Wednesday, 2 July 2025
For the Record, from Gozo
Monday, 30 June 2025
‘When we talk about the Mysteries of the Church’, I told the congregation on Sunday, ‘we usually mean baptism or holy communion. But there are more local mysteries too. We have recently solved some, such as where the electricity meter is (in the cupboard at the back of the church – I was looking for an old-fashioned spinny-roundy one when in fact it’s digital), or who puts out the bins on Wednesdays (it’s Chloe the bookkeeper). But the other day I noticed that next to the electrics cupboard is a jar of pickled onions. I have no idea where it has come from. If it belongs to you, or if you want it, your name is on it, and do remove it’.
Nobody has decided they want the jar of pickled onions yet. Its continued presence causes me to reflect on something not entirely banal, which is the issue of how laypeople interact with the church building they use and inhabit. To do something that they are helping with or organising, people will happily take matters into their own hands: they will seize the initiative. They will move heavy wooden chairs from the church space where they normally sit into the hall so a particular person can sit on those rather than a plastic one. They will shift the dial on the thermostat if it is cold. They will open the hall windows if it is hot. They will almost invariably forget, or not think it necessary, to restore affairs to the status quo ante, to move back the chair, to reset the thermostat, or to close the window, because the circumstance that engages their commitment, the particular event, is past, and they’re on to the next thing. In contrast, something that is not their direct concern can be screened out. A jar of pickled onions can be indefinitely left next to a cupboard, or a cafetiere full of four-day-old coffee left on the kitchen worktop can be deftly manoeuvred around rather than tipped down the sink (‘Oh that was here when we arrived’). The wonderful example I always quote, even after 14 years, is Mr and Mrs Bowdry, now both long gone to their eternal reward, putting their faulty service booklets back on the pile at an 8am mass in 2011 to confuse the next person to pick them up. I suppose people do this out of self-defence, to conserve their resources for the next important challenge they will actually need them for. I suppose I do, too.
Saturday, 28 June 2025
Transcendent Moments in Clerical Life #983
Thirteen years have taken their toll and those felt pads that remain are now compacted, but still just about doing their job. But many have disappeared and in some cases even the plastic roundels that held them have also vanished. There is one point in the church, the runnels into which the folding doors that close off the entrance area sit, where if you are not careful they will tear the little fixings off the feet of the chairs and benches, but the latter are moved over them so rarely that it surprises me it's happened at all.
I love the smooth oak floor of the church building. I remember, when it was newly laid down and before the furniture arrived, Peter the then churchwarden and his wife Paula the pastoral assistant went waltzing across its shiny surface. It is always a moment, then, of horrible distress when I move a bench ready for Toddler Praise or the Pilates class on the second Wednesday in the month only to hear a scratch and realise a tiny fragment of flint caught beneath a leg where a pad should be has just scored a white gouge across the wood.
It takes organisation to move from the pained regret of these moments to actually doing anything about it, as I managed to yesterday, replacing the missing pads with squares of felt cut out of sheets supplied by the local ironmongery. Moving the kneeling-screens and benches back to their places and feeling them slide gently across the floor was more delightful than I know how to tell you.
You think this is banal? Wait until next time when I post about the significance of pickled onions to Church life.
Monday, 23 June 2025
The Most Beautiful Dogs in the World No Matter What Anyone Says
Since Professor Cotillion's amazing Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Bartle and Brindle, captured my heart I have discovered more about these impossibly cute dogs than someone who doesn't own one needs to know. I now find them everywhere. As the conclusion of my Oxford Holy Wells project appears in the distance I wondered what to write about next and the Holy Wells of the New Forest occurred to me. I looked up the Abbot’s Well at Frogham which I haven’t seen in 35 years and what should come up but this picture of a beautiful tricolour Cavalier. His name is Merlin and his owner Nicky took him on a walk around the Abbot’s Well. She founded the Dog Friendly Dorset website so I considered all those links providential. Nicky has a rare cancer so hopefully with enough fundraising for her treatment she’ll be around to look after Merlin as long as he needs. Then my local community board highlighted an ex-breeding stock Cavalier called Betty who needs adoption, and I found that it’s because of a rescued Cavalier called Lucy that third-party pet sales were banned in England as a step towards eradicating puppy-farming. Poor Betty wasn't house-trained (unsurprisingly as she had never lived in a house), and had never been walked on a lead: these are dogs that are bred to interact with humans, and they find their greatest joy and contentment in human company, so there's a particular cruelty to keeping one in a cage away from human beings.
No wonder people fall in love with them. Dr Cotillion's Brindle is a bit of an exception being an only pup who is extremely protective of his owner and barks at anyone else who approaches, but almost every other Cavie treats any human they come across as a friend (they are not good guard dogs). They will let their humans do anything to them, dress them up in everything from crowns to sunglasses and take it completely in their stride. They are almost completely hopeless at anything other than looking cute. A nice Youtube video from Canada entitled 'Why our Cavaliers would not survive in nature' includes as reasons 'they need weekly manicures', 'they wear snoods to eat', and 'we are their emotional support rather than the other way round'. If you are their human, they will love you to distraction.
And this is partly the cause of their major problem. Cavaliers descend from the toy spaniels that have been known for centuries before modern breeds became recognised and established. Over the years these dogs were cross-bred with flat-nosed animals such as pugs and became what we now know as King Charles Spaniels, with domed skulls and short faces. Then in the 1910s breeders began to reflect that these dogs didn't look like the ones they could see in old paintings, and it might be nice to breed them back in that direction again. This was all going well until World War Two intervened. My very battered copy of The Observer's Book of Dogs from 1945 which I was obsessed with as a child describes the breed as 'the latest of these attractive spaniels to have come before the public eye' which was an optimistic account as at that point the entire breeding stock had been reduced to six animals. Maintaining a lap dog which was effectively useless at anything but being cute wasn't a high priority for a nation fighting for its life, and the breed almost disappeared. Every Cavie in the world now descends from those six dogs, meaning that whatever health problems they had, are now found through the whole breed. Among a host of common conditions, the most serious are the heart murmurs that virtually every Cavalier suffers from by middle-age, and syringomyelia, the formation of pockets of fluid around the spine caused by a skull malformation which Cavaliers inherit from the brachycephalic dogs they were bred from, and which can cause extreme pain. I told you I know too much.
Cavalier owners' groups often campaign for better breeding standards so that only healthy dogs are bred from, and if you're buying a puppy you're advised to get proof of good health from its ancestors for at least a couple of generations, but evidence from places such as Denmark which have had very strict quality control for some years suggests that the breed's genetic stock is so restricted it doesn't really make much difference how careful breeders are. Some vets argue that the whole Cavalier breed needs to be 'rebooted' by being cross-bred with (say) Cocker spaniels for a couple of generations, and then bred back towards the Cavie. That could help; but nobody wants to lose these dogs. They're too beautiful, and too loving. They reflect the best of us - until they have a toy-destroying party, or (as Bartle and Brindle did recently) have a competition as who could wee over the other the most, necessitating two baths in one day.
I can't have one, at least now. They fixate on their humans so much that they require training to be left alone for a few hours, and I couldn't give one the time and attention it would need. Instead I have a china one I picked up via Ebay which sits on my windowsill, and it demands hardly any attention at all. That may be the closest I ever get.
Saturday, 21 June 2025
Warming Up
From the vaguely theological and definitely pastoral we venture today into the realms of the severely practical. Back in the Old Days once an incumbent had been inducted into the real and legal possession of the temporalities of his [sic] benefice, he was responsible for it until such time as he left it, including any improvements or making good such dilapidations might have occurred to the parsonage house during the time he was there. The only thing he couldn't do was sell it. Such times are long past, and the diocese now takes a far closer interest in its properties, even if, some clergy find, they have to be persuaded actually to do anything practical.
The diocese has been telling me my boiler needs replacing since I moved in fifteen years ago, and has finally got round to it. I have been sceptical: the last time any change was made to the system was after I got help for a leaky pipe, when the visiting plumbers looked at the valves on my radiators, sucked in their breath, and informed me they would all have to be replaced to bring them up to modern standards. This was done, and a lovely silent heating/hot water system was changed in a trice into one that hummed, hissed and rattled no matter what was done to it, requiring careful management so I wasn't woken up at inconvenient hours. Now, I was warned that a new combi boiler would have to be mounted on an outside wall, requiring additional exposed ducting and pipework. At first I was horrified, thinking this meant vast industrial-size pipes leading round the kitchen, but was assured they would just be standard copper ones.
The actual work was done pretty efficiently even though the contractors discovered that a wall they had to take pipes through was in fact composed of plasterboard over about six inches of void space before they hit good Bargate stone. But when they were all gone and I turned everything on there was a noise like the thundering of mighty waters, as the Psalm says. Such noise persisted. I put this down to air in the system but bleeding my bedroom radiator for two hours didn't seem to stop it. The morning after a second contractors' visit to fix that, I got up to find there was no hot water at all. That fault turned out to be caused by a failed thermostat on the cylinder. Everything now seems to be both quiet and effective.
How expensive this would all have been I dread to think. I'm glad it's not been me paying for it. The new boiler sits unobtrusively on its wall, but the carcass of the old one is still in its cupboard. There is no getting it out, not least because the chaps were concerned there might be asbestos in it. You'd also have to take the cupboard apart. The works required my fridge-freezer to be moved, so I now have a kind of demarcated 'utility area' I didn't have before. It's as though the house is larger!
Thursday, 19 June 2025
Through the Garden Gate June 2025
Although I'm no longer posting updates for the sake of it (posts about boilers and dog-friendly churches may follow), the heat will keep me indoors on this day off until I venture down to the steeple house for Corpus Christi and then to Malham church where the new incumbent is being installed; so thought a few garden snaps cheer up everyone, including myself.
I thought this might be a new arrival, but in fact it seems just to be the Biting Stonecrop flower. It's just that the plant has never bothered flowering before!
Meanwhile, just above it, the bonsai-ed rowan is starting to look convincing and in very healthy leaf (provided I remember to water it).
Tuesday, 17 June 2025
Keeping Promises
M asked me about being married in the church. I knew, not
only that they’d been married before, but also met their new partner before
being divorced. It was a kind of request, surprisingly, that I'd never had before. ‘But did the new relationship cause the end of the marriage?’
the priest I talked it through with asked me: ‘Can they assure you it didn’t?’
I put this to M and they were honest enough to say they couldn’t be definite
that the marriage wouldn’t have carried on had they not met the new partner.
It’s all very uncertain, though I was happier having some kind of objective
criteria rather than just relying on what I felt.
If you’re a Roman Catholic, or a certain kind of Anglican,
there is no question: you can only get married in church once. If you’re (some
sorts of) Orthodox, again, you get three goes at it after which you are deemed
to be taking the mickey, but a subsequent marriage omits some of the
celebratory ceremonies of a first. Anglican churches are left to work out their
own approach, provided it is consistent with the House of Bishops’ guidance,
which includes the caveat about the new relationship not being a direct cause
of the marriage ending. Again, I very much want something more than my own
judgement to go on. Who am I to wade into the complexities of human
relationships?
The House of Bishops’ guidance advises the priest to make
sure that celebrating a subsequent marriage does not ‘undermine the Church’s
teaching’ that marriage is for life, but given our apparently limited
enthusiasm for our own teaching I think of it more basically. If the core of
all sacraments is about promises, your approach, be it ever so gentle and
pastoral, has to speak to the integrity of promises, of which the promises
couples make, and which God promises to help them keep, is only one. Society
has an interest in promises being kept, because we all rely on trusting that
most people will do their best to keep their promises, most of the time.
And yet we know (frail beings that we are) we break other
promises. We take part in the sacrament of reconciliation and promise God we
won’t do this or that, and it is very likely that we will. Does breaking a
promise preclude us from making another one? Or does the public, communal
nature of the matrimonial promise make a difference?
Monday, 9 June 2025
The Period of All Human Glory
We will leave aside the more cosmic consideration that we don’t
know quite where we’re getting to – the supernal or infernal postmortem realms
– and think about what it means for this life alone. Knowing in theory that
your time in this earthly realm is limited, as we all do, feels very different
from being told it is, even if no actual span is put on it. This has recently
happened to someone I know, and if that’s happened to you personally, it’s also
happened, to a lesser degree, to the people close to you. No doctor is brutal
enough to say ‘What you have wrong with you can only be cured by interventions
we will not try because of all the other things that are wrong with you, so all
we can do is manage it, and it will eventually kill you within the foreseeable
future if one of your other problems doesn’t get to you first’, but that’s what
they want you to understand.
Traditional Christian spirituality uses the transitoriness of life to point us away from this world towards eternal considerations, but that’s not the problem here, which is to invest the remainder of our human lives with meaning and joy. The confidence we might have in Christ’s saving grace may blunt the edge of death: we may tell ourselves that all that is good about us is held in divine remembrance and will be brought into the heavenly Jerusalem, part of the ‘treasures of the nations’ the Book of Revelation talks about. If we can successfully pit that spiritual knowledge against our every natural human instinct to be afraid, all well and good. But it seems to me that carrying on living fully is a separate spiritual issue. Call some of us weak and foolish, but we need some motivation not just to turn our faces to the wall and collapse into depression. What is the point of the strife? Even if we engage in battle to make it easier for others to do so, that just pushes the question one step away from us, rather than answering it.
Once when I was dealing with someone with suicidal
temptations I stressed that death was the enemy, an interloper in God’s world
(this only stands any chance of working with a Christian). But if that’s the
case we know that we will eventually lose: and that loss may even come as a mercy
depending on our circumstances. Perhaps we can see each day lived well as a
victory against a different Angel of Death that comes to us, rather than a
struggle daily renewed against the same foe.
And yet why should we? Death doesn’t have to be approaching that quickly to make that a valid question. The humanist concern to gather experiences against the day of death seems a hollow endeavour as it leads nowhere. Why should we try daily when we are weary and dispirited? Rather, the thought that occurs to me that nobody else will ever have our experiences, our precise mixture of impressions, reflections and memories. Those are the treasures of the nations to be brought into the heavenly city. What God will do with them exactly we do not know, but every moment is not just one of blessing to us but to the whole of creation, connected as we are through him who is the Head. That might be enough to keep me thankful each morning, no matter how long or short a time that might remain to me.
Saturday, 7 June 2025
St Michael's Well, Sopley - or Not
Wednesday, 28 May 2025
The Limits of Engagement
But we are 18 months of slaughter on now, and I have come to
admit that this is different. It’s partly the scale, partly the open avowal of
ethnic cleansing by some Israeli ministers, and partly the lies which it seems
to me quite clear that the Israelis want the world to believe. Il Rettore also gave
me a book, Faith in the Face of Empire by Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb.
This examines the interesting question of why God chose to be incarnate in this
part of the world when he could have picked anywhere; its answer is the geopolitical
position of the Holy Land on the contested border of great empires, in the past
as much as now. This is the right location for God to critique human lusts and
insecurities and offer an alternative to them, Kingdom against Empire, Cross
against sword. The Word didn't become incarnate in Judaea because that’s where the
chosen people were, but the Israelites became the chosen people because they
inhabited the land where the Word would become incarnate. So perhaps this
conflict does have cosmic significance in a way others do not.
I mention lies. There are few nations and governments which
always tell the truth, but few whose falsehoods extend to their military killing
aid workers and burying not just their bodies but the vehicle they were
travelling in and then maintaining an entirely false account of events until caught
in the lie. It is very clear the statements the Israelis give are untrue, and if I
were responsible for policy at an august news organisation such as the BBC I
would have begun treating them as such, in the same way that we quite reasonably
gave up routinely asking the Russians to comment on the war in Ukraine. In both
cases, you occasionally need to be reminded of the argument, and whether people
do themselves believe the lies they tell is an interesting and useful question
to consider. I think the Israelis probably do tell themselves that their state
is a liberal democracy the same as other liberal democracies because they had a
trans woman win Eurovision in 1998 (except those who loathe the fact). But there’s
limited value to wasting your time on untruths. Remember how long it took the
BBC to decide that it didn’t actually have to have a climate change denier on
every time the issue got mentioned.
There is a broader point here. I always approach any disagreement
(if I have my wits about me) along the
Dominican lines of identifying assumptions you have in common with your interlocutor
and proceeding from there. But there is no point rehearsing lies. You have to
distinguish the people from whom you might genuinely learn something from those
who are only trying to defeat you. Such people are not even interested in being
understood, in affecting the way you think: they would really rather you were
not there at all. There is nothing to be gained in dealing with them.
‘Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be
like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in
his own eyes’ run two adjoining verses in the Book of Proverbs. Christ negotiates
this treacherous landscape with skill. He encounters and distinguishes between those who ask him
questions in order to elicit a genuine answer, and those who ask them in order
to entrap him: the latter attacks he turns round in their own terms, exposing
the falsehood of the premises by bringing in some other idea or statement from
Scripture.
So here is a relevant question. When King David numbered the people of Israel, how did the Lord respond? He sent a plague. Where did the plague end? At the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. What did David do? He bought the threshing-floor. What did the threshing-floor become later? It became the site of the Temple. Now David was king: he could have done what he wanted. Araunah even offered him the place for free. But David insisted on buying it lawfully, so his offerings would not have cost him nothing. He did not seize it, not even from a foreigner, one of the People of the Land who the Israelites were supposed to have displaced.
Tuesday, 20 May 2025
Busy Doing Nothing
There are always things one could do, but on this occasion I couldn't face any of them. So I sort of faffed about pretending I was still at work but in fact looking up entirely irrelevant matters on the internet and things like that. Eventually I read a chapter of an improving book to clear my head and put the slight sense of self-reproach behind me. That somehow got me through to an acceptable time to return to the church, say Evening Prayer and lock up. It would have been more productive, including spiritually productive, just to stare out of the window. So why hadn't I?
Gradually I realised that I'd fallen into exactly the same habit I try to warn other people against, of validating myself by activity. When there is no activity, when I can't do the things I have planned to do and nothing else intrudes itself, I feel dull and deflated. My non-work life is also defined by activity, by filling the time with tasks. Of course you should be diligent and productive in the use of time, but when idleness comes upon you without being sought, and your response is to fill disturbed and ill-at-ease, this is a spiritual warning sign. My activity was for myself, not for the Lord.
Turning this over prayerfully on Monday I began feeling that I was enjoying God's company - as the old man famously told the Curé d'Ars, 'I looks at him and he looks at me', that some kind of pressure had been relieved. How unexpected. The next time idleness ambushes me, I will be more prepared by being happier not to do anything!
Sunday, 18 May 2025
2025 Museums
That is, museums I've visited this year, not two thousand and twenty-five palaces of culture. It is International Museums Day, which is no bad thing at all even if this year's theme, 'The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities' does sound like the old historian's joke that the perfect title for any work of historiography is 'Change and Continuity in an Age of Transition'. So, even though I no longer habitually post here every time I visit a museum, I would describe very briefly the ones my travels have taken me to so far this year, special exhibitions in London excepted.
1. West Berkshire Museum, Newbury
Many years ago I applied for a job at Newbury Museum, as it was then, and remember absolutely nothing about it apart from the building that houses it, the 17th-century Old Cloth Hall & Granary Store. The strongest memory from my second visit early this year is of the café where the visitor services manager acted as barista. The collection is rather the usual kind of thing you would find in a museum of its sort, though there's some impressive commitment to contemporary collecting with Greenham Common Peace Camp memorabilia (oh dear, that's not really very contemporary now, is it), and a covid vaccination centre sign.
2. Islington Museum
Between tracing the route of the next Goth Walk and seeing my god-daughter for dinner I found I had enough time to stride down Essex Road and visit Islington Museum, which is nowhere near what you might imagine Islington to be but serves the London Borough of that name. It is basically one big room under the Library, accessed down a flight of bleak concrete steps. I was not the only visitor but I caused confusion when I approached the desk and asked if I could make a donation. A collection of radical badges, a bust of Lenin from the Town Hall (power to the people!), a cow's skull and artefacts found under the floorboards of an 18th-century house: I am so glad this museum exists in the middle of what might seem like an unpromising chunk of the capital.
3. East Grinstead Museum
I had no idea East Grinstead was the location for a pioneering plastic surgery hospital in WWII, but that's the sort of thing museums can teach you. The town museum deals with that potentially queasy topic with compassion and interest, and contains plenty of the more common stuff you'd associate with the history of a market town.
4. Leigh on Sea Heritage Centre & Museum
'Museum' is a generous title for the Old Smithy as it has only a handful of artefacts, but it is the closest this seaside town has, a collection of photographs and a reconstructed forge in an old building which adjoins 2 Plumb Cottages. The Old Leigh Society leased that from the Council to restore and display as an example of a mid-19th-century fisherman's home, but it promptly fell down and so what you see now is more a reconstruction. Still, both were free to go in and I bought lots of postcards which is one of my key performance indicators for a heritage site.
5. Havant Museum
This is really one room with a mocked-up 1950s kitchen to one side (these seem to be eclipsing Victorian Kitchens which were the standard when I was a museum curator). There was an amusing mechanical toy involving a windmill, a yacht, and lots of cogs which I couldn't resist playing with, a graveyard-keeper's badge, and plenty of objects jammed into a small area, though I should have paid more attention to the significance of the stuffed big cat.
Happy museum-going!
Monday, 12 May 2025
Spring Fair 2025
Plants, books, burgers, singing and dancing, bottles and dogs and Hook-a-Duck: every church fair has the same elements, and thankfully I have little to do with the organising of ours. My main role is to consume cake, and tell everyone they've done very, very well. Which in the end we did, raising something like £5000 in addition to whatever the various charities represented managed to make. I did worry that the weather might be too good and everyone would head off to the beach, but this was not the case. Yesterday I passed two young gentlemen who I recognised from the visitors and they greeted me. It turned out one was a Polish student and his host took him to the Fair 'to see something of England', and that was probably achieved.
Friday, 2 May 2025
Spring Adventures
It feels as though I've been waiting a long while for this week off that is just coming to an end: the lateness of Easter has removed it far from my last break. I spent a couple of days in Dorset, taking my Mum to West Bay and my sister to Knowlton Rings; zoomed to South Wales to see my friend Rain who has been going through all sorts of trouble, taking them to an antiques emporium (their choice) and Llandaff Cathedral (mine); London yesterday to see two more friends, one for lunch in the amazing surroundings of Mercato Mayfair which used to be the church of St Mark North Audley Street, and the other at Pret London Bridge (probably less worthy of a photo), and two exhibitions, Tim Burton at the Design Museum and Secrets of the Thames at the Museum of Docklands; and a final excursion today to Leigh-on-Sea. Funny place, with one old street along the shoreline full of fishing-themed pubs and a more modern one at the hilltop where the shops are. I spent a good amount of my time in Leigh trying to find somewhere that would serve me a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch rather than fish-and-chips or tapas; I should just have gone to the church where they were offering community lunches!
I was also delighted to be shown a new and unheralded image of St Catherine at the Docklands exhibition - on a gold ring plucked from the Thames. Here she is, just visible, holding a tiny, tiny wheel, the last of a trio with St John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin.
Tuesday, 29 April 2025
Swanvale Halt Book Club: "Gaudy Night" by Dorothy L Sayers (Gollancz, 1935)
A friend may be leaving Oxford, a city she loves, after more than two decades. The 1930s is not her favoured period, but having heard Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Night described as ‘a love letter to Oxford disguised as a mystery novel’, I thought I’d buy an appropriately elderly copy as a present. I felt I should read it first, never having done any Sayers.
Good heavens, it was hard going. The action focuses on a fictional women’s college based on Somerville, the author’s alma mater, located somewhere off Jowett’s Walk where the modern Balliol housing now stands; and many of the characters, and suspects in the crime, are the college’s academic staff, a parade of virtually-indistinguishable Misses This or That, occasionally and even more confusingly referred to by their title instead of their name. They engage in bouts of verbal sparring of the kind I thought I might encounter myself in Oxford, but never did: perhaps such displays of intellectual prowess had died out long before I arrived, around the time fluency in Latin stopped being an entry exam requirement.
And at the heart of that is Lord Peter Wimsey, quite the
most loathsomely annoying character I have ever read presented as a hero. Any
such person you might meet in real life, whose every other sentence is a
recondite quotation and who politely refrains from making his intellectual
superiority over everyone else around them too apparent except obliquely, would
be an individual you would quickly learn to avoid. The romance between Wimsey
and Harriet Vane is part of the story, and you cannot help feeling she has been
absolutely correct to repel his matrimonial suggestions for five years and
should very much carry on doing so. At one point Harriet has discovered that
the antique chess pieces he has bought for her from an Oxford antiques shop
have been violently smashed by the unknown miscreant causing havoc to the
College’s wellbeing. One pawn has survived:
“My dear girl [counsels Wimsey], don’t cry about it. What the hell does it matter?”
“I loved them”, said Harriet, “and you gave them to me.”
He shook
his head.
“It’s a
pity it’s that way round. ‘You gave them to me, and I loved them’ is all right,
but ‘I loved them and you gave them to me’ is irreparable …”
A quotation, with grim inevitability, follows. At this
point, were I Miss Vane, the antiquity and belovedness of the chess-set
notwithstanding, I would have found a use for that surviving pawn that His
Lordship might have been surprised by.
Allied to the maddening quality of Peter Wimsey is the tendency
of this novel – as so many of the mid-twentieth century – to drew conclusions about its
characters from their physical appearance. Harriet notes that Lord Peter’s
nephew, a student at Christ Church who falls a bit in love with her, has
similar features to Peter’s but ‘with a certain weakness about the jaw’. Of
course the dashing aristocratic detective is a master at this dubious neo-phrenological analysis, but everyone in
the book whose inner thoughts we know does it, and it’s a feature you simply cannot
imagine emerging in fiction now. How did it come to an end?
This all adds up to a high price for a spot of Oxford
romanticism. But as the narrative builds towards the climactic unmasking of the
villain, there is a certain cathartic violence which culminates in the speech
that villain gives to the assembled members of the College, an attack on both
academic culture and first-wave feminism so daring, violent, and
all-encompassing, that it almost justifies the time you have spent reading so
far: regardless of whether you agree with the character in question, which
Sayers certainly does not. Whether I will in fact pass Gaudy Night on as
planned having experienced it, I am not decided!
[The picture shows 'the first cheap edition' of 1936, a copy of which I purchased at a very modest price. The presence of the original dust jacket would have raised it to £200 or more.]
Friday, 25 April 2025
Keeping a Kind of Vigil
It wasn't the first time I found myself negotiating my way through another sort of spiritual space. On St George's Day this week - the customary St George's Day, though in the Church calendar the Great-Martyr George has been bumped backward to next Monday because you can't celebrate a feast day in the Octave of Easter - I attended the monthly Vigil at Crossbones Graveyard in Southwark. Without recounting the contested history of the site, which you can look up for yourself, in later years the graveyard has become 'a shrine for the outcast dead' as that history has been recovered, publicised, and acknowledged, and therefore part of the consciousness of those living who also feel themselves marginalised and outcast and who read their own experiences in those souls who are memorialised at Crossbones. Although the acknowledgment of the site has included recognition by the cathedral community mere yards away, this place belongs to those the Church has traditionally pushed away, which makes it all the more affecting that it can make sincere use of Christian imagery and words from time to time.
This week's Vigil was especially poignant as it took place after an apparent attack on the shrine, burning some of the memorials and decorations. It was stressed that the rituals weren't religious, and indeed there is nothing specifically religious about burning incense, ringing bells, silence, tying ribbons in remembrance, and reciting poems. It was only the final bit I felt I had to stand back from - a collective act of re-hallowing the memorial by the assembled community touching the gates, while a prayer was recited and repeated with the aim of 'concentrating energy', a mode of operating that goes all the way back to the New Thought of the 1880s. It was described as an act of 'magic', so I touched nothing and said nothing. But then, it seems to me, Crossbones is a place of integrity, for me as for anyone.
Monday, 21 April 2025
Holy Week 2025 ...
… has offered a variety of experiences.
Monday: I attend on my Spiritual Director and mention that the Bishop, for the first time ever, is doing my ministerial review this year.
Me: I don’t want to say the wrong thing.
SD: Would it matter if you said the wrong thing?
Me: Well, he is my father-in-Christ to whom I owe canonical obedience –
SD: Oh, don’t give me that ****ing ****.
Wednesday: The new Dean at the Cathedral offers to hear
confessions at a set time for the first occasion in years. I don’t have much to
say but go and find myself tearful with thanks.
Thursday: I and Il Rettore are back at the Cathedral for
the Chrism Mass. As always, the Bishop preaches but delegates the service and
blessing of oils to his suffragan, which mitigates the point of the whole thing
somewhat. I am tired enough to enter a dubious state during his sermon in which
I hear every word but can’t recall a single one. (At least I think I am hearing
them: I’ve noticed that when I reach the stage of nodding off while reading in
bed I can start fully awake and then fail to find on the page the words I have
just read absolutely clearly). Fr Donald from Lamford, sitting beside me, makes
some theological point I can barely understand. Afterwards Il Rettore asks
me what I thought and I tell him the Devil seldom rages at me as hard as during
the Chrism Mass. He shares that he felt like walking out during the sermon. At
the Maundy Thursday vigil I do my usual exercise of bringing my friends into Gethsemane.
Of course Professor Cotillion’s dogs are there, and Bartle barks to keep the demons
away while Brindle licks the Lord’s hand to comfort him.
Friday: During the Mass of the Presanctified I get caught
out by Drop Drop Slow Tears as the communion hymn and almost can’t carry on. In
her new position in a big choral church in the North, my friend Cara has her
first experience of prostrating herself in their equivalent liturgy and finds
it ‘curiously restful’. Two priests of the Society mansplain administering the
chalice to her during the administration itself: ‘I’ll administer it in a way
you really won’t like in a minute’, she didn’t say. Paula the pastoral
assistant and her husband Peter drop off hot-cross buns on my doorstep which
present the ideal way of breaking my fast in the evening.
Saturday: I take communion to Janet, among others that day. We get to the end, and then she says ‘Did I tell you my friend is going to bring me to church tomorrow? I didn’t like to tell you not to come after all. Thank you, I know you’re so busy’. I mentally tot up all the things I have yet to do, from polishing the wall plaques to setting out the crockery for breakfast tomorrow.
Easter Day: A few fewer than in recent years at the Dawn
Mass but the other services drew numbers pretty similar to last year. A pink
rubber duck appeared in the churchyard, apparently part of a cancer awareness
campaign, so it came to the Dawn Mass and I popped a photo on LiberFaciorum.
Decease of pontiffs notwithstanding, happy Easter Week to you all!
Tuesday, 15 April 2025
Healing Words, Maybe
Only a few minutes before we began I discovered that my homily notes were nowhere to be found, so I had to try and remember what I wanted to say. Il Rettore said it had effectively skated the theological thin ice that holds the healing service up above the abyssal waters of blaming God for our sorrows or blaming ourselves, so I thought I'd put a tidied-up version here.
When people tell you in response to you sharing some trouble
that ‘God has a plan’ they mean it kindly, but it raises questions about the
purpose of what happens to us. If we think that our sufferings and sorrows are
God’s choice for us, what does ‘healing’ mean?
We can understand healing in different ways – the palpable,
natural problems we have that we ask for help with, and the inward shift in our
attitudes and understanding that enables us to see things differently. Both
make sense: the fact that in the Gospels people come to Jesus and he very much
does heal physical issues implies that Christian healing doesn’t only mean
passive acceptance of what might come our way, though it might include coming
to see our problems in a new light.
Preparing the readings I was reminded of the way the coming
of the Christ is prepared for through long ages, foreshadowed in the
declarations of the Prophets. God’s saving work unfolds across the centuries,
and in so far as we are united with Jesus, we and what befalls us are part of
that narrative. We can be confident that, though the fallen world may be
arbitrary, and therefore no direct reason lies behind whatever sorrows and sufferings come our way, God is not.
As we follow the way of Christ this Holy Week, we find that he is the site of understanding, the means by which we can place what happens to us in the light of God’s purposes. The events of his passion and resurrection point towards that time when even our sorrows and pains will be made sense of. Christian healing is a declaration of faith in that, here and now.
Sunday, 13 April 2025
Ready for Anything
When I described the idea, more than one member of the congregation took it as a signal that I was thinking of leaving, which is not the case, but it does rather suggest that they’re a bit scared of that happening. Which maybe means I should! The whole concept of the thing was to reduce laypeoples’ dependence on clergy in general and me in particular, but will that happen in any way while I’m still around?
Tuesday, 1 April 2025
Biblical Relics
It's actually a Prayer Book and Bible bound as one volume, and dates from 1773 with all the family names and dates inscribed on an initial leaf (the one in my illustrative picture would be much later). It's potentially a nice artefact, but isn't in good shape: the covers are detached, the leather almost worn away, and it smells strongly enough of mould that you don't want to breathe in too deeply in its company. Despite its date, the problem is that there are simply too many of these Bibles around for anyone other than the family involved to be interested in it, unless there was something unusual about the family or the circumstances in which it was compiled. Every family that could afford a book like this would have had one, and the question of what to do with them regularly arises, at museums as much as at churches (at my last workplace we had a couple).
The old Jewish custom is that worn-out texts and manuscripts that might contain the name of God are held in a storeroom in the synagogue, the Genizah, and then formally buried perhaps every seven years. Maybe churches should offer a similar service! If nobody in her family was interested in keeping the book, I told Anna, the most respectful thing would be to bury it, to return it to earth. She seemed to like that. I remember doing the same some years ago with copies of the Book of Mormon Mad Trevor gave me, but respect wasn't the issue there.
Saturday, 29 March 2025
Sew Surprising
One of the articles Ms Formerly Aldgate left in the Rectory was the sewing machine which she hardly ever used (clothes making was an idea she took up but never got very far with). I wonder whether she was aware it would - at least now, several years later - cost about £130 to replace? In any case it has sat in its box ever since she left.
Now, with two amices rapidly declining in effectiveness but some old altarcloths ready to be turned into something else, I wondered whether I might increase my productivity by pressing the contraption into service in making replacements. And so it has proved! An amice, admittedly, is about the most simple sewing project you could imagine (an oblong of white linen!), and my first foray into the realm of mechanised needlework has been a bit wavering resulting in a slightly wonky line of stitches, but it's a start. I was amazed it worked out at all.
I wonder what proportion of clergy sew? I do rather think use of a sewing machine could profitably have been added to the Leavers' Course at Staggers.
Thursday, 27 March 2025
Beautiful Badbury
When this blog passed its 2000th post I said I wasn't going to be striving to find something to say every other day, as I had in the past, but only post when there was something positive happening. Nothing very much has gone on today apart from a trip to Dorset to see my mum, going out with her for a meal, and visiting the farm shop at Pamphill Dairy, finishing with my obligatory walk around Badbury Rings. But Badbury Rings is always restful and calming, and maybe you find my photos the same! Today I did the opposite of my usual route of going straight through the monument and then following the southern ramparts back, by turning north along the banks and then cutting back through the wooded centre. I couldn't remember ever seeing the Trig. pillar before, somehow.
Tuesday, 25 March 2025
Keeping One's Council
Friday, 21 March 2025
Oxford Springtime
I couldn't have picked a better day to visit Oxford than yesterday. The pellucid blue skies framed the golden-coloured buildings, reminding me of our trip to Florence many years ago (I'm not a very good traveller so it remains a rare foray beyond these shores). Here's a view of one of the Clarendon Building muses (which have an interesting history), seen beyond the Bridge of Sighs along New College Lane.
Although I did get to see some friends, the centrepiece of my day was a visit to the Holy Well of Holywell Manor. The Manor is the graduate block of Balliol College, and although I studied at Balliol it was only as an undergraduate so I never went there, and had only glimpsed the Well through a window in the gate of the Praefectus's garden. Yesterday I was allowed in to examine the site itself - though apparently my request had prompted the Manor's health-and-safety manager to examine the well and decide that it isn't as safe as it could be and needs to be added to Balliol's lengthening list of works! There is a horribly corroded-looking set of steps leading down to into the well-chamber and as Mr H&S had been down there to look that morning I was perfectly happy to rely on his photos. I am still picking through the tangled history of the Well so won't go through it here, but the chamber still seems to contain the stone tub identified by the Clewer Sisters who occupied the Manor in the late 1800s as an Anglo-Saxon font, rather dubiously I fear. The Praefectus's PA gave me a copy of the history of the Manor by Oswyn Murray, who I overlapped with at Balliol all those years ago but who I didn't have anything directly to do with. It has some useful details of ghosts and folklore!
The 'Oracles, Omens and Answers' show at the Bodleian is fun (the central African custom of divination using land spiders was news to me) and I went into St Mary Mag's, rather scandalously for the first time ever considering I lived yards away from it for three years. There is a dramatic statue of St Catherine on the high altar reredos.