Precautionary Principle

Matt our New Churchwarden has been on the New Churchwardens’ Course and has had it drummed into him how local churches are responsible for such things as first aid and fire safety. It’s the kind of area he has done at work for some time so I am quite happy to have someone with an actual aptitude for matters of basic compliance to run with it. The other New Churchwardens had a lot of questions for the diocesan officials who were running the event: what advice can to give us on how to make sure we comply with the law, they asked? None, was the answer, It’s your job to find out. Ask your insurers. When the insurers are asked, their response is that they can’t tell churches what to do either, they must tailor their policies to their local circumstances and should probably employ the services of a consultant. So far as fire safety is concerned, we did this a few years ago, but the chap the office found turned out to have doubtful accreditation and we didn’t have the money to do as he advised anyway.

This attitude of ‘You must do something on pain of terrible recompense but you have to guess what it is’ is not that satisfactory. I decided to consult with my Deanery colleagues to see what they do. I imagine Tophill is well up to speed with this but it’s all done by the office so the clergy have no idea what happens, and that explains why they didn’t say anything. Best organised (predictably given the incumbent) was Wothay where their policies outline which activities need to be covered by first-aiders and they send members of the congregation for training when a gap arises, and they review their fire prevention policy whenever the Archdeacon’s Visitation comes round. Not far away at Holmpool they have some first-aiders across their two churches, but it doesn’t sound like a huge number, while as far as fire safety was concerned the rector knew the fire extinguishers were serviced each year, and that was it. Nobody else replied.

Matt suggested that, seeing that first aid was so important, the diocese might like to arrange training for a proportion of PCC members and, even though people move on and off the PCC, it would still raise the levels of knowledge and confidence and make the Church a safer place. I suggested Colin the Area Dean might raise this at the next diocesan meeting. ‘I will’, he answered, ‘but don’t hold your breath.’

Prayer, Perhaps

You might have thought it was a simple matter to get Christians together to pray. Our Church Development Plan envisages doing that - deliberately and consciously to seek the will of God for Swanvale Halt church rather than launching initiatives which might be costly in time, money and human resources, yet not what the Lord was really after at all. Yet it hasn't proved easy at all. Giselle the Lay Reader was the one tasked with this but when she gathered a group of likely souls to see what they thought found them more willing to revive something we used to have, an ecumenical prayer group to concentrate on the needs of our local community - a worthwhile thing in its own right, but not what I had in mind. We thought, well, perhaps this is also a movement of the Spirit, so Giselle set up a session - but nobody could make it. OK, I concluded, I will just pick a couple of times, half an hour before Morning Prayer one day and before Evening Prayer another, get Jesus out of the aumbry (in the form of a consecrated Host in the monstrance) and onto the Lady Chapel altar, and sit there and see who comes. And last Monday there were five of us which I consider not bad. 

I asked whether people had any impressions they might want to share with me. Matthew had a reflection on open and closed doors, Giselle asked 'what is the congregation hungry for?' and seems to have developed an unexpected interest in the iconography of dragons, and Estelle was 'just thankful to be there' as she usually is. Fr Donald the retired hospital chaplain mused on the salutary effect of encountering Christ in the Sacrament and thereby accustoming ourselves to listen to one another as well as to Him, and how our society might be improved if its leaders did more of it, like Harold MacMillan popping into the Westminster house of the Society of St John the Evangelist to pray when he got the chance. He may well have a point.

Goth Walk 37: Cocktails With Elvira

Curiously I found out about the 1932 Elvira Barney murder case through my investigations into Surrey Anglo-Catholicism. The Sisters of St Mary at Spelthorne once ran the only sanatorium in the UK for women alcoholics, and one of their celebrity patients was an actress called Brenda Dean Paul. Through her I discovered Elvira Barney née Mullens, a knighted stockbroker's daughter acquitted of murdering, and even of manslaughtering, her lover Michael Scott Stephen at her apartment in William Mews, mainly, it seems, because nobody liked him very much. Her defence counsel, the former Attorney General Sir Patrick Hastings may have had a bit to do with it;  she may, so one story goes, have repaid the debt by nearly running him down driving on the wrong side of the road between Paris and Boulogne later in the summer. She definitely did crash into the wife of the ex-Hungarian Prime Minister Count Karolyi in Cannes, a sentence which could only be written in the 1930s. These events all have a dark humour about them, but there's no fun to be got out of Elvira's own death in a hotel room in Paris in 1936 from an apparent cocaine overdose. I did find myself, for the first time ever, quoting Barbara Cartland: her novel A Virgin in Mayfair describes the milieu of Elvira and the Bright Young People, and includes, in a description of a Soho nightclub, one sublime line: 'everyone kept saying how thrilling it was to be there, and how they ought not to have come'. As Mr Gloommovie said, how good a quiz night question would that be - Who wrote this, Oscar Wilde, PG Wodehouse, or Barbara Cartland?

There were very few of us on the Walk, fewer than half the people who'd actually confirmed they were coming. I picked up doing the Walks from the Young Lord Declan back in the old days when we might get thirty or forty participants, and the old London Goth Meetup group used constantly to get new blood (as it were) passing through. Now it seems as though I'm doing them for a loyal but tiny group of people I've known for years and that's not as fun. I don't have another topic immediately in the pipeline, so perhaps it's time to call a halt. 

Even my one photo was rubbish! Instead I took this along the King's Road in Chelsea.

Cleer View

For some reason this day off has coincided with a low mood, and I know that there's no deliberately shifting it once it arrives - not the satisfaction from doing a succession of little jobs, seeing a friend for coffee, food or drink, or even the diversion of reading. It sucks all the pleasure out of these things, and will only move off when something unexpected moves it, like a breeze blowing away the cloud.

I think it was the right thing to do to go out of the house for an hour to the antiques centre, where I haven't been for a long time. I wasn't intending to buy anything, but along an obscure hallway (and they're all obscure at the antiques centre) found a print of a Cornish holy well. Acquiring new stuff doesn't necessarily make me any happier either, but at least this was a nice, small surprise. St Cleer's Well is a familiar one, but I've never seen this particular image before.

An Important Visitation

The children from Swanvale Halt Infants School regularly come to the church to look round as part of their RE syllabus. Yesterday was the turn of one of the Year 2 classes. They moved around in three small groups, asked all the usual questions they usually do and some new ones, and struggled to remember what I had told them at Assembly earlier in the day when the topic came up. 

They are often fascinated by the font, which we keep open with some water in it. During the visit we discovered that the water wasn't in a very good state - it had got dusty and when you dragged a finger through it a nasty buckle of scum built up behind. I thought it would be fun to empty and refill the font and bless the new water. 

The children gathered round as I sprinkled some salt in the font (I'm still working through the pot of Dorset Sea Salt I bought several years ago), said the prayer of blessing ('Lord, we thank you for the gift of water to sustain, refresh, and cleanse all life ...') and made the sign of the cross three times in the water. Even if they've been at baptism services themselves, they won't remember these words and won't even have understood a lot of them but that doesn't matter: instinctively they all came in with 'Amen' at the end in exactly the right place. They know that something holy happened. Probably.

Objection

There are many occasions when I take great comfort from not following the debates of the national Church in any detail: there are plenty of strains and stresses in ministry and life generally without adding to them, and my only interest in Synodical acrobatics is in how they might impact on what I am called on to do or not do. So there are many people more invested than me, for differing reasons, in the Synod vote this week to go ahead with experimental services to pray for, or bless, relationships in which both partners are of the same sex. I’m not entirely sure how it’s decided which measures do or don’t require an Act of Synod to enact: the admission of women to the ministry did, which was why two-thirds of Synod members had to support each measure, whereas this current change only needed a simple majority in each House of Bishops, Clergy, and Laity. And the Bishop of Oxford’s amendment to the effect that blessing services could be separate events rather than incorporated in other acts of worship only squeezed through by one vote in the House of Laity. Although some of the votes against might well have been cast by Synod members who would have preferred to go further than the proposal on the table, this isn’t a consensus, whatever else it is.

The Church of England Evangelical Council is now exploring ways of supporting dissenting clergy ‘who in some way might feel their membership of the CofE to be compromised’, including feeling unable to relate to their bishop on anything other than a legal basis. This is clearly inspired by the similar arrangements that have been in place for many years for trad Anglo-Catholics opposed to the ordination of women, but it’s odd, because Evangelical objections to these changes to do with sex arise within a different sort of ecclesiology. For those trad Anglo-Catholics, the Church itself, including its organisational arrangements, is the creation of the Holy Spirit, and fundamentally altering those arrangements is, arguably, cutting the organisation off from the Paracletal electric current. It’s not just about cohabiting organisationally with people you disagree with. But Evangelicals don’t think about the Church in that way. If you’re an Evangelical Anglican, your relationship with God is direct. It doesn’t make any fundamental difference to you what the church down the road does, or what your bishop believes. Your bishop’s opinions are probably massively divergent from yours already. It may be uncomfortable that she, or that putative church a few streets away, might be blessing or even eventually marrying same-sex couples, but you will still have the option of regarding them with the same derision and contempt that you probably do now. You may find it awkward that a same-sex couple might turn up to worship with you (though they’ll probably steer well clear), but they could easily do that already. No, my brethren who take a more conservative view on this matter won’t be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, and neither will I, so, as I have no interest in compelling anyone to fall in line with what I think, my sympathy is really very limited.

++Justin is clearly very content that he abstained on the vote, ‘to act as a focus of unity’. This too is modelled on the way the Church has accommodated trad Anglo-Catholics over women, and again it shows the same kind of misconception. A trad Anglo-Catholic objects to a bishop (or Archbishop) who has actually ordained a woman, not because that prelate thinks ordaining a woman is right or wrong: it’s not a matter of opinions, but of deeds. Evangelical objections are precisely about opinions, and we all know what the ABC thinks. That's why, I imagine, sundry Christians might find him hard to talk to from now on, if they hadn't before.

Layers of History

Strangely, perhaps, for someone who has such an interest in history, I rarely look back at my own, or devote much time to thinking about it. But the interlinking of personal and wider history is a different matter. My elder niece has not long since started studying at Sheffield University and is based in the university halls at Endcliffe. On her way to the city centre she walks past the house where her great-great-grandmother was in service, while a couple of miles away is the rather more modest house in Industry Street where her great-grandmother and namesake Grace was born.

Meanwhile, my mum's side of the family came from Somerset. Her grandfather owned Royal Oak Farm at Clanville once upon a time, a building now worth getting on for £850K, quite a far cry from Industry Street, Sheffield. Here it is, as revealed by a popular mapping app. Of course, although these old buildings are part of our history, they're also embedded in other peoples', one of the ways in which lives cross over one another, link, and construct a wider human narrative. 

Reviewed

Every two years we clergy go through a Ministerial Review. I think that as one of the dwindling band of incumbents with freehold, technically I don't have to do this, but in theory it's a useful occasion to try and allow the kind of outside scrutiny of your ministry which would be absolutely standard in secular life but rather rarely happens in the Church, so I have. Reviews have, as far as I'm concerned, never been that helpful; the results have been vague and while supportive not made for any forward movement. I wasn't expecting much better this time round when I asked the churchwardens, the head teacher of the infants school ('a representative of the local community') and Giselle the lay reader ('a colleague in authorised ministry') to send in their forms to the retired canon who's moved into the diocese and agreed to do this kind of work. I wonder if they're paying him or expecting him to do it for free?

In fact I came away from the canon's nice house on the road into Guildford more enthused than I started. He'd picked up on my hankering for some kind of conversation with someone outside the parish to assess what I'm doing inside it, and perhaps deal with the endless nagging suspicion that I'm missing something. We also talked about faith-sharing and the potential of Forest Church - and what happens in the future. How exactly might I assess whether I still have work to do in this parish, or ought to be somewhere else? There will be a point at which a move will become unrealistic; it will be too late. I ought, at least, to face the question. 

Wreathed in Uncertainty

Back in 1962, Martin Brand arrived as rector of Hornington. Scanning through the old parish registers from that time as I did a few weeks ago, I found that Revd Brand was wont to add illuminating marginal comments. In 1963 he led what would have been his second Remembrance Sunday in the parish, a service of Sung Mattins which he described in the service register as 'ghastly as ever'. One of my Swanvale Halt predecessors was preaching, but I hope Fr Brand was referring to the service as a whole rather than the hapless Canon Artington.

As Chair of Churches Together in Hornington & District this year, I was in town leaving Il Rettore to hold the fort back in the parish. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing but knew that in previous years the Chair has read prayers and laid a wreath, so a couple of days ago I asked the previous Chair what I was expected to do. 'I'm not sure, they keep changing it', he replied. 'No wreath, ask Revd Jim at the parish church what to do.' He told me 'Nothing expected, you're welcome to come if you like,' which was a more offhand response than I anticipated. I thought it was too late to rearrange everything, and so came along and dutifully sat in a pew while the proceedings proceeded. At the end I toyed with the idea of going home but then thought No, I am never usually here and the Air Cadets are parading so I will go to the War Memorial. Once there and waiting for it all to begin I was accosted by the Town Council's ops manager who said 'What are you doing standing here? I've got a wreath with your name on it', rather like the vineyard owner in the parable. So I found I was doing something after all. The wreath may have had my name on it but thankfully it was for Churches Together rather than being in my memory. I was able to speak to a variety of Swanvale Halt parents lining the parade route to watch their children marching with Brownies and Cubs and the like and that was probably even more worthwhile than putting down a circle of plastic flowers.

Messy Revival!

Just a very quick update this evening. Our last Messy Church in September had the lowest uptake since we started the event some time before I even arrived in Swanvale Halt in 2009 - just twelve children. Today we had 43 children and some 80 souls altogether, which is the highest figure since about 2015 (I think) and the second-highest attendance ever. Completely unaccountable!

The Geography of Contemporary Crises

At the Rectory, the mains water supply returned late on Tuesday evening and it was very welcome when the kitchen tap sputtered back into action. On Monday, getting a little nervous about how long the water in my pipes and tank might last, I did go to one of the distribution sites and collect a package of bottles, and carried on using these for drinking until Wednesday morning, as, to judge by what others had said their first return of supply was marked by flows of brown, green, and cloudy water. It all depended where you were, I suppose, because mine seemed fine; apart from my bedtime glass of water last night which emerged from the tap completely white. That was just fine water bubbles, though: if your water clears from the bottom there's no problem, it's only if it settles from the top that you need be concerned. I'd tried to flush the toilets with rainwater, and was surprised to see how mosquito larvae seemed unfazed by having to swim around in my wee when I would have thought that was an uncongenial environment even for them. They're all gone now, I fear: I try to exercise compassion for the whole of the mute creation, but I see little point in mosquitos unless you are a Dengue Fever bacillus when you do, indeed, have cause to praise them. 

The last time we had a local utility-supply crisis of this kind was ten years ago, when floods and recurrent power cuts afflicted the whole area over Christmas. That was hideous, and more so, because quite a number of parishioners had to be evacuated from their homes, but there are other differences between 2013 and 2023. Then, we didn't have the various rival community message boards on Facebook and other platforms, allowing us all to be constantly updated on what was happening in different postcode areas, and to compare the statements of our local MP with those of the leader of the Council (MP: optimistic; Councillor: sceptical). As the water supply returned through Monday and Tuesday, you could track its progress and contrast what people were actually saying with the confident declarations of Thames Water who, at one point on Tuesday, claimed that only 11 houses were yet to be reconnected, only to be met with a barrage of dozens of Facebook comments any one of whom represented more households than that. The water company's comms failings are one of the complaints everyone seems to have. I tend to think that more information is always better: when a train, for instance, doesn't do what it's supposed to, it helps to know why you're stuck in the middle of nowhere rather than imagining the crew don't think the passengers matter. But, as always, doomscrolling does nobody any good, and you have to exercise some conscious distraction and tell yourself you're not going to be more anxious than you need; and the endless updating did seem to make each day feel longer.

One thing Thames Water did well was managing the water distribution centres, even if many people would have preferred more of them. As well as going on my own account on Monday I collected a couple of packs of bottles for Mad Trevor on Sunday and it all worked very smoothly, especially for me as I could zoom past the waiting cars on my bike. The water came from Elm Spring in Staffordshire, though I'm sure other bottled water enterprises are just as good. The distribution points were set up by Sunday morning. Do the water companies have pallets of bottled spring water just hanging around in case something like this happens? Does Thames Water have a contract with Elm Spring? One online drinks supply company describes it as 'a fantastic-value brand bringing some much-needed humour to the party'. Frankly, for me jokes aren't a priority from my water supply.

Fire and Water

In what feel like the far-off days before our taps stopped working, I left the church on Friday after Evening Prayer and turned the corner to bump into a crowd of people thronging the street and about to set off on a procession to the Rugby Club behind a small tractor playing some most incongruous music. I had a burning torch thrust into my hand by the Leader of the Council, and found myself swept up by mass enthusiasm, as it were. Crossing the sodden earth by means of duckboards we joined hundreds more souls beseiging a variety of food trailers and milling about waiting for the fireworks to start. I used to enjoy fireworks, but not only did I have work to do, noisy bangs make me feel nervous nowadays for the animals listening to them. I don't know if Blue Peter still warns children to keep their pets indoors for the duration, but I'd prefer it all to be quieter. At least nobody lives all that near the Rugby Club.

As I write, my taps connected straight to the mains are still dry: up the hill where we are, we're possibly too close to the reservoir for the pressure to have built up sufficiently. That will soon complete the third day of interruption. I try to make allowances, and spurn the comments of various self-appointed community loudmouths online whether I agree with them or not, but I was genuinely astonished to discover that the water company didn't have the local care homes on their priority delivery list. They had to rely on the old people's day centre driving their minibus around to deliver water, and various local councillors visiting with bottles from the distribution centre as individuals. You could hardly imagine a better example of laudable charity filling a gap that shouldn't be there in the first place.

Who Turned the Hard Rock Into Pools of Water

... goes Psalm 114, the traditional psalm associated with baptism. Anything watery has particular resonances in this area today. Yesterday evening I noticed my kitchen cold tap running less strongly until not long before I went to bed it gave up entirely. Today was supposed to culminate in us hosting the Deanery confirmation service with twelve candidates from six different congregations, and I did think that the sense of dread and foreboding that strangely affected me when I first woke up was to do with that. But now I wonder. Sandra our pastoral assistant and her husband, who were organising the food after the confirmation, unusually turned up at the 8am mass to tell me No, the problem wasn't with my kitchen mixer tap but with the water supply generally. Through the day it got worse and the water company organised bottle distributions in a couple of local car parks. I was OK - a large house with only one person in it retains quite a bit of water in its pipework - but I ended up delivering some water to Trevor, and church members collected more for others they knew. People said intemperate things online to local councillors and anyone else who would listen. The problem seemed to originate with a local water treatment plant being deluged with dirty water after the recent storms. Hopefully the situation is now improving, but it'll be hours before the reservoirs fill up again enough to apply pressure for the pipes.

Everything went wrong with the confirmation. Somehow I'd missed one of the candidates off the order of service, and mangled printing the first hymn so had to run it off on a separate sheet. I forgot about microphones and the card reader until the last minute. The retired bishop leading the service forgot his kit and had to go home to get it: he was so late we assumed he was stuck in traffic trying to get to the water distribution point. But we got it done and I think even the toilets somehow kept working thanks to our own residual water in the system. The choir sang Psalm 114 as the bishop led the confirmands to the font. I'm glad we went ahead, though as much official advice I had was to cancel. I can now barely think two things in a straight line, if you see what I mean.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Goth: A History' by Lol Tolhurst (Quercus, 2023)

It’s only at the very end of his second book – his first, Cured (2016), described how The Cure came into being, what he did in the band, and how he crashed out of it – that Lol Tolhurst lets us in on the plan. At first he thought of writing an encyclopaedia, he says, before concluding that he wasn’t up to it and that nobody would be satisfied by anything he might produce, and so, instead, he wrote a memoir. But its subject isn’t ‘my time in The Cure’ – the earlier volume covered that – rather it tells how music, literature and aesthetics have fed into Mr Tolhurst’s sense of who he is and how he looks at the world. You do get a thirty-page account of the life and times of The Cure, but you also get encounters with other great names in the post-punk and Goth world, the bands Messrs Smith, Tolhurst et al saw perform, met, or worked with. Sometimes the connection is a bit oblique: a discussion of Depeche Mode begins with the author describing how he bumped into Andy Fletcher when they were both being treated at The Priory, and I can’t see any overlap that justifies two pages on the Sisters of Mercy at all, but along the way Mr Tolhurst addresses exactly the kind of questions other works haven't tackled. What was it like being a teenage music fan in the 1970s? He outlines the importance of John Peel, the music press and local record shops. What led proto-Goth young people to start playing music in the first place? He describes the drabness of his and Robert Smith’s Crawley surroundings and how their first visit to Salford revealed exactly why Joy Division sounded like they did; he relates Julianne Regan of All About Eve’s similar feelings about the landscape she grew up in, and David J of Bauhaus’s about Northampton. During an account of The Cure’s tour supporting the Banshees in 1979, he ponders the differences between London and the suburbs, laments the grotty venues they often played, and marvels at Siouxsie’s brisk methods of dealing with the unenlightened males who gave her grief at concerts. Why did musicians keep going? Mr Tolhurst tells us how making new music with French group The Bonapartes made him feel better after the stresses of his own band; David J describes performing as ‘an exorcism’ of negative feelings; Julianne Regan confesses that making music was a compensation for a decidedly unromantic existence. The chapter on the poetry that’s meant something to the author, and the concluding section on wider Goth culture, are there, again, to stress his sense of being part of something bigger than just one Goth band at one moment, something that ultimately brought him meaning.

You will look in vain here for Lol Tolhurst saying a single bad word about anyone. The closest he gets to being personally critical is in an account of The Cure’s first trip to California in 1981 when they find themselves staying in the same ‘kitschy motel’ as Joe Jackson: ‘Joe represented the new wave movement. Oh dear’. And that’s it. For all the gloomth of the Goth world, this book is overwhelmingly positive. It’s kind, humane and humble, conversationally-written and easy to read, and there is nothing else like it at the moment. Take off the odd paper half-jacket around the cover, and it’s even rather beautiful, bearing an embossed black raven against a cloud on the front and a feather on the back, with a neutral grey background, a bit like a children’s adventure book from the 1950s. Lol Tolhurst’s girlfriend in 1977, when the book starts, was a black-clad girl with straight black hair he calls The Raven; and we know that, in the dark, All Cats Are Grey.

The Night Watch

The usual problem the Halloween lanterns face is that gusty breezes will blow them out, but the night was relatively wind-free around Swanvale Halt. However it was wet, and so the flickering flames faced the greater danger of being extinguished that way. After toasting the dead in the churchyard as usual, I left this little fellow to do his work against the church wall under the protecting arm of a headstone cross, so we will see how long his light lasted.

Groups of little witches and other horrors made their way up and down the hill between about 6 and 7pm, but I only had two children and their parents come to visit me slightly later, when I thought everyone had gone home. Up in Leeds, Professor Purplepen had more than twenty in seven groups, while Dr FireFace in Oxford claimed a hundred. That's a lot of chocolate. 

Interestingly I have pagan friends who are starting to rail against the fact that their serious religious festival of Samhain has been commercialised and turned into a camp pumpkin-and-spookfest. They'd like to detach Samhain from Halloween in the same way many Christians would like to separate Halloween from All Hallowtide. I think they're looking through the wrong end of the telescope a bit, but there you go.