Pretty Pictures

Over late months I've acquired a couple of pictures which I have just now got around to putting on the walls of the Rectory. While I was at Petworth House at the start of the year, the National Trust shop had a little selection of art including some watercolours by a lady called Georgina Ling. One of these, to my great surprise, showed narrowboats on the canal at Swanvale Halt, caught in a snowy winter. Thanks to Dr Bones I do have a fascination for canals and so I had to buy that. 

Then, when I went with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen to Greenwich in the summer, we dropped in on a small antiques shop, and in a sheaf of prints I found a little one of Oystermouth Castle, which of course I visited last autumn, so I was tempted to get that. It came with a larger image of Harlech Castle, which I haven't visited, but both were worth the extra cash. The picture of Oystermouth Castle is fairly accurate though Harlech is not quite as dramatic as it appears here!

Back Inside

On Wednesday I and Margaret from the congregation went in through the airlock-like door of Widelake care home, and followed a member of staff to the 'pub' where we celebrated Holy Communion for a group of residents. This unremarkable event was the first of its kind to happen since March 2020 when covid was first gripping us. I'd had discussions on and off with Amy who runs Widelake about starting up services again, but for a long while we would have had to stand behind a perspex screen and have no contact with residents, which makes a communion service a bit of a non-starter and there's little point in doing much else. But now all is, more or less, back to normal. My face mask was all very well but seemed a little bit tokenistic.

One change is that we no longer have the services of Alec who used to play the piano so I had rigged up some music and a couple of hymns on my iPod. It turned out that the speakers weren't up to the job, leaving the music so quiet that even on 'All Things B&B' and 'We Plough the Fields' we were a bar out of time after a single verse. More kit required. I could barely remember what to put in the bag as it was, and spent a good chunk of Tuesday morning frantically photocopying hymns after the folder with the old hymn sheets was nowhere to be found.

Goth Walk 35: Chasing the Golden Dawn

It finally happened: my Goth Walk about the history of late 19th- and early-20th century London occultism was originally going to take place as part of my 50th birthday celebrations in May 2020, but of course other events intervened. Even when pandemic conditions allowed us to proceed (and get into the Main Quad of UCL for the last stop), the first date was stymied by a rail strike, the second by a heatwave (Goths die in hot weather, as the joke has it), and yet another rail strike put paid to a third. I began to think it might never happen, but it did, and yesterday. I did think it might have been nine years since the last one, but on checking find it's a mere seven. 

We started at one of our favourite old haunts, the cavernous Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, and then wound our way up through Holborn and Fitzrovia. Here we are pictured on the steps of St George's Bloomsbury: some of the stops were directly relevant to the Matherses and other characters and events involved in the story, and some were just convenient places to take a breath, like the rather nice find of Whitfield Gardens off Charlotte Street, culminating in front of the Slade School of Art where Annie Horniman and Moina Mathers - or Mina Bergson as she then was - I suspect rather fell for each other without really recognising what they felt. A tale of odd personalities, beliefs and events, and, to my thinking, some startling talents diverted from their true vocation; which even applies to Aleister Crowley, who by all accounts was a pretty good cook and probably should have run a restaurant rather than an occult society.

We realised how long it had been since some of us had seen one another. Archangel Janet was visiting from Somerset in the company of Lady Wildwood, down from Herts; Sir Goingpostal made it in from Essex; Lady Metalmoomin complimented Janet on her elegant undyed grey: she has now gone undyed herself. Apart from the entertainment and information, I hope, this is of course part of the point of the whole thing. I have some inklings of subjects I might try next: 'Mew Pussy Mew', 'Lud Heat', 'Taking Liberties', 'No Popery', 'Cocktails with Elvira', or 'Tap'd in Bunhill'. That's enough work to keep me going awhile.

Photo by Archangel Janet.

You Cannot Go Back

During the pandemic I was able to book an appointment with my GP via their online system and I assumed that would be the same today. Not so: the sequence went as follows, more or less:

  - The GP's website relocates me to Patient Access

  - Patient Access tells me I do not have a GP registered on my account

  - Having selected my GP I must now prove my identity and I am relocated to NHS Login

  - My first photograph of my driving licence is unacceptable

  - My second photograph, exactly the same as the first, is acceptable

  - My face must be scanned to make sure it's the same as the person on the driving licence

  - It doesn't seem to be similar enough no matter the angle or arrangement of spectacles

  - I am offered the chance to record a video of my face instead, during which recording I have to repeat a code of four numbers

  - Despite making sure NHS Login can access my laptop camera, the video doesn't work

  - It is made very clear that I can't go back and try another driving licence photo

  - I give up and in the afternoon visit my GP so I can be issued with an access code

I suppose such obstacles are one way of putting people off making appointments!

Ta-Da!

This flower has appeared in the garden as a welcome distraction from anything else that might be going on and a reminder that the earth will spin on, carrying out the Lord's instruction to be fruitful and multiply, no matter what we manage to do to it. This stuff is bergenia, and heaven knows how it got into the borders of my lawn, just in front of the camellia. 'Pigsqueak' and 'Elephant's ears' it's apparently called, so symbolically it introduces not just colour and delight but an entire, if small, menagerie.

Move Along Now

Well, I was disappointed. From the descriptions ahead of the event, I really thought the Lord Chamberlain was literally going to snap a ceremonial white rod over his knee at the Queen’s funeral and lay it on her coffin, whereas what he actually carried was a plain wooden stick somewhat less charismatic than a snooker cue and which just clicked apart with the slightest touch. How undramatic.

There was something to offend everyone within the space of ten minutes on the World Service this afternoon. Rob Watson’s statement that the monarchy makes British people ‘think, Our history is pretty cool’ might be taken as an insult to all the many victims of that history, but it was a matter of opinion. When, however, he went on to say that ‘a head of government and a head of state were changed in 3 days with the minimum of fuss’ he neatly glossed over the fact that changing the head of government took months of the ruling party arguing with itself, and then that new head of government being selected by a tiny group of party members without reference to anyone else; and that it would never have happened in the first place without the previous incumbent’s trashing of truth, the law, and the constitution. Pretty cool, all that. He was followed by Professor Alice Hunt from Southampton University, who topped her comment that the Coronation would be ‘the only ceremony that has any constitutional standing’ (OK, so Edward VIII was never really king and the many Acts of Parliament he signed were invalid) with the breathtaking insistence, speaking for the late Queen and the whole nation, that ‘nobody really believes that there is a divine being at work here, and yet that is what the Coronation will say’. Where does the BBC get these people from? Southampton University, apparently.

I pondered my own reaction. I don't feel emotionally involved in the Queen's passing, though I appreciate the emotions of those who are, and in fact it's those who affect me. I don't feel watching a TV programme is 'taking part in history', and I deal with death and life every day so I don't need more meditations on mortality. And yet, even I could hardly fail to be affected by the pipes and drums, especially when the pipes, at least, were at a safe distance. When the jabbering commentators straining to find something meaningful to say fell silent it was even moving, not least because inside that grand coffin draped in the royal standard was the body of a tiny old lady: ‘if she gets any smaller, she’ll disappear completely’, S.D. said to me the last time we met – but he was friendlier with the late Queen Mother, it has to be said.

At Swanvale Halt, we had just enough big candles to keep the memorial to the Queen illuminated until today was passed. In the short commemoration we kept at the end of mass on the 11^th I used the Kontakion, so it was pleasing to hear it in the committal service today; and because His Grace of Hornington was on holiday I ended up reading prayers at the local Accession Proclamation alongside our republican Mayor. I hadn't intended to do anything else: I watched in increasing incredulity the goings-on at Fr Thesis’s church in London where it seems nothing has been celebrated but Requiem Masses for the Queen since her death, and pondered dropping him a line to remind him he was allowed to do something else. But in the end I weakened and did do a Requiem of our own yesterday evening; we sang a bit, and got 16 souls. 73 people signed the Book of Condolence deposited with us by the Town Council, and a member of the congregation had to be persuaded not to walk out yesterday morning after Greta the Lay Reader alluded to the new King not paying inheritance tax in her sermon. She was the only one.

As we say with our Spring Fair, planning for the next one has (probably) already begun. I look forward to the choir of St George’s Chapel Windsor singing ‘Ying Tong Iddle I Po’ in twenty-odd years' time ... !

Long Ditton & West Molesey

The fundamental impressions St Mary's Long Ditton left me with were grandeur and cleanliness: its surfaces shine and nothing seems out of place. It isn't one of my 'core' churches but the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, so perhaps it reached a degree of soundness even later than The Church Traveller's Guide could reveal. It's what the church was designed for, with those sedilia. Nobody could describe that mighty pink marble reredos as beautiful, but it impresses by sheer force. 

It has an elegant Lady Chapel where the Sacrament resides behind a brass aumbry door decorated very pleasingly with the Sacred Heart, though the altar cross and candlesticks are the spindly, spiky kind beloved of the 1960s and 70s. Why does it have a brass set as well?

Some of the glass is obviously Kempe ...

... and some isn't. Just because it's modern doesn't mean it's bad, though.

The passage of Long Ditton up the candle isn't clear to me (as yet), but St Peter's West Molesey was a 3-star church in the 1933 Guide and then hit four stars in 1948, staying there afterwards. It used to have an east window of three lancets given to the church by a priest called William Giffard, who may have been the Rector of Weybridge responsible for the dreadfully unpopular decision to demolish that church and set it on an Anglo-Catholic path: the window was part of the wholesale rebuilding of St Peter's in 1843. Not that it was St Peter's then: it had no dedication until Fr Arthur Sydenham (1927-42) realised the building was aligned to the sunrise on St Peter's Day. Fr Sydenham was responsible for carving the church's reredoses with his own fair hand. The Stations look Faithcraft to me, probably dating to the same time. His tradition - if he was the one that introduced it - was cemented by the very long incumbency of Fr John Yeend (1949-97) who was responsible for installing the altar steps and rearranging the Lady Chapel in 1996 in memory of his wife. West Molesey is lovely, but it does have that slight feeling of bitty overkill you sometimes meet in Anglo-Catholic churches - why are there two tabernacles, for instance? It is beautifully well-kept, though now part of an Evangelical parish who seem content to polish brass, dust woodwork, and light candles, but may have little idea of the actual spirituality behind them all. 

St Peter's last Catholic incumbent was the lovely Peter Tailby, a man of such gentle and transparent saintliness that I and Il Rettore used to try and sit next to him at diocesan events because we felt embarrassed at the mere idea of misbehaving if he was around. 

Retaining Clergy

At Deanery Chapter we counted up the incumbents of local parishes who have left full-time ministry over recent years, and spent some time musing why this seemed so common. It was slightly surprising to me that several of my colleagues talked about money worries and especially those of clergy with families not being able to manage without a great deal of help - parishioners supplying secondhand white goods, charities paying for holidays, and so on. I can't recall anyone who actually quit the clerical life - though not the clerical state, that's a more radical and problematic step to take - mentioning this as a factor, though it may feed into the stress which definitely is. Most of the time the cause seemed to be something less definable, to do with a sense of purpose and support. In fact, as we spoke, we became unsure whether clergy were very different from other professions, teachers, nurses, even the armed forces, in the proportion who took the decision to leave after a certain time. Perhaps we are operating on a model of lifelong service, expressed in that old belief that ordination imprints a permanent character, which is less relavent now than hitherto. 

One thing we were agreed on was the feeling that our diocese doesn't feel like a collaborative venture in which our ministries are supported by a pastoral centre, but like a managed one in which we are supposed to deliver locally a central agenda. Funny how our discussions almost always seem to orbit in around the same point: there must be something in it. I feel the diocese's hand sits rather light on Swanvale Halt, but, as you know, the confirmation service last week was the first time I'd been in the bishop's presence in about three years. 

Portrayed

Another in the occasional series 'portraits of the Rector by church children', courtesy, this time, of Polly and Warren. My hat is not, as a rule, completely like this, nor is my bicycle, but it's the first time I've ever seen the latter portrayed at all.

An Unexpected Find

At some point I will post about something significant, and even describe a few churches, but I haven't the energy for that today. Instead - so it is preserved - here is an image of a battered but still standing Art Deco building in the backstreets of Farnborough which I spotted while on the way to one of those churches. It's a garage now, and inside is utilitarian indeed (though I wonder what the upstairs flat is like - are there any original features left?), and it's lost most of its old glazing bars; but it holds on, and the company using it has chosen a nice jazzy font for its signage. 

Reign Fall

Any questions I might have wanted to ask the Bishop about the reallocation of the Hornington patronage after the confirmation service last night – an affair, I fear, of rags and patches attended by a rather shockingly thin congregation in an unavoidably gloomy building – were rather put paid to by his announcement of the Supreme Governor’s death at the start of the service. That meant I couldn’t loiter and neither could he. ‘I’d better go and call the Comms department to find out if there’s anything I should be doing’, he flustered. Even I wished him luck with that.

Earlier in the day I’d taken communion to Don and Shirley and of course we talked about the Queen’s illness, which led to me saying that after a cup of tea I’d be going to town to try and find a black-edged photo frame, just in case. ‘I’m sure we’ve got a spare one’, Don said, and they had. Little did we know that Her Maj had already departed by then. It did save me trouble, that angel whispering in our respective ears.

After printing off some prayers and a photo, I scooted down to the church and set up – well, what shall I call it? I hesitate to use the word shrine. But I happen to have visited a variety of churches today and there is an irony in that a non-monarchist seems to have erected what appears to be the grandest ‘presentation’ for the Queen in any of them. Perhaps I am compensating in a safe way for my own conflicted feelings, combining admiration and even some affection for an individual (and certainly being moved by some aspects of her life and work) with lack of sympathy for the institution they were part of. I don’t feel inclined to hold any special services: that’s for people who are clear about what they think. But I am leading prayers at the Local Proclamation on Sunday, in lieu of the Vicar of Hornington who has with I imagine some relief gone on holiday. The Queen spent her entire life doing things that weren’t all that congenial to her, after all.

‘THERE ARE NO WORDS’, our friend Lord MaryBendyToy wrote on LiberFaciorum, but in truth there are lots, and lots. And then more. Looking positively at all the verbiage, the endless analysis of every aspect of this woman’s experience, it’s part of a national conversation about who we are and how we have changed over her long life. If the monarch expresses aspects of British identity, for both good and ill, then discussing the monarch’s legacy is a sort of talking therapy in uncertain times. Or any times.

I am not at all sure that churches will really be ‘the foci of mourning’ as our official guidelines from the Church claim they will be: today I’ve seen very little evidence of people going into them to pay their respects. Ironically the very qualities people admire most in the Queen resulted from the faith she was very open about, but which they pay little attention to. Even if Charles III is happy to take part in a Coronation along the same mystical, quasi-medieval lines as his mother, will that mean anything to the people watching it? I have told myself it helped to have such a public Christian bringing the Faith in front of the country repeatedly, and was grateful for it; but has anyone been listening for a long time?

A Matter of Choice

The proposal that the old town centre parish church in the probably-to-be-merged parish of Hornington and Tophill next door to Swanvale Halt be referred to in the future by the ridiculous title of ‘Hornington Minster’ is merely annoying: a more troubling aspect was brought to my attention yesterday.

Every Anglican parish has a patron, the person, or body, who has the right to propose someone to be its vicar or rector, a system which goes back to the early Middle Ages when the system of parish churches was first established; before the creation of Parish Church Councils representing the laypeople, the patron merely appointed the incumbent, and the right to appoint to a rich parish was well worth owning. When partisan activity in the Church was at its height in the late 1800s and early 1900s the societies set up to promote various aspects of either the Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical position gaily bought up ‘advowsons’ – the patronage of parishes – to embed their own viewpoint. The trade in advowsons came to an end in 1924, and, especially in rural areas where churches have been yoked together in multi-parish benefices, patronage is now often a complex matter, a patchwork of religious societies, Church authorities, Oxbridge colleges, and private individuals; Fr Barkley’s patron in Yorkshire is the local Lord of the Manor, while Il Rettore’s in Lamford was the Lord Chancellor. Since the foundation of PCCs representing the laity, the PCC has the ability to reject a candidate for the incumbency – not that it would be advisable for them to do it too often.

I learn that the patronage of the putative united parish of Tophill, Bramblecombe & Hornington is to be passed to the Church Pastoral Aid Society, an Evangelical missionary society which has been around since the 1840s.  Now, the last appointment to the united benefice of Tophill and Bramblecombe, just after I arrived in Swanvale Halt, was made by a patronage board including the Archdeacon, the Area Dean, the Lay Chair of the Deanery Synod, the PCCs of the two churches, and the Martyrs Memorial Trust; the MMT – like Simeon’s Trustees, another Evangelical body – has handed all its patronages over to the CPAS which explains their involvement. But the patron of Hornington is the Bishop. The proposal for the CPAS to take over the wholesale patronage of the entire united parish is presented in the form of a request to the Bishop to surrender his interest in Hornington, and as a tidying-up exercise. But, although our current Bishop is an evangelical, his successors might not be, and the removal of the Bishop effectively disposes of any non-evangelical influence in the appointment of a new incumbent.

Of course it makes me think about Swanvale Halt’s position. With the exception of Thorpe, whose patron is Keble College; St Augustine’s Aldershot, where the Bishop and the Society for the Maintenance of the Faith appoint the incumbent jointly; and the Clandons, where the Bishop and the Earl of Onslow alternate to make appointments, all the remaining Catholic parishes in the diocese are pretty vulnerable. Our patron here is the Bishop, making another reason for me to stick around to see whether Guildford Diocese is abolished and merged with a more congenial neighbour. I wonder how the Bishop would react to a suggestion from our PCC that he ‘surrender his interest’ in the patronage in favour of, I don’t know, the Guild of All Souls?! 

Hearing is Believing

Once a year, the church I used to worship at in Chatham was graced by the presence of the Guild of the Servants of the Sanctuary ('Oooh, the Serpents!' I can hear Father Barkley declaring) who held an elaborate mass at which something always went ludicrously wrong. One year, it was the thurifer banging the thurible into the pulpit to the accompaniment of sparks and scattered charcoal; and another, it was music coming mysteriously over the sound system because it had somehow connected with the radio. In my memory I have turned this into the theme tune from The Archers but sadly I think this is a false recollection. That would have been even funnier.

I have had to battle with audio systems too. At Lamford I was always getting nasty crackling interference: Il Rettore maintained it was due to my insistence on wearing a trad cassock-and-alb, too many layers mucking up the signal, while Dr Bones argued it was the Devil trying to stop my sermons being heard. I was not completely sold on either explanation, I must admit.

Here in Swanvale Halt we sometimes get a horrendous rasping buzz which comes out of the speakers at the worst possible moment in a service and makes everyone gasp: it's a wonder nobody has ever gone into cardiac arrest (at least, not because of that). The company who installed our sound system can never identify any cause, of course: my car mechanic Dad always said the words any engineer dreaded most were 'intermittent fault', and I suppose sound technicians are no different. But it only seems to happen on weekdays, leading to the suspicion that somewhere nearby in a shop or something is a bit of kit that interferes with our system, which on Sundays is turned safely off. 

This Sunday the sound wasn't working at all. I flicked the mute switch on my mic set on and off, checked the little set of lights stationed high up in the rafters, and during the Gloria at the 8am nipped back into the Vestry to cast an eye quickly over the audio system, but nothing happened. For some reason any problem with the sound system makes me unspeakably anxious, and I find myself concentrating less on what I'm saying in the Mass than the way I am saying it, having to project and enunciate to maximise the chances of people hearing. It's massively distracting, and I am not really sure why I find it so distracting. It turned out that a crucial switch obscured by the edge of the cupboard holding all the kit in the vestry had been turned off when the PAT testing was done this week. 

Another little aspect of church life that you don't get warned about at theological college!

Ambulance Chasing

It was a chance for a last Summer day out for my sister's family. They were intending to go for a walk along the cliff paths around Worth Matravers. Driving towards the village, they saw a gentleman coming towards them on a bicycle. He was a bit wobbly. Suddenly he appeared to lose control of the bike, fell off onto the road, and stayed there. 

They came to a halt abruptly. My brother-in-law went to alert any traffic coming up the blind hill to the south while my sister checked the victim and their daughters acted in a supervisory capacity. The poor fellow was unconscious and bleeding dramatically from a cut to the head - he hadn't been wearing a helmet. The advice from 999 was not what my sister was anticipating. 'We can get an ambulance to you in about five hours. Do you have a towel to staunch the bleeding? Can you move him to the side of the road?' The road, as those who know the area might anticipate, doesn't have any sides, at least not any that would keep someone out of the way of vehicles. 

After about twenty minutes, the injured man was coming round and my sister and brother-in-law called 999 again. They discovered - and it's at this point that the story becomes hard to credit - that the original call hadn't been logged. This time, the incident was recorded 'but the ambulance will still take about five hours. Can you take him to the cottage hospital in Swanage?' 'But he's hit his head, is that safe?' asked my sister. 'It's probably the best option', was the reply.

Well, Swanage is only five miles away so that was naturally what they did. The bike was an electric contraption which the gentleman had on approval with the intention of buying it. They took it to the local pub and asked if they could look after it. 'The landlord said yes', reported my sister, 'as though it was the kind of thing that happens every day'. We suspect that as soon as their car drove off, he was on the phone to Andy the Fence in Wareham, and that bike was on its way to a new owner.

My sister and family did get their walk, albeit delayed by a couple of hours. However, it is rather sobering to reflect that the emergency services are now expecting ordinary members of the public to get potentially seriously-injured people to hospital. I'd advise you all not to do anything that could injure you, or put you in the way of someone who might be ... !

Peterborough

The length of time that has elapsed since I last saw Ms Rainbowshunt is demonstrated by the fact that, on Thursday 25th when I did see her, her daughter had just received her GCSE results, and I'd never met the daughter at all. It took longer to get to Peterborough than advertised because the line had to be checked for safety: Ms Rainbowshunt reckoned that the checks would specifically have been on the drains, and ironically (having been a rail engineer since university days) she was working with various rail companies on a laser-powered AI thing that you can strap on the front of an engine and send it off to find things like drains that might get overloaded in heavy rain before it actually happens. 'You'll have to wait about five years for it, though', she warned. 

In Cathedral Square the fountains spouted intermittently across the flagstones and the children danced among them while the adults dodged the water coming from the sky rather than the ground. 

We'd booked our advance tickets for the dinosaur show at the Cathedral - a range of skeletons, fossils, information and animatronic creatures which were actually extremely impressive. The Tyrannosaurus rolled its eyes, blinked and wagged its tail in a very convincing manner. Why dinosaurs, I wondered? Was this making a comment about the Dean & Chapter? 'Why not?' was Ms Rainbowshunt's answer: the family has links with the Cathedral which, they told me, virtually went bankrupt a few years ago and is maximising its income as best it can. I don't mind religious buildings hosting educational or artistic events, even if the main focus is making money, but I did feel it was a shame that the dinos had taken the building over to quite the extent they had, meaning the side chapels and quire were closed off. In the south transept chapel the altar and associated kit were pushed to one side. I took the photo of the quire ceiling with its image of Christ Pantocrator by sticking my camera through the railings and hoping for the best.

The City Museum was fun. Set in a building which started off as a mansion house, then became an infirmary, and finally a museum in 1931, it had a big refurb a few years ago and as a result opened the old operating theatre from its incarnation as a hospital. It's more clinical and untheatrical than its older counterpart in Southwark, but you can still easily imagine the dramas of life and death that took place there. Equally stunning in its way is the decorated turtle shell over one of the doorways, apparently the source of the turtle soup served at a municipal banquet in 1688, and the very vessel in which it was served. Enough to make anyone gulp.