'To Bring You My Love' at 28

A nicer anniversary falling today (as well as being Lady Arlen and Madame Morbidfrog's birthdays) is that PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love was released on February 27th in 1995. Many moons ago now I told you about my first encounter with it. For lots of souls it was the moment they first met the Corscombe conjuror-of-storms, wrapped in red silk or her shocking-pink catsuit or whatever costume she might have been wearing at the time, and it has lost none of its haunting power over subsequent years. At the time, reviewers gulped at the inconceivable about-face the album represented, as its author seemed completely to junk everything she'd done up to that point; some hated it, Time awarding it their title of worst recording of the year, a 'hopelessly mannered CD' produced by an 'utterly graceless singer'. Nicholas Barber for The Independent, though, thought he could sum it up in six inspired words: 'imagine "Siouxsie and the Bad Seeds"'. 

In view of subsequent events, TBYML did seem a bit like PJH's audition for the job of Nick Cave's girlfriend, and many commentators were keen to draw the comparison at the time. But though it and the output of the Bad Seeds at the time seem to share an imaginative universe, they aren't very close together in it. If we think of TBYML as pastiche Americana, we are reading into it settings that aren't there, as its lyrics are marked by distinct unspecificity; and, with the possible exception of 'Working For the Man', Harvey sings for women characters, while the women on Cave's records are usually the victims of the characters he voices. And it was a good dozen years after the album was released that the maestra told Gary Crowley on BBC Radio London about a much more important consideration in her mind at the time, the writing of Flannery O'Connor. In 2020 she posted a picture on Instagram showing her with a copy of O'Connor's Wise Blood, taken, she said, around the time TBYML was being composed - though more recently she told Rolling Stone that she was already reading the American's work in her late teens (I'm not sure she isn't misremembering that, she is not always careful about dates).

Flannery O'Connor was an artist thought little of for many years, who seems to have ascended to general acclaim just at the point that aspects of her work - and, even more, her person, if the two can be separated - start to become unacceptable to those who decide what to celebrate and what to denigrate, aspects which shouldn't really be news. O'Connor was only 39 when she died in 1964 of systemic lupus, the same disabling disease that killed her father - a sardonic, thoughtful writer of morality tales with a taste for the violent, her attitudes drawn deep from Catholic Christianity, and yet an author who refused to proselytise, instead depicting her characters engaged almost unawares in the battle for goodness and transcendence the Faith outlined; and one who also resisted any attempt to locate good and evil in simple, obvious places. O'Connor's is a fallen world penetrated with grace. 

Harvey says that O'Connor's work taught her about storytelling: it 'was also shaping the way that my third-person narrative was becoming in the whole record'. Now, the curious thing about this is that, like most of her music, TBYML's songs don't embody stories. It's only really on her subsequent record, 1998's Is This Desire?, that she turns to such structures, and some of the tracks on that record do have specific lift-off points in tales by O'Connor. The protagonists of TBYML give you glimpses into their history - the obsessive of the title track who was born in the desert and has crossed wasted landscapes to meet the listener, the murderous mother of 'Down By the Water', 'The Dancer's' desperate abandoned lover on her deathbed. But each is speaking from a single moment, rather than laying out a narrative as Nick Cave's characters from around the same time do.

If Flannery O'Connor has sketched the landscape TBYML inhabits, what it takes from her writing isn't the third-person device which Harvey doesn't adopt until a few years later; and, while you can see the same interests in both artists, Harvey's music dealt with religion, violence, and extremity right from the start. Instead, what O'Connor seems to have provided her with is the permission to bolt them all together, to imagine characters whose lives move around religion and sometimes lead them in violent directions. And, as always, Harvey's imagination takes her deeper and wilder than virtually anyone else.

A Year On

Yesterday Hornington Town Council was planning a Pause for Reflection at 10am to mark a year after the invasion of Ukraine, and I couldn't make it because I was doing a funeral. At the last minute, or nearly, the Government announced there would be a national Pause for Reflection, at 11am, so the Council hurriedly shifted theirs. I couldn't make at it the later time either, because I had Toddler Praise which didn't major on Ukraine, funnily enough. I did manage to get to the evening vigil organised by the local Ukraine Support Group, opening the door of the community centre just as everyone was blowing out their candles. They made me do impromptu prayers as a punishment. 

My friend Lara, kind, liberal ex-BBC employee who is half-Finnish by blood and all Finnish by choice, told me a long while ago the Finnish proverb 'A Russian's still a Russian even if you fry them in butter'. Yesterday she posted on LiberFaciorum that what she felt mostly was 'hatred ... I recoil whenever I hear Russian being spoken on the Tube or in a shop ... I am lucky, I left Russia forever before I became an adult because my Finnish mother dreamt of leaving that wretched country all her life ... For now I can only hate, and donate a bit of money, and feel heartbroken'. Talk to my other Finn friend, anarcho-syndicalo-eco-activist Lady MetalMoomin, about the Russians and she becomes a Scandi-nationalist ready to pull the pin from a hand-grenade with her teeth. It's no surprise: they have been bad neighbours. 

Back when I was at college my mum's cousin worked for Oxford City Council and he and his wife regularly hosted foreign students, a good number of whom were decorative Russian girls called Olga and Natasha and so on who I quite enjoyed being invited to dinner with. There's a significant chance that some of them may now have grown-up sons of their own who are in Ukraine right now, trying to kill and not be killed. It amazes me that I can still speak on the phone to yet another friend, Peta, who teaches English in Moscow with her husband. They are South Africans so they're pretty safe there at the moment, though they'd quite like to go somewhere else. 'Please pray for the young men of Russia', she asked me the last time we spoke. 

As well as the physical dangers in this as in all wars, there are spiritual dangers too. War arises from delusion and falsehood, and is powered by pride and often despair: it unleashes hatred even where it did not exist before (at least Lara names it, rather than pretend). The ancient Russian conviction that they are eternal victims now combines with a terrifying nihilistic despair to take the country to a dark place indeed: it's only fascists who go on about how great death is. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, occupy the ground of hope and humanism, but they face the temptation any combatant confronts: to chase victory by turning, in subtle ways, into your enemy. Prayers for them must include a desire to preserve them from such a fate. War does all of this; it is hateful, even when it's necessary.

Two Little Girls

The fact that it was Ash Wednesday hadn't been mentioned at Church Club, but Etta spontaneously raised the subject. 'You didn't come to do the crosses this morning', she upbraided me, and it was true, I hadn't, because I ran out of time to arrange it with the school. Etta also reminded me of a story involving my elder niece which I had no idea I'd told the children. 'Yes, she has a photographic memory', her mum told me when the parents came to collect them, 'It can be quite disconcerting'.

At the evening mass the Swallow family came, mum, dad, baby daughter, and Edie, who is eight. When the Swallows first arrived in Swanvale Halt, Edie too was a babe-in-arms. They came to the main Sunday service and as soon as the singing started she bawled the place down, and did it again on every occasion they turned up. Discerning child, you might think, but it meant that they beat a retreat and didn't come back until Edie was old enough to see things differently. Now she seems to be growing very religious. 'I'm not saying we didn't want to come', said her dad, 'But it was Edie who insisted that we did'. I have seldom seen a more solemn recipient of an ash cross, and when the family knelt at the rail for communion and I blessed her sister, Edie reached along to touch the baby's hand with hers. Just as well I am a hard-hearted soul impervious to such sentiment or it might have been embarassing. 

Renewing An Interest

Fr Donald, the retired hospital chaplain, and I met in the café opposite the church after mass to sign the form to apply to renew his Permission to Officiate. This has to be done to make sure there are not retired clergy knocking around and illicitly doing stuff . 'Why do they want to know this?' he boggled, pointing to the demand that he specify the number of times he has presided at the Eucharist, preached, or done anything else that might fall within the remit of our agreement as to how his ministry should be exercised in the fair parish of Swanvale Halt. We agreed there could be any number of reasons. Positively it could be a way of making sure that a retired clergyperson's incumbent sticks to whatever it is they've agreed they should be allowed to do - not much, in the case of Donald and myself, just him being available when I might need him - to rule out them being sidelined or overworked. But I've never heard of the diocese intervening in such a case. The diocese could want to know what human resources they have available which they don't have to pay for, or how many fees are disappearing into the pockets of Retireds rather than the coffers of Church House. We weren't sure. But we did agree that him speaking to a group over Zoom at the intervention of an incumbent somewhere else he knows probably didn't need to be reported to the Bishop as it was difficult to see what harm he might be doing. Unless he's spreading heretical opinions, and in that case it's the business of the Bishop of London rather than His Grace of Guildford.

Talking Catholic

Back in November I began my series of talks about elements of what (in my opinion) it means to be a Christian and specifically an Anglican who includes the word catholic in their sense of identity and purpose, inspired by the story of the empty aumbry discovered in a nearby church by a former Area Dean: I've just completed it, in a rather hurried fashion as I wanted to get it all done before Lent begins. My aim was to escape from any impression that Catholic Anglicanism is primarily about incense and vestments - despite any appearances to that effect - and instead talked about The Communion of Saints, The Real Presence, Authority, Tradition & Obedience, and The Prayer of the Church, about the Office and how it works. The fifth and final talk, however, did major on worship and its features, thinking about how what churches like ours (and further up the candle) do is a way of helping embodied, fleshly beings meditate on the saving mystery of Christ, and reflects the fruit of long spiritual experience in the past. As well as The Beauty of Holiness, I also touched on Spiritual Disciplines and how they help anchor our worship in reality and stop it all wafting away into self-indulgence. 

Has it made an impression? People have certainly been interested, but if they also show an increased knowledge of these themes and self-awareness of our particular charism within the Church of England, I will be pleased. I started today's talk with this image: I can always rely on Fr Thesis's west-end church if I need a nice splurge of high-churchery to share.

A Waste of Everyone's Time Pt.2

The troops (of Swanvale Halt's disaffected youth) were out in force on Wednesday evening and I said Evening Prayer to the accompaniment of whoops and cheers and loud music from the churchyard. On the way out I did mention to them that this wasn't the right place for such celebrations because of the surrounding flats, but I didn't hold out much hope of my remonstrances having any effect. I didn't positively tell them to move on, because once defiance has been offered that's my arsenal exhausted, apart from excommunication which I fear holds few terrors.

I came past the church yesterday and cleared up the mass of detritus in the churchyard: fifteen or so teenagers can leave a lot of trash behind them. Among the remains was a somewhat rusty bicycle; I left that behind, and also delayed clearing up the broken glass until today, when I was formally at work and had my church keys with me. The bicycle had gone, and looking at the CCTV I was intrigued to see a man in a beanie hat come and wheel it away. What was the story there? Was it not in fact stolen as I assumed, but actually belonged to one of the children and then retrieved by their father?

We've been through this cycle (of behaviour, not the bicycle) many times before, and I don't want it to happen again. Groups of youngsters congregate, increase, drink and smoke weed, and it escalates into problems for local residents and the businesses. The answer is to make the churchyard a less comfortable place for them to gather, and the only way to do so while preserving its friendliness to other people is for the police to swing by every now and again. I filled in a report online and pointed this out, and the reply was swift and polite, though not that helpful: the police have a set routine of patrols to monitor anti-social behaviour, and these can't be altered until it's clear that there is a pattern of behaviour in a particular spot. From the point of view of thinly-spread police resources this makes sense, but such an inflexible approach does feel a bit like saying 'We can't act to forestall a problem until we can prove there's a problem'. 

Having said that, there was noone around yesterday evening, nor tonight. So perhaps the youngsters really have gone somewhere else!

A Waste of Everyone's Time Really

There are a number of dull things I have to do in the course of my work, but I find none of them as dispiriting as dealing with the periodic disorder that centres on the church building. Yesterday, for instance, I was so disgusted and depressed at the trash distributed along the road as far as the railway line that I went along with a litter-picker and a bag and, even though there was new detritus apparent by the end of the day, that felt like a reasonable contribution to make to the local community. Less so scrubbing what seemed to be barbecue sauce off the vestry windows on Monday morning, obviously sprayed up the wall in an attempt to spatter the CCTV camera. I couldn't get the sauce off the stonework without a ladder and a scrubbing brush, neither of which I had access to. 

Yesterday evening I came down to the church to check the hall ahead of the cleaner coming today, and decided to cast an eye over the CCTV. That camera to the rear of the church wasn't working, not because it had been sprayed with condiments, but, as a glance back through the recorded footage revealed, because it had been attacked. A figure in a parka was very visible putting a ladder against the wall, going away and then coming back with a shovel, before banging the cage around the camera. I don't think either implement belongs to us, which raises the question of where they came from and how planned this was. The young gentleman's face is very clear, and the images will be usefully attached to the crime report I will fill out, another very boring activity given the number of times I have done it. As Connie our bookkeeper said, 'If they had brains they'd be dangerous'. 

Passed For Service

One of the woes revealed at last week's Deanery Chapter was that of the vicar of Wormton, whose boiler had been condemned by the gas safety engineer sent by the diocese. As there wouldn't be a replacement for a fortnight or more, and the temperatures were due to dip below -5, he was fortunate to have parents not far away from whom he could borrow a range of electric heaters to stand in. This became in itself another cause for complaint, as some years ago the diocese stopped doing full annual services on boilers in clergy houses and just authorised the bare legal minimum of making sure that they aren't belching out carbon monoxide. The Wormton machine had failed because a previous engineer had neglected to put a small component back properly, and had this been picked up on a subsequent service visit it might have survived another five years or more. The engineer came to me today, and much to my relief declared that my boiler could limp on another year. 

Another change that apparently slipped past without any fanfare is that the diocese has decided it's no longer responsible for the maintenance of any outbuildings at parsonages unless they are physically joined to the parsonage house itself. This might explain why nothing has ever been said, still less done, about the various faults identified a long time ago with my funny little garage that used to be a stable. A visiting fellow dropping off a card for his gardening/fencing/maintenance firm pointed out some corner tiles on it that he says are just about to slip off to disastrous effect, so I will have to look into that for myself, I fear. 

London Revelations

Following on the recent theme of not doing work, some time ago I was invited to pop out to London with Lady Wildwood and Ms MaisyMaid as they both liked the idea of visiting the Transport Museum in Covent Garden. The stuff I immediately needed to do could be compressed into the morning, so yesterday I went. My first discovery was Adelphi House in John Adam Street off The Strand, an amazing 1930s Art Deco block I had no idea existed.  

The Transport Museum had a long queue outside. We had anticipated neither the effect of the start of half-term nor a go-slow by the ticketing system, not helped by the TM's insistence that all its tickets are annual passes so they have to take your email address and details so you can come back in should you want to. I doubt I will unless I find myself at a very loose end: it was fun (though not cheap), but I think you have to be very interested in the topics covered to want to find out more. Now, as a former museum worker I like to go in to a museum, and be welcomed with a big sign saying 'Hello, this is X Museum, this is what it's about, and this is where you go next', as I can then choose to disobey if I wish. Yesterday we went round the whole place the wrong way, as we missed the small sign telling us to start on the second floor and work downwards. That added an extra chaotic element to the visual and aural chaos, as small children ran heedlessly around us until we felt like targets in a pinball machine. But there was a lot to enjoy. I especially liked the Brunel Thames Tunnel Peepshow, a paper concertina you can look through to see the three-dimensional scene, like a tiny toy theatre. 'You can see it more easily just by looking at it from the side', pointed out Lady Wildwood, and of course she is right but what's the fun of that?

We were exhausted after a couple of hours and set off on a slow amble along The Strand and Fleet Street to the Cheshire Cheese where we were dining with two more friends. As we drew closer to St Mary-le-Strand we could hear bells ringing, before realising that the strange glowing pentagonal structures on posts lining the road were a sound installation. But then we worked out that they were producing ambient ringing noises and not the bells: those were coming from St Clement Danes along the way. Was it a practice or being done for a particular event? Lady Wildwood was delighted to be hearing The Bells of St Clements - though that lyric may refer to a church in the City instead.

24-7

'This is my 19th day working without a break and it's going to go on', said Hilary at the Deanery Chapter, and at one stage I thought she might cry. Hilary is unusual in this diocese in looking after a collection of four churches, though two of them have very little going on in them these days. In many rural dioceses, of course, this is nothing unusual and there are swathes of countryside where benefices might comprise groups of churches that run into double figures. Taken to that level, it makes a mockery of the parish ministry we all have in the back of our minds as the model of what we as local clergy are supposed to be doing; no clergyperson can hope to replicate that with such a proliferation of sacred buildings and their communities to care for. My only limited experience of that kind of thing came when I was still attached to Lamford but looking after Goremead; I wasn't doing very much at Lamford during that time, just the odd service and some of the many weddings we happened to have that year, but it was still disorientating trying to remember where I was supposed to be at any one time. 

That's one issue: clergy overwork is another. I always feel a tremor of guilt when this subject comes up because I don't feel overworked. There are periods when what I have to do seems overwhelming, but this is always in anticipation of work and linked to my sense of inadequacy rather than the sheer weight of activity I have to cover. I defend my day off jealously, and although I sometimes end up biting into it there is still a sense of balance. Last week, for instance, Candlemas Day fell on my usual Thursday break, so I did a service in the evening and was glad to, but the evening before I was in London seeing Monsieur HaslandGraphica's pictures on show, which was compensation for Candlemas. I did that rather than shift my rest day around and miss the Toddler Group and other things happening on Friday. I remember some years ago Colin, a really experienced priest not that long off retiring who looks after another parish in the Deanery, saying to me 'When a funeral comes up on your day off, you have to do it, don't you?' and I didn't have the courage to say, Well, I don't, no. The local undertakers know when I can't do funerals and don't ask me to. Our friendliest undertakers are reluctant even to call me on Thursday, and always apologise if they absolutely have to to get a date for a service sorted out. If it was for a member of the church and there was really no option other than a Thursday, I'd do it, but I've found that anyone who really wants me and nobody else to take their Auntie Doreen's funeral will wait a day or two.

I don't think I'm the one that's wrong about this. Sabbath is a Biblical principle and even if clergy require a Sabbath different from everyone else's, they cannot ignore the basic idea without, frankly, breaking one of the Ten Commandments: 'on this day you shall do no work'. Hilary and Colin wouldn't dream (I imagine) of pinching someone's lawnmower from their back garden, but this Commandment is fair game, it seems. 

Now some of this may be due to a clergyperson's need to be needed. Hilary mentioned especially a recent OfStEd inspection at her church school which came up on what would normally have been her day off, and so she had to be there 'to support the chair of governors'. In Swanvale Halt our church school has had three OfStEds during my tenure, and I've always felt my contribution is best made by going nowhere near the place apart from finding out how it's gone once it's over. They really don't want me around exposing my sketchy knowledge of what's actually happening in the school: I could drag it down a grade single-handed. I wonder whether Hilary is really so clued-up about the technical aspects of the school that her presence really makes that much of a difference beyond, say, making the headteacher a cup of strong coffee. 

But not all of the pressure falls into that category. Sometimes there are, indeed, parochial activities it would be good to have, and might have had in the past, but there's nobody to run them apart from the priest. Because a priest's work is so undefined and shapeless, in those circumstances the only way you can possibly prioritise is to ring-fence time when you do no work, and what doesn't get done in the rest, doesn't get done at all. I have seen from bitter experience what happens to priests who go bang: they are packed off on sick leave, and usually never come back. They don't get a medal. The diocese treats them as an embarassment, and their parish quickly forgets them. They may tell themselves that they have made themselves sick in the service of the Lord, but what were they really serving - him, or an institution?

Fr Somerset Ward said that a priest who did not have a full day off in every seven should examine his conscience. Mind you, he also said that of anyone who didn't get eight hours' sleep a night, and insisted that no average Christian could get by on less than an hour's silent prayer each day. Oh, it's hard! 

Men Only, Supposedly

Edgar organised the Men's Breakfast for many years until he became too poorly and had to give it up and, as nobody felt able to take it on, the event fell into abeyance. On Saturday the members organised a special one-off gathering in Edgar's memory, close to his birthday on Candlemas Day, with his wife Jill at the head of the table. All very splendid though my venture back into carnivorous habits by partaking of a convivial bacon butty failed to convince me I was missing anything - unlike the leftover bits of ham and beef I took home after my mum's Christmas lunch (those were worryingly pleasurable).

When I went on the New Vicars Course many years ago one of my fellow sufferers had already been in his parish for a couple of years, and when he arrived there was a well-established Men's Breakfast. He went for a couple of times before noticing that while the chaps sat down to partake, as we too did at Swanvale Halt, of bacon butties, toast and cereals, in the kitchen the wives were doing all the catering. My colleague was outraged. 'If this is the Men's Breakfast, the men should do the work', he maintained, and insisted this should be the case. The members stopped the event rather than do it themselves. 

It was understandable and in fact very good that Jill was present on Saturday, but I was perturbed to find Susan and Renee in the kitchen doing the washing up. 'We don't mind, it's all for Edgar and just the one', they smiled. It had better be!

What To Pray

At first, Sally told me that Harriet wasn't going to be able to get to church anymore. Her Parkinson's had advanced to the point where she would now need two people to get her out of the house, and while we have some very obliging members of the congregation, there are few confident, and none trained, in moving around the dead weight of a human being, even one rendered lighter by long illness. So I dropped round a note saying I would be very happy to bring Harriet communion at home, and suggesting Friday after our Toddler Group. Then in the middle of the week I had another conversation with Sally who reported that Harriet was determined to get to church. I thought this would turn out to be unrealistic and let things stand as they were. After the toddlers were finished, then, I toddled round to Harriet's and was let in by Nadia the carer who told me Harriet was having a tough day. She was in her usual chair, but barely able to move or speak. The sign of the Cross was a vague movement of her hand across her chest. It was no surprise when her son called me later in the day to say she'd been taken to hospital, or that her daughter rang me this morning with the news that she'd succumbed to pneumonia and died in the early hours. Given how weak and ill Harriet was, the nine-hour wait for the ambulance probably didn't make any material difference, but it doesn't look good that her daughter was able to fly back from Spain and get there in less time than it took an ambulance to arrive from Guildford. At least receiving the Sacrament was virtually the last positive act of Harriet's life, as she would have wanted it to be.

As soon as I had the news that Harriet was in hospital I asked Giselle the lay reader to ask the prayer chain to keep her in mind. I stood in front of my little shrine at home and wondered what I should pray. Of course basically you hold the person before the Lord and pray that his will for their best interest be done, but you still have your own feelings. Harriet's has been a long and hard road and there have been times I have found her 'courage' - which has seemed occasionally to involve a refusal to accept that her illness brings limitations on what she can do - enfuriating. She began to lose track of time and would call late in the evening and spend ten minutes telling me - what? Usually I could only pick out a few words. Sometimes it was to apologise for not being present at a service I never expected her to attend. Didn't she realise it was virtually impossible, by that stage, to understand what she was saying over the phone? I tried to see it as an act of service in its own right, but I feared so much misunderstanding something that was actually important. What was that like, to have a functioning brain, except when pharmaceutical fog affected it, and not to be able to communicate? I couldn't pray, Friday and yesterday, that Harriet wouldn't make it, and I expect she would have wanted to. But it was part of what I felt. 

The last words of Harriet, our friend and sister, that I understood, repeated over and over until I could grasp at them before they fled away again, were 'Where am I?'

An Art Evening

It's ironic that I went to the Brick Lane Gallery Annexe - not in Brick Lane at all, but Sclater Street - in order to support my friend Monsieur HaslandGraphica and didn't photograph any of his art at all. He was contributing to this multi-artist show based around abstract art, and as Lady Wildwood couldn't make it down from north of the capital due to strikes on her line I wanted to make the effort, especially as it would also balance out working on the night of Candlemas Day. Msr HaslandGraphica developed this particular sequence of works while in lockdown in France, filtering the cliffs and rivers of the immediate surroundings into digital paintings. 

My favourite bit of the whole show was a large black canvas decorated with patterns of black, scarlet, and rust-red, but I wasn't going to reach down the back of the sofa to pay for it. I was also intrigued by Hannah Robinett, who reads Psalms and decides which colour they make her think of, before blocking the words out with gold. I wondered which translation she uses, and also whether there was anything I could justify buying. There wasn't, I fear.

Learning Experience

Months ago Sally, our pastoral assistant, suggested we should investigate providing meals for families who might need them in our current challenging economic circumstances. Asking around I found that there were several projects of this kind being run by churches elsewhere in the diocese, and more were establishing themselves as 'warm hubs' with or without support from the relevant local authorities. Sally went about the project in an impeccable way, talking to every local agency she could who could be assumed to know more about these things than we as a church might - the home-school link workers, the food bank staff, the Council, the youth service, and so on. Everyone was very supportive and enthusiastic and money was forthcoming from the Council, the Bishop of Guildford's Community Fund, and the like. Most impressively of all, Sally was able to recruit a team of helpers hardly any of whom had prior connection with the church. The trouble was, as it turned out, that very few people availed themselves of the opportunity to benefit. The time of the sessions was tweaked, the marketing was amended, the schools (who were our main source of communication) offered to accompany family groups to the church hall when the sessions were on, but it never caught fire, and Sally has now called a halt to the project and is thinking whether it can transmute into something else. It wasn't the quality of the food which those who did come thought was great!

Thankfully we know it's nothing personal, as the Council report that other similar initiatives have met the same problems and are returning their funding. One 'warm hub' has had not a single person turn up in the months since it was established. I am relaxed about something like this failing: I think we did everything we could conscientiously have done to research and plan, and failure is part of the process of development. The experience does raise big questions about the nature of our local society and how need and poverty are perceived: we doubt that the experience in other parts of the country than leafy Surrey would be the same. But it's very hard to discover why something doesn't work than why it does.