"A House Divided"

Over at Fr Thesis's church yesterday the Society of King Charles the Martyr were enjoying themselves celebrating the entry into paradise (we must surmise) of Bd Charles Stuart in 1649, rather to my surprise as neither has the good Fr ever expressed any fondness for the Royal Martyr in the past, nor has his church had any link with the SKCM, as far as I know. When I raised this with him he merely commented mildly that 'the stars were aligned in its favour'; the stars in question, I supposed, being King Charles's Wain. A friend-of-a-friend once took a Methodist acquaintance to the SKCM's annual Memorial Mass, which always used to be held at the Banqueting House; at one stage in the proceedings the Nonconformist minister leant over and whispered 'What happens next, do they sacrifice a cockerel?'

Forget Gothic versus Roman vestments, Sarum versus Western rite, or even an all-male priesthood versus letting women in, or any of the other things Anglo-Catholics have disagreed about: the real dividing line, I think, is your attitude to the Royal Martyr. For some of my friends he represents a dream of Catholic Anglicanism, pious, hierarchical, and reactionary. Of course they know it's loopy, and its very loopiness adds to the sense of naughty fun involved in observing the cult of King Charles (you find the same sort of thing among Goths and vintage enthusiasts). Meanwhile I can't even pretend to take it at all seriously. In Enid Chadwick's My Book of the Church's Year she has a drawing of St Charles standing serenely, regally, and unhistorically tall next to the chopping block, with the caption 'Charles I, the White King. He died to save the English Church'. I can never help thinking at this that I'm not at all sure that was why he died: he died because he was an idiot, albeit a berk of a principled brand. His best modern biographer, Leanda de Lisle, records that the legend that the black pall of Charles's coffin was covered with snow as it was carried to St George's Windsor, giving rise to that title of 'White King', derives from 'a professional liar'. The old Book of Common Prayer was more interested in making sure people repented of the blood-guilt of attacking the King rather than in his own virtues, and the observance of his death was struck out of the calendar in 1859; the English Missal of course omitted him, as that dutifully followed Roman models. The Alternative Service Book listed him, but it took the Franciscans' Celebrating Common Prayer to come up with a slightly strained Collect referring to the royal martyr 'praying for his enemies' as the chief mark of a holy life. I have no idea where that came from. About as good a stab at it as you can make, though. I can usually ram my tongue far enough into my cheek to be able, when the occasion arises, to read it without choking.

Charles's feast day is, technically, today rather than yesterday, displaced to the 29th by the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany. As I was preparing to leave after the 8am mass I listened to the Roman Catholic congregation we share the church with limbering up and their pianist practising what was clearly 'He Who Would Valiant Be', so I congratulated Fr Jeremy on celebrating St Charles's Day by including a hymn written by that doughty Puritan and Republican John Bunyan. Who is also in the Anglican calendar, a symbol of heavenly reconciliation if ever there was one. But not even we have included Oliver Cromwell.

A Tiny Treat

Part of the delight of the garden is that it often furnishes surprises: you can never quite predict what's going to be there. The other day I went out to trim a couple of errand branches from the bay tree and found a goldcrest flitting around the pond. Goldcrests, Britain's smallest bird species, are shy little things but this one was keen enough to get at the water to be relatively unbothered by my presence. Back and forth, back and forth it went, and was still loitering about long after I'd got a reasonably good photo.

Even the leucistic blackbird reappeared after an absence of a few months - I hadn't expected to see it again. 

'Gothic: an Illustrated History' by Roger Luckhurst (Thames & Hudson, 2021)

Do we really need yet another 'history of the Gothic'? What professor of English Literature at Birkbeck, Roger Luckhurst, does to justify writing one is to take a strictly analytic and thematic approach, breaking the multifarious extremity of the Gothic tradition into its constituent elements, into which the history emerges sidelong and in passing, Horace Walpole rubbing shoulders with modern film – lots of film, as it turns out, Dr Luckhurst’s preferred medium for illustrating how the Gothic has morphed into its contemporary manifestations. He identifies four domains of human thought in which the Gothic expresses itself – form (buildings and structures), landscape, ‘the Gothic compass’ (how the Gothic imagination orders the earth and beyond it), and monstrosity – each of which are then neatly divided into five sub-chapters. Sometimes these divisions are perhaps overly neat, as Gothic thinking about the far North and far South turn out not to be that different, and neither are the uncanny undoings of structure signified by ‘Tentacles’ and ‘Formless[ness]’, but the format allows Dr Luckhurst to examine ideas and themes in a fruitful way.

And this is, as the name suggests, an illustrated history - illustrated nothing short of sumptuously. This is not a physically big or even a long book, but it packs in 350 pictures and more. I think there’s a paperback edition, but I bought the hardback, and what with its heavy, embossed covers and thick, glossy paper making all those images shine, it’s almost too weighty to hold up in comfort. The prevalence of the pictures means the writing is brisk and concise, and even if just occasionally the pell-mell listing of films reflecting this or that theme gets a bit bewildering, if nothing else you’ll come away with a list of scary movies you want to look up. The mainstay of the book isn’t literature, but I was pleased to see Emily Dickinson get a mention: ‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted’, she warned, and this beautiful book shows how right she was.

United

It only takes a moment to volunteer for something as a generous gesture and then with it comes a tidal surge of worry. I can't remember what led me to say to the executive of Churches Together in Hornington that Yes, we could have the annual United Service at Swanvale Halt. Last year, of course, it was all online, but we wanted to do it in person this time, and so towards the end of last year I began trying to assign roles to various people, attempting to ensure a good mix of church communities, male and female voices, and things like that. 

In past years the music provision has constituted a knotty issue. Customarily a group of musicians from churches across the town has 'emerged' and wanted a degree of input into what ends up being used in the service; a negotiation has ensued between them and whoever is organising the event until a consensus has been reached. Some years it's harder than others. This year I was assured that there were musicians out there, but nobody felt they were in a position to organise them, so in the end I fell back on the boring but reliable option of using one of our organists.

We do the service this time of year because it falls within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Churches Together in Britain and Ireland issues a set of liturgical resources which this year were devised by the Council of Churches of the Middle East. You can't use the whole lot because you'd be there all morning, but they help. I decided to project an appropriate image of the Visit of the Magi rather than get our Crib back out of the loft again, and thought it would be nice to play St Ephrem's Hymn to the Divine Light from the Syriac liturgy, one of the pieces included: that would help us reflect on the circumstances and experiences of the ancient Christian Churches of the Middle East. Nice ideas but requiring fiddling with laptops, projectors, screens and iPods: these are antique tech these days but do the trick provided they work. And there's the rub.

It was all fine. Lots of people came, Simon the organist caused me more nail-biting by uncharacteristically only turning up ten minutes before kick-off but he was there, Revd Alan from the United Reformed Church preached movingly on 'Light from the East', and nothing went wrong. That's all one can hope for at the moment.

Who Will Count the Cost?

It was Dean, the Treasurer, on the other end of the phone. First, he wanted to ask some details about the ecumenical service we're hosting tomorrow for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and how to manage the collection. Dean has a stammer, and when he said he had something else to mention and his stammer got noticeably worse, an angel whispered in my ear what he was going to say before he said it. He would quite like to stop being Treasurer, if that was all right.

Dean has been Treasurer for more than ten years: he moved across from being Churchwarden not long after I arrived in Swanvale Halt, and has been brilliant as the role has gradually expanded, grappling with budgeting (we didn't even have a notional budget to measure ourselves against at one time) and the ever-changing requirements of HMRC. He is a gentle and Christian soul who I know would always do anything I asked him to, so I was careful not to ask too often. Ten years and more is enough for anyone.

Now of course people very rarely want to do any role in church and usually take a lot of persuading, but of all those reluctant tasks Treasurer is the one they seem to want least, and once you get someone willing to take it on you tend to grip them as tight as you can. It isn't only churches where this is true: the rule applies to every voluntary organisation I've ever been anywhere near. When I was in the Liberal Democrats at Oxford there was only one occasion when an officer served more than one term, and that was a very special case when we were undergoing a particular episode of chaos - but the exception was the Treasurer's role. Both then, and after I left, there were three Treasurers who served a year each, and Oxford time being different from everywhere else's, even a term can seem an eternity. It wasn't as though being Treasurer of the Oxford University Lib Dems was a very onerous task, as incoming and outgoing funds hardly amounted to a king's ransom. It was the title that scared students off - the worry, perhaps, that they might get something wrong that would have actual consequences, rather than just get up the noses of students like the other officers. 

It isn't as though Dean has any special financial expertise: he's a computer programmer. I suppose you might argue he is the possessor of a tidy mind, but that's really his only qualification aside from being a Good Egg. So I shall be looking through the box to find another one, and trying to persuade them that's what they are.

Barely Tamed

The savaging of the old apple tree that threatened to topple over in the Autumn was accomplished a few weeks ago. My professional gardener friend Lady Quercus says it should be all right, but it may concentrate on survival rather than fruiting this coming year, and I will have to look out for lots of sudden new shoots which will need to be dealt with. But as soon as I took the tangled branches off the south side of the tree, the prop I'd put under it fell out, demonstrating how unbalanced it was. I did reposition it, just in case.

The other day I looked back through my old photos for images of Boots, Dr Bones's dog whose loss I described previously, and some of the pictures show the garden too. I see that in 2009, when Boots and the Dr visited for my induction, the gigantic fir and laurel hedge which leads along from the sleeper-steps was just a couple of bushes no more than two feet high. How did it get so colossal without me noticing? How did it creep up on me like that? I did think the winter pruning was all done, but only this week I realised that the laurel bush right at the top of the garden leading into Melpomene's Grove has also turned into a sprawling tree which really needs restraining or its lower bits, which is what I really want, will become ragged and disorganised. So the ladder, saw and pruner have been taken out again. One day I will reduce it all to order, I tell myself!

Good Bye, Good Beast

Sadly, as of yesterday, Dr Bones's dog Boots is no more. She acquired him having been deemed by the pet shop an unfit person to own a goldfish, but apparently it was fine being responsible for a creature considerably higher up the evolutionary ladder (at least in theory). Boots was a rescue dog and came to the Dr quite young: we never knew his story, but it took him a while to get used to his new life, consistent with his old one not having been very much fun. I am not a doggy person - not an animal person at all - but Boots has been a part of all our lives for so long that, even though he's done pretty well for a greyhound-of-some-sort, it is sad to think he will be no longer. He was a venerable and faithful hound.

I have photographs of Boots in canal tunnels, conversing with Ms Formerly Aldgate, and listening to me speak about Charles Dickens on a London Goth Walk in the pouring rain, but here he is in Swanvale Halt rectory on the day of my induction twelve years ago. I think this was after he chewed the wall in the bathroom where he was confined while I and Dr Bones were at the ceremony itself. I mean, fair comment.

Hackfall Holiday

It's rare that I use anyone else's photos here, but my friends Madame Morbidfrog and Mr Romeburns have been celebrating their anniversary by travelling to Hackfall near Ripon and staying in The Ruin. I realise I was there so long ago it was before I even began this blog: Autumn 2008. Hackfall wasn't my first introduction to the concept of the 'Gothic Garden' - that had been Hawkstone in Shropshire the year before - but it crystallised the idea in my mind and confirmed my theory that there was a series of these dramatic landscapes around the country. The Landmark Trust's restoration of The Ruin (or The Banqueting House, to give it its more correct and less interesting name) was the first step in rescuing Hackfall from its decades of obscurity and neglect, work which has carried on under the aegis of the Woodland Trust and Hackfall Trust: the follies that inhabit the woods have been stabilised, the great Fountain restored, and the walks tidied up - so far as they can be. This time of the year they will be an ocean of mud if my experience was anything to go by.

I loved The Ruin: it's one of the Landmarks I might return to, notwithstanding the fact that none of the three rooms communicate with each other, so to have a wee or retire for the night you have to go outside onto the terrace, teetering on its precipitous drop down to the valley of the River Ure far, far below. My first night was marked by howling wind and rain and strange noises: finally I went to the window to investigate and found myself being stared at by the reflecting eyes of a sheep. I think. Realising that Professor Purplepen wasn't far away in Leeds, I invited her to dinner (actually, Leeds turned out to be farther away than we thought, but she came anyway). On the second day I'd come back from a trip and there was a knock on the door. A woman in a wax jacket and wellingtons with a dog asked me whether I was Mr Weepingcross. She handed me a letter: 'This arrived at the farm for you. I think the postman delivered it to me as it's the closest address to The Ruin'. The missive turned out to be from the Professor who couldn't remember whether she'd told me she was a vegetarian, and had lost my phone number. Royal Mail to the rescue.

Madame Morbidfrog and Mr Romeburns look like they are enjoying themselves immensely. Only proper Goths take all their gear (it's nowhere near all their gear, but never mind) to a field in Yorkshire even though nobody else is going to be there. And don't quibble that Madame is barely wearing black at all, it still counts. 

It's very encouraging to see the restoration work elsewhere in Hackfall. This was The Grotto when I visited, a tumble of stones with a bench in the middle:

The Grotto hasn't exactly been restored, because it can't be, but its remains have instead been transmuted into a splendid arch which you'd never believe had only been in place for about ten years.

I can feel a return tempting me even now (though not this year, I am booked elsewhere). 

Cheers

Which group would be out of the church premises first, the Pilates class or the Townswomen’s Guild? It would be nicer for Deanery Chapter to meet in the church rather than the hall, but that would require the former to vacate, and they were lingering as I put out biscuits and a carafe of coffee on a trolley. We ended up in the hall, as the ladies of the Townswomen’s Guild were long gone, but Pilates can’t be rushed.

‘I reckon there’ll be six of us’, predicted the vicar of Watwood, the deputy area dean, explaining that the dean himself, the rector of Tophill, was absent at another engagement. In the end he was wrong by a factor of 100%, but those twelve souls took quite a while to gather, grappling with the challenging parking situation in the centre of Swanvale Halt.

We shared how Christmas had gone. Through all our different local permutations of services, whether we tried to sustain the normal diet of worship or slim it down, move carol services outside our buildings or restrict numbers, the leitmotif throughout was just trying to get through it all and being grateful that we did. At Ackbury Hill the curate-in-charge held a Crib Service for eight people, two of whom were her own children: ‘I felt so deflated’. At Thawton the vicar was persuaded by her congregation (she looks after more than one church) that nobody would turn up on Christmas Day because they were all too worried about the Plague, and so there was no service; then she was invited to carols in the village pub on Christmas Eve and found several of the congregation, singing perfectly happily at the tops of their voices, clearly having decided that setting was much less risky than a church. This was the parish whose Profile asked for a priest who ‘won’t keep talking about discipleship like the previous vicar did’. Rebecca at Charlington had enquired about sabbatical leave and had been told ‘You can forget about that – no matter how long you stay in this diocese we won’t get through the backlog that’s ahead of you’. I can’t quite picture the authorities putting it that bluntly, but even so.

We were all getting a bit morose until John from Campham called us back to why we were all ordained: the Ordinal’s words of ‘speaking the Word in season and out of season’ take our attention away from the circumstances of the moment and back to God’s time, which is what we represent.

That may have been the thinking behind the crib scene at Holy Trinity Hawley, a visit I will describe on another occasion: it included an elephant.

Missing In Action

If I am in bed and hear the sound of a helicopter somewhere nearby, it seems a fair bet that it’s hunting for a missing person. Yesterday I positively knew it was, because the person concerned was Bill, an older member of the congregation. Bill had left the house while his wife Jenny was out, and even when she returned she assumed he was napping upstairs, and only discovered he wasn’t there when she went to check whether he’d taken his medicine. I got to the house about 6.30 by which time Bill had been absent four hours: by this stage there were three police cars in the road, Bill and Jenny’s daughters had arrived, Sarah our pastoral assistant and verger Rick were present, and so were a variety of friends and neighbours. We agreed, in the end, that Bill was probably still close by, and perhaps sleeping somewhere: he has a number of health issues and isn’t that mobile. In fact it seemed to be those issues which had driven him out: a note and his clothing seemed to suggest he wanted to walk away from the challenges and not come back, but without his meds he was unlikely to get far without falling asleep.

As the evening wore on and I carried out my allotted task of calling Bill’s phone, I feared for him more and more. The circling helicopter meant he still hadn’t been found at gone midnight. I wondered how long the police’s procedures give them before they would start dredging the river. I slept as (almost) always but had particularly weird and uncomfortable dreams, though nothing clearly to do with the situation at hand.

But I got a text at 6.30 in the morning: Bill was home! He was found nowhere local at all, but miles away, having managed to get to a bus stop and then as far as a town in the next county. This was a particular surprise as Jenny thought his fear of covid would have kept him away from public transport, but perhaps he wasn’t thinking about that. I had already begun imagining what Sunday would be like, having to bend the story of the Wedding at Cana around the loss of someone we love, and had a tear. It would not only have been loss, of course, but the knowledge that the soul lost would have left this life in despair, and that those who loved them knew it too: almost too terrible to think about. Thank God we don’t have to.

Coming Around Again

One of my current projects is to reunite as many as possible of the Spiritual Instructions of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward, the Anglican spiritual director in whom I’ve had an interest for some while. He issued more or less one a month for years, eventually totalling about 450. Some time ago I was sent printed copies of the majority of them, and I now have copies of his books in which many more were published in extracted form. Some are lost, but it should be able to compile three-quarters or more of them.

Fr Ward eventually gave up issuing his Instructions in 1957 on doctor’s advice (he was already 76 by then) and was evidently flagging a bit in the years before that, sometimes only managing one missive to his directees every two months. I wonder whether the slowdown was caused not only by health but by the lack of much new to say after forty years or so. I am only scanning the documents rapidly at the moment rather than reading them, but even so I can detect pet themes and writers being repeatedly mentioned. In contrast, I’ve only been ordained 17 years but there are already many times when I finish composing a little homily for a quiet said mass that I am pretty sure I’ve said essentially the same thing, on maybe more than one occasion!

Nevertheless the round of preaching, driven as it is by the lectionary cycle, does mean you try to come up with new thoughts. At least they may be new to you: it seems to me vanishingly unlikely, even when I produce something I’ve never considered before, that nobody else in the past two thousand years of Christian history has ever stumbled across the same motif.

Now and again you draw something from the texts you are given which seems to offer you some help as much as your audience, but it turns out to be a variation on a theme. Last Sunday was the Baptism of Christ and I spoke, naturally enough, about the relationship between Christ’s baptism and our own. Take whatever it is that causes separation between you and God, and drown it in the waters, I said, or something like it. But is that very different from nailing it to the cross – the kind of imagery we might use in Lent?

The supposed spiritual insights we happen across either for ourselves or from others have a resemblance to, say, dieting fads: here is the thing, the new thing, which is going to make the lasting difference. And we fall on it enthusiastically, pursue it for a little while, and then find it not working, and eventually forget about it.

But perhaps such spiritual techniques can only work for a short time, and that’s all we can expect from them. I try to follow the advice of Metropolitan Anthony, and draw a phrase or verse from my morning Bible reading which shapes my thoughts for the day ahead, usually turning to a new one the following day. I find Fr Somerset Ward counselled the same sort of thing: to take something from your morning meditation (he assumed that would be when you’d do it) and use this as the basis for spontaneous prayers through the day. None of these phrases are supposed to be the one thing that can revolutionise your spiritual life, because nothing will. It’s a long-term business, and such is the dullness, perhaps, of the human soul that we constantly need some new direction to approach God – which will do no harm, provided we recall the unchanging nature of the one who draws us near. 

Petworth House

My last holiday trip was not very far to the south, to Petworth. I'd walked round the park before, and I and Ms Formerly Aldgate had even ventured into the house, but it had been frightfully overrun and coming home rather than fighting our way around was the right decision as we weren't paying for it. This time, of course, I was, but on a dull Epiphany day only a handful of visitors were making their way around, dwarfed by the scale of the place.

Petworth is unusual as you get a clear impression of life below stairs in the kitchen wing, a range of grandiose rooms basically designed as backdrops for the Egremonts' art collection, and not much else. The family themselves vanish in the face of the paintings and the sculpture. The house is always associated with Turner, who often stayed there, but even he doesn't feature very prominently. I spotted one little Turner work, high up on a dark wall, depicting Jessica from The Merchant of Venice and described by one of the artist's early biographers: 'Only a great man dare paint something so bad'. Instead it's as though the house has its own personality, or series of personalities, separate from any of the people who have lived there - the clear Marble Hall, the umbrageous Great Staircase, the Chapel panelled in black wood, the musty North Gallery, as well as the low and slightly resentful kitchen wing. 

I look instead for strange nooks and details, and find them in the background figures of John Leslie's Sancho Panza and the Duchess and the horrified face caught in the midst of Blake's Day of Judgement. 

Parental Guidance

Dr Bones used to look after a young woman called Hilary who was a mixed-up Child of the Manse not unlike Dr Bones herself, because her own parents were very bad at it. The Dr gave Hilary odd jobs to do on her boat and referred to her affectionately as Slave, though she was a very unwilling and usually inefficient skivvy.  One day we heard that Hilary had met Carl on a train, who was twice her age and very soon an attachment. We were dismayed, but somehow despite being to all appearances a wastrel, Carl stuck, and in time even got a job. They ultimately produced three offspring and in fact parenthood was the making of Hilary despite all our forebodings.

That’s not true of everyone. I was under strict orders from Ms Formerly Aldgate never to tell her parents where she was, though as she’d been in regular contact with them before getting together with me and leaving London I did feel obliged to let them know she was still alive, as I thought a) this was kind and b) it made them less likely to come looking for her. As far as I could work out, they were just a bit rubbish - for instance, as many divorcing couples do, treating her like a bit of furniture to argue over. 'Rubbish' is an inadequate word for the parents of my friend CG who told me ‘When I dared to ask them why they had me if they didn’t want me, they just hit me harder’.

I have never wanted to have children. This isn’t because I don’t like them: as time goes on I find I like children rather more than I do adults, and I appreciate quite keenly the way the love couples have for each other, at its best, extends to produce children. I glimpse this in the parents, and the children, I deal with in the course of parish life, and in my own mum and dad. Years ago I digitised all their old slide photographs, and found myself entering, through the snaps, into their relationship with the infant me, which I knew can’t have been an altogether easy one as I got older. So, as I say, I have come to like children, but it doesn’t follow that I want to make one of my own. I am fond of saying by analogy that I like the Taj Mahal but don’t want to build one in the garden. Actually, don’t give me ideas.

So when Pope Francis goes on about the selfishness of people who don’t have children, I wonder. I have long felt that the priest is the last person who knows the truth about their flock: remember John and Mary, the couple in Father Ted who loathe each other murderously but who smile, embrace, and present the perfect marriage as soon as Ted appears. This is the only explanation for the kind of fantasy world so many clergy seem to live in. There is projection, too, of course. Several people who have been in the position of advising me over the years have blankly told me that I must really want children and all I am waiting for is the right person to have them with. No, I think whenever this comes up, that’s because that’s how you feel and you can’t possibly imagine anyone feeling differently. To me, the desire to reproduce is weird. It’s completely beyond my experience, something I have never, ever felt. It’s not because having children would force me to give up the way I live – I could imagine getting together with someone who already had a child, though at my advanced age even that doesn’t seem likely - but it comes from a deep, visceral and intense dislike at the idea of having offspring of my own. Disgust, in fact. Make of that what you will.

There’s an ideological element to what the Pope has to say, too. Catholic Natural Law theory assumes that God has made human beings to function in certain quite narrowly constrained ways, and to defy those ways a) is sinful and b) will hurt them. Thus he arrives at arguing that human beings should ignore their deep instincts and deliberately act against them: this is how human beings are supposed to be. So CG’s parents, who beat her, did the right thing in producing a child they didn’t want. He doesn’t say that about gays, strangely: about gays, famously, he says ‘Who am I to judge?’ But then he’s not that much of a theologian.

He brought the same subject up a little while ago, specifically in connection to fatherhood rather than parenthood. Papa Francesco isn’t a complete idiot so he anticipated the argument that a celibate priest banging on about how selfish people are for avoiding fatherhood is a bit incongruous, and he insisted that priests have a relationship to their parishioners which is analogous to fatherhood. There are, I can gladly admit, similarities, especially if a priest stays a long time in one church community. But to say this is in any way equivalent in degree to actually producing new human beings in whom you can trace your own genes and those of your partner and your respective families is, not to put too fine a point on it, an insult to actual parents.

God’s intention is that human beings learn to love and to give of themselves, to give themselves to something greater than their own individuality. Most people do that through parenthood. But the point is that they do it, not that they do it in a particular way.  Perhaps those of us who are not parents need to pay greater attention to being loving and productive. But experience suggests even that isn’t true. Not that the Church ever placed much store by experience, did it?

Winchester

It has been a very, very long time since I interacted with the city of Winchester more than glimpsing the Cathedral from the M3. Today's trip took in the Museum, the Cathedral, and a sweep around the city centre. The City Museum is one of a pair: Tudor, Stuart, and 18th-century history is delegated to the Westgate Museum, meaning that the displays at the City Museum jump abruptly from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, and it's a bit sparse: you wonder really whether there's enough to fill two sites. 

The Cathedral's current lighting scheme hits you forcibly when you first enter, but in fact it looks rather good:

The Anglo-Saxon holy wells beneath the cathedral are currently inaccessible in a partly-flooded crypt. When the water rises, the hands of Antony Gormley's sculpture Sound II are filled. Ironically the flooding means it's too far away to see, and, although it's been there since 1986, long before the mobile age, it now looks as though it's checking its phone.

St Swithun-upon-Kingsgate is a rare survival of a small urban chapel still used for worship and very evocative for being so.

I managed to locate the 'holy well' Lady Arlen once sent me a photo of after a visit to Winchester, untold years in the past. She couldn't remember where it was, even at the time; it turned out to be next to the former church of St Thomas west of the city centre. This huge Victorian building replaced a small medieval one a hundred yards away and is now, rather amazingly, converted to apartments. Next to the 'well' you can see an old War Department boundary stone, marked with the broad arrow, delineating the land of what was once Peninsula Barracks. I don't see how this can be a holy well of any description: it is instead (surely) a public drinking-fountain made from medieval fragments relocated from somewhere else. Nice, though - and note the little troughs for dogs at the bottom! 

That was a bonus, as was finding an image of St Catherine in the Cathedral. It's a tiny stained glass window, high up in the north aisle. The sword was my first clue, and then I just about spotted the wheel fragment, confirming what I thought.

Follow the Science

Back in the depths of the pandemic over a year ago, we talked a lot about the social lessons we had learned, or at least hoped we might learn. I have also, I think, picked up some new thoughts about how science works and how it interacts with the media, which may not be new to anyone but me, of course.

Firstly there is what I would call the distinction between experimental science and experiential science. The first is what happens in laboratories: it’s about measurements, the physical properties of substances, double-blind trials, repetition of results, proving or disproving theses. It is controlled and discrete. It’s this kind of science which has produced our vaccines. On the other hand, experiential science happens outside the lab: it brings data and observation to bear on the ‘real world’ and seeks to answer questions about it. It is a far, far more hazardous venture than experimentation. In truth, it isn’t amenable to the ’scientific method’ at all, because you can’t isolate, say, an entire society and screen off various factors which might be affecting it to assess the truth of your hypothesis: you end up with a mass of data and really very limited means to analyse them in a way that would rule out other analyses. Human behaviour is too complex. It’s this second type of science which characterises the epidemiological decisions governments across the world have had to make, and its relatively indeterminate nature obviously makes it much more subject to bias. This leads onto the second observation, how different scientists and groups of scientists, once they move outside the laboratory, are driven by their own preferences and personalities to read the data they confront in different ways; perhaps not as much as the rest of us, but to some degree. My favourite covid commentator is possibly Sir John Bell, the Canadian Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, favourite partly because he is the living spit of 1940s band leader Spike Jones so whenever he comes on the wireless I half expect to hear him playing farty noises on a trumpet and firing a gun. ‘You know me’, Professor Bell told an interviewer on Today once, ‘I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy’, and so he is. At least he admits it, and thus you can apply an optimism discount to his pronouncements. Then there is (for instance) Dr Carl Henegham who I heard opining the other day that there isn’t anything really wrong at the moment, and that everything we hear about the Omicron variant is exaggerated. Everybody seems to have forgotten about the study his Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine published in May 2020 alleging that covid had been in the UK far longer than anyone thought, that therefore everyone had had it already and it was massively less lethal than supposed, and that the pandemic was essentially over. An academic friend of mine commented that ‘Carl Henegham tests my belief in tenure’. Again, does anyone now remember the days when the World Health Organisation was advising us not to wear masks? The reasoning seemed to be that masks encouraged ‘a false sense of security’, and this is a piece with the WHO’s apparent concern less with medical facts than with how it thinks people behave, and ought to behave. Whereas it changed its mind about masks, it’s consistently argued against travel restrictions: now, it seems to me that, while restrictions on international travel obviously aren’t any kind of long-term solution to a pandemic, they logically must do something in the short term to impede a pathogen’s spread, in exactly the same way that getting people to stand two yards apart does something. The WHO’s concern appears to be that travel bans break down international solidarity, which I can’t help thinking is a) not necessarily true, and b) isn’t its business. 

Finally, the media. I am a great defender, in general, of the BBC, but a lot of its coverage, even via the sedate medium of radio, has been disgraceful. Barely a day passes without some headline along the lines of ‘Professor A says Y is possible’ or ‘Dr B warns of risk of Z’ when neither Professor A nor Dr B are speaking on behalf of anything like a consensus. Well, you can always find someone to say nearly anything, and the fact that someone says it is hardly of itself worthy of a screaming news item, especially when you can just as easily source an opposite opinion. Very few things aren't possible, and hardly anything isn't a risk.

A friend complained some time ago that the reporting of the different brands of vaccine was a capitalistic development, making heroes out of the companies that manufactured the medicines, whereas once we had no idea where our drugs came from. I argued that this was in fact a good thing: it cast light on the process of pharmaceutical research and procurement which had previously been mysterious and obscure. People would know more in the future. I think that probably applies to ‘the science’ as well.