Words of Encouragement

The grim monument of Archbishop George Abbott in Holy Trinity, Guildford, provides one of the most Gothic experiences you can have in Surrey. His effigy rests on a charnel house propped up on columns of books, all carved in marble. Yesterday our suffragan bishop had been addressing us all in the church about the theme of ‘Tension’ in Advent, and as I sat with ++George for a few minutes to contemplate I reflected that this dramatic structure also had a tension about it. All flesshe ys grasse, it seems to want to say, and nothing earthly about us abides, but it also wants to do it in grandiose marble funerary art and to remind us that the Archbishop was very, very clever and devoted to his books. He doesn’t want us to remember that he was (to date) the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to have killed anyone outside conditions of war. Oops! It was an accident, honest.

The Study Morning was billed as a ‘retreat’ though there’s only so much retreating you can do together with a hundred or more other people at a town-centre church. I am better at these things than I would have been at the start of my ministry, a bit less brittle and insecure, and so I can let most of it wash over me and even try to be prayerful now and again. After it was all over I went for lunch with Cara from Emwood and Gillian from Stanpool and we weren’t even that bitchy. Not about what we’d just been listening to, anyway.

On Sunday at Swanvale Halt we’d had three services. The 8am and 10am were a bit thinly attended and as I did the second of a short series of talks about elements of Catholic spiritual life in the Church of England I did wonder whether I was wasting everyone’s time. Problems with the sound system were horribly distracting and the PCC Secretary has just resigned for health reasons, two more little incidents which have contributed to the feeling that the millstones are grinding our little church at the moment. But numbers at the Advent Service of Light in the evening were a bit up on last year.

Yesterday Derek, who came into the church first thing to set the heating for the week, told me how his faith had revived since coming to worship with his wife; at the Study Morning someone I’d dealt with in my role as a vocations advisor and who is now sharing a curacy with her husband came over to tell me how our conversations had been ‘pivotal’ for them both; and Cara thanked me for giving her the idea that it’s important to pray in your church building, as this had actually had a positive effect not just on her own sense of relationship with her parish but also with some difficult souls within it. So perhaps I have done a little good! And the eucharist reminded me of the wonderful gift we are given and can pass on to the souls God loves, which is more important than anything.

A Wander in Wittering

My birthday was last Sunday: there were of course things to do, but I had a yearning for the sea and had enough time to do what many people from Swanvale Halt do and zoomed down to West Wittering on Chichester Harbour and, as we always used to say in our family, 'look at the water'. It was a chilly and windy afternoon, but the low autumnal sun struck across the beach and sand bars, illuminating the walkers, dog-walkers, and wind-surfers who were there in what I thought were surprising numbers on a November Sunday afternoon. A mermaid's purse was waiting to be discovered. The wind whipped the drier sand across the damper in long streams, and it found its way even as far as the table behind the dunes where I sat with my tea and an ice cream. But it was worth the sand, the drive, and even the charge for the car park, to mark the day as something different.

The Churches of Cove

The Hampshire-yet-Guildford parish of Cove is another where an established old church is less interesting from our point of view than a new one. The former is St John the Baptist, built in 1844 supposedly in imitation of the Hospital of St Cross near Winchester, a pleasing but not spectacular church with the usual sort of flashy high-Victorian reredos and not a bad nave altar as these things go, plus some very odd details such as a font cover topped with a weird sort of winged urn thing, and a wooden screen of round-headed arches in the transept.

But then I went to what is now Christ Church, between Cove and Farnborough centre. This was built as St Christopher’s in 1934, and represents Gothic boiled down to its absolute essentials. There is a tall tub-shaped font very typical of the time, and a dramatic east end now rendered a bit of a liturgical backwater behind the nave altar on its dais, a somewhat paltry little table, I’m afraid, compared even to the straightforward one at St John the Baptist’s. Five years after its construction St Christopher’s gained a plaque depicting its patron saint, and it seems to have got its aumbry to celebrate its golden jubilee in 1984. I was rather taken aback by the pentagram-style light fittings, and the church feels quite uncomfortable about them too!

There was a third church in Cove: it was an Anglican congregation that used the Southwood Community Centre from its construction in 1993. In 2019 it ceased to exist as a separate grouping and the members relocated to St Christopher’s, which was renamed Christ Church.

Although we see that the sacrament was once reserved at Christ Church – to judge from experience I wouldn’t like to bet that it is now! – and it had an image of its one-time patron saint, I’ve never seen it referred to as a particularly Catholic church. Instead it shows where expectations of any new church in the mid-20^th century lay.

On the Shoulders of Architectural Giants

Fr Jeremy, the Roman Catholic parish priest, used to sit on the board of the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust and suggested we go to a Trust lecture at Merrow yesterday on the revision of Pevsner's Buildings of England volume for Surrey. It's seventy years since the first edition and forty years since the last revision carried out by Bridget Cherry, and now Charles O'Brien has revisited the whole county to complete the latest one. The talk gave a bit of background to the Buildings series - I hadn't realised that Pevsner got the idea from an earlier series of architectural monographs covering German regions, or how much of a popular audience the volumes were pitched at when first released; Penguin Books produced posters announcing 'The only comprehensive book about the buildings of your county', for instance. We had a whistlestop tour of Surrey churches and discovered that the original house in Stanwell where Dr Pevsner first sat at a table with Allen Lane from Penguin and conceived the idea for the series still exists. We learned how Pevsner's collaborator Ian Nairn wrote far more of the Surrey volume than anyone has tended to realise. I was delighted to learn that some omissions have been made good: St Mark's Hale with its fantastic wall paintings is in the revised volume, when the existing one not only overlooked it completely but called the other church in Hale, St John's, by the wrong name. 

Fr Jeremy has long had a responsibility for the fabric of Roman Catholic churches across the Arundel diocese and some of these are quite recent in date, as former bishop Cormac O'Connor insisted that each deanery should have one major church in it, which often meant building new ones: he asked Mr O'Brien whether he could think of particularly good churches built in the 21st century, or failing that good secular buildings. The author was forced to admit a little shame-facedly that the new Guildford Crematorium chapel wasn't in the revised book, as he was familiar with the old one and hadn't thought it worth while to go and check its replacement, 'and actually it's quite good. But it can go in the next edition'. We were all encouraged to get the new book, and if you order through the Yale University Press and quote PEV22 you can get a discount. There was one copy there at the lecture, and so many people crowded round it to look I didn't get to check whether Swanvale Halt church's entry was any improvement on the old one, which amounted to three words: 'dull lancet chapel'.

So What Does Your Parish Need Exactly?

It’s been a long time coming for us, the Parish Needs Process, but on Saturday I, churchwarden Grant and his wife Sue who is our sole Deanery Synod rep (we are entitled to two but I’ve never found anyone else to do it) went to Tophill church to be told how it’s all going to work. Essentially this is an attempt to kickstart what we used to call Mission Planning, with the stress laid on the diocese helping parishes to identify what they want to do and working out how they can be supported to do it. There is nothing wrong with that, but my problem is that I’ve been around too long and remember the last time I went through this process seven years or so ago. I took on board all the injuctions to involve the whole church in settling its priorities for the next few years, getting people talking about ideas and plans, and we came up with a document that had my initials alongside action points suspiciously often. The number of people who actually wanted to use their limited free time to engage in the process was never very large and for the most part the congregation nodded and smiled and then went home. I have become entirely sceptical that this exercise as a process brings its supposed benefits to the church community, any more than constantly assessing what we do in the way we normally would. Attentive readers might remember, in the dim and distant past, the diocese’s Twelve Transformation Goals. Feedback indicated that nobody could remember what they were, so since the Pandemic they have been shrunk to three, stressing the priorities of discipleship, evangelism (what is called 'Growing Diversity' on the logo means outreach and evangelism), and community service. These, it seems to me, are more or less exactly the same as the three goals our former bishop set the diocese long before ‘Transforming Church, Transforming Life’ ever came along, and this is no coincidence because these three areas of activity are what the Church of Jesus Christ is for. Any plan for the future of any kind will always and I dare say has always included them, and so what the diocese has come up with is not only not new, it is exactly the same as anyone would.

All that said, in theory it helps to have something to guide your activity rather than flailing around randomly, and Mission Planning, or Church Development Planning or whatever you want to call it, is useful to that degree. After our conversations on Saturday I came away from the meeting less dreadfully negative than I started. In the new year a Mission Enabler from the diocese will have a conversation with me as the parish settles its ideas for the coming couple of years, and eventually we will have a Plan on a single side of A4 which the Archdeacon will look at when he makes his visitation in June. I’m not sure how much the diocese will really have had to do with it apart from kicking us all until it gets done.

Tophill has a nice new church Café which functions as a separate business and which serves coffee at least as posh as the café opposite Swanvale Halt church, the beans not exactly rolled on the thighs of dusky maidens but nearly. Everyone attending on Saturday got a discount voucher for their coffee, but we still had to pay for it. I was not alone in thinking this was a pretty poor show for laypeople giving up their free time to sit in a church and talk about toddler groups and the like, and I’m afraid I’ve said so on the feedback form so we’ll see whether I get feedback on my feedback.

Canalside Scenes

My original plan last Thursday was to go walking around Long Valley near Aldershot, but the military ranges were closed, so instead I picked out a set of interesting features to go and look at near Deepcut, around the Basingstoke Canal. In the event a series of locked gates on the land associated with the old Deepcut Barracks meant I couldn’t see those either; some people do, because I’ve seen references to cyclists visiting Porridgepot Hill and the Old Windmill watertower not far away. But I had to be content with a short circuit around the Canal.

The Basingstoke (Dr Bones will confirm) is one of the less-used waterways in the network: it’s not well-supplied with water and traffic is regularly stopped, and it doesn’t take much of that for boat-users to avoid it (in fact I remarked on this a few years ago). The houses lining one bank not far from Deepcut Bridge all seem equipped to take advantage of their location with kayaks or rowboats but apart from one short narrowboat which showed signs of not having moved for a long while I saw nothing bigger. But there were chaps fishing around Frimley Lock, carved owls, folly-like water-gates at Wharfenden Lake, and remarkable graffiti at Deepcut Bridge. They’ve been there for at least twelve years, but nobody seems to know the artist or who they’re depicting.

That Doesn't Make Any Sense

Trevor has been quiet for quite some time: his delusions haven't been of the kind I can do anything about, and I have stopped arguing with him as there is no point. They are so deep-rooted and such a part of him that there is no dislodging them even as they upset him. But just over the last couple of weeks he has been complaining about the Adversary's activities again.

Trevor: I'm experiencing supernatural events. I keep levitating.

Me: When does this happen? Are you sitting watching the TV and then lift up out of your seat?

Trevor: It's when I'm lying on my bed. [clue: this means he's asleep].

Me: Has anyone ever seen this happen to you?

Trevor: Leeeet meee thiiiiink ....

Me: I think you'd probably remember if anyone else had been there.

- As indeed any potential observer would have done. Trevor wants to be exorcised, but I reminded him that I can't do that without referring to the Diocesan Advisor on Deliverance, and I have taken him to three of those over the years and none of them have deemed exorcism a necessary step to take. He accepted that without complaining, for now.

In the afternoon it was Church Club. The story was Gideon, and taking a cue from the episode of the fleece my theme was experiments. For some years when I've told this story I've taken a pair of tarnished copper coins into school and, during storytime, put one in a jar of vinegar until the end of the session to show how the vinegar cleans it. I sat down to do this yesterday and Disaster! found no bottle of vinegar in my bag|: I was convinced I'd brought it. I apologised to the children. 'There's some vinegar at the bottom of the toy box!' cried Bryony brightly. The toy box sits at the side of the hall, full of foam rubber balls and the like and the children had all been playing with them while we got ready for storytime; it seemed prima facie most unlikely that the school would be storing vinegar in it. I went to investigate, surrounded by a crowd of excited children, and, sure enough, right at the bottom, was a bottle of vinegar.

For a moment, I admit, I was bewildered. All my expectations, which seemed so reasonable, were confounded and I could not work out any reason why the school would want to have vinegar around other than in the canteen, let alone hide it in the hall under a mountain of foam rubber balls and rings. But this was only a moment: I realised it was my bottle of vinegar, which must have fallen out of my bag thanks to the children rummaging around, and found its way to the bottom. This was a relief, or I might have had to concede that perhaps Trevor had been levitating after all.

Upheavals Among the Dead

Undertaking is a very stable business: funeral fashions change, but dying itself never goes out of fashion. Families tend not to shop around for an undertaker when someone dies, as getting a good deal isn't usually the first thing on their minds; they will stick with a firm they've used before, unless their most recent experience was absolutely awful. This means that companies develop their own local fiefdoms and while there is rivalry there is not really that much competition: firms will share facilities and personnel if they have to. It is true that The Trade is now dominated by a few big providers who operate locally under the names of long-established and familiar companies, but the people who actually work in those local branches, whatever name they have, often stay for decades so the experience people have using them isn't very different from what it might be if they were genuinely independent.

We had a bit of a shock a little while ago in Swanvale Halt when our local branch of Co-Op Funerals closed after a car drove through the front window, accidentally one has to add, and the company decided not to reopen it. Shame really, as I remember blessing the chapel of rest when it started up. But our ancient and much-respected undertaking firm, Greengages, are now experiencing their own upset. A reorganisation at the overarching company who operate Greengages resulted in a demand that branch manager Phil re-apply for the job he has had for thirty years and more, and although this is now a common practice in our weird modern world it was quite understandable that he told them to take a jump and handed in his notice. He took with him his son who also worked for the firm, and all the local knowledge and experience they had built up over the years. Pastoral Assistant and local councillor Paula now tells me Phil and Arthur are setting up their own business on the road into Hornington and I think I ought to call by. It never does any harm to be nice to your undertakers, even though - or perhaps especially - because so many fewer funerals come clergy's way these days. 

Children Present and Absent

Messy Church at Swanvale Halt has been severely impacted by the pandemic, though we aren't entirely sure why this should be. Our numbers were steady right up to the very last gathering in March 2020, and now we are getting roughly half what we could expect before the Great Disruption. Some attending now are new, some are the families who were coming before, but there are just fewer of them. Saturday's theme of 'Holy Fire' chosen by the team was a bit of a challenge to try and illustrate in my worship time, but I gave it a go and I think everyone was happy even if I didn't end up actually lighting a fire. Today Poppy (rather appropriately) joined the serving team for Remembrance Sunday and her plus two children present with another family meant we had more minors present at an ordinary Sunday mass than for a long time.

We've long since given up trying to do any traditional Sunday-School-type children's work, having tried so many configurations over the years. On Wednesday my colleagues in the Deanery Chapter shared their woes in the same area. Even the big, well-organised evangelical Tophill finds that its numbers of children have halved since the pandemic, and its vacant children's and families worker position is one of thirty-seven across the diocese. At Caringfield Rector Rebecca can't find anyone to fill her similar job, despite offering to juggle it to fit applicants who won't work with primary school children, or secondary, or work this or that time. She's propping up all her groups herself by doing all the preparation and organisation: 'I have just enough to make these groups viable in the hope that eventually someone will take them on before I go under'. At Wormton they had a very flourishing Sunday School but now can't tell whether they will get a dozen children or two, and I didn't feel like warning them that's exactly what happened to us: after few weeks where the children themselves can't be sure any more than a couple will be there, they will stop wanting to come at all. It's no fun with just the two of you, or even three. Meanwhile what parents expect, my colleagues think, is the level of children's work they are used to from schools, and there are very, very few churches who can provide that. 'Our outreach has gone back by ten years', said the vicar of Wormton. I think we are moving into a new and very different world, and there will be no going back to the old one at all - but that nobody really knows what the new will be like.

Complete Rubbish

More inspiring insights into parish life: I was going to post about praying the Office, but will delay that in favour of discussing Bins. We are not quite sure how the church managed to acquire nine wheeliebins, nor how several of them lost their lids. We have been expecting the Council to come to collect the superfluous ones for some time, and lined them up along the church path like superannuated Daleks waiting for the knacker's van to turn up and cart them away. And there they have remained, for rather too long. We debated their ongoing presence at this week's staff meeting, and as a result I asked Sandra the office manager to try to find out what the Council's plans were. It turned out that the bin men wouldn't take the bins away because they were full of water. This is true, but invites the obvious response that the reason they are full of water is that THEY HAVEN'T BEEN TAKEN AWAY.

So after Morning Prayer today I did the only thing open to us, which was to tip the bins over, drain off the repulsive water, sort the resulting cascade of trash into the bins we're keeping, and then turn the spares upside down. In pity Fr Donald gave me a pair of the latex gloves he uses for refuelling his car, and I was grateful, as one pile of muck revealed a black bag not quite managing to restrain a sprawling dog turd. 'I thought your job was so full of glamour', commented Grant the churchwarden. He had come down to give me details of the damp in the gents' toilets.

In some relief I sat in front of the computer and found a message from a young mum asking whether she had to book into the Toddler Group. No, I said, but it's been really busy over the last few weeks so you might like to make sure you're here early. 'OK, I'll set off early,' she replied, 'I'm coming from Portsmouth'. Portsmouth? Gosh, I replied, did she have local connections? Thankfully she answered that she would indeed be visiting her sister-in-law in the parish and so they would both hope to come with their respective children. For a moment I thought that Swanvale Halt Toddler Group was being expected to serve the entire southeast of England.

'The Music of Gothic' at the Wallace Collection, 28th October

Oh dear, I should have posted about my trip to London on Friday 28th to attend this event: a combined lecture-cum-recital hosted by Dr Emma McEvoy at the Wallace Collection, discussing, and illustrating, 'The Music of Gothic'. Dr McEvoy's case is that Gothic literature is full of music, and stage adaptations of Gothic works are too - but at first such orchestration was quite lighthearted, drawing on the conventions of comic opera. It was only from about 1820 that melodrama took over and 'The Music of Gothic' started to turn into 'Gothic Music'. A chamber ensemble conducted by the organist of St Cuthbert's Philbeach Gardens played a variety of pieces by now-forgotten composers to make her point. Funnily enough I have been reading a book about Henry Purcell at the moment - I say 'reading', but there are quite a few bits which I have no greater chance of understanding than I would a programming manual, so I skipped over them - and that mentions a number of pieces from his theatre work that would seem to go against Dr McEvoy's case, but she is, of course, planning a book, which will doubtless deal with all of that. I can't promise I'll be prepared to take out the loan necessary to buy it!

Who Cares About What

'The aumbry light was on, but the churchwardens didn't know what it was for', the retired incumbent told me of a visit to a church as Area Dean, 'and when we opened it, it was clear the Sacrament had been in there for a long, long time'. I thought of visiting that very church a little while ago and noticing the light on but the door of the aumbry ajar, rather implying that there was nothing in it. What with the new united parish of Hornington and Tophill being handed into the care of the CPAS, it occurred to me to make another little effort to make sure the good people of Swanvale Halt do have some dim idea of what's distinct about the Catholic tradition within the Anglican Church, partly so they can use it spiritually, and partly so that they are on guard if anything happens to me. I began last Sunday with 'The Communion of Saints', to a congregation depleted by illness and torrential rain, but an appreciative one at least.

'Do people really care about this?' Giselle the lay reader asked me. It's a fair question and fair, too, coming from someone who has spent most of her ministry at Tophill but comes from a Roman Catholic background so does at least understand what it's about. If what we are dealing with is simply a set of markers of partisan identity, they probably shouldn't, but equally Swanvale Halt has to think about why it exists at all in these hard times. I think the fact is that a minority do care because they 'get it' and do indeed consciously understand and value what I've been talking about for twelve years. What most people in the church care about is comfort and familiarity, and in a world of hectic change, and a life of inevitable change, comfort and familiarity are not things to be treated automatically with contempt. On a spiritual level, the things they find comforting and familiar about their church life are the ways they have become accustomed to talk to God and to hear him talking to them. What I would say is that they may not realise the degree to which those things depend on the principles and ideas behind Catholic spiritual life. They may by the time I finish!

St Peter's, Ash

This church is a bit of an oddity. Gilbert Wall Heathcote was the incumbent between 1835 and 1884, a sound Tractarian who had been vicar of Hursley before John Keble, and paid for the rebuilding and extension of St Peter’s in 1863, but the church never advanced very far liturgically and didn’t feature in any of the Anglo-Catholic church directories. Yet it now has a number of features which you’d expect to find in those settings, and nowhere else.

The marble and mosaic reredos has the brutal vigour of the period before church architecture and fittings began to become correct and tasteful. There is a chancel screen which must be rather later than the 1863 rebuilding, but of a different date from the choir stalls as it’s in a different style. The old chancel became, eventually, a Lady Chapel which now has a couple of icons and a slender little statue. There’s a figure of the Christ Child installed in 1938 as a memorial to AM Lichfold – whoever they were – and a set of Stations of the Cross put in about 15 years ago at the cost of a parishioner. All of this points in quite a Catholic direction but there is no suggestion that here it’s seen as part of anything of that kind. I was allowed to look at the vestments and found a set exactly the same as one we use in Swanvale Halt, with the exception that the main colour of the orphreys is red on ours.

History for Atheists (and Christians)

My former neighbour Fr Advocatus recently mentioned on LiberFaciorum Tim O’Neill’s blog History For Atheists, and I was grateful as I’d come across it some while ago and then lost all record. Mr O’Neill is very frustrated with the nonsense about Christian history that lots of atheists tend casually and not so casually to come up with. His special mission is to combat ‘supposed rationalists parroting pseudo-history with no sign of fact-checking, let alone engagement with scholarship’, and we can all sympathise with that. I've done a bit of it here and here. But he is, nevertheless, firmly and definitely an atheist with an atheist’s account of Christian origins.

Now I spend most of my time in spiritual engagement rather than apologetics, that is, talking to people who are already believers rather than who aren’t. What I talk to those believers about is a different matter, as, rather than anything very religious, it tends to be their ailments, the weather, or why did Slimming World leave out all the tables and chairs in the church hall so that the cleaner had to work around them rather than packing them away like usual? This means that my ability to deal with the questions non-Christians might ask is actually a bit rusty and I am not as agile as I really ought to be.

Tim O’Neill’s version of how Christianity came about is a very familiar one, and goes like this. There was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher called Yeshua who went about first-century Palestine telling everyone who would listen that the end of the world and the victory of YHWH was imminent. When he was put to death his traumatised followers began seeing him in phantasmal form, because that’s what traumatised people do, and then they reformulated his teachings to give themselves something to keep them going and explain what had happened, because that’s what believers in UFO cults and the like do, and finally invented a set of stories to back them up. I’m not going to get into examining this in any detail, because I can see three massive books on my shelf by Tom Wright essentially doing exactly that and taking about 1500 pages to do so, but as soon as I read it I found myself thinking, What do I actually think about this? I ought really to have an outline response, not anything detailed but just enough, to hand. I suppose it helps to posit a rival narrative, which is not just to assert that the picture the Scriptures paint is simple and uncomplicated fact: but that the early Church came to believe things about Jesus which were completely outside the boundaries of Second-Temple Judaism – not only the Resurrection, but the account of the Last Supper in which Jesus says things no Jew would ever say – and that the events in the atheist narrative are inadequate to explain this. Yeshua the Jewish preacher is an invention of the commentator, not a figure depicted in the texts: an imaginative deduction designed to preserve a point of view. We’ve been here before in this blog, and I should strive to remember.

You don’t normally expect to have these slightly fazing encounters with people who do go to church. Yesterday while doing a couple of chores in the middle of the day I met an older couple looking around, who told me they attended an Anglican church not far away. The man described scriptural debates he had with his sister-in-law. ‘She says Jesus is God’, he mused, ‘But I say that he points the way to God. He never claimed to be God. It was only other people that said that about him.’ Here we have again the idea that you can get behind what the Church said about Jesus to a reconstructed ‘real’ Jesus behind them. I raised the matter of the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus and how they amounted to a statement of divinity, but I could feel the words rather withering on my lips: quite apart from it being quite an abstruse point, you can always argue it was part of ‘what people said about Jesus’ and subsequently put into his mouth when the texts are written. The man wasn’t listening anyway, because he just repeated his earlier point. I should have started a completely different conversation. That, I tell myself, is what the Lord would have done. Assuming any of my ideas about him are true at all. 

P.S. I used this photo after Googling 'Lego Jesus', but what's he wearing? Is that some kind of Best Messiah of the Year award?

Obligatory Halloween Shot

In fact Halloween night was wet and windy at Swanvale Halt and keeping the lanterns lit was no easy task. By the time I set out for the churchyard for my customary toast to the dead and to leave a lantern to watch over them - for however long or short a time - there wasn't a single glint of a candle from a pumpkin. Nor did I get any visitors so I will have to eat all the chocolate myself. It will take some time.

Halloween is my younger niece's birthday and my sister took her and her friends out trick-or-treating, though at 13 I get the impression she's a little long in the tooth for it as it seems to be primary-school age children who mainly engage in it. Earlier in the day they'd been shopping in Bournemouth and visited the tomb of the Shelleys at St Peter's which seems like an appropriate cultural activity for the day!