An Emissary from the East

For a long time I've wanted to replace our 'best white' set of vestments. The existing set, made by Mary our long-departed ex-nun sacristan in the 1980s, betrays her unaccountable fondness for gold lamé, and doesn't have a maniple. These days I feel semi-naked if I don't have a maniple. My own 'old gold' set is fine, but a) it's mine, b) it's a bit threadbare, and c) it's Roman-style so some, like our former diocesan bishop, might gib a bit at using it, though not everyone is as fussy. (Just to pre-empt any queries, in Church terms 'white' includes gold, silver, cream, and all stops in between).

When the war started I remembered that Yulia whose Etsy shop EkklesiaStore I've bought stuff from before was based in Ukraine, so as an expression of hope and solidarity I thought I'd order some fabric. Mat. Yulia was brilliant, as I expected, but the parcel, having found its way from Zhytomyr quite rapidly, sat so long in a warehouse in Lviv that I'd really given up on it ever getting here, and thought a missile from Mr Putin had probably incinerated it along with a collection of Ukrainian postal staff. But suddenly it started to move again and this morning it arrived - tat, all the way from a war zone.

'I'm very ashamed of the long delivery', says Mat. Yulia, who's married to an Orthodox priest, Fr Ivan. 'Thank you for your patience and kindness. Thank you for your prayers. God protects us from all dangers. May God protect you!' He's certainly been casting an eye over this package from a place of hazard.

Books: 'Queen of Stones' by Emma Tennant (1982)

Lady Arlen alerted me to Tom Cox’s novel Villager, set somewhere that might be Dorset or might be Devon but isn’t quite either, and out last month. He mentions it in a brilliant evocation of a visit to the Isle of Portland and, in passing, called attention to a far older book located in that bleak and wondrous landscape – Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones from 1982, in which a schoolgirls’ sponsored walk ends in ‘sacrificial rituals in the dark places beneath the clifftops’. I had to get it after that, hadn’t I?

Class, scorn, sexuality, jealousy and dreadful violence mingle in this short book (it seemed more coherent on a race-paced second reading that took about an hour, than spread across several bleary-eyed bedtime sessions) which is a sort of reknitting of Lord of the Flies, in the same way that Emma Tennant mangled a variety of classics in a feminist direction – more superficially as time went by, some critics argued. The girls vary from Class Four of Melplash Primary, who function as a chorus (average age: six and two months), to Bess Plantain, elegant and apparently superior but deeply mixed-up nearly-thirteen-year-old who indentifies rather too closely with Elizabeth I. Suddenly engulfed in ‘the thickest fog ever seen in West Dorset’, the party are separated from their adult leader and wander catastrophically off-course, going missing for the better part of five days. They spend the last bit of this ordeal isolated in a quarry on Portland, where the tensions and fantasies they have brought with them culminate in a terrible, cathartic resolution. Returning to reality, none of them can quite remember how it came about, or choose not to. What happens in the fog, stays in the fog.

Queen of Stones is brilliant – provided you can take such strong stuff – yet impossible, really, to swallow. Mingled with the elliptical main text which prises beneath the girls’ reactions and experiences are authoritative comments on them by a psychiatrist, a social worker, and a bishop, delivered in their own idioms. The narrative is as fragmentary as the text is intense, and you have to concentrate; you also have to deal with two of the characters being the objects of adult sexual interest in a way which I suspect nobody would dare to write now. The overall effect is still dazzling, but you can’t help wondering if it’s all a trick. The unnamed author was, they state, ‘staying with friends nearby … recovering from an illness’ at the time of the case and decided to occupy their time ‘attempting to reconstruct’ the events. By the end they claim vindication for their version of what happened, but it’s clear that its details are speculation. No 12-year-old could possibly write Laurie Lelandes’s journal; and even the newspaper article on the girls’ disappearance which opens the narrative seems like no local journalism I’ve ever read. Then there is the setting. Now, Emma Tennant had a house in Netherbury for many years, so she knew the area well; and that raises questions about how it is intended to be understood in the book. The girls are on a walk from Beaminster to Melplash, which would be demanding enough for six-year-olds; they disappear on the lane to Mapperton, and wind up ten miles away at Abbotsbury (albeit they make part of that journey in an abandoned landrover). From there they go by boat to Portland and, right at the end, resurface at exactly the point they got lost in the first place, without anyone on the ground having encountered them. Anyone familiar with the landscape knows this is impossible. Did Emma Tennant intend it to be taken literally, or is it merely a set of elements to hang a narrative from, its representation connected only loosely with the real places? Dorset natives will find it hard to suspend their disbelief.

Queen of Stones was critically very well-received in 1982; Emma Tennant’s Tess, a recasting of Thomas Hardy’s great novel twelve years later, less so. But I think I may have to get that too!

Power to the Laypeople

We weren’t sure whether Paula’s licence as Pastoral Assistant had expired, and it took ages before I was able to find someone at Church House who could tell me. Pastoral Assistant, it turned out, was no longer a licenced role: we should have had a letter from Bishop Jo about it at the end of 2019. Neither I nor any of the three people in the parish with PA licences could remember getting a letter from Bishop Jo, but fair enough. PAs were now PAs as long as they and their incumbent wanted them to be.

But that wasn’t, it seems, a one-off: the Diocese is completely changing the ‘Lay Training Pathway’, as I was told in a meeting on Tuesday. Once upon a time, Pastoral Assistants, Occasional Preachers and Worship Leaders were all trained centrally, on their own specific courses, and either ‘locally recognised’, ‘centrally authorised’ or ‘episcopally licenced’; now the intention is simply to let parishes get on with it in all these three areas and if people want to have any training they can take part in the relevant modules of the Local Ministry Programme, the training schedule for priests and deacons. When Sylv, the most active of our PAs within the church, did her lengthy and demanding course, she came out of it with an obvious sense of confidence and of being equipped for what she wanted to do, so it was worthwhile in her case, but the diocese maintains a lot of potential PAs are put off by the training and what they want to do is ‘empower the laity’. Mind you, they also want to avoid the situation where a church has half-a-dozen Occasional Preachers all stabbing their diocesan paper of authorisation with a forefinger and demanding their full entitlement of five sermons a year or whatever. I was baffled by the distinction between the new ‘Lay Pastoral Visitors’ and the old ‘Pastoral Assistants’ who have ‘done more training’, when you would that thought that the training was tailored to the role rather than determining what role you have. Oh well. A liturgical church is less likely to need ‘worship leaders’, and as for Occasional Preachers I allowed local teacher Tim to occupy the pulpit (if we had a pulpit) without a demur as I was sure he wouldn’t preach heresy or upset people too much. I’ve always thought I could do what I wanted in that respect anyway.

I had to explain that I was keeping myself muted because there was off-screen noise at my end, but I didn’t explain the noise in question was an online seminar on another screen with Professor Ronald Hutton talking about the contribution of occultists Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente to modern paganism. I think I managed to get the gist of both, but it was a close-run thing, I can tell you. 

A Dinner at Willow Grange

For such a big and venerable house, there are remarkably few images of the Bishop of Guildford’s official residence, Willow Grange, around. This one from the catalogue when the house was sold in the 1930s, long before a bishop came anywhere near it, is quite fun.

I should have taken a photo of the house when I was there on Friday for the Bishop’s supper for ‘clergy and plus-ones’; as the Bishop himself pointed out, increasingly often those plus-ones are clergy themselves (I suppose that cuts down the number of guests at these things). I hadn’t been to anything like this for a long, long time, so I thought I ought to go, rather than scooting over to Emwood for Cara’s garden party which was happening at the same time.

It was all fine, as it happened. Rather than hang around in the marquee dithering over the social/emotional/theological implications of sitting at one already-established table rather than another, I went in ahead of most people, brutally sat at an empty table and dared others to join me. Tom from Charlham and his wife took up the challenge. The food we were served was tasty but could have been a bit hotter. Perhaps it was to encourage us to eat quickly, never usually an issue with me.

When people learn that I’ve been in Swanvale Halt for nearly 13 years now they tend to widen their eyes and offer the opinion that it’s a long time, but Tom has been incumbent of his parish for over twenty and he was curate there before that. ‘You need to keep yourself fresh if you’re in a place for a long time’, he told me, ‘Do lots of reading.’ Oh dear. When I try to read I usually nod off. The trouble is that I can’t imagine being any more fresh in another setting: I think of my predecessor Fr Edgar who basically did the same thing in three successive parishes and looked less trendsetting the longer he carried on.

I managed to reverse out of the car park at the end without destroying anything. There might have still been time to race across the county to Emwood but my socialising batteries were well depleted by that point so home was by far the more charitable option!

Hatfield House

As it is World Goth Day, I will delay relating what happened at the Bishop's Supper in favour of this topic. which has some vaguely relevant aspects. Yesterday I visited Hatfield House with Lady Wildwood, who is, after all, one of the very first people I met in London Gothic many years ago. Her Ladyship has just finished working in the tourism and heritage sector in Hertfordshire and is now marketing director at a London arts venue, so she knows Hatfield and the other local attractions very well, while I'd never been there. It seemed surprisingly quiet for a bright late-Spring Saturday, but Lady Wildwood says this is quite common: Hatfield makes most of its money from events and hiring itself out, and visitors are so relatively unimportant that it recently closed its souvenir shop. Both house and estate are appropriately grand but I will remember some of the smaller details best: the famous portrait of Margaret Beaufort; the tapestries of the Four Seasons lined with little allegorical vignettes which were only deciphered in the last ten years; the bust of Queen Alexandra in the robes of a graduate of the Royal College of Music; Queen Elizabeth's sleeve in the Ermine Portrait.

The last stage of our visit took us round the woodland walks, as far as The Castle, a Gothick folly dating from the 1780s which is fun but, at the moment, dreadfully underused when it could so easily make a splendid holiday let a la Landmark. We'd both have stayed there quite happily!

Flaming May

Not everything I try in the garden works, but my Japanese acer is doing what I intended, providing a flash of fiery red amongst the greenery:

But over on the box hedges I am losing the battle with the caterpillars. What has become a more or less daily disgusting task of squishing them never seems to reduce their numbers; I see other box bushes around the area (including one at the church) reduced to sticks by their attentions. Left to their own devices, the beasts will carry on until the box is destroyed completely, and any other creature that might use it will be bereft, including the box moths themselves. Just like human beings in our relationship with the earth as a whole, perhaps. I am investing in a pheromone trap to grab the adult moths and break into the cycle: that will, all being well, deal with cydalima perspectalis, but what might manage homo sapiens?

Discerning the Spirits

It's been a long, long time since we had a meeting of the Local Vocations Advisors, and even the prospect of nice sandwiches in Church House yesterday lunch-time couldn’t drag out more than three of us in addition to Ciaran the Diocesan Director of Ordinands and Tina who co-ordinates the whole process, matching enquirers up with LVAs and making sure all the right bits of paperwork are filled out. But, as she ruefully pointed out, while the number of LVAs on paper is quite healthy in fact quite a few of those aren’t at all active, and there’s a distinct geographical imbalance with most being in the east of the diocese (‘I suppose they’re just holier over there’).

The discernment process is undergoing quite a change, with what was once the scarifying ritual of the ABM or BAP or whatever it was called at the time you went through the process – a residential ordeal of interviews, exercises and checking whether you tried to eat your soup with a fork, as Fr Gooley maintained someone at his did – now split into two. The first stage will be done online, a quick-fire series of conversations with different interlocutors now focusing on the ‘six qualities’ applicants are supposed to evidence, which we couldn’t resist comparing to speed-dating.  The second is more like the traditional way of doing it but with an effort to make it less like a university entrance exam. In between comes a very in-depth examination of where an applicant is in personal and spiritual terms, questioning everything from sexual habits to substance abuse. It crosses my mind how legal some of this might be – the kind of thing, in normal circumstances, any prospective employee would be justified in telling the organisation they were applying to was none of their business – but somebody must already have thought about that, surely? The intention is clearly twofold; first, to do something to diversify the base of ordained ministry away from middle-aged, middle-class people who are used to writing essays, and second, to try and make it less likely that deeply damaged souls will be let loose on the Lord’s flock without at least flagging up ‘areas to work on’.

People sometimes complain that the modern Church is becoming too homogenous and we have lost so much of the creative eccentricity that made it work in the past. I suppose there might be some hazard in expecting people to have got themselves completely sorted as human beings before they begin their ministry: even for the ordained, a degree of holiness is usually a hard-won prize reached after years of pursuing the spiritual life, not a base position from which to start. Here I am, 52 years from my baptism, 27 from my conversion, and 17 from my ordination, and I’ve barely begun. At the same time, you don’t have to delve very deeply into the history of the Church of England, or any denomination, to come across lots of ordained people who were not just flawed souls (as are we all) but broken ones who then went on to damage others, and the tremendously laissez-faire process of discernment in the past barely did a thing to stop that happening. We were very often sending out pastors who would not so much reap the Lord’s harvest field as burn it, trample on it, roll around in it, and pee on it. A little less of that is probably all to the good.

Church House is a less bustling place these days than once it was: the axe has cut its way through the diocesan staff and all those meeting rooms and offices still gleam, but are denuded and quiet. I wonder whether the Diocese will stay once the lease is up, whenever that is. 

At the Hazard of Life and Limb

Now that Il Rettore and Mrs Rettore have retired and moved to Hornington to be next to their daughter and her family, Swanvale Halt has become their church of choice. Of course it has, where else is there to go? Yesterday we baptised their grandchildren. One godparent uncle stood proxy for another who is in the United States, just like the Royals. Unlike them, said absent uncle watched the proceedings via a phone.

All was well until, in fact, the service was over. Then suddenly, as I was still standing next to the font and talking to one of the party a small girl pushed the Paschal Candle stand a bit too forcefully and propelled a spurt of molten wax off the top: I caught it just before it tipped more than a few degrees off the upright. She seemed pretty unaffected, to be fair, until her parents began trying to get it out of her hair and that was the cue for some very vocal objection on her part. The parents were fine about it, possibly being more used than I am to the mishaps small children can experience, but (as we discussed a few days ago) crying infants are never a good look.

The towering Paschal Candle does have to be there, doing its job of symbolising the light of Christ within the church, and ready to light the small candles given to the newly-baptised members of the Body of Christ; a fortnight ago I was baptising four cousins at once, so you can write for yourself the joke I told about the number of candles we needed. But ours could perhaps do with a more stable stand than the one provided for it by Reg (whose traumatic death long-term readers may remember). I always try to push it right against the font making it much harder to topple but Rick the verger hadn't done that. We could put it at the back of the church, and I could make a point of warning parents about the potential hazard. None of these expedients is foolproof, though, or childproof!

Lizzie Dripping

Part of the wonder of the internet is that it allows you to prove that random bits of memory from your childhood did actually have some relationship to reality. It has been like that recently with me and Lizzie Dripping. This TV series, made by the BBC in 1973 and 1974, starred Tina Heath as the eponymous Lizzie who meets a witch in the graveyard of her village church and spends the nine episodes of the series trying to work out whether she is real and what her relationship to her really is: can anyone else see her, is Lizzie herself a sort of witch, and is the witch tied to the village or can she go elsewhere? Of course we viewers can see instantly that the witch is a projection of something inside Lizzie, an outlet for dreams and desires that don’t fit the life of a 12-year-old working-class girl living in a small village in 1970s Nottinghamshire. In fact, I didn’t really remember any of this, not surprisingly as I would have been no older than 5 when the series was broadcast: I did recall the title sequence of Lizzie running down the village street and turning a corner, and her encounters with the witch including the one where she pops up to interrupt a family trip to the seaside, but that was all.

Looking at Lizzie Dripping now (and I’ve just watched all of it) you can see an intriguing mixture of 1970s verisimilitude and unreality. The location, Eakring near Mansfield, feels very real as does the life of Lizzie’s family the Arbuckles, laid-back plumber dad Albert, often quite stressed mum Patty, flowerpot-hatted Gramma who is always on hand with strongly-worded advice which (even Lizzie notices) she does not consistently follow herself, and baby Toby. When Albert wins the village leek-growing competition in ‘Lizzie Dripping and the Leek Nobblers’ the prize is nothing other than a spanking, shiny front-loading washing machine! – we must have acquired ours at roughly the same time – and although Albert drives a truck for work purposes that’s no good for taking the family to the seaside so he borrows a car from a customer as payment for a job. It’s all quite period, and even daring in a way nobody would now even think of being daring: showing ordinary, mostly nice people living very ordinary lives and speaking in extremely strong accents full of beautifully incorrect grammar. Good.

And the grammar, or dialect, leads us to the unreal side of the series. For a start, ‘Lizzie Dripping’ isn’t the character’s name (which is Penelope), but supposedly a Nottinghamshire phrase for a girl who can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The fact that everyone in the village calls her this, including her sympathetic teacher, and parents, is odd and unexplained. I use the word ‘supposedly’, because I rather suspect author Helen Cresswell made it up. She claimed she heard a neighbour in Eakring using the term for their daughter, but I can’t easily find any indication that it existed before the TV series; we need a dictionary of northern slang but I have none to hand! The 19-year-old Tina Heath has a good stab at being a pre-teen but when placed alongside actual children looks a bit awkward, most acutely when she’s surrounded by a class of singing kids in what is nearly the final scene.

You never see any scenes specifically relating to religious life but in the first episode everyone assumes Lizzie should be at Sunday School (the teacher is away) which I would have thought unusual even for 1970s rural Nottinghamshire. Lizzie teases her very unhumorous Aunt Blodwen that she could help with Sunday School - 'I know it's Church and not Chapel', when it's clear Blodwen would never countenance any such thing. How many children even then would know what that was about? And in the last episode Lizzie refers to the unseen vicar as 'parson'. This all has a slight air of anachronism and I wonder whether Helen Cresswell was remembering her own childhood rather than what she could see around her in 1973.

There are lots of lovely moments: ‘leek nobbling’ prime-suspect Jack Jackson’s face as he only gets third prize in the competition; Gramma following up scolding Lizzie by giving her a mint imperial; snobby Aunt Blodwen’s appalled discomfort on the journey to the seaside when, just after her tirade against ‘day-trippers’ (which of course the family are), Albert strikes up ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’ and everyone except Blodwen lustily joins in; the school children singing a deliciously eerie song about the Pendle Witches which just happens to have been written for the BBC’s schools Music Workshop series in 1971 by Yorkshire poet Harold Massingham and Irish composer Gerard Victory; and just the sights and sounds of Eakring, rechristened Little Hemlock for the series, the flower meadows, the streams, the sunny or rainy churchyard.

It’s the final episode which is something of a masterpiece.  The title ‘Lizzie Dripping Says Goodbye’ flags up the theme but what we get is much more than we might expect. The summer holidays are nearly here and the village school is assembling a time capsule to be opened in 2074; right at the start, Lizzie’s mum tells her she is growing up and the valedictory atmosphere is maintained when Lizzie and irritating southern cousin Jonathan go out to take photos of wild flowers for the archive, prompting Lizzie to meditate on memory and impermanence. She wishes she could put the whole day in the archive. ‘They’ll have days like this, even in 2074’, counters Jonathan. ‘Nor’ exactly’, insists Lizzie, ‘Never have a day again exactly like today. Even we’ll never have one exactly the same. Coz we’ll be different, see.’ She inspects the photo she’s just taken of the meadow. ‘No. That ain’t it. That ain’t it at all. Nowt like, really.’ Show me a contemporary children’s show that philosophical. In the end a bitterly regretful Lizzie has to cope with the departure of the witch, and, as she leaves the graveyard having committed the story to tape, her life is ahead of her. Though her mum’s already accused her of being so morbid that ‘I sometimes think you won’t be happy till you’re buried’, it won’t all be like that. The last sound we hear is the churchyard crows. They really don't make them like that anymore.

The Smoking Ruins

Last week Church Club was a surprise; this week, it was a disaster. I offer you an account only because it shows that I can be doing something for twelve years, and the church for about sixteen, and it can all still go haywire out of the blue. 

We arrived at school to be told that all the Year 1s were out at Sports Day at the local secondary school. We looked at the rain, the first significant precipitation hereabouts for weeks, and thought of the bedraggled six-year-olds making their way back like half-drowned rats. The school has only just re-started mixing year groups in its activities after the pandemic, so this term we only have two Year 2s in Church Club, meaning we started very quietly indeed with two unprecedentedly sensible little girls. 

Sure enough, about twenty minutes into the session the Year 1s began to return, damp and tired - but small children don't express their tiredness as you or I might, by having a nice lie-down for ten minutes, but in activity which is even more frantic and less focused than usual. Despite Sandra's scepticism I thought we would still be able to get through a truncated version of the story (the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders) and the craft (making a little card house), because we always have in the past. The children's inability to listen to anything was marked, as was, once we began the craft, their tendency to do anything but apply themselves to the task in hand. The limited time seemed magically to melt away and we were nearly at home time with me, Sandra and Jill desperately trying to help the children complete something to take home, while a couple of the girls made unfeasibly-elaborately decorated houses and the less-careful Year 1s, more satisfied with their efforts, wrested toys from the trays on the far side of the hall and tore around with them. It was bedlam. I rounded up such children as I could for a final prayer, not without, I fear, some ill-temper on my part as Aaron responded to my demand that the toys be replaced in their trays by getting more out. 

We returned the children to their parents, a few minutes late, and not without trauma. Bobby was in tears as it became horribly clear that he wouldn't complete his house to his satisfaction; Evie was inconsolable as her roof kept coming off. I was mentally composing an email of apology and not far off weeping myself. We looked at the wreckage, and got a broom to sweep up the bits.

Fair Enough

The infants school have removed the last of their pandemic measures and that means they’ve returned to activities that mix year groups. Yesterday I did my first whole-school assembly since March 2020, though the school have been having them for a while. The new time, ten past nine, is a bit of a challenge as for me it means either saying Morning Prayer earlier than its customary start time of 9am or later (earlier makes more sense). Was that set in stone? I asked the head teacher. ‘Not in granite, but I’d say in sandstone’, she replied.

Neither the Church calendar nor school life lent me a clear topic to talk about. Some of the children were at the Spring Fair on Saturday to do country dancing, but, as I told them, there are no stories about fairs in the Bible, and while some people do dance you can’t describe those incidents as stories (actually you could make a story out of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant and being despised by Michal his wife, or indeed of Salome doing her turn, but neither would make for a very edifying narrative). Instead I thought of Woodbury Hill in Dorset where the great Fair – one of the biggest in southern England, in its day – probably began after a hermit came to live in the old hillfort in the 12th century, and an annual gathering was set up by the landowner, Tarrant Abbey, to support them, whoever they were. There was even a holy well there whose waters were drunk by visitors to the Fair. So I made up a bit of a story about a holy man (‘We don’t know his name, let’s call him John’) and how the Fair might have started. I even had a couple of photos to show, one of the Fair in full swing in about 1910, and one I took of the hilltop in 2017, now bare apart from a farmhouse and cows, as you can see here.

It struck me that this is a bit like the stories in saints’ lives, woven out of a few things people did know and a lot of supposition about what must have happened. Possibly some of what is in the Bible isn’t too far from that either. Talking of things half-remembered and half made-up, I’d thought my grandparents had met at Woodbury Hill Fair, but checking back I discovered it was the Ilchester Flower Fair at the Lamb & Lark in Limington, which must have been a much humbler occasion. Nan remembered that Grandad and his brother Alec were there, Alec with his arm in plaster having broken it in the gate-jumping contest. Grandad asked Nan to stay to the dance and so she did. I don’t think we’ll have a gate-jumping contest at the Spring Fair next year.

An Old Venture Made New

It was a huge gamble. For forty years the Swanvale Halt Church Spring Fair has occupied a field outside Hornington town, an increasing effort over the decades and one which, during the re-assessment of everything that took place during the pandemic restrictions, the planning group decided was beyond them to repeat. The suggestion was made to relocate the whole event to the church and churchyard, and scale it down while keeping most of its elements. Would this work? Would we recoup anything worthwhile without the footfall from Hornington High Street just a few yards away, the draw of the bouncy castle and the great ring of tents and stalls? Would it even be possible to do it cramming everything into the immediate curtilage of the church, including finding enough space for the children of the infants school to dance? It did, and it was.

Stalls, children’s activities, visiting choirs and bands, and the aforementioned dancing children, all duly appeared and did their stuff. The rain threatened, and occasionally splashed down the upturned instruments of the Hornington Brass Band, but generally stayed away. And we made a kind of profit on the event that we would have been pleased to make in its old format. ‘Great to have something right here in the centre of the community’, was the consensus. What a relief!

Seeds of Doom

The story at Church Club on wednesday was the Parable of the Sower. For the last few years we’ve played a very satisfying game as part of this session. The floor of the school hall is scattered with seeds and the children are set the task of gathering as many as they can into a plastic beaker each. The beakers are then weighed to determine the winner of the game. Not that they actually win anything other than, as I am fond of warning them to general bemusement ‘a warm glow of self-satisfaction’ but that’s usually enough for six-year-olds. It is a very good game, in that it provides the maximum amount of child activity and occupation with the minimum amount of adult involvement. This week we even got to tidy up while the children were busy. Everyone gets what they want!

But, also this week, an unparalleled event took place: someone cheated at the game. When we came to the weighing-in at the end, John’s plastic cup was unfeasibly full, while a couple of his friends had nothing at all in theirs. ‘John said we should give him our seeds so that he would have more’, they complained. John’s denial of this seemed unconvincing given the unanimous testimony of the others and their completely empty cups, unfeasibly little to show for several minutes of fevered scrabbling on the floor. First place accordingly went to someone else, I’m afraid. Quite apart from John’s cheating it struck me as remarkable that the others went along with it as a perfectly reasonable proposal until after the fact when it struck them that giving him their seeds meant they didn’t have any. ‘we’ve all learned a lesson,’ said Anita who was helping. Yes, I thought, as well as an insight into child development, we now have to build anti-cheating measures into the games.

Bank Holiday Canal Ramble

A very simple photographic post today as I have no brain for anything else: I kept the Bank Holiday on Monday as a mixed observance of some work and some leisure, and went on a walk along the canal to St Catherine's Well and Chapel, a very, very familiar journey but one that always delights with its different views and moods. And it did! As I ate my lunch on the bench next to the a family came past looking at it and pointing out the little yellow flower in the water, which was gratifying as it was one I'd put there. It was still there, somehow stuck in the current, when I came down the hill from saying hello to the Chapel some time later.

Flying a Flag, Perhaps

There is a story that when an archdeacon, or somesuch dignitary, inspected Thaxted church in Essex early during the incumbency of that church’s ‘Red Vicar’, Conrad Noel, to see for himself what all the considerable fuss was about, he asked Noel to justify the presence of the red flag he could see in the chancel. ‘It stands for the Blood of Christ, staining all the nations of the world’, replied the vicar. ‘Very good, Mr Noel,’ admitted the archdeacon, but pressed ‘Then how might you explain the IRA tricolour on the other side?’ No further explanation was forthcoming. Noel does seem later to have put up an amended Red Flag which made matters a bit clearer.

Whatever sympathy I may or may not have with Conrad Noel’s opinions, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable with the display of any symbols in church which aren’t directly related to the Christian religion. This cropped up this weekend when Sylv our pastoral assistant asked to put up a Ukrainian flag and an encouraging message to welcome any Ukrainian guests who might find themselves worshipping with us. I thought this was essentially a nice gesture but the flag turned out to be quite big and its position draped over the church door was very obvious indeed. Of course that was the point. However I did take it down at the end of Sunday evening, folding it up into a box in the entrance area to put out again next week.

This may seem picky and fastidious, but I suppose the root of my discomfort lies – if it’s anywhere other than in my own scepticism and tendency to see the ambiguities and contradictions in any statement or position, including my own – in a feeling that the Christian Church exists to proclaim the Kingdom of Christ, and nothing else: no subsidiary cause, no secondary human organisation, no matter how worthy or admirable. We have to announce the primacy of the Incarnate word, and nothing but, because nobody else will. I don’t even feel that comfortable with our own national flag which plenty of churches fly: even though the Cross of St George has a religious significance (it’s the red of martyrdom against the white field of innocence, and, well, it’s a cross, which is why the Lamb of God carries it as well as St George), its primary meaning now is national, which is why it was one of the other insignia Conrad Noel displayed in Thaxted Church. The blue-and-yellow of Ukraine which is now so familiar to us I can just about cope with as a sign of welcome to a particular group, but that’s as far as it goes. There are loads of causes I could rope Jesus into supporting, from Extinction Rebellion to the Museums Association. But somehow I do not dare!