Sent On Their Way

There was a concert in the church last week; although it was my day off I thought I would just drop by on my way home and check that everything was all right. When I arrived it had just begun to rain; the church porch was crammed with the usual young people who hang around the building and I noticed at once that a pane of glass in the inner door was cracked. ‘I suppose nobody knows how that happened?’ I asked – this kind of low-level practical nonsense never ceases to annoy – and as it wouldn’t be long before the concert began thought it was time to move the youngsters on before patrons began arriving and had to run the gauntlet of pot-smoking teenagers in order to get in. After a bit of persuasion, less from me than from the college music department staff who were the organisers, they did indeed move off, grumbling that they’d only just arrived. That proved to be true, as our CCTV footage showed them moving from the back of the church when it began to rain, and, as I was realising, in fact the crack in the glass had almost certainly been made by the door swinging shut in the strong winds earlier in the day. The only other place in the centre of the village with any shelter is the railway station, so I presume that’s where the youngsters went, and where one was stabbed barely a quarter of an hour later, ending up in hospital. He’s on the mend, apparently, but might well not have been. ‘Five quid says county lines’, Ellie who runs the Brownies commented.

I know I wasn’t responsible for this awful event, but I was involved. It’s an unpleasant realisation to know that, as soon as I’m confronted with a problem – a crack in a glass door – my first thought is the inconvenience it’s going to cause me, and in the end even that was dealt with by someone else as Grant the churchwarden took the entire door away and got it fixed. Did my mood affect how I acted? Had I offered the whole thing in a tiny prayer before beginning, as I continually tell myself I should but vanishingly rarely do, might the Lord have been able to do something different with the situation? How our own sins and temptations interact with other people’s, and build up into something potentially tragic.

Where Did That Go/Come From

The noticeboard was bare: all the posters had disappeared. I found them in the porch, neatly placed on a bench. I presumed they'd been blown off the noticeboard in the wind, and someone had put them in the porch, but this was just a presumption as nobody had said anything. This is an inverse version of the more usual phenomenon of extra notices appearing outside or indeed inside the church, with little stacks of flyers for events or organisations popping up on the desk in the entrance area. The same day, Sally the Pastoral Assistant called my attention to a group of small tins which had arrived in the kitchen, unheralded and unexplained, while Sandra the administrator wondered about a bin which had gone missing and was found in an entirely unexpected place. The church, you see, is a space to which many, many people have access to for a variety of different purposes, and all of them feel that they have a right, nay often a duty, to fiddle with it, but do not usually remember to pass on information about how they have done so.

The oddest example (recently) was a tin of baked beans that rested on a shelf of the bookcase where we keep the orders of service for weeks. Every time I saw it I wondered how it had arrived, and resolved to take it to the food-bank basket at the Co-Op, and then forgot to do it. Yesterday I was actually going there to do a food-bank shop, and finally remembered the tin of beans at the right moment. This time, at last, it would find its way to where it could be truly useful, rather than an out-of-place oddity.

Of course, it had gone.

Passiontide Devotion

Yesterday evening our 'augmented' choir (all the singers we can muster from ourselves, plus the odd soul dragged in from other churches) laid on their musical offering for Passiontide, this year for reasons of convenience on Passion Sunday rather than Palm Sunday. In the past I have moaned a bit about the music, and the form, alternating between examples of what I can't help but regard as somewhat turgid and uninvolving Victorian fare. This year was very different, a selection of readings, anthems, and congregational hymns, along the same pattern as our Advent and Christmas carol services, and I liked that much more: it was less of a performance and more of a service, and though that might make it harder to market beyond the church, the takers for the previous version, if they weren't already church members, were family and friends of the singers anyway. 

Delving into old service registers as I am at the moment has shown how common this kind of musical event in the days leading up to Easter was at one time. Lots of churches seem to have put on a similar kind of devotion, performance, or whatever, on a Sunday evening at the end of Lent, and I wonder whether this reflects the paucity of official Anglican liturgical provision for the season. Until Lent, Holy Week and Easter was published as late as 1984, if you wanted to do anything beyond what was available in the Prayer Book you had to borrow from Roman sources. Of course plenty did, even if they weren't all-out Roman Rite churches, but these musical offerings may have been part of the same attempt to add something appropriate to the diet.

Goth Old, Goth New

The display about the foundational Goth club, the Batcave, at the Museum of Youth Culture in Soho, is only open for a few days. Madame Morbidfrog and others were there for the private view during the week, but I could only get along today with Ms Mauritia after celebrating Mass for the Annunciation this morning - a case of from blue to black. Lots of monochrome photos of young people in the particular style of that moment (spiky hair, studded collars and fishnets all derived from punk), posters and flyers covered a wall, introduced by a very helpful big map showing the Batcave's various venues during the years of its existence. There was also a little display case of objects, again mainly paper, but also including a club t-shirt and what looked like a teddy bear in a gimp suit: without a caption its significance was unclear. Between the map and the display were a set of information captions which for inaccessibility in size or type rivalled any I have seen in my career in or out of museums. We eventually realised, from the page numbers, that they were taken from a book. Now, I would have been prepared to pay and even pay through the nose for a nice glossy history of the Batcave, but it turned out that the book accompanied a compendium of music which amounted to a do-it-yourself guide to '80s Goth, and even if it has a few unfamiliar gems in it I could live without that. The show, essentially, was promotion for the product. We were not delayed long, therefore, and set off in search of free art galleries and afternoon tea.

Tea gave us a chance to complain about the current domination of the Goth world by nostalgia, or at least the sense of retrospect. I know it's a bit rich for me to moan about this as I've been banging on about its history for ages, but nobody now seems to produce anything else. As real Goth clubs go under, we celebrate one of the places where it all started; as fewer Goths seem to appear in public, we analyse where those that remain have come from. There are two major books coming up in a month or two examining the history of Gothic, John Robb's The Art of Darkness and Cathi Unsworth's The Season of the Witch - I wonder how they will each justify their space in an increasingly crowded field? The bands our friends occasionally rave about, even when they're newcomers, don't seem to bring anything very fresh to the table. On LiberFaciorum at the moment I seem to be bombarded with adverts for Goth-friendly clothing retailers - Disturbia, EMP, Killstar - and under the televisual influence of Wednesday Addams big white collars in various styles seem to be in for women, but, most of the fashion seems to be, in Ms Mauritia's words,  'Goth as Shein imagines it'. (Mind you, Stylesock seems to be doing interesting things, not all of them Gothic by any means, if you're a young person with enough money to spend on them, even with much-neglected men's clothing, which most of the time boils down to t-shirts and little else). Ah, age does terrible things to us, friends, and not even just physically.

Building Sight

The cheeky, albeit slightly murky and obscured, grin of a Henry demonstrates that there's something going on in Swanvale Halt rectory. I know it isn't strictly a Henry, to judge by its name, but apart from that it looks exactly like one. What's happening is that the loft is being lagged with insulation, and there are a variety of other works the Diocese has decreed should be done. Rather the most dramatic is that the plasterboard along one wall in the Green Bedroom has become detached from the wall itself and needs to be replaced or it may, apparently, fall at any minute. That was where Ms Formerly Aldgate used to sleep. 

But there are other tasks on the list, such as the fixing of the garage roof - for 'garage', understand 'former stable' - and the relaying of the hip-tiles along its corner. A few weeks ago one of those fellows who come door-to-door offering gardening and small building services visited me and pointed out these were loose. So they were, and as they hover over a patch of ground outside the Rectory (and not part of its property) where people tend to park their cars I hastily arranged a little sign to warn folk that this might not be advisable for a while. Now some time before this, one of my colleagues (a former lawyer so you would assume he knew what he was talking about) maintained at Deanery Chapter that the Diocese were abandoning responsibility for anything at parsonages that wasn't physically attached to the parsonage house itself, so I assumed that repairing these tiles was my job, and asked a local builder to do it. In the manner of these things, they haven't even been to look at it yet, so I've relieved them of the responsibility in return for £10 put into the tea fund to recognise the admin they've already done. I do hope I won't have to reverse that instruction yet again.

Quiet Day

Clarissa, who looks after Gristham church not far away and has kindly heard my confession a couple of times after the Cathedral ceased to be interested in such things, lives with her husband Simon in a former mill building in Bortley. They have a music room in a refurbished outbuilding and offered it to me should I ever want a place to run off to. I have been too disorganised to arrange a proper retreat this year, either to Malling Abbey or anywhere else, so yesterday I availed myself of their generosity and spent the entire day (at least from 9am to 5.30pm) in that space. Maintaining my faltering connection with holy Malling and its holy Sisters, I took the community's office book and read Lauds, Sext and Vespers for Lent, similar enough to the normal Anglican Office to feel I was indeed doing what I am enjoined to by Canon Law but different enough from it to be refreshing. I had with me my Bible (funnily enough), Fr Somerset Ward, and Michael Yelton's An Anglo-Catholic Miscellany, from which I learned about another religious order which passed through Surrey, the very weird Servants of Christ the King who once ran a home for boys with learning difficulties at Frensham, and which was governed by the odd Brother Joseph: he became convinced that God wanted him to utilise the talents of his young charges in a circus, at which he would appear as ringmaster in a monastic habit and a black top hat. But he had crossed the Tiber by then so this is one eccentricity the Church of England can't be blamed for.

My time at Bortley was, I think, rather fruitful if for nothing else than the picture that when the Holy Spirit deals with our sins it's a bit like unravelling a tangled skein of wool which has to be done one knot at a time before the stuff can be made into anything very useful; and tabulating all the instructions Jesus gives the people he speaks to, and demonstrating my suspicion that he mentions the sins of individuals only a handful of times. 

I did leave the premises once, and walked the short distance up the muddy lane to the millpond where I saw three swans attempting to dismember a frog so they could eat it. If only two of them had gripped it and pulled it would have been easy, but they could only get as far as gobbling at it and throwing it about. There's a spiritual message in there somewhere. This is real old Surrey, all hollow lanes, tangled trees, tile-hung cottages, Bargate stone, and frost-nibbled antique red brick. 

Lion Cubs Den

Widelake Secondary School has been almost uncharted territory for me in all the time I've been in Swanvale Halt. There is a Christian ecumenical youth work charity in the area that goes in to run a Christian Union and do seasonal assemblies, but paradoxically I suspect that means I have less contact with the school than I would have if they didn't exist at all. So I was delighted to be asked to visit by the RE coordinator to speak to two classes, bring some kit, and answer questions, last Friday. The younger group were studying Christianity as part of their general RE course, while the older ones were at a more philosophical level, and so it proved. I really enjoyed the experience. They were (mainly) interested and engaged and the second group provided some genuine intellectual stimulation. The very first question I was offered by them came from a girl whose opening gambit was 'I don't mean this with any kind of disrespect ...', which made everyone laugh, and who went on not to tackle the Church's attitude to same-sex relationships or child abuse but to ask, 'You spoke about prayer and how it works. How can you tell that what you experience isn't just the effect of long-term self-analysis and examination?' I thought that was rather brilliant, because of course it could be and (as I said) there's no way of proving it isn't. I feel hugely encouraged to think there are such thoughtful young people in our community (even if they don't come anywhere near the church).

Unwelcome, But Gone

While talking to Jackie from the congregation in the alleyway that runs past the Rectory a couple of weeks ago I happened to cast my eye on the wall supporting the fence that separates my garden from that of a long-unoccupied adjoining house and spotted this thing. Jackie said she'd noticed it a day or two before. I may be traducing the maker, but I couldn't help but think it one of the most hideous and baleful objects I have ever seen. I hesitate to inflict it on you but it did make an impression with its goggly eyes, half-formed nose, apparently detached lips and warts, if that's what they are. It was clearly there to gaze out on passersby and, presumably, unnerve them. It achieved its aim as far as we were concerned. Now, I remember Ms Formerly Aldgate once remarking that 'most people choose objects and decorations to make their houses more homely and comforting. You pick yours to make it more unsettling', which I thought was an exaggeration, but even so I don't like unsettling things suddenly appearing out of nowhere that I have had no hand in procuring. Later that afternoon I made some holy water, took my purple stole, and sprinkled the mask while saying some appropriate prayers against malign intentions and reciting the Prologue of St John. I didn't want to destroy it; something nagged at me that that's how horror movies start. 

Now, despite a former Staggers colleague of mine saying that a similar thing had appeared in his churchyard once and thoroughly discombobulated everyone who saw it, I wasn't expecting the Adversary to manifest himself nearby as a result, even if I was reading Jeremy Harte's Cloven Country at the time (about which I may say something on another occasion). But if there are malevolent intents about, even perfectly human ones, I do think they attract more and so they need to be recognised and defused in some way. 

Yesterday I discovered that the mask had gone. Perhaps I was being too sensitive and someone was simply showing off their pottery skills (Ms Kittywitch commented that it was better than anything she ever produced in pottery class - 'the best I ever managed was a creepy hedgehog'). Professor Abacus asked 'Will it return?' and that would be really unsettling. LiberFaciorum did its best to add to the mood by posting on my timeline the banner 'Suggested for You' and then a picture of Patrick Troughton as Fr Brennan in The Omen skewered by a pole. How encouraging in my ministry.

Sapper Satire

Bill Tidy, who died a couple of days ago, did more than one version of his 'Iceberg' cartoon but it's none the less funny for that. I met him once through the odd intermediary of the Royal Engineers Museum, my former workplace many years past. I'd done a temporary exhibition on Sapper art and in the course of that discovered that the cartoonist had served with the RE as a young man. A little while later we were completing the post-War gallery of the Museum, a somewhat fraught business as the plan was held in the Curator John's head and nowhere else. With just hours to go before we were supposed to open I and the rest of the staff stood watching him attempt to arrange a mannequin only to see it topple over no matter what he did to it to cries of 'Bugger, bugger' from John, all of us completely unable to assist. I also remember the discussion about the Northern Ireland display which was supposed to feature a barricade being cleared; John called over one of the Corporals from the Project Team who assisted with display construction and slipped him some cash, and a couple of hours later he returned with a burned-out Ford. We never talked about where it came from. Anyway, we got it all done somehow. 

The question had arisen who might open the exhibition. It would have been easy enough to drag in some well-known retired officer, but boring. One morning as the dread day approached I asked John whether we'd got any further with the matter. 'Yes', he said, 'Bill Tidy's going to do it'. How did you manage that? I asked. 'Phoned him up', was the simple answer. Well, if you don't ask you don't get, I suppose. 

As it turned out, Tidy was clearly very, very tickled indeed to be asked to do the job, someone who in his military career had been no more than a lowly sapper now being feted by senior officers and dignitaries of the Corps. I suspect that John, who despite being a former Territorial RE officer retained an anarchistic streak, also enjoyed the slight but definite air of trepidation that surrounded our guest in case he did something really naughty. In the end all that happened was that when the Chief Royal Engineer, General Sir John Stibbon, invited Tidy to ascend the walkway over the displays and cut the ribbon, the cartoonist merely grinned and said, 'Ah, but if I follow a General, can I be sure he knows where he's going?' We all chuckled but you could almost hear the sound of the Chief Royal's teeth being gritted.

The errant mannequin that had caused so many problems was finally propped up against a box in a very odd way for someone supposed to be attacking a North Korean hideout, but the most interesting incident concerned the display which showed an armoured car being unpacked after being lowered into the Malayan jungle. The forest scene had been built by some outside contractors and was really impressive, with a pump-powered stream running past and convincing fake plants bedded into what we were assured was heat-treated, sterile soil. After a couple of weeks the soil began to sprout mushrooms. They were not a British species, apparently, so at least that had an authenticity too. 

Violating Community Standards

The last time I met our esteemed Member of Parliament - not long before he became the Chancellor, though nobody could have guessed that at that point - he was out in a remote part of the parish with a volunteer litter-picking team. 'Thank you so much for all you do', he smiled. I am of course immune to such blandishments. 

He rarely finds his way into the centre of the village and sometimes as I make my way to church for the first service on a Sunday I find the amount of garbage I pass oppressive, and depressive, so I try to do something about it. Yesterday I was a couple of minutes earlier than usual so before the trash became inaccessible beneath parked cars I took the litter-picker and a bag and did a quick sweep of the short stretch of street along from the church, past the kebab shop which is responsible for a lot of the litter and round the corner. There was the odd can and bottle, lots of bits of paper and wrappers, a sole face mask (not as many of them as there used to be) and a glove. 

The reaction of the few early-Sunday passersby always fascinates me in that the expressions I catch out of the corner of my eye seem a weird mixture of confusion and outrage. Not only is picking up litter in full view of others apparently a bizarre, eccentric and shocking activity, it's also objectionable, it seems. And I thought it was one of the more useful things I do with my time, frankly.

Opening the Word

On Tuesday morning I emerged from the vestry to discover that nobody had braved the chill and damp to join Rick and myself for mass. Like many churches at our end of the spectrum, we gave up a daily eucharist, in the late 1990s in our case, because it had become unsustainable - though my scouring of old service registers is revealing how it was barely sustainable almost everywhere even when it was happening. The Tuesday service is the only survivor of that tradition, and again you can find that pattern in many churches.

We carried on through the service just in case anyone else came along, which has happened in the past, but it meant my meditation on the Feast of SS Perpetua, Felicity, and Companions didn't reach more than a pair of ears, so here it is. I offer it not because it's a masterpiece of the form, but because it's representative of the kind of short homily I usually offer on such occasions. Readings were Revelation 12.10-12 and Matthew 24.9-13 (mercifully brief).

I often say that the early martyrs we commemorate in the calendar are people we know next to nothing about, but that’s not quite the case with Perpetua, Felicity and their companions – though what we know about them is mainly the story of their martyrdom, which we have a detailed account of, some of which could even be in their own words. In fact, through that account they became the model for the early martyrs of the Church, and accounts of what happened to them, as well.

Some of the story might seem a bit morbid and odd, especially perhaps the bit where the gladiator is making a mess of despatching Perpetua and she basically says ‘Oh, give it here’ and grabs his sword-arm to guide the knife to her own throat – but then if you’re on the way out anyway you probably want to expedite matters!

In fact in the story I find myself thinking today less about the saints and more about the crowd in the arena in Carthage at the time. Martyrdom is hard, but cruelty is all too easy. For the crowd watching Perpetua, Felicity and the others, that kind of cruelty was part of public life, the culture they were brought up with. Even if what happened in the arena was often a way of executing people, it was death as a spectacle, an entertainment, whether people were being gored by wild animals, or someone who’d never handled a weapon before was being put up against a professional gladiator – they weren’t going to last very long. The crowds had learned their cruelty.

We must be aware of every step that takes us along that road, whether as individuals or collectively, even if it seems like a small one – because we know where it goes. To argue and act against cruelty in our own time, which may not be popular at all, may just be the martyrdom we are called to. 

Poetry Reading

A little while ago Lady Arlen was kind enough to send me a copy of her first proper volume of poetry, Shouting at Crows. I put it in the lavatory. This is not a statement about its quality, because I make a habit of having one book of poetry there and consulting it each day. I've always enjoyed poetry, and have produced the odd lyric now and again which has even appeared here, but I generally think there is too much writing of poetry and not enough reading of it so I don't regard that as something I should spend time on.

The predecessor of Shouting at Crows in this respect was Colin Simms's Goshawk Poems, which I bought at the Post Office in Garrigill while I was on holiday last Autumn: it was one of a set of volumes in the window wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the damp. I boggled at the sheer amount Mr Simms has apparently managed to write over his career as a biologist and an observer of birds: this book alone runs to about 140 pages, and his oeuvre includes dozens of similar volumes. And I did find it quite hard to batter my way through: it strikes me, dreadful though it might be to someone who spends a lot of time watching them, that there's only so much you can say about goshawks, and I would really rather read about people. Lately, in fact, leaving PJ Harvey's baleful Orlam to one side, my poetic excursions have been a bit unsatisfying. The Collected Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, which Lady Arlen herself bought me years and years ago, was shocking old tripe and it was no surprise so little of it was ever published. Mary Barnard's lucid, Sappho-like lyrics were enjoyable but not quite as sparkling as I expected. I found Bedouin of the London Evening by the mythical Rosemary Tonks almost impenetrable. Revisiting Thomas Hardy increased my respect for his industry and inventiveness but I felt little warmer towards his work. My favourites remain Geoffrey Hill, who you may well have heard of, and Elisabeth Bletsoe, who you almost certainly haven't.

In this company, I rather liked Shouting at Crows, with its meditations on pain and loss in the small, domestic, hidden, and unstated. I wonder whether the next adventure, Jeremy Reed's Patron Saint of Eyeliner, will be as worthwhile?

What You Think You Need

It gradually turned colder in my sitting room as the talk between myself and the lady from the Mission Enabling Team at the Diocese wore on, not because there was anything frosty in our interaction, but because, I realised, I'd only switched the heating on for an hour. She didn't take her coat off, which was wise. We were having the first meeting in our Parish Needs Process, the title the Diocese gives to its efforts to accompany parishes as they work on their Development Plans. She kept reiterating that it was entirely up to me/us whether I/we wanted the Team involved in our planning at all. We discussed the nature of Swanvale Halt parish and the church's relationship with the local community, and the fact that, in common with virtually any church you might pick, there's a lot going on but not many people to do it. We will come up with some kind of a document that summarises where we are and lays out a couple of things we might try in the mission field over the next year or two, but I have a feeling that there will be no surprises. What the Mission Enablers are offering seems to be general consciousness-raising about the nature of parish mission in the 2020s, and I fear that what they will say will not be substantially different from what's been said for the last three decades or so, and which keen followers of this blog will have read before. What I would like is clever insights into our specific situation, but I doubt anything like that will emerge. Perhaps I should have offered her biscuits.

Spring, Believe It Or Not

It is cold and dry in the garden, and nothing seems very Spring-like. There are some bold primroses about and the daffodils are struggling to get going, but there has only been one camellia bloom and I wonder whether the buds will get beyond that.

In the pond, the fish continue to skulk around the bottom as it is too chilly for them to be very active, and this coming week is hardly likely to encourage them. There is frogspawn, and I'm considering whether I should take out a handful and rear the tadpoles indoors, not only because the cold could easily get to them, but because I don't fancy their chances once the fish do get active. 

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Villager', by Tom Cox (2022)

You might remember me writing about Emma Tennant’s novel Queen of Stones, the feminisation of Lord of the Flies that culminates bloodily on the Isle of Portland. I’d been led to that in the first place by Lady Arlen recommending Tom Cox’s novel Villager, via his evocation of the weirdness of the Portland landscape on his website. He’s been around for ages, but Her Ladyship’s tip was the first I’d heard of him.

You often hear it stated that in this or that book ‘the landscape is itself a character’, and in Villager that is quite literally the case, so if you can’t swallow that device you’re not going to get very far. This would be a shame, as the chapters where the moorland that shadows Underhill – a place which, if it were real, would just be on the edge of Dartmoor – speaks for itself are short and self-contained, while the rest is an emotional and psychological tonic for the jaded 21^st-century. Mr Cox’s other fiction has been in short-story form and this book builds a novel out of a collection of linked stories, zipping backward and forward from the present to the near-past and the near-future. Some of the characters know one another, and a person mentioned in one chapter might get their chance to be the centre of attention in another, set in another time; so by the end you have built up a patchwork portrait of this place and the individuals within it. One episode is told via messages posted to a village Whatsapp group, while another (set the farthest in the future) is related through the protagonist’s conversation with an AI search engine, so I suspect this book would be called ‘experimental’ if it was about horrible happenings done by dreadful people, but it’s not: most of the characters we meet are pleasantly ordinary, there is a good deal of generous humour, and even if there are deaths and floods they are no more than most of us might expect to encounter from time to time. This concentration on the small and undramatic means almost certainly that Villager is destined to be treated as less clever and accomplished than it is. It is humane and kind and other things that critics don’t rate that highly, but anyone else can read it and be a little uplifted by finding the human spirit, and its place in the creation, affirmed.

New Responsibilities

From now on, when he occurs, I will refer to the new incumbent of Lamford as Fr Dominic to distinguish him from Fr Donald the retired hospital chaplain in our parish. So, that said, today Fr Dominic served me vegetable soup (‘During the vacancy the Diocese cut off the power and water supply to the greenhouse; it would be very handy to be able to grow some tomatoes’), bread and cheese for lunch. Very Lenten, though St David whose feast day it is would have baulked at such indulgence as cheese. We were meeting to discuss my potential taking over as Rector of the Guildford Chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests. ‘The Bishop’, he went on, ‘will see you as more congenial than me after my civil partnership with Jake, but probably only just. All these things are relative.’ SCP has been doing next to nothing lately while Dominic has been relocating to Lamford, the Secretary is looking for a new job and the Treasurer is run off his feet. I will probably assume the role in July, provided the existing committee – all three of them – can work out some dates to meet.

And the evening offered another gathering, Churches Together in Hornington & District. Now, this I’ve known I will be taking on for quite some time as I’ve been Vice-Chair for the past year, preparing to ascend to Chair at the AGM. I’m not sure what to do with SCP particularly, apart from providing a space for my colleagues to bend a sympathetic ear, but I do have some thoughts about Churches Together. The schedule of events could do with being pruned a bit; for instance, in this year’s calendar a ‘Pentecost Songs of Praise’ appears which was done last year over the Jubilee weekend as part of those celebrations, and I would quite like that not to become a regular fixture without anyone actually taking a decision about it. We also claim to be co-operating in service to the community, but we don’t really. I wonder whether getting our various pastoral assistants together to swap experiences and think about issues of concern to the Hornington area we might be able to tackle together in some way. It might come to nothing, but it’s a different way of going about what we say we do.

How I fit it all in is another matter, but as our Area Dean is resigning and I really did not want to be considered for that thankless task, I thought it a wise precaution to do take on something else instead!