Far East Gothic

Radio 4 is redoing The Wombles at the moment, though I can’t see (or rather hear) Richard E Grant narrating as any kind of credible replacement for Bernard Cribbins. Still, rather like the Wombles ‘making good use of the things that they find’ as the song goes, Goth fashion was originally a matter of salvaging bits and pieces other people discarded or used differently – lace, and velvet, and torn fishnet-stocking sleeves, that sort of thing. By the late 1990s and early 2000s some Goth scene participants had realised they could make some money (and maybe even a modest living) out of the things they enjoyed wearing, by making them for other people to buy: every Goth girl (and a lot of the boys) knows how to sew, though actually making stuff anyone might want to wear required a bit more application. There were of course the one-stop-Goth-shops in Camden where you could pick up desperately cheap corsets, skirts and coats that were only one step up from Halloween fancy dress and would fall apart after a couple of evenings out; but there were the serious makers like Darkangel too. Based in Tavistock, Darkangel* was the brainchild of Carri who began as a photographer and has cycled round in that direction again now that, she says, it’s ‘very difficult for small independent labels such as ours to survive when competing with low cost overseas manufacturers’. In fact, my only item of clothing from any Goth retailer is a Darkangel brocade frock coat – it has a suitably clerical collar, not that I’ve had a chance to wear it for a long time, since S.D. gave me a vintage frock coat from the 1930s. Good, heavy wool, that, keep you warm if nothing else.

I hadn’t noticed Darkangel’s claims to be an ethical manufacturer, specifically ‘avoiding using any fabrics, trimmings or other components that are made in China’. I wonder what Carri makes of one of the makers whose wares were flashed across my LiberFaciorum feed the other day, the Guangzhou-based fashion house Punk Rave. They’ve been going since 2006, though I’d never heard of them (in contrast to Poland’s well-known Restyle brand, with its big round hats, huge hoods, and astronomical imagery). Punk Rave’s founder and head designer, Zhi Yi Kim (or sometimes Kin) comes from Chinese/Korean ancestry; she started out (she says on the company website) from a poor background and was always interested in clothes. An early clothing store business didn’t work out, but after a stint slaving in a Beijing restaurant Ms Kim went back home to Guangzhou to try again, having discovered punk and Goth culture through a friend and realising that the styles she kept being instinctively drawn to had a name and a meaning. Dissatisfied with the clothes she was selling – mainly, then, for export – Ms Kim took a design course at Baewha Women’s University and set up Punk Rave. In 2010 a sub-brand, PyonPyon, was started to market clothes specifically in the Japanese-oriented Gothic Lolita style. Further lines ‘Fashion Series’ and ‘J&Punk Rave’ now cater for a Chinese home market as, Ms Kim says, ‘domestic young people acceptance of punk Gothic culture is far greater than when she first started designing’. Punk Rave came to pre-lockdown London Fashion Week in 2020 (you can even see a catwalk video here) and now sends its wares to online Goth influencers to try out, and the founder has a go at describing Gothic fashion for anyone in doubt on the matter. So this is not a local cottage industry outfit, nor a mainstream fashion house which occasionally uses Goth ideas, but a basically Goth retailer becoming part of the international mainstream.

But what are the clothes like? Unlike Restyle, Punk Rave does try bravely to cater for chaps, but although there’s a range of dramatic cloaks, coats and shirts, such as the Halifax jacket below – with integral weskit, as far as I can make out – on offer, what I really want is an interpretation of the traditional gent’s suit. Ah, if only I had the talent to do it myself, or believed enough people would buy such an artefact.

Predictably it’s in the women’s range that Punk Rave is most interesting. We might legitimately claim that ‘all Gothic life is here’ (it's not even all black), but in amongst the more familiar Victorian and punky-influenced stuff we find some really beautiful items such as the Cheongsam jacquard dress (trad Chinese style, Gothically reinterpreted with buckles and lacing), the Amaterasu kimono dress in cotton and leather, named after the Japanese sun goddess and which you can easily imagine Yuuko-san from xxxHolic wearing, and this lovely asymmetric velvet coat the company just calls ‘Avant’. I don’t know what conditions this schmutter is made under, but it’s no cheaper than Darkangel was.

There’s another political aspect to think about, too. Ms Kim seems to envisage fashion as having something to say about ‘promoting a future-oriented consumption model that achieves a cultural, environmental, scientific and technological balance’, and sums up the punk ethos as ‘never depressed, never slavish’. Such comments are two-edged in modern China. She’s probably safe as long as she carries on making money and doesn’t comment too much.

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*[I notice an increased emphasis in parts of the Goth world on ‘fairy’ motifs. You find this in Carri of Darkangel's current photography, in events including the annual Fairy Ball in Glastonbury, and the styles occasionally adopted by my friends such as Madame Morbidfrog and Lady Wildwood. There’s some crossover with pagan and medieval themes, and enough material for a short thesis].

Drop Down O Heavens

According to my entries - which are the only entries - in the service register at Smallham Chapel, numbers at the annual Christmas service were about 30 for the last couple of post-pandemic years, but I thought there were about 50 people this time, including a variety of children. I recognised some faces, including that of Clarice who used to organise the event and who moved to a care home last year, brought along in her wheelchair, but as always there are new souls. For the first time ever, there was a deluge just as we left the church to head down to sing to the sheep, and so we were allowed into the barn to shelter (very Biblical). In this photo it looks as though we are advancing menacingly on the unfortunate beasts, but that's just the distorted perspective of the camera. Honest. The pompom on my biretta will never be quite the same.

Christmas 2023

It was pretty similar to last year in terms of numbers, the Cribbage and Midnight very much the same, 8am a bit down, and 10am a bit up. The fact that it was one of those years when the Fourth Sunday of Advent magically transforms into Christmas Eve at mid-day didn't seem to make that much of a difference to anyone except me and the team of souls who staff the services, who were spread a bit thin between six services, not to mention Carols by Candlelight last Friday night. 

After last year's experiences, I rethought the Midnight: rather than attempt a grandeur we can't manage, we went for intimacy instead, abandoning the old high altar, not having anyone in the choir (two choristers were present but sat in the congregation), and having subdued lighting and lots of candles. I was just thinking that for the first time I could remember the service had gone without any mishap at all when Margaret who was one of the eucharistic ministers knocked one of my huge pillar candles over and sent wax spinning over the dais the altar sits on. At least it hadn't been Tim the crucifer as, in his polyester robe (we still use the ones a churchwarden made in 1975), he would have gone up like a candle himself. 

On Christmas Day I attended the Churches Together Christmas Lunch, ending up giving three of the guests a lift after various people went down with a norovirus. I ended up sitting with a Nigerian gentleman, a woman from Sierra Leone and her small daughter, and a Sri Lankan nurse working in one of the local care homes. Somehow we began talking about Reformation history, and it was quite agreeable to explain about Lady Jane Grey and Henry VIII's wives to people who wouldn't have been able to pick me up on the bits I'd forgotten about. They still knew more about the history of the British monarchy than I do about those of West Africa or Ceylon, though. They had no idea about the UK Christmas tradition of the monarch's speech. The Lunch organisers had some trouble with the audiovisuals and so we ended up watching Chucky Boy on the TV while his words were played through a mic off someone's phone, with a delay of about 3 seconds which was most disconcerting.

Down in Dorset for Boxing Day, I, my sister and elder niece went for a little walk over Turbary Common, that charismatic landscape of my childhood. As I and Lady Arlen discovered last year, there are cows there now, and they were there today. I can't tell you how odd it is to see these bovine presences so close to a very suburban environment I am very familiar with.

Real Presence

The approach of Christmas is about concerts and nativities, but it's also about taking communion to members of the Church who won't be able to make it any time over the season itself. It's strange that this is more a Thing in some parishes than others; I once spoke to a priest who looked after two rural Oxfordshire parishes with completely different traditions, the one where there were lots of home communicants, and the other where they assumed that being brought the Sacrament in their own surroundings was a certain prelude to death. At his training parish in the mid-1980s, Il Rettore was once charged with taking communion to 14 people in one day, and surviving that without derangement was quite an achievement. Here in Swanvale Halt, my illustrious 1970s predecessor Fr Edward introduced the Roman Catholic practice of communion being taken to home communicants by lay ministers directly after the Sunday mass, an ideal long since gone by the wayside, and now it's almost invariably me visiting a fluctuating group of souls. 

So yesterday found me visiting two homes with two people in each, and today I've seen five more in four visits. Tomorrow I'll call on Sarah who has just been discharged from hospital. It's helped me feel that I've been doing something worthwhile on a day which began with looking for my keys and grappling with an unco-operative photocopier. I suppose delivering Lemsip tablets to Mad Trevor also counts as 'worthwhile', though his insistence that he has flu is undermined by the fact that he insists it every other week. 

Seven home communions over three days isn't twice that in one, and I don't know how I'd react to that: I probably wouldn't want to do it every week, either. But curiously it doesn't seem wearying (any more than I already was weary) or tedious. Each encounter, which has exactly the same shape, feels different. It involves a different person or persons in specific surroundings, each with a special history of their own that they bring to that moment. Tomorrow we begin the great celebration of the Incarnation, so the presence of the Christ in each unique individual is part of the point. The Sacrament brings him together with them. This is the best way I can imagine of making it real.

Christmas Revival

As Christmas approaches there is often a spate of journalistic comment about religion that doesn’t necessarily bear on the season, but on the state of Christianity as a whole. Dr Abacus recently called the attention of myself and other clergy he knows to a piece for the FT by Camilla Cavendish, about the benefits of religious observance, while in The Scotsman Tory leader in Scotland Murdo Fraser tilts at the long-toppled windmill of Dr Richard Dawkins to allege ‘early signs of a Christian revival’ in the UK. I thought both were a bit questionable. Baroness Cavendish describes herself as an unbeliever but prescribes religion for personal wellbeing, while Mr Fraser, while also declaring Christianity’s utility in answering what he reports as Nicky Gumbel’s summary of human needs – ‘to be loved, to have a purpose, to belong’ – adds to them its role in underpinning 'Western values', basically roping God into culture-war discourse. His description of Christianity’s ‘inspiring message of hope and light’ rings every bit as hollow and unconvincing as you might predict. I’d never dream of using arguments like this. The first amounts to ‘come to church and you might feel a bit better’, while the second translates as ‘come to church and together we can stop the Muslims’. Never satisfied, me.

Meanwhile over on Radio 4 we have a somewhat more rewarding and intellectually hard-edged diatribe from Will Self:

It’s precisely in order to hear [these ultimate questions] posed that I attend church services of all denominations, and ones in mosques, ashrams, gudwaras, and synagogues as well. Other non-believers may go for aesthetic reasons, and especially at this time of year, for a live enactment of some Christmassy reverie; I go, as I say, to test the mettle of my own understanding of my self, and its relation to others and the world, and for this to work for me, I require a sermon! Often, I’ll find the sermon in the established churches so woefully bad I have to restrain myself from heckling. It’s not just a matter of banal popular cultural references, it’s the reduction of the majesty and awe that should be associated with this extraordinary belief system to a kind of weak humanist jus.

… which all acts as some sort of cautionary warning as I compose the five sermons I will preach across Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, just in case someone like Will Self is there, ‘believing that any sermon I hear could be the one that triggers some profound conversion experience’. At least he was mildly approving, despite one throwaway reference to Nigel Farage, of what he heard ‘on Advent Sunday as I sat with about forty others in the exquisitely beautiful St Jude’s-on-the-Hill’, preached by, as it turns out, Revd Emily Kolltveit, former Mediaeval Baebe and leader of symphonic-metal band Pythia before she caught religion. I wonder what sermon got to her.

Coffee, Interrupted

'Are you working on sermons for Christmas?' asked the older gentleman who entered the café this morning, saw me, and came and sat at my table, leaving his companion scanning the menu at theirs. As a matter of fact I was, but I was quite happy to have a conversation with someone new.

He was a Quaker, he said, and asked what our church was doing to support the Palestinians. Not a great deal, I had to admit, although at the start of the war I'd observed the Patriarchs' call for prayer and fasting in a somewhat thin way as you may remember. My interlocutor was very disappointed at the Churches' response to the Gaza war, 'whereas they've fallen in line with what the Government's told us to feel about Ukraine, and that's a situation completely of the West's own making'. He was wearing a keffiyeh: although I think for a Christian to wear a keffiyeh as a sign of solidarity with the Palestinians is a bit like a White person blacking up to protest against racism, people will have different opinions about that and I didn't raise it. 'It's a terrible situation in which there is much evil', I offered, 'But there are many terrible situations in which there is much evil around the world, and I never quite see why so many people who aren't involved feel so invested in this one particularly'.

I was being slightly disingenuous: I have a pretty definite suspicion why, and there's a kind explanation and a less kind one. The kind one is that Christians read about Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and all these other places in their Bibles, and feel a sense of connection with them as a result. (I am curious about the fact that I don't. I have absolutely no interest at all in travelling to the Holy Land, walking in Jesus's footsteps or anything of that kind, not when the whole point of the Christian religion is that you can walk in his footsteps perfectly well here rather than burning up hydrocarbons to visit a war zone. But anyway.) 

As for the second explanation, my unsought companion was about to prove it. 'Well', he said, 'How would you like it if someone was to hand your country over to the Jews? - Or anyone', he added hurriedly, editing his instinctive opinions in a way that made the original outburst worse. Thankfully by this point the café staff were very keen that he should return to his seat before it was time for him and his friend to leave.

It's not the first conversation I've had with a keffiyeh-wearing Christian who's made an eye-stretching comment about 'the Jews' - not just some Jews, not those Jews, note, but all of them. That this hides among ordinary people who talk a lot about Peace with a capital P shouldn't perhaps provoke such shocked disappointment, but it does.

What A Difference A Year Makes

It is the time of Christmas concerts at the church - schools, choirs, councils, all doing roughly the same thing and getting lots of people through the door, although the GCSE music students from Widelake Secondary doing Bohemian Rhapsody was moderately unusual fare. The latest of these events came from the Hornington Singers. I left last year's concert midway through the first half, not because I had other things I absolutely needed to do or because I was any tireder than usual, but because it was an aesthetically challenging experience and I couldn't help concluding that putting up with it was an Advent penance I could manage without. When anyone talked about the concert I managed to come up with circumlocutions which obscured how bad I thought it had been.

This year they have a new director and instantly you could tell matters were very different: two hours later and they were understandably a bit tired, but even then it was OK for a bunch of amateur singers. Today I've had a couple of conversations with people who were there. Typically my interlocutor has opened with 'It was good last night, wasn't it?' and I have ventured a cautious 'Yes, and a bit improved on last year I thought', and then it all comes pouring out, the sense that this person has waited for twelve months for someone (presumably someone they don't live with anyway) to share how dreadful an experience it was. How much of life is like that, he says in 'Thought For The Day' mode. 

Moving In the Past

I have no idea why my Mum decided to use a recent letter to describe how it was that she and Dad came to live in the house in Bournemouth that she still occupies, but it seemed worth recording for posterity. Here's what she said, with her own approach to capitalisation as that seems important to me, too: 

I was 26 years when we moved in. We had a Cooker a Bed an old TV & Settee. Mum & Dad [hers] Bought us the Table & Chairs. Dad [mine] laid the Paths all round & mixed cement & Carried it in a Dustbin Lid haha Couldn’t afford a WheelBarrow.

We had £200 put Back to Buy things But. They charged us £200 for Road Charges So that was that. Still we got there in the end. I’ve bought a New Washing Machine cum Tumble Dryer. I’ve got to laugh as it was a quarter of what the Bungalow cost, 8 Times Dad’s Wages.

Before this, Mum and Dad had had a caravan in New Milton, their home from their marriage in 1962 until the bungalow came up. In the past Mum's related how Dad's employer agreed to inflate his wages so they could successfully apply for a mortgage, and how because the street was newly carved out of a chunk of waste land the gardens of the bungalows were an expanse of mud and the road hadn't been properly laid out, hence the 'road charges'. The 'table and chairs' are an Ercol set which is still serviceable 57 years later.

Of course these are all challenges and delights that modern couples in their 20s are never likely to encounter at all ... !

Prayers at the Hour

‘I think that clock is fast’, observed the Chief Executive as he cast his eye across the Council chamber, and so it was – by about five minutes. ‘Someone’s been overzealous winding it’, suggested one of the councillors.  I couldn’t help Brian Cant’s voice running through my mind: ‘Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock, telling the time, never too quickly, never too slowly …’

The reason I was there, and waiting for 6pm to arrive, was that I was leading prayers before the full council meeting of the Borough, an authority which includes Hornington and a couple of other towns and the villages in between them. Paula, still technically one of our Pastoral Assistants, is Mayor this year, having been Mayor of this or that authority on several occasions, including stepping in one year when the sitting Mayor of Hornington had to stop sitting and go to prison. She is perhaps unusual in being a Christian of progressive political opinions in public life, and a definite supporter of the principle of the Council being prayed for when it meets.

Now this has been an area of some controversy in the past. I’m not sure about the Borough, but Hornington Town Council went through a period when prayers were deliberately not being offered, one of the rare occasions when Paula found herself on the same side as the Conservative councillors. It threatened to become a little skirmish in the culture wars, until Paula became Mayor again and offered the compromise that prayers would be offered before the Council meeting was formally opened, giving councillors who didn’t want to be present the chance not to be, and to enter the chamber only once prayers were finished. 

The whole issue seems to have calmed down since then. Not all the current councillors are Christians by any means, including the present Mayor of Hornington (also a Borough Councillor – I hope you’re keeping up at the back, there), as evidenced by his own civic service back in June. I noticed that none of the elected members availed themselves of the opportunity not to be present as I offered their deliberations and decisions to the Lord. I also note, consulting the Youtube video recording the meeting, that the proceedings went on until twenty to nine, so I’m glad I wasn’t obliged to listen to the debate as the councillors had to listen to me ...

Taking Centre Stage

'Come to the Year Two nativity' advised the head teacher at the Infants School, 'They're more likely to have got it together'. And so they had. I spotted all the attenders at our after-school club, including Billie ('girl Billie' as she points out when there might be confusion) who was the most animated star - a starring star, not just the stellar chorus - I've ever seen; and Miriam, the oldest child in the school who sometimes looks remarkably out-of-place when stood against some of her tinier classmates, and who carried off the Angel Gabriel with RADA applomb. It was, we all agreed, the best show you'll see this Christmas.

I can remember nothing of the nativity plays of my own childhood. In contrast to the situation now, when school events are virtually illuminated by the light of phones held aloft by parents recording the occasion,  in our own family archive there are just three relevant images, all from the same event in 1975. I'm invisible in every one, and in fact not much can be seen at all, the only identifiable person being the teacher whose name I forget and who looked a bit like Princess Anne. That initial failure was probably why my mum didn't bother trying to take photographs again. I rather envy Billie, Miriam and the others their apparently easy enjoyment of taking the limelight and dancing about the stage: certainly by the time my memories really begin in junior school I was so atrociously self-conscious any movement was torment. The role I was best suited for was the Magic Mirror in a production of Snow White when I could read my lines completely unseen behind a cardboard screen!

Better Than Feared

The world looked less than inviting through the window of the café opposite the church this morning: drizzly and chilly, with worse threatened for later in the morning. It was one of those days when there is a coffee morning at the church and as well as my parish coffee over the road I feel it would be rude not to pop back for tea and, this morning, inevitably a mince pie, with such of the congregation as may be present. I'd waited weeks and weeks for Rightmove to update the information on properties in the area that have changed hands: the last update was in September, but now it had, I was faced with inclement conditions for visiting. Would anyone welcome me arriving unexpectedly on their doorstep? Still, I didn't want the backlog to build up. I steeled myself to head out. The weather, in fact, didn't look too bad.

As often happens, my reluctance to set about this self-imposed task is balanced by the pleasure of how it turns out. Today I met an older couple who've moved into the village and already attend an Anglican church in Guildford of moderate churchmanship, so I can't complain too much about that; a vicar's daughter who asked about our Christmas services; a completely bemused young woman; a recently divorced lady whose doorstep I arrived at hard on the heels of an Amazon delivery fellow who rang her bell and ran away leaving me to hand over the parcel; and a former member of the congregation who I haven't spoken to for ages, and who drifted away after their own marriage broke down, and now has a new home with a new partner. Of their daughters (both former Junior Church members when we had such a thing) the elder is now a teaching assistant at a special needs school, while the younger is studying Fine Art at university. Next door to them is a house I visited on my last 'rounds', and found another family I already knew and whose children used to be Messy Church regulars.

Wasn't that worth doing? I think so, and it barely rained at all. 

(The photo is from my day-off walk around Frensham Little Pond, excitingly bleak!)

Cast of Thousands

You can look back through these posts and check the previous times we've hosted the ATC enrolments. On this occasion it all went off more or less perfectly, even though there were no fewer than 23 new recruits to be sworn in. One of the NCOs put them all in alphabetical order and whispered their names to me as I went along the row shaking their hands. I didn't need to do that, but I think that it's a good gesture to make - a formal expression of welcome. This time the conversations withe relatives included questions about what being a 'chaplain' meant and what my hat is called, and you know the answer to that query if not the first.

Hills of the North

I would like to have more photos of services and other church events to pop onto social media, but it's actually quite hard to arrange unless (like some churches I know) you've got someone handy to do it. We haven't! On Sunday evening I grabbed a blurry shot of the procession out of the church during the Service of Light, the Advent Sunday liturgy of carols and readings whose major distinctive element is the lighting of candles and carrying them out of the church and round to the hall at the end. It felt somewhat furtive and undignified but at least I had something to share.

When I came to Swanvale Halt the Service of Light seemed unusual, and I was told my predecessor in the 1980s had borrowed the idea from Salisbury Cathedral; but I've become more aware that Advent carol services of different kinds have been common for a long time, even if I'd never encountered them at my previous churches. I wonder if they've increased in popularity (or at least frequency) as a way of trying to preserve the distinctiveness of Advent at the same time as churches gave in to social expectation and moved their Christmas carol services, typically, to the Sunday before Christmas from the one after, where they used to be until about the early 1970s.

'Hills of the North' was our last carol on Sunday. We had to sing it twice as the congregation took so long to make it round to the hall, but it was none the worse for that.

Changing Times

Keeping with the principals of theological colleges, Fr Robin Ward of Staggers lately posted a link to this video of Pope John XXIII being carried to St Peter's in Rome for the inaugural mass at the start of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. What a glimpse into a long-past world. John's successor Paul VI was also borne aloft on the sedia gestatoria and fanned with ostrich feathers on ceremonial occasions with visibly less and less enthusiasm, until John Paul I refused to use them, only being persuaded to be carried on the sedia by the argument that people needed to see him, provided he could dispense with the rest of the regalia and just wear a plain white cassock. John Paul II got rid of it entirely and you simply can't imagine a pope using it again. 

But why can't you? Benedict XVI revived lots of bits and pieces of old papal kit that his two predecessors had dispensed with (including things John Paul II had gradually discarded over the course of his long reign). Here, he can be seen wearing Pope John's mitre and mantum, visible in the video from 1962 - except that the mantum has been shortened and reduced to the dimensions of an ordinary cope. Lots of trad-Roman Catholics (and the Anglo variety, too) would be very excited to think it might all make a comeback one day. No, this kind of prelatical ceremony is inconceivable now because it belongs to a version of religion that Christians have moved away from, and it's worth thinking about what is going on here, in emotional terms.

When I first saw the film, I, even I, pursed my lips in a slightly Protestant way and found myself wondering where Jesus might be in it all, what he would make of such a spectacle if he was among those watching crowds. The interesting retort to that is that this is Good Pope John being carried through the throngs flanked by ostrich feathers and surrounded by men in Renaissance uniforms: Angelo Roncalli, the peasants' son who became pontiff, and who we know was one of the humblest and holiest souls ever to occupy the throne of St Peter. He's doing it because it's part of the job. His jewelled mitre is uncomfortably rammed down on his head making his ears poke out; he's tired and even after mass has to go through the business of having his gloved hand kissed by a succession of bishops and heads of religious orders: for each of them it's a special encounter, but for him it's one in a long, long chain of bowed heads. The pomp itself is not the issue. 

The point to remember is that there's nothing religious about the grand spectacle of the papal procession, whatever might have happened in St Peter's afterwards. Before the age of film or photography, only those present would have had any idea of its existence: the audience for such an event were the people of Rome, watching their head of state in his pomp. It's essentially monarchical. If there was any kind of Christian element, it would have been the gestures of blessing His Holiness made to those on the ground. But after the Papal States were lost (around the same time, coincidentally, that it became possible to transmit images of such ceremonies around the world) it became something else - a way of declaring and dramatising Catholic identity. One poster on LiberFaciorum commented on the film 'This was spectacle - on the scale of Cecil B DeMille when I was little - 6th grade I think. It was awesome and edifying - the school sisters were filled with anticipation - we prayed for the Council - it was epic for me'.

Certainly this is what it looks like from the video; but as in any such occasion it might feel different to experience it in person. Noise, difficulty in seeing what's happening, discomfort of various sorts, indigestion distracting you from the thoughts and reflections you're supposed to have: we're well versed in the distance between image and reality now, and are a bit wry about it. 

Perhaps this why we've become very unused to expressing our sense of self-hood, even when it involves being part of a wider group, through this kind of grand spectacle. It's not just a matter of taste, or even the individualism which leads us to prefer the small and local. At least partly, it's because we know, deep down, that it doesn't really work.  

Setting Goals in Oxford

Oxford was wintry yesterday when I arrived (despite the best efforts of the rail network completely thrown into chaos by a points failure at Slough) to fill in the gaps in my lists of Surrey clergy with a visit to the ranks of Crockford's and the Clergy List on the shelves of the Bodleian. I also wanted to look up Old Cornwall, the magazine of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, to pursue accounts of the restoration of holy wells, which meant my first-ever visit to the Taylorian Library. I was shown to the farthest recesses of the basement where there was a tiny, tiny desk at the end of a row of rolling shelves. 'I could give you directions', said the thoughtful young woman at the enquiry desk, 'but they'd be too complicated to remember'. I think she just wanted a break. On my way out I looked through a doorway and saw a bust of Voltaire seasonally-decorated.

I made my way up the Banbury Road to Wycliffe Hall to see the Principal, Michael Lloyd, who was my doctrine tutor at St Stephen's House. What's happening at Wickers these days, I asked? 'It's interesting, we have quite a number of students who regularly worship at Pusey House', said Michael, 'so we're working out how to negotiate that without losing the basic Evangelical nature of the college.'

'Our current ambition is to help renew the Church of England's engagement with society on an intellectual level - trying to do something about its current habit of anti-intellectualism. We want to encourage Christian academics who work in different fields, not just theology. Strangely though there's a lot of talk about the conflict of religion and science, there are lots of Christian physicists and chemists, but hardly anyone working in English literature or sociology. It impoverishes the Christian mind. We have a writer-in-residence here: I'd like to have an artist-in-residence, a musician, a film-maker. The Church has spent too long just talking to itself, so it's no wonder the rest of society ignores us.'

'I'm so pleased to hear that', I said, 'it's been something I've complained about for years (to myself) - that we talk all the time about engagement with the world but don't do it. All we seem to do is shout at it.'

'Yes', went on Michael, 'we're calling it "The Renaissance of Christian Intellectual Life".

'I don't know what we'll do next year.'