A topsy-turvy New Year for me as I am off on New Year's Eve and at work on New Year's Day: I had a funeral yesterday on what would normally be my day off. That was unusual, too: a graveside ceremony for someone relatively well-known in the community (though not to me directly), assisted by the Council who provided a PA system and music, and with sloe gin to toast the departed. Seeing people line up outside the cemetery (a rather nice spot, our little local godsacre) was very moving and seemed much more pleasing than being at the Crem., or even, dare I say, in church. Today I have largely spent ordering books and managing to avoid employing the Evil Empire of Amazon to do so, and downloading music ranging from the orchestral accompaniment to the Golden Parade of the Pharoahs back in July, to early-1980s feminist punk, to 1940s Chinese jazz. This has a name, shidaiqu, so don't say you don't learn anything here, unless you knew it before.
I get slightly peeved when people I know speak as though calendar years have personalities, and it's both a mystery and a shock when one turns out unusually horrible, but I also get peeved when other people I know get very superior about not doing that. It's a natural if loose way of thinking. The annual ticking-over of one digit to another gives us a way of framing our outlook and perhaps amending our behaviour, though whatever life may presently be throwing at us pays no attention to it, of course.
People ask me whether I think the pandemic will ever be over and I say, Yes I do, because human beings have been through this experience umpteen times and it has always followed, overall, the same trajectory. Pandemics never end with diseases eradicated: we've only ever managed that twice, with smallpox and one sort of polio. Instead successive waves of infection sweep across continents, or the world, and they get milder as resistance builds up among their survivors. What's different this time is twofold: first, we have far more information than ever before, and can analyse what's happening with the virus in a way we never could in the past, and secondly we are tackling this disease not predominately with natural infection, but with vaccines. We are not just shrugging our shoulders and letting lots of people die. That's a degree of progress.
I think it will all be all right, and it may all be all right sooner than we fear. Not everything will be. Democracy and freedom seem to me very fragile indeed - more fragile than they always are - and of course we're still heading, more likely than not, for the collapse of our civilisation and everything we love and value before the end of the century. You might have noticed this is the warmest New Year on record. That may well not be all right at all. But this will be. In a couple of hours time I will drink a small toast to it!
If ever an Angel had cause to Weep, it is this one. I'm using the fallow week between Christmas and New Year - actually, it is anything but, the work I would normally do in the first week of January just being displaced into this one - to have a go at some tasks I've been meaning to do for ages. One job is repairing one of our angels. We have four, but two have suffered a bit of misfortune so, armed with what describes itself as 'Extreme Epoxy', I am trying to glue its right wing back on: we will see whether we can get the celestial being back into service. The remaining one is at our sacristan's house, and we may get round to that in due course.
I thought the angels were plaster, but they turn out to be made from some very heavy metal - not lead, as it's not flexible enough, but something like lead: a kind of pewter, perhaps. Each one holds a staff with a pricket for a candle. They must have come from the riddel-posts of an English altar, but we have never had anything so grand at Swanvale Halt, so one of my esteemed predecessors must have salvaged them from somewhere else. My money is on Fr Edward as the culprit in the late 1960s, as he had a habit of repurposing detritus from other churches even as, paradoxically, he plotted to have his own church purified of all its Victoriana including the stained glass. I would love to know where the angels' former home was, but Edward is no longer around to ask.
Like many other things, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition. When Radio 4's podcast The Battersea Poltergeist came out at the start of the year I was wary of its promised mixture of 'drama and documentary', but having dipped into presenter Danny Robins's other offering, Uncanny, I gave it a go and somewhat against my better judgement was drawn into the narrative. The hook is the prospect of finding something that will prove conclusively what's going on in this 'paranormal cold case' from 1956, in which a working-class family in southwest London is tormented by a manifestation which - it was eventually claimed - was the Dauphin Louis Charles, the lost heir to the French crown. It will not spoil the fun too much to reveal that nothing is mentioned in the podcast which proves anyone's point of view. It's vanishingly unlikely that Louis Charles was smuggled into England, rather than dying, as history has recorded, sick, maltreated and neglected, in the Tower of the Paris Temple in 1795, so whatever the poltergeist the family called 'Donald' was, he wasn't that. Yet while there are possible normal explanations for much of what happened in no.63 Wycliffe Road, it's hard to account for the rappings, bangings, and other weirdness that followed Shirley Hitchings, the 15-year-old at the centre of the phenomena, to distant places, including the studios of the BBC where she was interviewed by Cliff Michelmore for the Highlight programme, an event that clearly unsettled Michelmore enough for him to refer to it years later. Mr Robins has two resident consultants to epitomise the different approaches listeners might take to the story - writer on the paranormal Evelyn Hollow, who is a bit of a Goth, and 'arch-sceptic' academic psychologist Ciaran O'Keeffe, who isn't. They bat about the possibilities between them and neither inflicts a killer blow, as it were. With skilful artifice, the show draws every atom of energy from this indeterminacy: but in truth, although Mr Robins often mentions using a mysterious cardboard box of papers left by the paranormal investigator Harold Chibbett, who worked on the case at the time, and having interviewed Shirley Hitchings, James Clark, who wrote the whole thing up in The Poltergeist Prince of London in 2013, did both too. The podcast adds a few new nuggets of information: for instance, a graphologist decides that the mysterious letters from Donald are almost certainly in the same hand as Shirley's. But ultimately the only way a listener will be able to decide is to have decided already, long before they hear the story.
What do I think about it? In the end I wouldn't see much to dissent from in sceptic Deborah Hyde's assessment that Donald was 'a story with many authors, created communally, both consciously and unconsciously, according to a script that's readily available to everyone in that culture'. There's a lot in the Battersea Poltergeist narrative that doesn't add up, but at this distance in time it's almost impossible to disentangle what might have happened regarding any reported phenomenon in the case. As the priest who took our classes on this stuff at theological college said, 'There's about two hundred things a thing can be'.
My experience is that people often have a somewhat unhealthy interest in this kind of weirdness and so I am wary of feeding the fire: the Church as a whole has also been very, very reticent about this in the past after some loose practice resulted in terrible cases of abuse or malpractice in the name of 'the ministry of deliverance' (I wrote about a film based on one fairly recent incident in Romania). But the situation when I arrived in the Guildford diocese where people were reluctant even to mention who the Advisor on Deliverance was does seem a bit extreme, and in fact there's now a relevant page on the diocesan website. In fact such stuff comes my way pretty infrequently, amounting to only half a dozen cases in sixteen years, and most of them so vague and uncertain that it wasn't clear any lay beyond the normal bounds of psychology. As a priest I am of course committed to the idea that there is a non-material aspect to human life, but also to a scepticism about any particular incident that presents itself, and I'm always grateful that I seem to be completely insensitive to 'atmospheres' and the like. I don't know anyone even remotely inclined to go in all-guns-blazing with holy water, lighted candles and the Major Exorcism of Persons and Places at the first hint of paranormal events. The last such incident I dealt with was someone who had become convinced there was a 'presence' in their home and who'd been unsettled by a medium friend claiming they could detect the spirit of a young woman who'd lived in a large house on the site of the block of flats that was there currently, who had died after a pregnancy and been illicitly buried in the garden. After some discussion we agreed that in fact nothing needed to be done apart from praying for this soul, if soul it was, to be assured of God's mercy and justice. We did so, and the manifestation, such as it was, stopped. Make of that what you will.
Make what you will, too, of the only time anything weird has ever come my way personally. I went to visit a mother and adult daughter who lived on a new estate built on an old site. The daughter had done some low-level mediumship in the past and was now, she said, afflicted by unwelcome presences that seemed to be linked to the history of the place: she (and others) heard voices, and she experienced a sense of oppression. I arrived at the house, and spoke to the mother in the kitchen, with my bag (containing all my kit - Bible, stole, water and anointing oil, just in case) on the table beside me. I could see the daughter appear on the stairs out of the corner of
my eye but was still in mid-sentence so I didn’t turn to her for a few seconds.
When we moved to go to the living room, I checked my bag and found a lipstick and hair grip in it. As I got them
out, the daughter said they were hers. Both she and her mother seemed bewildered at how
they got there. We left them on the table and said no more about it. After I left the house, I sat in the car for a few moments
and said, ‘If there are any of you here, I want to make it absolutely clear
that you must stay here where you belong. You’re not coming back with me!' On getting
home I thought I’d go to church to say Evening Prayer and went through my bag
to get my stole and the oil to take back. Right at the bottom, under my Bible,
notebook and other things, I found a bulky car key and battery fob with two
keyrings. This turned out to be the daughter's too. It's possible that she could have placed the objects in
my bag in those few seconds when she wasn’t completely in my field of vision,
though she would need a Magic Circle-level of expertise to do it without me
seeing her move, or hearing the keys rattle. She certainly couldn’t have done so without her mother seeing
so if there was deception it was done by both of them. Despite my prayers and those of others - it turned out the couple had been talking to various other people as well as me - the manifestations didn't seem to stop completely. I still have no idea what any of that was really about.
Don't, as the wonderful theme song to Uncanny by Lanterns on the Lake insists, have nightmares!
It has been virtually a rerun of last year, almost to the worshipper - well, a different mixture of them, but amounting to the same numbers. The three mini-crib services on Christmas Eve, the curtailed midnight, 8am and 10am, took place without incident, and without a great many souls there either. But this year we have the added cruelty that Boxing Day is a Sunday. Who will turn up tomorrow to listen to my further attempts to squeeze some vaguely interesting thoughts out of the readings, I can't imagine. It has been wet and grey: I had to turn the lights on in the middle of the afternoon, and I don't mean the Christmas Tree lights. But we have survived (one more daily Lateral Flow Test to go and then I'll revert to twice-weekly again) and next year must surely be an improvement. Mustn't it?
When he was a curate, Il Rettore was handed the list of home communicants in the parish and sent off to see them. It's a way of doing something useful with a new curate who can't do much else and isn't supposed to be deluged with preaching duties and the like, and also gets them to meet people. But the temptation is just to get them doing all of it. Il Rettore once took communion to fourteen people in the same day. I wondered that his mental equilibrium was maintained, saying the same words over and over again. Perhaps it wasn't.
It isn't like that in Swanvale Halt, but I tend to do a series of home communions just before Christmas and Easter, to make sure people are included at these vital times. Some of my most moving moments in my ministry have been doing this as I encounter people who have lived lives of faith and faithfulness, and share with me their thankfulness for the mercies they have received and still do. They are always grateful to me, but when I say thank you at the end of the meeting I do mean it. Taking communion to someone in their own home, not celebrating a eucharist but simply administering the sacrament - to myself as well as them - is a situation of great equality. We are both recipients, approaching the Lord in his sacramental presence, even if I say most of the words. When Marion the curate was with us she did some home communions, but not all of them. I think any incumbent who delegates this job because they're awfully, awfully busy doing more important things is genuinely missing out.
In Farnborough, one of those wild corners of the Diocese of Guildford beyond the Surrey border in Hampshire, there are (now) three Anglican churches. The modern Good Shepherd need not detain us long:
And nor need we linger at St Peter's, the old parish church in the centre of town. Architecturally it's interesting, and even has medieval wall paintings - three fragmentary female saints, none of them, sadly, St Catherine - but it hails from the Low-Church end of the spectrum and has been cleansed and purified inside, to a degree. How on earth did it get away with driving through a pair of massive transept extensions either side of the old chancel in the 1960s, linked to it by sort of flat neo-Tudor arches?
But then I found my way to St Mark's - a humble redbrick building of the 1880s and no great distinction. I knew it would be open thanks to a Christmas tree festival, but I didn't anticipate the congregation members on duty would ply their visitor with tea, leek-and-potato soup, and mince pies, and show him their photograph albums and describe the history of the church. Nor was I anticipating images of priests in birettas, statues and shrines amid the hazardously trailing cables feeding the fairy lights, or a sacristan proudly showing off the 'best thurible' she was just finishing polishing. The church hadn't been founded with an Anglo-Catholic tradition, I was told, but had acquired it in the 1920s. 'Some of the locals never forgave us'.
The great treasure of St Mark's isn't anything specifically to do with its tradition, but a side chapel displaying its link with military flying: the Royal Engineer Balloon School and its successor the Air Battalion, and finally the RAF's forerunner the Royal Flying Corps, were all based at Farnborough and this was their Garrison Church. The chapel is a memorial to the RFC dead of WW1, each fatality's name recorded on a separate plaque of rather nice oak (including a local woman who was killed on war work). It has a mock-Jacobean screen at the entrance and, either side of the altar, what are not riddel-posts but nearly, topped not as you might expect by angels but by knights. There are Knights Templar on little pillars either side of the High Altar too - conspiracy theories ahoy!
So I had much reason to feel warm to St Mark's. But I suspect all this may not last all that longer. Like a number of other old Anglo-Catholic churches I know, it has the signs of something that was once grand and spiritually enriching but which can't be sustained, like a clock running down. There was once a rood beam which was removed, I was told, because it had woodworm; the Lady Chapel is no more, its old baroque altar reredos now wedged behind a piano while Our Lady of Walsingham sits on a shelf, a bit forgotten; and, if you look carefully, you can see Jesus on the high altar has a broken halo. The church is in vacancy at the moment, but they know where their new incumbent is coming from: an evangelical church not far away.
Sixteen years into my ministry, and eleven into my incumbency, and I have only just recognised a peculiar feature of parish life: the link between undertakers and Christmas trees. Our local undertakers are Galliards, who like many of their breed have been around for donkeys' years. I've always got on well with them: they're informative and co-operative, and don't simply arrange dates for funerals and then check whether I can do them afterwards. And they've always provided the church with a Christmas tree.
I had always thought of this as a local arrangement but suddenly became aware that it isn't. The South Yorkshire church currently served by my old vicar from High Wycombe, Fr Barkley, also has a Christmas tree provided by the undertaker's, and it isn't the only one. How has this come about? The companies don't get much publicity out of it (I decided the time had come to put a photo of our tree on Facebook, as much to promote the church as Galliards), and the connection isn't intuitive. The only thing I can think of is that undertaking often grew out of allied trades: carpenters, for instance, made coffins and branched out into arranging funerals, so there was a link with wood, trees, and Christmas decorations.
In fact our tree was a little dumpy and wonky this year: I had to put it on a little table to bring it up to most people's eye level. Rick the verger and Andy from the congregation wedged it level and draped it with gaudy tat so it looks presentable. I also made sure I photographed it from a clever angle. Not angel.
(As well as the church Christmas tree, Fr Barkley used to have a personal one delivered to the Rectory on behalf of the Lord of the Manor, along with a brace of pheasants. Sadly that custom no longer pertains. As the good Father says, "times is 'ard".
We are used to collecting crisp packets, cans, and kebab cartons from the churchyard, not pairs of trousers. These seem to be unsullied, and appeared in the middle of the day. I have left them there in case anyone wants to reclaim them.
'Very bold!' cried Edward from the congregation who was sat on the station platform having coffee with Rick the verger and Rena, another regular at the church. He was referring to the fact that I was catching the train to go and see S.D. for the first time in a long time, and possibly the last for a bit, too. Earlier that morning I'd been to the Park-and-Ride near Guildford to have my booster vaccination - which probably shouldn't be called that now, but simply an additional vaccination. I'd been booked in for the third inoculation at the end of the month, but my mother wanted me to get it sooner. I'd looked for a walk-in centre, but wasn't overly bothered until Professor Abacus, who should know, emailed me to say I should get it done as soon as I possibly could. Really. I was going to go to Kingston, until Sandra and Clarice in the church office pointed me to the Park-and-Ride which isn't listed publicly as a walk-in centre, but is. I called: no bookings until after Christmas, I was told at first, but then the nice lady spotted a cancellation early the following day, so I went along and waltzed past the poor souls queuing for their walk-in jab, waiting for just a little while before I was speared and free to go.
By the New Year the whole population will have been infected, says the BBC, or various scientific sages through it. We are not shutting up shop at the church unless we are told to by the Lawful Authorities, but I am anticipating lots of people falling by the wayside and many souls deciding they will prioritise, if they must, family gatherings rather than worship. In fact some have already told me this is what they will do. My chief problem is what happens if I fall victim myself: anything else I can absorb, short of playing the organ (and I can lead carols a capella if need be). If I do, Christmas at Swanvale Halt will be reduced to one mass on Christmas Day and the funeral I am booked to do on the 30th, and I have asked for help with those. I suppose I really need a Plan C as well as B.
S.D. asked me a couple of probing questions but proffered no advice. He was most put out by attending Mass for the Immaculate Conception at St Mary's Bourne Street the other day, and finding that His Grace of Chichester, presiding, chose only to use one mitre rather than the mitra simplex and the mitra preciosa to which such an occasion entitled him. 'He now looks like Pius XII in the last stages of his life', he offered.
The last time I discussed covid-scepticism I mentioned
Florence who refuses to take the vaccines on ethical grounds - that is, their development
using foetal cell material, like many modern medicines. I recently got into a
discussion about it, rather to my trepidation, as she’d stated a quoted mortality
rate for covid-19 of 1.37% made it ‘mild’, which I suppose it is compared to
many other sicknesses, but of course 1.37% of a lot, is a lot, as any
statistician knows. We disagree about the moral status of early-stage foetuses,
but some of the other challenges Florence makes seem worth thinking about.
Should we not learn to rely on God rather than the idol of medicine,
Florence asks. I don’t think anything in the Bible suggests that Christians ought in every situation to expect the miraculous intervention of God rather than ordinary
secular healing. In Jesus’s time sickness was viewed as a sign of God’s
displeasure on specific individuals and the Lord gave that very short shrift (John
3.1-3). His healing ministry was a way of revealing God’s will, and restoring
individuals to the fellowship of Israel. Though Christians were also likely to slip
into seeing illness and disability as a divine visitation, the Scriptures
themselves don’t: in his short discussion of healing, St James (5.14-16) neither
claims that, nor that Christians should not avail themselves of secular
medicine as well as prayer. Miraculous healings still take place, but a) we now
think about sickness differently and b) in order to reveal God’s will they
necessarily have to be extraordinary events rather than things we expect to
happen all the time. I don’t see any reason to believe that God wants us not to
use ordinary, normal human methods of fighting covid.
Florence is a serious soul and also raised the fact that the
word the New Testament uses for medicine, pharmakeia, also means ‘sorcery’,
and ultimately derives from pharmakon, ‘poison’. Isn’t this a suspicious
view of medical science, she suggests, and therefore presumably one Christians should
also exercise. I hadn’t thought about the way the Scriptures deal with medicine:
it’s easy enough to claim that it is merely a matter of ignorance (obviously at
the time nobody (including the physicians themselves) would have understood the
process of healing so the use of drugs was close to magic and therefore suspect);
also, the texts use another word, iatros, for ‘doctor’ when talking
about ordinary physicians and St Luke the evangelist himself. But we have to be
more positive than that and assume that the Biblical language has something to tell
us – that there might be a valuable point to that apparent connection between doctors
and sorcerers. Perhaps there’s a link between both magic and medicine in
our human desire for quick fixes to our problems that don’t require us to change
anything about ourselves. There are all sorts of lessons to learn from the
current pandemic involving our society and behaviour and early on almost everyone I spoke to talked about that, but now we’re just exhausted and yearn for it
to be over: we really want the vaccines to be a get-out-of-jail-free-card. In
terms of the pandemic's origins, for instance, we may never know whether the virus emerged
from a laboratory accident or a crossover from animals being kept in bad conditions; but, whichever it was, human actions have played a major part. A purely medical
solution that leaves out any spiritual reflection or room for repentance plays
to the very understandable desire (which I feel as much as anyone) to ‘get back
to normal’. Could that be the insight that lies underneath the Biblical
language?
Oh dear, it was some months ago now that I went to the churches of Hale but I have neglected to say anything about them here. And both St John's and St Mark's are so interesting, too.
Both churches - St John's is the earlier and grander, dating to 1844 and paid for by Bishop of Winchester Charles Sumner - were built to serve the expanding suburbs north of Farnham. The monumental mock-Norman St John's has had a strong Catholic tradition in the past and is the only place locally I have seen an integral sacring bell, which you can see in the photo of the statue - I suppose that must depict St John, though it's an unaccustomedly muscular vision of him if so. That Marian and Eucharistic woodcarving in the Lady Chapel must be pretty modern, and the Angelus still appears on the wall. What the Evangelical Bishop Sumner would have made of that I can't imagine.
In contrast to its smart suite of offices and meeting rooms, St Mark's a little north of St John's is a bit of a mess, but you can tell it's a beloved mess. It was paid for by the congregation itself in 1883; as the daughter church it never attained the heights of four-star status, as St John's did. It has a sole sanctuary lamp, though. That bit of white concrete in the photo is where the font used to be (it was replaced by a little glass basin which you can see in the fourth picture below), and there are marks of choir stalls in the floor. The congregation is doing its best to use the church as a community resource for events, art, and the like. I think that window of St Mark must surely be by the same artist as the one of the BVM at St John's; and isn't that altar frontal unusual? 1960s, perhaps?
But the great treasure of St Mark's is the wall paintings, the work of one Kitty Milroy, who lived in the area between 1902 and 1911. There is an Annunciation scene and angels behind the altar, but the rest of the images are seasonal, allegorical, and landscapes: Miss Milroy used various local people as her models. They've recently been restored and are thoroughly remarkable, all the more so for their presence in a thoroughly ordinary, inexpensive suburban church.
Outside you can see the old font, weirdly islanded in the garden. It isn't even used as a bird-bath.
The Deanery Chapter Christmas Lunch wasn't something I looked forward to, but then I got into a conversation with Rebecca who has been incumbent at Charlington for a couple of years. Obviously much of this time has been abnormal; I asked Rebecca whether she'd found Charlington has been a good fit for her, spiritually. What I found is an unusual picture these days of an incumbent trying to move their church further into Catholic life rather than away from it.
'I've learned,' she said, 'that because a church reserves the Sacrament and so on it doesn't necessarily tell you anything real about its spiritual life. "Liberal Catholic" really describes a church that's got a Eucharist on Sunday where the celebrant wears vestments, and that's it. There's not necessarily any sense of anything bigger or wider. I've made sure we celebrate Holy Week and they think it's all my idea rather than mainstream Catholic practice. That Tenebrae is something I made up. "Open Eucharistic" would be a better description.
'I tried to encourage sacramental confession by calling it a "Spiritual MOT" but the people who take it up are usually former Roman Catholics. I can introduce little bits and pieces, but what most of the church lacks is an awareness of how it all fits together, that this is a way of living life and making sense of it. If, when I leave, a few people have managed to grasp it, that'll be success.'
A book I have ordered seems to have gone astray, and when this little package turned up yesterday I was momentarily excited until I realised it was much too small for what I was expecting. Instead the mailing came from ChurchSuite, a company that runs a church-management software package that we don't use, and contained, as you can see, a bar of Green & Black's chocolate, which as it happens I rather like. As an attempt to capture my attention it definitely worked, but didn't have what I imagine was the intended result. Instead it made me feel very uncomfortable. I haven't done anything to deserve this bar of chocolate. How many were ChurchSuite sending out to random parish incumbents? How much profit do they make to enable them to engage in a marketing exercise like this? These sweets, as I know well, usually cost £2.20 from Messrs Waitrose & Sons (unless they're on offer).
I gave my chocolate to Rick the Verger, who had fewer qualms about it. It hasn't made me any more likely to spend a lot of the church's money on ChurchSuite.
Until yesterday I had no idea Hornington had a Shoe Tree. It's not much of one, to be fair - it doesn't have a great many shoes - but it seems to have been photographed as long ago as 2017 so how I can have missed it given the number of times I must have gone past it I can't imagine.
The redoubtable Ms Trollsmiter asked me what on earth Shoe Trees are about, but this absolutely reasonable question is impossible to answer neatly. There are masses of Shoe Trees across the world (here's a list of US ones) and new examples appear all the time; this folklore-and-magic blogger reports on a recent one in Scotland. There is no single reason why people start tossing shoes in trees and other people choose to imitate them, and the reason why the first event happens may not be why it's followed by more. The Hornington tree is near the skate park, as is the one in Basingstoke which began last year, and this one in Soham, so there might be some local significance to that, but popular theories that shoe trees mark rendezvous points for drug sales, gang territory boundaries, or that popular folkloric staple, 'fertility rituals', seem to be mythical. As this US-based writer points out, it's unclear what 'slinging shoes into a tree has to do with sex'.
When I worked in High Wycombe there was a famous Shoe Tree along the main road leading west from Stokenchurch. Here it is, as I photographed it in 2000:
The tree was right beside a busy main road and very hard to get a clear look at, let alone throw anything in. Several people assured me gypsies were responsible for it, but again nobody could explain what they might have got out of the act of lobbing a shoe, or a pair of shoes, up a tree: gypsies are of course mysterious and secretive figures so you can safely pin any mystery on them. This tree has existed since the 1970s and has moved about: the one I photographed fell a little while later (I have another photo of it somewhere in its recumbent state) and now there's a successor. There has been some outrage that £265,000 was supposedly awarded by a National Lottery grant to 'get to the bottom of the mystery', but this is based on a misunderstood report in the Daily Mail: the grant was actually given to the Chilterns Woodlands Project in 2005 to research, preserve and publicise 'special trees' across the whole Chilterns region, not just this one.
Ultimately, I suspect, while the specific reasons why some Shoe Trees begin varies from place to place, they carry on because they're fun - a way of leaving your mark on a place. You will carry on knowing your old footwear is there, even if nobody else knows it's yours. As Hunter Stuart sums up a little deflatingly, 'shoe trees exist because people enjoy throwing their shoes into trees' ... !
There were Christmas lights in Swanvale Halt last year, but no ceremonial turning-on; we did it this year! Singing, Father Christmas, the Mayor of Hornington (and a number of former Mayors) and refreshments from the Day Centre and the café over the road. In fact this photo comes from 2019, but that doesn't matter.
The Town Council Communities Officer, Sindy, asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would be willing to be involved again and apologised for the late notice - I said that was far from late notice in my experience. So, in between the singing group and the Mayor counting down, I spoke for precisely three minutes about how end-of-year celebrations in whatever religion or culture were all about marking the fact that we'd made it and that's sometimes all we can manage, so well done all of you, said a quick prayer and blessing and then handed over to the Mayor for the great illumination. We never used to have our own lights in Swanvale Halt: they first went up as an extra community initiative seven years ago and have become quite a feature.
There's no real reason why the parish priest should be involved in the turning-on of the Christmas lights in these secular times. I suppose it represents the dim surviving sense that the continuity the church stands for is a thread that runs through the whole community. The fact that I'm asked to take part is, I think, a huge privilege and one I made a point of thanking Sindy for.
Some of the moments I will best remember (I hope I will remember them!) from my ministry will be from communion at home with older congregation members. Today, I took communion to Angela who lives in the flats next to the church. Afterwards she told me: 'I live alone, but I never feel alone. I mean, I know who's there. It's when I get up in the morning and I'm reeling about a bit, and then He comes to me and I know I've got another few days to do. But sometimes I do wish He'd get on and take me!'
Are you ready, Angela? I asked. 'Well, I'm 91 and yes, I am ready, but not in a hurry, if that makes sense. I look out of the window and I've got trees and birds and squirrels and it's so beautiful. I've got so much to be thankful for.' As a result, I reflected I had, too.
On the door of the flats I saw this sign. The question is, who is the mysterious woman referred to?
Rob who assists Rick the verger sends me an email saying he wants to leave all his church roles as he is fed up with people (including Rick) questioning what he does: 'it's always the wrong candles etc'. Rick denies all knowledge. We have an ongoing knotty problem with a church property and the legal arrangements surrounding it. Grant the churchwarden is questioning the (minimal) overtime paid to Chloe the bookkeeper. A neighbour is complaining about the sound of the organ coming from the church. I contemplate all these matters and would quite like to chuck the whole thing in and go and do something that has no responsibility attached to it.
Probably the key to managing is a certain sense of detachment. I am the pastor to my church community but I can't manage relationships within it such that everything will always be all right. Ultimately my fundamental role is pointing towards God and restating that all our structures and relationships need to be ordered in reference to him, and the key to that is keeping my own sights fixed on him as well. I will be soaking up conflict and disagreement to a certain extent as to do this is to follow the Lord, but on its own this is not guaranteed to make everything good and happy. That's really what I would like to happen, but I can't make it happen. Can I discern the way forward between defending the weak and recognising that I can't stop every bit of the bad stuff people carry around with them emerging? And that, of course, includes me as well.
Lady SteamThreader alerted me to the strange circumstance that
my blog post from last year about Slimelight and the death of its founder Mak
MaYuan has, as she said, ‘been screen shot to prove something in the feud over
Slimelight’. I wasn’t aware there was a ‘feud’, and I can’t see that anything I
wrote can possibly be of use to anyone as all my information came from a
modicum of Googling, but angry people clutch at straws, perhaps.
There’s little to be gained by delving deep into what seems
to have been happening, but in brief Mak MaYuan ran Slimelight (the Goth club),
Electrowerkz (the music venue) and the Islington Metal Works (the ground floor
of the same property, 7 Torrens Street, a broader events location) as
businesses with his wife, even after they separated and he found a new partner
with whom, as the newspapers reported at the time of his sudden death, he’d
recently had a baby. Whatever may have been said or not, he doesn’t seem to
have updated his will or maybe had one at all, so said partner has no rights
over anything other than what said wife chooses to concede, except perhaps the
baby. As said wife was a bit older than Mak, she would be very unwise indeed not
to have a will, and said baby might stand to inherit a profitable business and
chunk of real estate in the middle of London. Even though Mak, wife and partner
rubbed along relatively amicably while he was still alive, you can see how this
had the potential to get very grubby now he’s gone. Given that so much of
London Goth life has now retracted itself into Electrowerkz, whatever happens to that site and business also
has an impact on the entire community.
Part of the point of my earlier blog post was to argue that Goth is
now an accepted part of British cultural life, recognised by the Arts Council grant
to keep Slimelight afloat during the pandemic. The current Slimes situation proves that Goth is normal in a different way: as
much as the Goth world thinks of itself as alternative, once personal rivalries
get overlaid by money and property, it turns out to be subject to the same strains and conflicts as mainstream society. You can read the
longstanding frictions afflicting Whitby Goth Weekend in the same way. It takes
more than a bit of black leather and lace to deflect the iron laws of capital,
it seems.
I turned up at St Catherine's Chapel south of Guildford for what I hoped would be the customary mid-day prayer service - and ended up leading it because the new incumbent of the parish church was poorly. At least one of the other attenders had brought an old order of service along so I could improvise on a theme!
I don't remember seeing the mosaic on the wall of Pilgrim Cottage by the side of the path down to the holy well, so here it is.
Back in the old days, if your church used the English (or
even the Roman) Missal, you might have been used to the way the liturgical calendar
was organised. The complex system of hierarchies between feast days was mainly
intended to determine which prayers should be said, on what day, and in which
order. Things are, thankfully, rather simpler in Anglican Common Worship (and
in fact in the Roman observance nowadays – there is only ever supposed to be
one collect on any occasion rather than a set ordered by the rank of the feasts
they commemorate), but even with us the system survives in the form of its
Principal Feasts and Holy Days, Festivals, Lesser Festivals, and
Commemorations. Individual churches will always have had their own ways of
marking these liturgical distinctions which have grown up according to local
circumstances – best sets of vestments, or candlesticks that are brought out
for special occasions, and the like. That’s only natural, as much a way of meditating
on the mystery of Christ as general things like liturgical colours are.
Now Rick our verger is a great blessing, but he does illustrate
the law that liturgical custom, left to its own devices, tends to escalate.
Not long ago I came out into the Lady Chapel to celebrate a quiet midweek mass
to find that, unbeknownst to me, he’d arranged with a relatively new member of
the congregation who collects icons to bring in a massive icon of
whatever-day-it-was, which was sat on an easel atop a draped table right in the
centre of the very modest available space. I have had to stress that extra
elements are not introduced into services without me being asked, but Rick does
keep forgetting. A few days before Remembrance Day I arrived to find little
standard British Legion poppies fixed on all the pillars with blu-tack, and palm
crosses coloured green in strategic positions, over doors and on chair-backs – because
green is the seasonal colour. They all had to come down, and I had to devise a
form of words which expressed the truth ‘this looks rubbish’ in a kindly way.
Last Sunday, it being the feast of Christ the King, I realised too late as the
8am mass started that Rick had put the great brass cross and accompanying
candlesticks on the old High Altar to mark, as he thought, a special day – but not
as special as Christmas and Easter when we usually make use of them. Joy
the sacristan took them down later on, replacing them by our standard, simpler ones.
I despair at having to restrict people’s enthusiasm over
such petty matters, but beneath them is the tendency we all have to impose
ourselves on our surroundings, and that’s a spiritual business. The point about
the rules of managing feasts and observances, complex or simple, is that they provide
an agreed way of controlling the worship space, and making sure we all serve
them rather than bend it to our own predilections. They are about restraining
our self-regard. The church doesn’t belong to us as individuals, no matter how
well-meaning we think we are: it is the physical medium by which a community talks
to God and God talks to them: lose sight of that, and there's no end to it. From time to time, even I have to remember that,
too.
A zoom down to Dorset to celebrate my birthday brought the chance to revisit two museums which have been completely refurbished over the last few years. The mighty County Museum in Dorchester, which I reported on in 2017, is all but unrecognisable inside. They are understandably keen to recoup some of the enormous cost of the rebuilding, and so not only is there now a rather steep entrance charge but the one-time centrepiece of the whole museum, the Victorian Hall, its galleries jam-packed with miscellaneous social-history collectanea, is now an 'events space' - I could only peer into it and watch it being set with tables for rich people to come and eat at. The new organising space is a colossal Brutalist stairwell with the Fordington Mosaic up one wall, a bit like the Ashmolean's only rougher, with the exhibition areas opening off it: those are sleek and imaginatively laid out, and ever so slightly antiseptic. I know it's churlish to quibble at that, especially when four years ago I was complaining about it being a bit old-fashioned! I wonder whether even more of the collections could be brought out, now there is so much space to display them in.
I have more invested in what used to be the Priest's House Museum in Wimborne and is now the Museum of East Dorset, as it was my workplace in 1991 and 1992. I was there in the midst of the great refurbishment which marked its transformation from an essentially volunteer-run, somewhat quaint little place to a more professional set-up whose arrangements were shaped around historical and architectural knowledge. Stephen, the curator, had a vision of exploring the very varied history of the building through the people who had lived there, decorating a series of rooms to fit in with those themes based on the fragments visible in them. Expensive handmade mannequins were purchased and displayed. So the entrance area became an old-fashioned ironmonger's; grumpy Victorian Mr Low glowered behind his counter in the stationery shop; in the Georgian parlour, Mrs King consulted with her plumber whose initials had been found on the lead rainwater heads; and in a 17th-century back room an anonymous woman we all called Harriet sat sewing against a background of painted wallcloths based on those surviving in Owlpen Manor. Every day the first and last jobs (which fell to me when I was on duty) were to take down or replace the wooden shutters along the bow-fronted windows: Stephen had had these reconstructed to recreate the 18th-century shop frontage.
Thirty years later and all of this has gone. Mannequins are certainly not flavour of the day any more, notwithstanding how well-made they are; the bow-fronted windows have been replaced by a plate-glass panel. Not only has a lot of the reconstruction been driven by the need to provide a fully-accessible space, but the whole display philosophy is different - instead of a succession of period rooms, the construction of the building is highlighted. Upstairs there is a massive stone fireplace I don't even recall existing, which must have been covered up behind later plasterwork. I can't work out where the Tinsmith's Forge was: it was an horrendous mess, but still part of the history of the site, so I'm surprised it's gone completely. I spent several freezing days listing all the objects, and on my last visit, with Ms Formerly Aldgate back in 2013, was able to point out the little tags I'd put on them in 1991, left undisturbed, so it's probably understandable that they are all gone. The only things that remain from those far-off days are the Victorian Kitchen, and the mummified cat, which inhabits a tiny case upstairs and, I suspect, always will, as long as the museum survives!
I realised I actually enjoyed reading my friends' blogs, and so have made my own, with an oblique nod to 4th-century theologian Theodore of Mopsuestia. Christian and Gothic matters will probably predominate. Names are changed to protect the furtive.
