Huggy Church

A couple of days ago we had a big funeral. Several things went wrong and the memory is so traumatic I'm not going to rehearse them, but they were things that were not fatally disruptive. The deceased lady was a parishioner and mother of a former churchwarden and had been ill a long time, surrounded and looked after by a large family of strong and contrasting opinions and carrying a lot of weight from the past: there was much emotion and I think everyone was simply glad it was done, and done as Priscilla would have wanted, and the things people wanted said, said. One of her grand-daughters present was a Goth girl of about 20. I told her there should be a rule there is at least one Goth at every church service. 

'Some churches are so grim and cold', one of the mourners told me after the service, 'this church feels like it's giving you a hug'. The very first time I ever came into the building, I certainly felt a warmth, and a quiet prayerfulness; I am not a big hugger or a very willing huggee and wouldn't have thought of it in those terms, but I think I'm glad someone else does. Below-pictured is Fr Thesis's church in London, and there's part of me that thinks it's what a church ought really to be like. This is just the Lady Chapel, too.

You can't imagine this church giving you a hug, but it does express the transcendent beauty of God, and in such a building God doesn't seem remote, I find, just different. Does he feel different in the surroundings of Swanvale Halt? Is the church distinct enough from the secular world around it to make it clear how holy and awesome the Lord is, and how he has come to raise us heavenward in heart and soul?

Part of the point of the Christian faith is that the Eternal stoops down to embrace us, to reach us in our fallenness. He does not simply wait for us to find him: he seeks us out. The quietness at the core of our church life we aspire to is enough, I hope, to point to his otherness, his eternity, even though we are humble and lowly and not at all grand, little Swanvale Halt. Sometimes sorrowing souls need a hug.

The Archbishop Flies In

The hall at the independent school not far away was full enough not to make the Archbishop's 'Big Questions' event in our deanery too awkward - but I could tell looking around that the majority of people there were already church members, not the souls on the fringes of faith that the session was originally intended for. I'd faced a quandary: should I come in clericals to demonstrate I was there to show willing, or dress in mufti to pretend to be a real person? In the end I kept my clerical collar more because there was no time to change rather than anything else. I spotted colleagues who had taken either position. The questions were just the ones you could predict people would ask, and nothing Archbishop Justin said in response was any surprise, it has to be said: the only left-field query was one which asked what the Church can do to help the people of Afghanistan and ++Justin's response was that, whatever it might be, he couldn't really tell anyone about it publicly.  The Archbishop left the platform and our Area Dean then spoke to his aides who 'gave their testimony' of coming to faith earlier in life, again quite comfortingly undramatic. It was all quite short and low-key; worthy, but hardly earthshaking.

The whole event was supposed to provide a springboard for evangelism. Churches would invite people on the edges of their worshipping communities to these sessions, and then follow up with enquirers' courses. In a moment of weakness I'd told the organising committee about the one we were planning and there it was, one of only three such courses mentioned in the Big Questions leaflet given out to the audience. I don't know whether I would have been more annoyed to be ignored than I was horrified at the prospect of actually having to do it.

The Mechanics of Grief

'I don't think I've ever grieved anyone', Cylene told me. She discovered a few days ago that her friend Harry has been dead a month and she knew nothing about it. Harry was 31, a young man buffeted by the world and conflicted against his family. Cylene doesn't know whether it was suicide, a drug overdose, an accident of another kind, or whatever. Notwithstanding her own problems, which have seen her hospitalised twice in the last few months, Cylene 'dreamed I could do good things with him, show him something good in life. You know how it is with abused people, sometimes they can never accept anything good for themselves, they attract more abuse'. She could be talking about herself. Now she has only her self-devised magical rituals to try and hold on to Harry's memory, to offer him to - what?

We talked through how a Christian might view the loss of Harry. If you are a conservative evangelical, there is nothing much to say: Harry didn't give himself to Jesus in life, and so must face the penalty of his sins. You might come up with the bogus line I have heard from Christians of that stamp, that in the last moments of life an unbeliever might have accepted the Lord and thus be welcomed into his everlasting mansions. It's hardly likely, is it. Poor Harry never gave the Lord a second thought through his short and unhappy life so what on earth would propel him in that direction as it drew to a close? Was he ever in a place where that would have been likely? Where is the justice in substitutionary atonement for him?

At funeral services I tell people that what is good about us is not lost: how can it be, when God has made it? But how does that relate to our individual identity, salted with purgatorial fire and cleansed of everything unholy, if that process leaves little enough of us behind? I'm not confident what the answer is. Souls like Harry test all our doctrines. 

So I am reading again. The Matthean Beatitudes are as far as I've got; they help a little. I'd never been struck before how little they have to do with faith. Until the last clause, where Jesus tells the crowd that they are blessed if they are reviled for the sake of his name, the statements all proclaim that those who suffer in this earthly life will be rewarded: and that's it. There's no sense in the text that they have to have any kind of faith before that happens: rather that poverty, mourning, and hungering and thirsting after righteousness predisposes a soul in God's direction, that they generate faith. This is God's 'option for the poor': even for those as poor in spirit as Harry, maybe. 

Tempted by Things

My destination this morning was St Paul's Tongham (which I will post about another time), but this took me only a mile or two from Bourne Mill Antiques in Farnham. Once upon a time this, and the Bourne Buildings shed- and garden ornament-emporium next door, known for its splendid advertisements - 'Now Is the Winter of our Discount Sheds', one declared - could provide an entire morning or afternoon out, and I and Ms Formerly Aldgate did that more than once. Then in 2015 Bourne Mill caught fire. Five floors of cramped, timber-framed and tile-roofed rooms packed with stuff were left in a dreadful condition, and took more than four years to reopen: I began to fear it never would. I failed to make it there before the pandemic began, and then finding my way around Bourne Mill's convoluted arrangements trying to stay 2m away from anyone else didn't seem very attractive. So today has been my first trip back since the fire.

'It seems a lot tidier,' I told the woman at the desk who replied that she hoped that was the case. In particular the staircases used to be flanked with shelves and cubbyholes packed with books and junk and that is no longer the case. I suppose it will be some years before the dealers who use Bourne Mill manage to stuff it with unsold stock to the same dizzying level as before. Mind you I looked down one hallway which I didn't remember existing and saw a lamp in the shape of a duck lighting the dark corner so not all Bourne Mill's old surrealism has been lost.

There was a variety of Nice Things I would have been happy to give a home, though I have yet to discover the bust of General Gordon which is my dream find of many years' standing. But the appeal even of nice things has palled over the years and I resist filling my space with more stuff. But I did find this, which was inexpensive and has potential: a clock frame I presume, labelled on the inside AGDA. These are post-War German, apparently. I thought I could stick a mirror in it with some improving inscription about the illusory nature of existence.

This inspired me to do something about a little, battered watercolour I inherited from Dr Bones and which had travelled over the years our of her narrowboat into the boot of my car and then to the garage. I have always been rather fond of it though that fondness has only run to looking at it face-down in its metal frame on top of a dead car battery and thinking that I ought to do something about it. It's finally made it into a new frame, and into the bathroom! 

Revelation at Guildford

Today's SCP eucharist and lunch at the Cathedral made a number of things clear to me. Probably the first was how unobservant I can be. It struck me that the altar furniture in the Lady Chapel where we gathered was really quite surprisingly unattractive, and I couldn't remember ever seeing it before. Yet here the cross and candlesticks are, in this photo, rendered slightly less unappealing by the height of the candles, which today were mere stumps. Perhaps they'd been regilded which caused them to make themselves more apparent to my eye.

As we repaired to the café I further realised how problematic covid protocols now are. We ended up huddled around one table because nobody felt it was their responsibility to start a new one or insist that anyone else did. As soon as my soup was finished I pushed my chair back a little in a pathetic and half-hearted attempt to make a gesture in the direction of physical distancing. Of course now that Dr Spector's ZOE covid symptom tracker has announced that the disease's signs are more or less indistinguishable from a cold's I think I might have it all the time. There is scarcely a day when I don't have a headache, a tickle in the throat, or feel tired. When does one not feel tired!

Everyone else seemed fully clued-up about the resignation of the Bishop of Winchester and his mysterious CV and dubious validity, something which had entirely passed me by. We strove to find something positive to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury's forthcoming evangelistic visit to the diocese, and some of my colleagues worried that any failure to produce the expected waves of converts would be blamed on our unhelpful attitude. Surely there aren't enough of us? Even if we all had dolls of Justin Welby to stick needles in? and most of us, we discovered, had missed the Voodoo module in our training. 

My final discovery was that I am even sloppier than I thought, getting home to find that my phone was nowhere in my bag, or my car. It was apparently on the floor beneath the chair where I'd been sitting, having failed to be properly lodged in the bag. Will I learn from the experience? I only wish I might. 

A Load of Rubbish

The architect who did our Quinquennial Inspection back in June counselled us to seek the advice of a structural engineer about the floor-loading capacity of the loft over the church hall built in the 1980s. In common, I suspect, with your loft if you have one, the church's attracts junk. It is not the only space that does so: the Choir Vestry has also been treated as though it is an infinitely expandable space, and dumped with stuff nobody can quite bear to throw out to the extent that, even if we had much of a choir, it would be hard to fit them in it.

This is something of an inevitable process. The tempting voice that whispers in your ear that 'it would be a shame to get rid of X' or 'Y might come in useful' is not actually that wide of the mark. It may take some time to discover that something isn't going to be used again: that those empty boxes that you didn't make use of for Messy Church and kept just in case (which is partly what you can see in the photo) actually won't be making an appearance any time soon. Sometimes you may not know at first that a particular activity has come to a permanent end and not a temporary one, and so that box of paints and brushes, for instance, is going to sit in a dark corner for 20 years until they are completely incapable of being used. Time tells. When it comes to junking stuff, virtually everything could be of use to someone, but your chance of finding that person might be vanishingly slim. They could be in Ulaanbaatar which is not a lot of good. So a skip was hired, and sits being gradually filled at the house of one of the churchwardens.

The most jarring ambiguities come with old books. I found a little stack of varied copies of the Book of Common Prayer and it certainly goes against the grain just to send these to a skip, but the sad truth is that these are not all that rare: once upon a time pious Anglicans in their hundreds of thousands would have had them, and frankly nobody wants them now. Out they must go. Strangely enough, being a museum curator made me quite ruthless when you might expect it would have the opposite effect: I suppose it gave me an appreciation of the sheer quantity of stuff human beings have produced, and the impossibility of preserving it all. Instead it was precisely the destruction of things that gave surviving stuff its value. 

Examining the loft, and other places, I found:

• A suitcase containing ladies' shoes left over from a tabletop sale
• A xylophone
• A pot full of gravel
• A stack of very home-made wooden easels
• A pottery Nativity set which hasn't been touched in two decades - too delicate for handling and too nasty for best
• A set of speakers labelled 'Wives Group' which seems to have nothing to do with the Wives Group
• A box of Victorian school log-books which should be in the Record Office
• A headless statue of St Joseph - I did know this was there as it came from the Churches Together nativity scene which was vandalised several years ago. I remember people saying that the head might turn up: well, it hasn't. The statue would be about four feet tall if it still possessed its head

- but no sign, probably thankfully, of a Golem. 

Anglo-Catholic Sources no.2: Churchgoing Guides

If you were away from home and looking for an amenable place to worship in the far-off days before being able to look it up in Dr Google’s archive, it helped to have a handy booklet to slip into your valet’s pocket which detailed what you could expect to find when opening the door of a particular church. From the 1870s the main pressure group of the Anglican Catholic movement, the English Church Union, produced a string of Tourist’s Church Guides which laid out just that information. The earliest, published in 1874, describes a landscape in which frequent celebration of communion is still relatively rare and the aim is to find a church where a visitor can be sure of a eucharist to attend early on a Sunday morning (and, thus, fasting). It lists churches where altar lights can be found, where sittings are free (rather than rented) and the building is kept open, where vestments are worn (not very many of those), where the Eastward Position is adopted, and even whether the chant used in the Offices is Anglican or Gregorian. Of course the editors were dependent for their data on returns from incumbents and secretaries, and so the Guide almost certainly omits churches, but it probably includes most of the ones where these ritual elements were definitely in place.

As time went on and the Catholic movement both advanced and attracted official opprobrium and repression, it became less wise and less practical to include all this information – helpful though it is to investigators like me as such things are rarely mentioned in local church histories – and the markers of a ‘sound’ church resolved into four, the much-besought ‘Full Catholic Privileges’: namely, a Sung Eucharist every Sunday, a daily mass, perpetual reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and set times for confession. There were more and more such ‘four-star churches’ as time went on; and from the 1933 edition onwards the criteria for inclusion became stricter as, the Guide editors stated, by that date ‘there are now few districts in England where an early celebration of the Holy Communion on Sundays is not to be found’.

The last official ECU Tourist’s Guide was printed in 1951, right at what has traditionally been taken as the peak of Catholic influence in the Church of England. However, it’s becoming clearer that the standard markers of that influence, as shown by the number of four-star churches, were continuing to be adopted long after that point. So it was good that Fr Peter Blagdon-Gamlen took it upon himself to carry on the work of the Guides by producing his own Church Traveller’s Directory in pretty much the same format with the ECU’s support. Blagdon-Gamlen had a ‘colourful’ ministry that took him from Evesham to Yorkshire to Derby, then Bedfordshire, and finally to Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. At Derby he once called for a trade union for the ordained that would ensure pensions for clergy widows, but most of his causes were less progressive. To say that he flirted with the far Right would be charitable but inaccurate: no flirtation was involved. In 1962 he permitted a parish magazine article he’d written denouncing white women having black babies to be reprinted in the British National Party’s magazine Combat, fulsomely supported Enoch Powell while describing Martin Luther King after his death as ‘a neo-Communist agitator’, and in the 1970s put the National Front’s newsletter on his church newsstand because of their sound approach to the Common Market. ‘A character’, we might say if we were being kind, though those who encountered him (he only died in 2004) recall a beneficent soul with a wide if odd range of knowledge if you steered clear of politics.

There were two editions of the Directory, issued in 1966 and 1973: the later one is digitised here but the 1966 edition isn’t even in the Bodleian which is a great shame. The second clearly reveals that the peak of Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England came rather later than we have guessed, by-and-large, at least if those landmarks of Full Catholic Privileges are the criteria, and (as we knew) that non-metropolitan Surrey wasn’t at the ritualist cutting edge.

Thus in that earliest, 1874, edition of the Tourist’s Church Guide, there is only one vestment-using church in Surrey outside the London area, Reigate parish church; two years later it’s been joined by an oddity, St Matthew’s Hatchford, a small private chapel established by Lord Ellesmere. Hatchford doesn’t appear again and Reigate is soon outstripped by its daughter churches, St Luke’s and St Mark’s – the latter a four-star church in 1948. Even though by 1933 the atmosphere in the new Diocese of Guildford (and the longer-standing one of Southwark) was far less hazardous for liturgical development, there were still only nine four-star churches then; but, as the table below shows, advance was quite rapid in the decades afterwards, washing up some names which seem surprising to anyone who knows the diocese well today.

You may also note the eight churches which left the list between the last two columns. This was, in every case, because they gave up a daily mass, while retaining the other three markers. This may not necessarily have indicated a positive alteration in churchmanship, as a daily eucharist was a demanding thing to sustain and many impeccably Catholic churches (such as Hascombe and Weston Green) never got that far; but it does perhaps suggest that a high-water mark had been passed by the early 1970s.

Church Clubbing

Another small milestone today as we resumed Church Club at the Infants School. Sandra, Hilda and I struggled to remember how to set things up after 18 months, even though the school had made it simple enough for us by restricting membership to Year 1 children which resulted only in 6 attenders, half what we would usually expect (and will all of those stick, we wonder?). Over the course of the pandemic all the stuff we store in the room off the hall at school has disappeared, so I'm glad I found a secret hoard of hole-punchers, staplers and sticky tape while clearing out the church hall loft - of which, rivetingly, more later.

The Year 1s, only just out of Reception, are very, very tiny. Normally a leaven of Year 2s would lead the way, boldly tackling the puzzles and crafts, and sometimes take the younger children under their wing. At least the girls might. It would be an exaggeration to say that this group don't know which way up they are, because achieving that is a key goal in Reception year, but they haven't got much farther than that. 

Return to Mess

Messy Church in March 2020 was the last special event we staged before the first lockdown, going ahead only after a lot of indecision. We'd cut our activities down to Sunday services alone after that, I'd already decided before the decision was taken out of our hands. As anxiety and uncertainty swirled around, many people said how good it was to do something 'normal'; and they said that again on Saturday as Swanvale Halt Messy Church met for the first time since then. The team had decided on the theme of the Good Shepherd, which suited me as I'd done that four years ago and so could virtually recycle what I did then (none of the twenty children who came this time had been there in 2017). We asked people to confirm they were coming beforehand: only one did, meaning we set the bar of expectations comfortingly low, and the fact that we had a reasonable number of attenders goes to show how hard it is to expect families with small children to plan anything at all. Reasonable: but still on the low side compared with what we are used to. I wonder whether the Messy model will have to rebuild as much as any other aspect of our Church life. 

Anglo-Catholic Sources 1: The Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline of 1906

In 1904 the main evangelical Anglican pressure group, the Church Association, managed to get a Royal Commission established to examine Anglo-Catholic ritualist naughtiness, or, more technically, ‘breaches or neglect of the law relating to the conduct of divine service’. Over the two years before the Commission finally reported, it heard accounts of what was actually happening liturgically in nearly 560 churches across England and, for some reason, the diocese of Llandaff in Wales. It used to be claimed that all the witnesses were bigoted evangelicals with axes to grind who, occasionally, didn’t know what they were looking at when they attended a ritualist service. Opinion on this is starting to shift and certainly some of the reporters were perfectly au fait with the details of Anglo-Catholic worship of different brands and varieties, and just didn’t like it. Some ritualist incumbents replied to the enquiries of the Commission that they had not done the things, or some of the things, they were accused of, while others responded, in what was clearly an organised standard letter, that they did not dispute the accuracy of the reports but ‘the colour put upon the facts’.

The 560 churches whose worship was reported to the Commission (out of something under 15,000 across the country) were not the only ones who were worshipping in a ritualist way; many evaded the reporters’ attentions. But they were perhaps representative. In the whole of non-metropolitan Surrey, for instance, only two churches were deemed worthy of attention, Holy Trinity Bramley and St Nicolas Guildford.

At an 8am Sunday eucharist at Bramley in August 1904, the Revd Mr Green wore vestments (which, he later insisted, were of plain linen), absolutely denied the statement that he kissed the Gospel Book, and thought a ‘slight raising’ of the elements after consecration could not fairly be described as ‘elevation’. From Bramley the reporter went on the same day to a Choral Eucharist at St Nic’s where he saw the incumbent, Mr Dandridge, also vested, conduct what sounds like a relatively modest and low-key service, but one in which, in accordance with contemporary Roman and Anglo-Catholic rules on fasting, only four people took communion. In his reply the priest disputed some aspects of the report, the most serious, perhaps, being the accusation that he had made confession to the servers at the foot of the altar before the service began in the Roman fashion; the witness had clearly observed some interaction take place, but Mr Dandridge would not confirm exactly what it was if it was not the priest’s confession. Times for confession were also being advertised in the parish newsletter, but Mr Dandridge claimed this had been the practice at the church for some time preceding his arrival and rather than the ritual ‘steadily going up’ at St Nic’s as the witness averred, he was only following his predecessor’s lead.

These two services were hardly all that elaborate even for 1904 and that probably indicates that ritualism in Surrey had advanced only very modestly by that stage. I was a bit disappointed to see that there were only two reports relevant to my current work, but that itself tells you something. There must have been other Surrey churches worshipping in a similar way – Woodham, for instance, established specifically to do so – but not very many. In this, as in so many other aspects of its history, the county was a bit of a backwater.

Apples and Gravity

The old eating-apple tree in the garden hasn't been that heavily laden with fruit this year and normally I wouldn't take it off for a few weeks yet. But having noticed its southward branches nodding unusually low, I looked it over and found myself treading on a raised hump in the grass just at its base on the northern side. It was being pulled over! I hastily relieved it of all the fruit I could reach, and now I have wedged a post under it so it shouldn't move any further for a while, but come the winter I think a lot of it is going to have to be cut off, and I wonder what that will do to it, poor thing.

Love Divine

Actor Lena Headey was on the radio yesterday talking about her relationship with the Hindu god Ganesh.

[On a trip to India] I picked up a very ancient Ganesh and carried it in my backpack … I felt, this is just extremely peaceful to me, and it makes sense … I don’t sit and pray, but in my daily move around the world, I think about him. I love him. I love what he represents, I genuinely ask him to help me when I’m stuck … he’s my one constant.

Ms Headey is white, English and born in Bermuda. She doesn’t consider herself a Hindu by belief, but has what’s obviously an intense connection with the unlikely figure of the elephant-headed deity, who has a presence in Swanvale Halt in the form of a little statuette in the Post Office as the family who run it have a Hindu background. It makes me ponder what Christian love for God really means, in terms of its content.

Perhaps surprisingly, love for God isn’t that big a theme in the New Testament. St Paul mentions it in passing in a couple of places, but he is far keener to stress God’s love for us and ours for each other, flowing from God’s. Even the Blessed Apostle John whose first Letter is all about love is anxious to tell us that love consists in the fact ‘not that we loved God, but that he loved us’. The kind of intense personalised emotion we tend to find expressed in many modern worship songs isn’t really present in the Scriptures. There is adoration at what God is, and exultation at what he has done; there is a beneficent restfulness and gratitude that comes from knowing that ultimately everything is all right. It’s a philosophical sort of love, which is not to say it is not deep and powerful, but that it comes from applying a universal divine action to oneself. Another element that is missing is the intense focus on the humanity of Jesus which was so strong an element of medieval piety. Notoriously, St Paul says next to nothing about the earthly life of the Lord at all, and it took a thousand and more years before Christians began to meditate seriously on the features of that life which made him vulnerable, which brought the Godhead closest to the creation. If we’re talking about love in the way we normally understand it, that sense of Christ needing us (that is, human beings) for his protection, and his suffering, opens a different avenue towards it.

Unlike Ganesh, God is not one image. He is at once the glorious light to be adored, and the unfathomable abyss of ultimate being to be lost in. He is the baby held in a woman’s arms and the man crucified. He is historical and eternal. A parent looks at a child as they grow older, or a lover at their long-term love who they have grown along with, and can see all they were, and what they will be too, is present in what they are. We see God that way, and in that gaze is the tenderness of love, knowing that the beloved also loves us.  

Nunhead Revisited

My first Nunhead Cemetery Open Day was in 2008, although I claimed here it was a year earlier. Last year, of course, nothing happened, and even this time round it's been pushed back from its usual May date to this weekend. The chapel is fenced off, with no information as to whether this is due to Covid or general dilapidation; and I get the impression that the Friends of Nunhead (who are still restoring the East Lodge as they have been for several years now) would really rather you didn't put your life and their funds and perhaps liberty at risk by going wandering around the overgrown parts of the cemetery in search of picturesque monuments, so several entrances to the woods are blocked with brambles or stacks of wood. These are no serious barrier if you are properly equipped, but I wasn't. Still, I was surprised that I still managed to find things I hadn't seen before. Just behind the chapel is a house-like mausoleum with its pitched roof on pillars, surrounded by tumbledown tombstones; and a few yards from that is an area scattered with small monuments each about nine inches square, and clearly moved there in a group. You could, were you so disposed, abscond with one, which of course I wasn't. 

Individual Contributions

Commenters on the video were discussing the merits of PJ Harvey’s first album, Dry. Someone had stated that while the woman herself was a mighty creative power, the other members of the band, as it was then, could have been replaced by ‘any competent session musicians’ and it would have made no difference. As is the way of these things a ridiculous polarisation developed in which any defence of the other musicians involved was read by some as a denigration of Harvey’s own genius. I was pleased with myself for not chipping in.

Ian Olliver, Harvey’s original bassist, was a quarryman who worked for her dad, and when his wife insisted he couldn’t carry on a 7am-5pm working day and play in a band on top of it, he was replaced by Steve Vaughan, an engineer by trade. Bassists are mostly there to add sonic ballast, so perhaps their contribution wasn’t all that individual, but it would be certainly unfair to say the same about the drummer, Rob Ellis. Ellis was interested in 20^th-century classical music and irregular, unexpected rhythms; so was Harvey, she just didn’t know it at that stage. When Ellis mentioned Bartok and Stravinsky to her she looked at him blankly, but both Dry and Rid of Me are marked by the irregularity, dissonance, and extreme contrasts between quiet and loud passages which appealed to both of them. Ellis was modest enough to claim that Harvey had made use of him because he was the only available drummer around Yeovil at the time, but it counts as one of the great good fortunes of her life that he was perhaps the only one who stood a chance of understanding what she wanted to do. By her own admission Harvey finds it almost agonisingly difficult to express what she has in mind, and has always needed collaborators who get it without much prompting.

We’ve now heard the demos for Harvey’s early work, of course, and while they clarify the power and energy of her imagination, without the other musicians the end product would have been different. No creative artist is entirely alone; and, quite apart from the practicalities of art-making, each stands in a cloud of endeavour extending before they were born and beyond their individual lives. Ideally, to tell the story of an artist you would begin with their entire society.

But we still want the individual. After a mention on Radio 4 I recently read Jenny Uglow’s acclaimed 2012 ‘anti-biography’ of Sarah Losh, The Pinecone. Losh is a fascinating character, a landowner and amateur architect in mid-19^th century Cumbria whose politics had a radical tinge; the problem is that apart from one tiny essay about her building of the compelling and frankly Deist church at Wreay, and a I think a letter about travelling in Italy, she wrote nothing, nor did others say very much about her, either. Ms Uglow tries to get around this void at the heart of her enterprise by writing about everything else – Sarah Losh’s antecedents, the social and political life of Carlisle, the industrial and agricultural interests of the Loshes and the families linked with them, science, religion, and economics. But that void won’t go away. Time and again the writer guesses at Sarah Losh’s thoughts, opinions, reactions, and beliefs, but they remain guesses, and by the end I, certainly, felt I’d been wandering through mental mist. Even I, it seems, anti-individualist thought I may be, hunger to know a person, to touch a personality.

Needling

Valerie's mother frequents car-boot sales and other such events and a couple of years ago passed to her some items of ecclesiastical fabric. Now Valerie is a member of a Baptist congregation in Guildford which, with the best will in the world, has little use for such things so she in turn gave them to Marion our then curate. I was amazed to discover that one bit was in fact a complete black requiem altar frontal and that was soon pressed into use as we didn't have one - I'd been making do with a big bit of black cloth spread over the altar. But the other was a large piece of predominately red fabric, somewhat on the garish side but still rather splendid for that. We already have a nice red altar frontal so we thought this cloth could be used for a cope. Our in-house seamstress Pat felt hulking about large bits of fabric was beyond her and I found myself thinking, Well, a cope isn't a very complicated garment, so what was stopping me having a go at it? I used my own cope as a pattern and with a bit of amendment to work around the shape of the red, some red velvet from Hertfordshire, red cloth lining from the local craft shop, braid from the Ukraine and trim from Thailand (!), this was the result. My sewing is not up to much if you look carefully but from a distance it's OK: I made a few mistakes which had to be rectified and even after it was all done found a pin buried in the lining which somehow I'd missed and had to be wiggled carefully out, but overall I am pleased. I produced the cope in the odd half-hour here and there, and it has renewed my admiration for people like my friend Archangel Janet who do this for a living and often find - if they are freelance makers - that their clients have shockingly unrealistic expectations of how much they should pay for what is actually long, painstaking and hard work.

I must confess that in sixteen years of ministry I have only worn a red cope once, when we had a children's mass one Pentecost Day and Choral Evensong later on, and on that occasion I borrowed it. But it's good to have and makes use of something that might otherwise go to waste. Unless my stitching is worse than I realise and it falls apart!