presume most of them had never heard it. It was either that, or the life of St Alphege whose feast day it was and for once I shied away from bishops, martyrdom and Danish invaders. 'Did you say Emmaus in the story?' one girl asked. 'I go to a church, it's not your church, but it's called Emmaus Church'. 

I realised that thanks to my disconnection from the school over the last year I could only name a handful of the children (or rather a smaller handful than I used to know). They still seem to know who I am when I meet them about the roads of the parish, but this is just one aspect of the church's life which needs some urgent rebuilding as we start to get back into gear again.
 

At Last, Some Churches

My break this week helpfully coincided with some local churches reopening to visitors (some of whom might have been looking to commemorate Prince Philip) and they're an interesting collection. Apart from a low-key Lady Chapel with a blue frontal on the altar, St Nicholas's Thames Ditton seems to have avoided any contact with the Catholic movement at all, but the East Molesey churches have certainly been affected by it - even if they've moved on now. The first sign of interest at St Paul's comes before you even go in, as there's a holy water stoup beside the door. That's empty, but the Sacrament is still reserved inside and there are Stations of the Cross which look post-World War Two to me. I couldn't tell when the carpeted dais was installed, but the Catholic fixtures are now relics of a past the church has left behind: the tambourine resting on the unremarkable nave altar is symbolic ...

No lack of detail along the road at St Mary's, though, where I was told very definitely that the reordering of the nave took place in 2015 and the chancel a couple of years later. Here, the nave has been cleared and carpeted, fitted with metal-framed chairs, and the 1929 chancel screen left in place to provide a backdrop for the band (it's the sort of church where that's the centre of attention). Behind the screen, the old chancel is kept as a beautiful space though I'm not sure what they do with it. They have a range of sumptuous altar frontals and a nice Art Nouveau cross of a type I've seen elsewhere, but I can't quite work out where to place the church as a whole. There are Eucharistic motifs and the Instruments of the Passion carved into the wooden reredos, and three sedilia next to the altar now very strikingly bisected by a prie-dieu repositioned and repurposed as a sound system desk, but I can't see any sign that the chancel screen had a rood or a cross on it, or that there was ever an aumbry anywhere. 

The story is a bit unclear at Chobham too, where St Andrew's is a heavily restored medieval church with the Sacrament reserved in a Lady Chapel with a jarring modern altar frontal (the aumbry door embroidery looks very like what we saw at Shere). It has a stone dais leading into the nave, but no sign of a nave altar, nor do there seem to have been choir stalls which your standard Victorian restoration would normally have put in. The panelling round the altar is dated both 1937 and 1950 and the pews look more modern than you would usually expect (the latest memorial date they bear is 1977 but they must have been installed long before that). On the north side of the church opposite the Lady Chapel is another chapel whose altar must once have had curtains on three sides but it's a bit of a junkyard now. At least that cabinet blocks the view of the altar frontal. I can't really work out what's happened with this church.

Finally to St James's Weybridge, a JL Pearson-designed church which I know well and which furnishes far too many clues to a varied past to describe here, a past that includes the illegal requiem mass conducted by Rector Edward Rose in 1866, an incumbent in the 1930s who had been curate at All Saints' Margaret Street, and a gentle downward slide in churchpersonship during the 1970s and 80s abruptly ended by an upward heave in the mid-1990s. The current incumbent is a devotee of St Pio and you will now find an icon of the Padre in St James's, as well as one of the church's patron saint on the grandiose High Altar; you can also see from these photos that while the church was open for people to pay their respects to the Duke of Edinburgh, the altar frontal has not been changed to purple as the Diocese of Guildford rather shockingly advised us, and it is the Blessed Sacrament in its monstrance which has central place. You can also see in these images the bizarre triptych in the All Souls Chapel (a WW1 memorial, as these things so often are) which bears an image of Sir Galahad, presumably as an epitome of Christian knighthood; and St James's 'Trisagion' altar and accompanying furniture, consecrated by Rowan Williams, no less, in 2007 and helping to make this a rather unique church within the Catholic tradition.

Follies and Funerary Art

Despite declines in Covid levels a visit to London still seems like a risky adventure and if yesterday's experience is anything to go by it will remain that way for a while, so I may not repeat it very soon. Being outside, even sitting in the chilly wind with Dr RedMedea at a café in Lower Marsh, was fine, but the afternoon trains became busier than I might have liked and I was glad to avoid them when I could.

Tempted by some images I'd seen I wanted to visit Gunnersbury Park. This is a delightful and amusing landscape but illustrates very neatly the difference between a true Gothic Garden and a garden which just has Gothic follies scattered around it. There is nothing awe-inspiring about Princess Amelia's Bathhouse constructed over its grotto, the arched walls of the Kitchen Garden, and even the Tower at the far south end of the park, even though that does a fair stab at looming over the pond (it shelters, rather dilapidatedly at the moment, a boathouse); they are all simply appealing decorations, added to the fine Orangery and the Temple beside a lake near the house. It's the smaller of the two houses which provides perhaps the most Gothic experience, thanks to its ruinous state.

Next to the park is Gunnersbury Cemetery, with its memorial to the victims of the Katyn Massacre and especially numerous Polish and eastern European graves:

And a short walk brings us to South Ealing Cemetery, older and more umbrageous (or perhaps that was just the weather).

A moderate risk taken, then, for the sake of Art!

What Were the Well-Chapels?

The first day of my break on Monday was significantly spent reading about early Christian baptisteries! Unable to do much work on the history of Anglo-catholicism in Surrey (though I have in fact able to visit a couple of churches this week) and rather itching for an alternative project I was thinking about some aspects of the story of holy wells in Dorset, which led me in the direction of well-chapels in Cornwall and elsewhere and why those very distinctive buildings were so different from what we find in ‘English’ England. Going along my bookshelf I realised I’d completely forgotten about Ian Thompson’s short 2008 work Early Hermit Sites and Well Chapels, which covers this territory, and that sent me off on a trajectory which eventually included the Burghal Hidage and the early history of Dorchester, and the letters of Cassiodorus!

Ian Thompson’s argument is alluded to in the earlier book he wrote with his wife Frances, The Water of Life: Springs and wells of mainland Britain (2004), but the booklet elaborates it fully. What he defines as well-chapels, buildings deliberately constructed to contain holy springs and channels of water, are few in number (8 definite and ten probable sites), limited in geographical spread (to Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and areas of England subject to Celtic influence), and mysterious in purpose. Noting that no explanation seems to suffice for all the features of these buildings, he ends up arguing that their true origin lies in sacred and symbolic geography – that well-chapels in this narrow sense are attempts to express the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the ideal Temple. In chapter 47 of his prophecy, Ezekiel is shown by his angel guide the Temple in the renewed Jerusalem, through which a river flows, south of the altar, and eventually entering the Dead Sea, making it into fresh water teeming with fish. Building on a reference to prayers being said for a good fishing catch at the weir associated with St Trillo’s Chapel in north Wales, Mr Thompson speculates that this was also part of the purpose of the chapels – to bless and render more fruitful the rivers into which their waters flow.

This ingenious case is one I find hard to support. Christian churches don’t replicate the Temple: the whole point of Christianity is that the Temple has been replaced by the one who it existed to foreshadow, namely Jesus of Nazareth. In a later vision than Ezekiel’s, that of St John the Divine in the Revelation (which Mr Thompson also cites) the heavenly Jerusalem, the image of the new creation, has no Temple, because God is immediately present there; the ‘river of life as bright as crystal’ flows through its streets, and that may well have some relevance to the architecture of these structures but not necessarily to the details of their orientation. Mr Thompson has to explain the variations in the chapels’ arrangements by different interpretations of Ezekiel, rather than what seems to me the obvious conclusion that the explanation lies elsewhere completely.

These buildings have traditionally, if imprecisely, been described as ‘baptisteries’, and I still think that is what they are: remnants of forms of evangelisation in these parts of the British Isles which relied on individuals – the ‘Cornish Saints’ who are often no more than names – setting up informal worship centres which included a farmstead and a place to baptise converts, developing in many cases to a proper chapel where mass could be said; some became parish churches, some dwindled into overdeveloped well-houses, and some fell to ruin. Whether the water runs through them, adjoins them, or is at some distance, doesn’t seem very important.

Cornwall may have been part of the Empire, but Romanitas meant little west of the Tamar, and not much on that side of the Severn either. Whereas in the rest of the Roman world villas and houses, from Chedworth in Gloucestershire to Dura Europos in Syria, formed the infrastructure for Roman Christianity, in which baptismal pools were either adapted from baths or nymphaea or constructed anew, there wasn’t much of that available in Cornwall. Purpose-built baptisteries of course were grander affairs; in about 313 the Emperor Constantine gave the residence of his wife Fausta’s family, the Laterani, to Pope Miltiades, and just over a century later Pope Sergius built the Lateran Baptistery there, utilising the spring which used to supply the family palace. Then there’s the baptistery associated with the gigantic basilican church at Lechaion in Greece; I can’t see from any of the reports where its water came from, but while you might have filled the tank at the Dura Europos church by hand, you wouldn’t have wanted to do that at Lechaion: it would have taken half a day, and there must have been a natural source. Our tiny Cornish buildings are the remote cousins of these huge structures.

But well-chapels in other parts of ‘England’ aren’t. Different settlement patterns and a more centralised model of secular authority under the kings of Wessex led to entirely separate models of ecclesiastical development. We can guess that a lot of Cornish chapels (most of which are lost) predated their parish churches, while in England east of the Tamar they are almost always later. That means that chapels linked to springs at Spreacombe in Devon or Littlebourne in Kent have an entirely different origin: manorial, in those instances. I am not so sure about the case that first got me thinking about this, Evershot in Dorset, where St John’s Well, source of the River Frome, is just a hundred yards away from the church which once bore the same dedication and which, despite its size and the size of Evershot itself, was just a chapel of Frome St Quintin parish until the 1970s. I think that may be pretty old, perhaps something more on the Cornish model.

On Monday I got home having put in a big order for books from newly-reopened Waterstones in Hornington, and on reading about these abstruse matters realised I had to add another to the list: Elizabeth Rees’s 2020 tome Early Christianity in South-west Britain, which promises to shed light on all these questions. There are even two holy wells on the cover, St Levan’s at St Levan and the Nun’s Well at Pelynt!

But my picture is neither of those: it’s the cistern at the well-chapel at Madron in Cornwall, which I first saw in 1989. Ian Thompson insists it can’t be a baptismal font because it doesn’t drain to earth, which strikes me as spurious though it certainly can’t have been all that easy to use. The Holy Well itself is a little distance away, and, as many writers have pointed out, is very, very hard to get to. When I saw it its loose stonework had been knocked about by cows and the bog was so deep I was in danger of losing my boots, and stood a bit away to take a photo, full of admiration for those brave souls who had got close enough to hang their clouties from the trees around.

Vindicated!

I was sure I'd spotted a blackcap in the garden the other day, but it was too far away to be entirely sure - yesterday, though, it made it abundantly clear, a female bird drinking from and then washing in the bird bath (just as well it was that way around, dirty little thing). 

I don't remember ever seeing blackcaps in my younger days and apparently they are now well on the way to being permanent residents in southern Britain. The British people's strange predilection for feeding garden birds has made it possible for what were almost always summer visitors dependent on lots of insects being around to spend the whole year here. In fact, some scientists speculate, the bird is well on the way to separating into two distinct species, one which resides permanently in the UK, and the other continuing to winter in warmer areas such as Spain. I confess I never put out food for the birds (it seems very odd to me for humans to grow food for birds when without human damage to the ecosystem (including growing bird food) there would be plenty to sustain sensible populations of birds in the first place!) but I imagine 'my' blackcap must be eating elsewhere and then dropping by at the Rectory for a wash!

We Interrupt This Programme

'I quite liked the man until about three hours ago, but now I don't mind if I never hear about him again', my mother told me about 6pm yesterday, 'and I'll be very annoyed if they don't show the final of Masterchef', which of course they didn't. She is not the only person I have heard about making the same comment regarding the return of normal TV service, and I have to say when Radio 4 broadcast an old episode of Great Lives yesterday evening and it turned out to be about Mary Anning (a clever gay girl in a peak bonnet picking fossils! It doesn't get better than that. OK, well, she may not have been gay) I almost cheered. I don't dislike the late Duke of Edinburgh particularly but it was a huge relief to hear about someone different after six hours of the same thing over and over again.

Meanwhile the Establishment (including, I strongly get the impression, a lot of clergy) is hugely enjoying itself with protocol and speaking-for-the-nation stuff, and normally sensible souls can be found saying daft things. 'I always wondered', said Simon Schama on the wireless, 'why he volunteered to join this establishment and sacrifice so much. It was, I think, because he thought so much of Britain'. The great historian didn't seem to believe - and nobody else on the programme corrected him* - that it might have had something to do with the fact that young Lt Philip Mountbatten had fallen in love with the heir to the British throne and thus accepted what came with it. But I wonder whether the British people is not quite where the Establishment thinks it is. I rather suspect the British people doesn't regard the death of Prince Philip as the epoch-making event that it is supposed to, certainly not worth postponing the final of Masterchef for. In Swanvale Halt, I have heard absolutely nothing about it at the Co-Op or the café. The Diocese advised churches to have lots of spare candles available, but here, Rick the verger, who commemorates the death of anyone famous, printed off a set of Wikipedia pages about HRH and sat in the church all day, and the only person who came in to light candles was Selina. She always lights candles for her relatives but is increasingly unclear whether they are alive or dead, and certainly doesn't really know which day it is. It isn't indifference, as I think people definitely care about the situation the Queen is left in, thinking, surely, of their own bereavements; it isn't hostility. It's simply not regarding the Forth Bridge event as that much more important, say, than the death of Albert down the road who didn't quite make it to 100 and who they spoke to a couple of times and wasn't he a character. 

The Diocese has suggested we change the altar hangings to purple, which we are not doing: as my friend Cara in Emwood put it, 'the last time I looked, Jesus was still alive'. Instead our republican mayor and her republican husband our senior churchwarden will come to church and she will read a short Bible passage and light a candle while Rick will toll the bell and I will attempt to record the scene for posterity. I wasn't really a republican at midday yesterday but now I think I probably am, too.

London Bridge will of course be a different scale of event, even I will concede that. It really will mark the passage of an epoch. But even then, I wonder whether the national mood will really be grief, as the Establishment will imagine, rather than a stoic awareness of time sweeping all its sons (and daughters, and those who identify as neither) away, a sense that from that point on we will have to conceive of ourselves differently. They will misread things, as a way of imagining that they matter more than they do.

(* But said show did furnish one wonderful quote from a journalist who stated 'I have refused to watch The Crown on the grounds that I am still upset at Matt Smith leaving Dr Who')

Escape to Dorset

Like everyone else I haven't been very far lately so sitting with my mum in her garden (well, she sat inside the conservatory) and then a walk with my sister and her family around Sandbanks today was a profound and much-missed pleasure. I was tempted by an ice-cream which I thought would be a bit like a Cornetto, as it appeared to operate on the same principle, but proved to be a deadlier concoction of sugars than I was expecting. The lifeguards were out despite the chilly sunlight and there were indeed some hardy souls braving the water.

I've mentioned before the swift turnover of buildings in this part of Dorset, and how many of them seem to want to ape what the builders think Art Deco architecture looks like. This apartment building, though, nos.72-74 Banks Road, is one of the more successful: I couldn't believe it was genuine to the Art Deco period - how would I have missed it? - and it proves to date only from 2008, but it doesn't look at all unreasonable compared to some of the concoctions you sometimes see around the Poole basin. I wonder what it's like inside.

Institutionalised

When the Archbishop of York was just beginning his episcopal career, he came to St Stephen's House for our Founder's Day and virtually had to be shown how to wear a mitre by the sacristans. It was his very first appointment after his unexpected elevation to the position of Bishop of Reading subsequent to the atrocious mess over the non-appointment of Jeffrey John, and his complete lack of preparation for the role into which he had been propelled was refreshing in a bishop. He had not, like Cosmo Lang waiting to become Archbishop of Canterbury, been practising his episcopal signature long before. He spent several years writing little books on prayer and that sort of thing. Now, as we know, he feels he needs a 'Chief of Staff' on a salary of £90K p/a. The pay is, the Archbishop's office stresses, on a par with that of equivalent positions in the charity sector, and I'm sure this is true; the bigger question is whether one is needed when previous Archbishops have survived without. The much-ridiculed job description, which sounds a bit like the slave who was deputed to stand in the chariot of a Roman general at his Triumph to whisper in his ear 'remember, thou art but mortal', doesn't give a clue what this functionary will actually do to earn that salary. Presumably the Archbishop already has a PA and the Diocese of York has HR support and a diocesan secretary; it's hard to see what else a Christian organisation needs. 

The Church of England draws its standards and expectations from the secular world in just the way we know it shouldn't, but always has. Stephen Cottrell the vicar of St Wilfrid's Chichester in 1988 might have boggled at what Stephen Cottrell the Archbishop of York in 2021 thinks is unexceptionable: but over the intervening years he has become part of an institution with its own momentum, its own norms and models, which use the highly-wrought language of religion but which are structurally no different from those of an indifferent and, truth be told, slightly old-fashioned commercial enterprise. 

I might well have followed the same progress were it me. The sad truth is that we all tell ourselves we're individuals, and that we, if no one else, will resist the norms of the organisations we find ourselves part of; but we don't. For the most part we're all sucked in, assimilated, absorb the attitudes and outlooks of those around us. 

There are a lot of illustrations of this lately. The recent Government-sponsored report on Racial and Ethnic Disparities provided one: its definition of 'institutional racism' was very strange, and as far as I remember reversed completely the one I was used to. I thought that 'institutional racism' - going back to the MacPherson report in 1999 - was a way of describing the unequal outcomes which remain even when explicit discrimination is removed from laws and rules, and when nobody explicitly intends discriminatory results. Of course if you define institutional racism as explicit discrimination, you're unlikely to find it, because that's against the law. The conclusion was naive if nothing else. 

The dreadful speechifying at the anti-Policing Bill demo I attended on Easter Day was the usual sort of stuff you expect at student demonstrations and not very different from the fare served up at Oxford in the 1980s. I looked across at the few police officers monitoring what we doing and thought their main concern was almost certainly getting home on time rather than oppressing minorities. But the point is that the best of us, the kindest and most public-spirited and most generous-minded, are subtly beaten by the institutions we belong to into the shape they are accustomed to, however much we flatter ourselves we won't be. I represent an institution that's been around for two thousand years, and it has done great good and great evil, so I know. Institutions require rules and law to bind us to the better angels of our nature, and without them the world, the flesh and the Devil take over: and don't forget it. 

Easter Contrasts

Last year I courted disaster doing the Easter Vigil on my own at home: this time there was a handful of us observing the proper rites at the church. Things that went wrong included the Paschal Candle, whose wax motifs I managed to break and which doesn't quite fit in the holder unlike every other 2"-diameter candle we've ever bought, but the fire, which is easily the most hazardous element of the whole proceedings, was lit and then extinguished without adverse incident. We had over 60 souls at the main service, more than at any time in a year, and for them it didn't matter that halfway through Bill Gates decided to send my laptop a message, thus diverting its attention from livestreaming the liturgy. Oh well.

Rounding off the day's activity (apart from Vespers) was a protest against the Policing Bill in Guildford. It wasn't a big protest, and I was glad to see someone from Hornington Extinction Rebellion, another person, at least, who could remember the last millennium as the crowd contained more teenagers than I've seen together for a long time. The speeches, once we stopped, were awful and it was a relief not to be able to hear most of them. Almost enough to make you sympathise with Priti Patel, but not quite. 

Meanwhile St Catherine's Chapel was at its Romantic best against the blue. Happy Easter!

Time Present and Time Past

The three hours of the Maundy Thursday vigil always seems to pass quicker than three hours should. By this time I was unaccountably weary and my ability to enter into the sufferings of Christ in Gethsemane was very limited; I had brought along a book about George Herbert to read but couldn't manage more than a page, and was in little mood for more scripture. Once upon a time I would try and pray through my whole list of personal intercessions, bringing my friends and family into the Garden, to be with the Lord as he readied himself for the ordeal to come, but mustering up the concentration is harder than that sounds. Now I just visualise them, as they are, rather than do anything with them. Mostly, my mind wanders, occasionally pulled back to our Lord. I manage by getting up and having a stretch every hour or so.

I've always had the feeling, near-blasphemous though it sounds, that at this moment you are not so much praying with Jesus as for him, that he will indeed have what he needs to take the Via Dolorosa. Perhaps it isn't so fanciful: perhaps the prayers of the faithful and less-faithful, all down the centuries, have indeed been some help to our brother and champion. 

Swanvale Halt was mostly quiet. A young woman came in and sat at the back of the church, tearful: 'just the usual rubbish', she told me when I asked. Another crying female voice went along the path outside at one point, but its owner was gone by the time I arrived. The village was silent as I went up the hill with Marion and her family, the last vigil-keepers that night - within the church, at least.