Bling

Earlier in the year I mentioned the fabric I ordered from Mat. Yulia in Zhytomyr and which near-miraculously made its way here from Ukraine. It's finally been turned into the long-planned new 'best white' set of vestments, and we used them for the first time on Christmas Day. I used our existing Gothic sets, which I think were probably bought to celebrate the church's centenary in 1949, as a model, but in the event opened up the collar by an inch to make it easier to put on: in fact sewing around the collar was the most difficult bit. I'm pleased, because we now have a 'best' set that includes a maniple but doesn't have any gold lamé, and which others will be happy to use! It also stands as something of an expression of solidarity with the people of Ukraine and a reminder of the links between nations, peoples, and international politics. We are all connected.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Tess' by Emma Tennant (1994)

When Emma Tennant’s Tess went into shops in 1994, I hope nobody bought it looking for a light bit of romantic fiction with a happy ending. That’s what you might conclude it was, based on the cover, but if so you’d be sadly disappointed. I thought I had to read it after tackling Queen of Stones earlier in the year, and anticipated it would be a baleful piece of work to judge by its predecessor. I hadn’t expected my initial confusion: Tess is the title, and there are three Tesses – it’s a theme of the book that the fate of women repeats in successive generations, ‘the ballad is played and played again’ – the fictional one imagined by Thomas Hardy, the narrator Liza-Lu’s sister, and the baby to whom the story is being told. There are also two Marys, the narrator’s mother, and her niece. Deft writer as she is, Tennant keeps pointing out in the text who is being referred to, but it takes a while to get your head around the repetitions. There are other aspects of the book that you might struggle to get your head around: it’s moving towards the revelation of a secret, repeatedly signalled by the narrator in case we forget it’s coming, which might have seemed shocking in 1994 but now feels predictable; and the narrative is broken up by wodges of a feminist manifesto which may, or may not, be the author’s own. It might have been better to let the story make the point.

And the point is pointed enough, and well enough made, when the tale gets the chance to: that females are the raw material of the fantasies of males, and suffer for it. Baby Tess, granddaughter of Liza-Lu’s sister Tess, represents the generation who might break the cycle and begin the healing of both humanity and the earth (the novel’s environmental urgency was unusual for the time). Part of Tennant’s programme is to wrest control of the Dorset landscape from Thomas Hardy, and she never misses an opportunity to insult or malign him: in this novel he becomes not a complex and divided man with deep flaws, but an unmitigated monster, so captivated by the imaginary woman he creates that he manipulates and damages every real one he  has anything to do with. The action takes place between Abbotsbury, West Bay and Beaminster, the landscape spared the phantasmagoric treatment evident in Queen of Stones so that Tennant’s characters can realistically inhabit it. She imagines the eagles on the gateposts at Mapperton House coming alive, and mentions in passing the old nightclub that ran on the coast road out of Bridport near Burton Bradstock, and you have to be fairly familiar with the history of Dorset to know about that. Casterbridge seems a long way away.

Tess is ambitious and extreme, but not so complex that you can’t look past its flaws. It’s never going to displace the ‘real’ Tess, but it does enough to stake a place in Hardy’s shadow, insisting that his vision isn’t the only way of looking at Dorset, and at humanity.

No Use Crying

Never was anything so rightly characterised as a mixture of triumph and disaster as Christmas 2022 at Swanvale Halt. The chief instance of the first was the Crib Service, the first time we have followed the old pattern since 2019. I say 'the old pattern', but in fact this was the pattern devised by former curate Marion which we'd only actually done once anyway, and which I cobbled together from her notes. The keynote is the children bringing up the crib figures - nice, robust wooden ones - to form the crib scene. The children were led by Poppy with robe and candle, and that all went pretty swimmingly with a couple of hundred souls in church. But the Midnight - the Midnight was another matter. Now I have always regarded the Midnight Mass as one of the high points of the liturgical year and have worked to set it as a marker of proper Catholic practice, so I already feel a bit pressurised to get it right, not least because there are always going to be people there making an occasional, or even once-a-year visit to church. It's important. This year the choir could muster only two voices, thanks to illness and absences, and we had as organist Corinne who has only just begun playing again after a long gap. She wasn't the most confident of presences and the music was hesitant and a bit inconsistent. There were very few people there anyway - no more than 40 - and I was on edge enough by the time we got to the high altar for communion. Then I noticed Gordon the head server had managed to lose the new charcoal from the thurible, and it lay smoking on the Victorian tiles. The thing now only contained a charcoal that had long gone out, and so though I went through the motions of putting incense in it I knew it wouldn't burn. The altar itself was an inch or two too far towards the wall meaning it was awkward to lean over. And then, somehow, unaccountably, I managed to spill the wine - a big, significant spillage of already-consecrated fluid. I hadn't knocked anything, or caught my sleeve or anything like that: instead it felt as though something unseen had knocked my arm (demons, presumably). It took some time to recover. The tiny miracle was that, although I'd registered to my horror that there was no plastic sheet under the altarcloth and on top of the superfrontal, and although the cloth was soaked in wine, we discovered at the end of the service that none had gone through to the superfrontal. Washing winey linens is one thing; getting consecrated wine out of a piece of kit you can't wash is another. So I went home a little less horrorstruck and shakey, and clutching an armful of linens. 

It all makes me reflect that I may have to retreat from my ideal of how the Midnight works. We seem not to have the resources to run an event on the Lamford pattern, or even how we did it at Goremead that one year I was there. It needs a confident musical lead and if we can't find that, and have to scrape around to find servers and singers, we need to rethink.

The Christmas Day services were fine, thankfully!

And Just the Wrong Time of Year for a Journey

Oh dear, I realise that I have ascribed the name ‘Fr Donald’ to both the vicar of Elmham who runs the local bit of the SCP and my retired hospital chaplain colleague locally. Well, there is little to be done now and I can’t think of an alternative name for the time being and so will just say it was Fr Donald of Elmham who posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday about everything that was happening in the church there this week running up to Christmas. He does it because he loves it, he says.

As you know I have never felt that in the same way! The same period here at Swanvale Halt is very similar, though we will only have the one Crib Service today because the church is quite a bit larger than Elmham’s. This first relatively normal Christmas since 2019 is, as they always tend to be, a dragged-out, draining business, essentially three weeks of the same thing over and over again. I find myself even more than usual clinging on to the recitation of the Office which has doggedly remained in apocalyptic Advent mode even while the rest of the world is singing Hark the Herald. That provides some spiritual balance, it seems, as I try to wrap my vocal chords around the Great O Antiphons. Even those seem to have begun a long time ago, when it was only last Saturday!

This morning my Bible reading was the very last bit of the Gospel of St John, and the phrase that leapt to my attention was Jesus’s instruction to Peter, ‘feed my sheep’. Regardless of what I might be experiencing, and regardless of how remote any of the Christmas activities – the concerts, the turning-on of lights, and so on – might seem to be from the kind of spiritual activity that stands a chance of changing souls, they are all, in varying degrees, food for the sheep and therefore vitally part of what I am supposed to be doing. Weak as I am, I might find a lot of what I do burdensome, even when there are moments of joy and the conviction that the work is right and what I am called to. Perhaps the Lord felt the same. If misery was all I felt, I might be compelled to consider whether I should carry on doing it; but there is still the fundamental sense of rightness, surprisingly often love pokes through the surface, and ultimately I rest on the fact that it is a command: ‘feed my sheep’.

After all, this is what Jesus does, and what we are all called to take part in. I found myself thinking in my prayer time this morning that he who is the Bread of Heaven is laid where the animals feed. In 2000 years of meditation on this mystery I can’t imagine nobody has had this thought before, but I can’t remember anyone mentioning it. It was a bit thunderstriking, terrible and glorious. That's the business we are in. Happy Christmas! 

Season's Greetings

On my way back from the Air Cadets on Tuesday I saw these on a garage door. Now of course my Christmas tree is bedecked with bats and spiders, but I hadn't expected them anywhere else. I'm sure they are not left over from Halloween or I would have spotted them before. But compliments of the season to those responsible, anyway.

Singing All of the Wrong Notes

Weston House is the other care home in the parish, as well as Widelake at its other end. In fact it isn't quite in the parish, but just within the Hornington boundary. However many Swanvale Halt people find their way there, and it's in the area that doesn't really feel like Hornington, being just north of the meadows that delineate the northern edge of the town. There used to be monthly communion services at Weston, led by one of the Hornington pastoral assistants, in which Paula, one of ours, participated: they used reserved sacrament from Hornington church. Naturally all that stopped in the pandemic and, just as we recently started going into Widelake again, the staff at Weston asked if we might be able to hold a service there before Christmas. Canon Jim who is looking after Hornington was extremely content for us to take it on, so we did. In fact Paula - despite now being a local councillor at three different levels! - said it was one of the things she missed most from the pandemic time and would be very happy to lead a service on her own once we'd relaid the ground, so yesterday we went in to do a complete communion service.

I wanted to have an Advent carol and then a Christmas one. I inherited a list of about thirty hymns used at the remote services, mostly copied from the New English Hymnal. Arthur used to come and play the piano for us at Widelake, but again that arrangement has come to an end, so now I have a CD bodged from recordings lifted from Youtube. As far as Advent songs go, the thirty include 'Lo he comes with clouds descending', and 'The Lord will come and will not be slow'. I am always a bit wary of the former because of the bit about gazing on Jesus's glorious scars which I think is somewhat strong meat for those not used to it, so yesterday I went for 'The Lord will come'. Barely anyone in our pretty elderly congregation knew it. I have sometimes wondered how long it will be before what are pretty familiar hymns to anyone who has much to do with ordinary English church life drop out of general knowledge and we're left with 'The Lord is my shepherd' and 'Away in a manger'. There might be some other Advent hymns that would work - 'Long ago prophets knew' is pretty easy to pick up even if you aren't that familiar with it - but there's no time to make the change before we go back to Widelake tomorrow. At least they ought to know 'O little town of Bethlehem'!

Renewal

'I am shocked that you have had a carol service rather than watching the football as the Church of England ordered us to,' said S.D. who I am due to see tomorrow depending on the trains. I pointed out that not only did we have a carol service at Swanvale Halt, but I'd also led the one for the local uniformed groups in the huge public school chapel nearby just as the football was due to start: 'This is obviously the way forward,' said S.D., 'order people not to come to church, and they will'.

'A friend came to visit yesterday and was describing how he and his family decided to go to church last Christmas,' he went on. 'There was a new vicar. Her first words were "We're going to start the service by singing Happy Birthday to Jesus, and I've brought my guitar". They all came out saying they were never going to that church again. So even when people do come to church, we have all these fun new ways of making sure they never, ever come back.'

Horror!

A week last Saturday I went with Lady Wildwood and MaisyMaid to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House, a bit nervously as it was my suggestion we should. We all quite liked it though my friends preferred the first bit with its nostalgic glimpses of punk, New Romantic and early Goth ('My memory isn't wrong, people really did dress like that', MaisyMaid mused at the blownup footage of early-80s club nights, being a few years senior to her Ladyship and myself), but I thought all of it was good fun even though a couple of bits were a little queasy: the artist who'd sculpted himself as a hyperrealistic drowned corpse under an archway admitted in the captions that even he'd found it thoroughly unsettling to make. I was almost overcome being brought face-to-face with Sue Webster's Banshees jacket: 

The premise of the show is that the mode of horror has been used to analyse society since the breakdown of the hopes of the 1960s in three broad phases, that the curators categorise as 'Monster' - figures and institutions of power are made monstrous, and to oppose them nonconformists construct spectacular selves that are also monstrous; 'Ghost' - the sense of reality collapses into nostalgia and pastiche, paranoia and hysteria, fragmentation and the uncanny; and 'Witch' - narratives of power and authority are deconstructed and reconstructed into new expressions of self-determination and connection. There are multiple ways of arranging even the specific art of rebellion across five decades, of course, but this is as interesting as any.

Notwithstanding all the horror, the artwork that caught me up most was Susan Hiller's Homage to Joseph Beuys, which is 86 bottles of holy well water collected from a variety of sacred springs and sites between 1969 and 2016. I couldn't quite see what was uncanny about that. Lady Wildwood suggested that the healing capacities of the water were there to counteract the fractured and baleful material around it: nice try, I thought.

Illuminations

I am late posting about the turning-on of the Swanvale Halt Christmas Lights last Friday - considerably and satisfying into December, unlike most places! - for which I was drafted in to say a few words. In fact it was all on the brink of disaster when Santa Claus drew into view about ten minutes early and all the children bundled in his direction. The Mayor and the Town Council Community Services Officer wondered how they would ever get their attention back, but in the end I even had time to fit in a three-minute homily (which, for reasons best left obscure, majored on Kate Bush) before the lights were switched on. Actually, as the Town Clerk admitted to me, it's only the lights on the Day Centre and adjoining tree that are switched on, while most of them are on timers. Meanwhile, in the church, we were hosting music exams for the Royal School of Music. One parent came out of the building with her child examinee only to find that, since she'd left her car (against all advice) in the Day Centre car park, it was now boxed in by a couple of hundred children and Father Christmas on an illuminated sleigh. 

Refer It Upwards

A US-based friend once told me of a young Christian friend of theirs who, when asked (for instance) whether they wanted to go to the shops or something, would screw up her eyes in an attitude of intense concentration. When asked what she was doing, she would say she was ‘asking Jesus what to do’. After a moment or two the answer would come and she would, or would not, go shopping.

Although this might be a somewhat eccentric model of bringing the Lord into your decision-making, I find the great spiritual director Fr Somerset Ward advocates something not that far off. ‘Every day we make innumerable choices’, he argues (to summarise) in one of his Instructions I read this week, ‘and to bring those choices before God allows our decision-making faculties to be shaped by his will. Even when the choices seem small and trivial, perhaps from the divine viewpoint they are not; and if they are, the habit of referring them regularly to God will prepare us for those greater decisions which really matter’.

I think, contrastingly, that clear choices occur less frequently in a day than Fr Somerset Ward imagined. Many of the things we do are constrained by the decisions we have already taken: my day is dominated by routine and the tasks my role places upon me, and what I need to do in order to fulfil those obligations. Some decisions are what I call phantom choices: that is, they are theoretically there, but in fact unrealistically distant. As I stand at the level-crossing waiting for the train to arrive, for instance, in theory I face a choice whether or not to jump the gates and run across, but really this is something that operates at a lower level than a choice, which I think has to consist of two options either of which you might realistically take, and I am vanishingly unlikely, on a cold winter’s day, to make the physical or moral effort to leap the gates, break the law and risk the fine. I don’t feel a need to refer that to God.

And you may be familiar with the technique Christians sometimes employ of considering ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, perhaps wearing a pastel-shaded rubber wristband to remind them of it. It strikes me that most of the time, concerning most situations, we haven’t got the faintest idea what Jesus would have done, and this is very different from referring a choice to God: instead it’s a way of organising our own reasoning, still relying on ourselves more than the divine.

Once upon a time I would have said that God is almost certainly uninterested in whether I go shopping or not and so to bring him to bear on the choice to do so would be a bit weird. I’m not sure this is true now. I don’t expect any positive response to referring my choice to God (and might doubt my soundness of mind if there was one) but instead I’ve found that doing so does have an interesting effect; it makes me more aware that he is there, a far more subtle and strange effect than a voice or vision might have, and that to an extent reshapes my expectations and reasoning. Fr Somerset Ward was basically right: quelle surprise.

If You Want to Get Ahead

It’s taken ages to get my new hat from Mad Hatters in Brighton, where I purchased my last couple. Previously I went to a Leading High Street Retailer but over the years they began to prove erratic and I do like a snap brim, which Mad Hatters seemed able to supply reliably. The hat I’ve had since before the pandemic has become increasingly battered and a replacement was desirable, but between July and November I just got regular apologetic emails saying the requested headgear hadn’t arrived. Finally the suppliers came up with the goods. In the end I also got a panama (those never last more than a couple of seasons before the straw begins to fray).

I was never a hat-wearer before theological college, when a group of Staggers students quite self-consciously adopted black fedoras which gave them something of the air of Foxy-Faced Charles and Chubby Joe from The Box of Delights. I wasn’t part of that cadre but found a similar hat at Tumi in Little Clarendon Street and thought it was quite smart. Panamas I started on because I decided it was inappropriate to carry on wearing a black fedora in the summer. I now have a carefully-devised schedule to work out what time of the year I should wear which hat!

This dress element has become almost second nature to me, but it remains relatively unusual in society at large, and in fact my impression is that there are in fact slightly fewer hat-wearers even than there were a few years ago. I blame George Galloway, although Vince Cable’s fedora could almost have come from Mad Hatter’s too. Anyway, this means I stick out a bit in Swanvale Halt and I feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that the hats have become publicly associated with me; I have a feeling clergy ought not to be so individual.

The clerical uniform is intended to act in the other direction, eroding the distinctiveness and inviduality its wearers exhibit, but some clergy spurn it. It is a rare day when, for instance, you can catch Dr Bones’s father wearing clericals in his Cambridgeshire village: there is little point there, because everybody knows him anyway. Others think the uniform is off-putting, and perhaps they are right. I can only hope that my demeanour offsets it, and probably those who would be put off would still be put off by a pastel pullover and tan chinos. Were I to try to go down that route, I know I would not only be put off but feel my soul withering inside.

Obsession: Radio 4's 'The Witch Farm'

Let’s talk ghosts again!

My dad used to describe the frustrations of being a car mechanic. Customers would bring their cars to the garage and report ‘a funny noise’ which might be difficult to define or locate. When does this noise happen? the mechanics would ask. The customer might say that it happened under such-and-such circumstances, but not all the time. The mechanics would sigh and do their best. Sometimes they would begin work on one problem, only to discover something completely different. If this is how difficult it is to diagnose an issue concerning a lump of steel, plastic and glass with an internal combustion engine in it, an entirely material business, how hard must it be to deal with non-physical stuff you can’t test or measure, matter that’s affected by psychology, history, culture, and circumstances to unknown degrees?

As we noted in respect to Danny Robins’s previous dramatised paranormal investigation radio series, The Battersea Poltergeist, this problem is much to the fore in the one which has just finished on Radio 4, The Witch Farm. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the unfortunate Rich family experienced a bewildering variety of terrifying manifestations at an old house not far from Brecon called Heol Fanog. Over the years they engaged an equally wide range of specialists to find out why these things were happening and to stop them, beginning with the Anglican clergy at Brecon Cathedral who sprayed holy water about to no effect at all; a strange psychic with the unlikely name of Larry Harry who identified witches and other presences at the heart of the problem; a dowser who told them it was all about ley lines gone bad; a Baptist minister who spent two years, on and off, trying to drive demons out of the house; and finally ghosthunter Eddie Burks whose ministrations to the unhappy spirits he described at Heol Fanog seemed to bring positive results that sadly proved only temporary. Eventually the Riches had to leave, the family fell apart, and poor Bill Rich essentially drank himself to death.

Although I’d never heard of it before, this is far from the first time that the story of Heol Fanog has been told, but we are still no nearer a clear explanation. The various rationales, natural or paranormal, for the events at the house are not necessarily mutually exclusive; but that means that it’s hard to exclude any of them and reach a clear judgement about what went on. There’s nothing secure to go on, and in the show Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow roll their sceptic-versus-believer double act across the ambiguity without resolution. The one absolutely demonstrable, material oddity among all the Heol Fanog phenomena is the abnormally high electricity bills the Riches found themselves paying not long after moving in: that should be a plain matter to investigate, but the electricity company that operated then no longer exists, the question is never really gone into, and, while no natural explanation is offered, neither is it clear why these entities should cause so much electrical disturbance when so many others don’t.

In my very, very limited experience of this area of work the first question one asks oneself is what might be the centre of the event. Some phenomena are definitely place-based; most ghosts, whatever one thinks ghosts are, focus on a particular location and never manifest anywhere else. Many of them play out the same actions and motions whenever they appear, like recordings. Other phenomena are person-based, and what we tend to call poltergeists seem to be of this sort, capable of manifesting in different places a specific individual happens to be. So, when trying to find out what might be going on in any stated case, you would ask the witnesses whether anything of the kind had ever happened to them before, in another setting. When The Witch Farm began, this was the very first question I wanted answered; whatever may have happened to the Riches, Heol Fanog appears to be quiet now and at one point in the drama Liz Rich is told that the previous tenant never experienced anything at all (though visitors to the house claimed to have done). In fact, Heol Fanog is quiet to the point that when Danny Robins goes to visit the location with a dowser he rather implies that they have to creep around the perimeter of the property and avoid annoying the current residents: he doesn’t actually state ‘we contacted them and they told us to get knotted’, but let’s say they don’t seem to have anything to add to the investigation, as they might if they were being plagued by the paranormal themselves.

Despite Heol Fanog’s apparently complex and disagreeable history, that led me to think right from the start that one of the Rich family was crucial to the whole thing and, by the end of the series, it seems that Bill Rich’s one-time involvement with the occult – he began an initiation into witchcraft with Alex and Maxine Sanders, but backed out before it was complete – was at the centre of the events, whether we understand its effects as supernatural or psychological. But in fact I’m coming to wonder whether there’s a third category of phenomena engendered by a person susceptible to disturbance arriving in potentially disturbed surroundings, and that may be what we have in The Witch Farm.

David Holmwood, the local Baptist minister who the Riches are put onto as a potential solution for their problems, interests me. Mr Holmwood worked in industry and his wife Patricia was a nurse before he concluded that he was being called to the ministry in 1971. He served as a student pastor at Stockwood Free Church in Bristol and then went to Fillebrook Baptist Church in east London before they both worked in Brazil. Mr Holmwood’s next posting I can find was in Romsey in 1988, after which he must have gone to Wales. Then he was at Stoke Row in Buckinghamshire, and his last appointment was with the chaplaincy team at Heathrow Airport in the early 2000s – in fact he was there to witness the effects of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. This all seems unspectacular enough if a bit more varied than the average nonconformist minister's career, but The Witch Farm interviews his successor at Jerusalem Baptist in Pentrebach who states that Mr Holmwood had an extensive ministry of exorcism and dealing with the paranormal, at least while he was there.

Of course I had my head in my hands when the show described him as ‘a local vicar’ (he wasn’t), but Revd Holmwood doesn’t do anything an Anglican clergyperson might not, apart from working as a freelancer: Anglicans operate in teams, bringing doctors and psychologists into play as well as spiritual weaponry, but Mr Holmwood doesn’t have anyone else on board except for an American ex-Satanist called Anita. He drives them all to Heol Fanog and during the journey an owl chucks itself against the windscreen of the car in broad daylight, which is very Hammer House of Horror. Curiously he appears – from the drama, anyway – to identify Bill Rich as the focus of the problem quite quickly, but apparently never draws from him the actual reason why this might be so, instead getting him to burn his spooky paintings as he decides they are the way the Devil ‘gets in’. Even if Mr Holmwood’s techniques are not that different from his Anglican counterparts’, his obsessive persistence seems unusual. Not only does he take months readying himself for his oncoming battle with Satan, if we believe the narrative we’re presented with, he spends about two years hanging around at Heol Fanog, intermittently staying there, praying, reading Scripture, and scaring the Riches even more than they are already, until eventually they’ve had enough of him. Nothing that he does has any effect on what they’re experiencing. Coming from a Christian perspective, these techniques are supposed to be powerful and effective, based as they are in the power of God; if they haven’t achieved anything after repeated application, you ought to question whether your entire analysis of the problem is awry.

However we interpret the story of the Rich family, it strikes me that there’s another tale to be told here, that of a Christian minister sucked in by their own interpretation of a set of events which in fact seem to centre on a disturbed, lonely, and guilt-ridden individual. In that way, Revd David Holmwood – God rest his soul – should probably have had reason to be grateful that he was eventually detached from the obsessive power of Heol Fanog. 

That's Full of Holes

Talking of money, it’s easy enough to be outraged by a report that ‘Rishi Sunak bought a £1.5M sculpture for his garden with public money’ which is what friends of mine were sharing the other day. As this relates to the museum/art world I was especially interested, and thought it would be very unlikely that any such purchase for the PM’s own garden would get through. What seems to have happened is that someone from The Sun saw Henry Moore’s Model for Seated Woman being carried into the front door of 10 Downing Street a few days ago. It’s quite impressive that a tabloid journalist might recognise a sculpture by Henry Moore, but if it’s for the Downing Street garden rather than Mr Sunak’s own personal home it will be the responsibility of the Government Art Collection, an organisation most people know nothing about: I knew it existed but had given it no special thought. The Moore was, as reported, definitely sold at Christie’s in October and the quoted price is roughly what it was expected to sell for. But did the GAC buy it?

The GAC is run by an advisory board consisting of leading art gallery directors who sit on it ex officio, curators and academics, and is chaired at the moment by Sir David Verey, a banker by trade with a long record of involvement in the arts world. It’s the curatorial staff of the GAC who draw up lists of items for acquisition, which the board then approve. The board members aren’t paid and no politicians sit on it, so there’s no obvious political influence on what the GAC does.

It's slightly unsatisfactory that up-to-date information on the GAC’s budget isn’t easily available, as the latest report on its website is only from 2018-19. But then, and in the year before (I have looked back no further than that) it spent some hundreds of thousands of pounds on a wide variety of artworks, the great majority by contemporary, living artists; the cheapest cost a couple of hundred pounds, the most expensive about £70K, and the average in the few thousands. Model for Seated Woman would have cost about four times the GAC’s usual annual spend on acquisitions, and it would be exceedingly unusual for it to buy a piece by one of the world’s most acclaimed and expensive (and dead) artists, rather than the relatively humble purchases it seems usually to make. It already owns a Henry Moore, albeit not a very spectacular one, which sits in the garden of the British Ambassador in Seoul and which it bought in 1965; and it therefore seems very unlikely that it’s added another, far pricier example, of its own choice or at the insistence of someone in Downing Street, even maybe the Prime Minister.

The official line is that the sculpture was not bought by the GAC, but has appeared in the no.10 garden as a result of ‘a longstanding charitable arrangement’. If accurate, that would suggest that the actual purchaser was a private individual who has then loaned the figure to the GAC for display as part of some tax scheme or something like that, meaning that neither public money nor political influence was involved. But of course Christie’s doesn’t reveal who the buyer was, and if the loan was made to set against tax, no official body can comment on it either: it could be Mr Sunak himself, though it's unlikely. That outrage-provoking headline clearly isn't true, but it hides a far more complex process which mingles public and private interest that few people pay any attention to.

Paying for the Right Things

The 5% rise in stipends planned by Guildford Diocese for its clergy was not something I asked for or even anticipated, but it made me remember that our own church staff here in Swanvale Halt – Sandra the office manager, Cally the bookkeeper, and Debra the cleaner – should be considered too. Sandra and Cally languished for years on the same pay rate because we simply forgot to do anything about it, when we ought to have reviewed their salaries annually. Anyway, I worked out that raising all their wages by 5% (which is below the average rise at the moment) would only cost the church £600 over a year, and if it was controversial I could use my own rise to cover that.

When I proposed it at PCC, Grant the churchwarden was beside himself with rage, saying it was ‘disgusting’ that the clergy were ‘lining their own pockets’ when people were suffering. I rather limply tried to say that a) the Board of Finance had decided it, not the clergy, and b) what we were talking about was not me but our own church emlpoyees, but he didn’t think they should be ‘rewarded’ either. The rest of the PCC tried to be as objective as possible. I eventually said we weren’t going to reach a consensus so would have to have a vote. Grant was the only dissenting voice, and immediately packed his bag and left the meeting. It is the first time anything of this kind has ever happened here, and it’s a testament to the quality of this church that several PCC members tried to contact Grant the following day to check he was OK. He wasn’t really as he was already annoyed about various things before we started on pay, but he and I were corresponding about other matters before long.

Leaving aside the question of whether clergy should have their pay raised in hard times, I still think I was right regarding our employees. There are, I suppose, two models of justice here. The first is that many in society are suffering, so the Church (and that means those who work for it) should suffer in solidarity: it is those very people who pay its staff, after all. The other is that justice must start with those the Church has closest responsibility for, namely the people who work for it, and if it can’t treat them fairly it has no right at all to speak to the rest of the world. I see the force of the first, but I come down on the side of the latter. I don’t dismiss Grant’s anger, and have put the Director of Finance’s details in this week’s pew-sheet, in case anyone else wants to make their feelings known.

It has made me reflect on the nature of the parish ministry, though, its pay and status. I’ve wondered for a long time what priests are for. A traditionalist Catholic account would insist that sacraments require priests and that’s why you have them, which is true but doesn’t get you very far because it remains unclear why you should have a special caste of people who earn their living from priestly ministry rather than do it as part of a largely secular life (as many now do).

Instead I find myself thinking this way. All Christians are called, by virtue of their baptism, to carry on the mission of the Church: living the spiritual life, proclaiming the Gospel, and serving their brothers and sisters. That’s what we’re all supposed to do. But the Church has found from long experience that that is not what happens unless you positively set people apart who both structure their whole lives around doing those things, as opposed to fitting them into their secular existences, and, very importantly, promise that they will do so. The business of promising is at the centre of what the Church calls sacraments, the signs of our promises to God and his to us, so it makes sense for the person whose life is organised around the publicly-made promise to carry on the work of Christ also to preside at the other sacraments. And, lo and behold, you then have eucharistic communities with priests at their centre. Of course this is only the sketch of an argument it would take a book to fill out!

The Church of England has chosen that its priests should be ordinarily comfortable; not wealthy in the context of the society that surrounds them, but not, usually, having to worry about putting a meal on the table or paying their taxes. A hungry or anxious person finds it hard to pray beyond the basics. The typical benchmark is that the entire remunerative package of a parish incumbent – not just their stipend (at the moment mine is quite a bit below the average full-time UK salary), but their allowances, expenses and housing too – should be roughly on a par with that of the headteacher of a small primary school. I think that’s quite generous, truth be told, as I’m sure the headteacher of Swanvale Halt Infants works far harder than I do. But then a good chunk of my 'work' consists, externally speaking, of sitting with my eyes closed concentrating on the presence of an unseen being, and you just have to accept that or get rid of the whole thing. Perhaps you think a separate group of people should not live ‘ordinarily comfortable’ lives basically off the contributions of others, and I could not really argue against you except to point to the purpose of full-time clergy which can hardly be provided for any other way.

Neverthless, you have to guard against the self-serving materialism that can, and universally does, creep into Church structures. The Church of England, riddled as it is with the standards and understandings of the World, has been notoriously grasping at points in its history:

In the bare ‘30s, bankrupt farmers

Blew themselves from barnlofts

While you whinnied at the door for tithe.

Your bloodied hands slide around the chalice.

Again, when monasticism began it was a hard and ascetic life to choose, but gradually as the faithful piled monasteries with gifts the lives of their inmates became more and more relaxed and ‘ordinarily comfortable’ or more than comfortable. That does not mean they did no good. Religious houses ran schools, fed the hungry, looked after travellers and the sick. In medieval Europe, they were one of the chief means of making a monstrously unjust society humanly palatable, and when they were abolished it didn’t make that society any less monstrously unjust. But they softened the injustice (when they did) with the very same resources they drew from it. I am no revolutionary, and you could argue I am in no different position. Perhaps one day I, too, will be expropriated, and if so will I be gracious enough to see in it the hand of God?

Contested Pasts

Today a museum, but not one I have visited – it’s the Museum of the Moving Image in Deal, opened by a film archivist and his wife in a house they purchased for the purpose. Ms Brightshades and partner Stan recently went there and with the pictures she shared was this one in which among the other movie stars you can glimpse Louise Brooks. Well, I was excited, anyway.

Museums rarely get in the news unless they do something unusual, and over the last few days this has meant the Horniman concluding an agreement to return its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria (eventually) and the Wellcome Institute dismantling the Medicine Man exhibition structured around the collection of Henry Wellcome. The museum staff at the Wellcome claim that they’ve attempted to interrogate the display with contradictory or contextualising installations alongside bits of it for some years, but the time has come to abandon the whole thing and do something different. I’ve seen it several times over the years, and my main complaint at it closing is that it was always fun to drop into as the Wellcome is free and the stuff in it is fascinating.

The reaction, at least to the closure of Medicine Man, coalesced around the predictable lines that this was ‘vandalism’ carried out by a ‘cultural Marxist elite’, or that it was a welcome re-evaluation of assumptions that no longer seem true or just. Beneath that is a more interesting philosophical question of whether the historical stories museums tell are part of a movement towards greater truth, or are mere fictions that serve our purposes at a particular time. A Christian is committed to the idea that there is an objective viewpoint from which truth can be judged, and we can approximate our own closer to it or further away from it; I’m not sure a non-believing historian can say the same. Perhaps accepting that there is such a thing as truth, a real, overarching story that in theory we could tell if only we had enough time, knowledge and sensitivity, might help, as we can see that there are genuine, objective experiences which can be included within or excluded from museum displays or history books, and could at least accept that they are real. Otherwise all we are left with is force – who happens to control the institution at any one time.

Were I still in the industry I might be tempted to shoehorn Louise Brooks into every display I could, which only proves the point.