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.'

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.