Sew Surprising

Fr Thesis is well-known as a dab hand with a needle and thread and I have been known to delve into needlecraft myself, but I have always relied on hand techniques - if in my case they can be called 'techniques' - only. This makes the exercise massively laborious and inefficient. 

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.

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.

Keeping One's Council

The CEO of the local Council was only supposed to be a couple of minutes, but I was waiting for him for about twenty. Well, things come up, I know that. I have agreed to be 'Borough Dean', which is something our Bishop is very keen on: a point of contact between the local authority and the churches of the area, explaining the ways and concerns of the one to the other. When he did arrive, full of apologies and offers of coffee, the CEO made it gently clear that I was representing one of a variety of faith communities, albeit the vastly most numerous in sunny Surrey: that was quite understandable and a role I don't mind filling.

While waiting, I watched the receptionist field enquiries. She has to know who to get in touch with and broadly how the structure works to be able to help the people who turn up. Today, a Council tenant was pursuing a Gas Safety inspection on his property which was supposed to have taken place, but the plumber never turned up and he'd heard nothing back (the same happened to me the other day). The receptionist waited on the phone to someone for about ten minutes and then gave it to the man while she dealt with another gentleman who had some papers to hand to a Council officer who she also couldn't get on the phone (it turned out the officer was out at lunch - she came by later). There was also a woman with a non-native-English accent pursuing a housing enquiry with a man who I presumed was from the CAB or a housing charity or something - he was certainly acting as her advocate. She seemed to be about to be ejected from a friend's house and they were trying to secure her a place in a night shelter. They were shown into a meeting room to call either an advisor or a Council officer, I wasn't clear which. It was quite a tally for twenty minutes, though perhaps mid-day is a busy period. 

At Swanvale Halt church, we pray for aspects of our local community on a cyclical basis, including our local authorities, the elected members and staff. That's all very well, and I'm sure the Lord does something more than absolutely nothing with prayers like it. But watching the Council in action for just a few minutes on this very basic level adds some meat to those outline aspirations. How complex it all is - and how worthwhile the odd prayer seems. 

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.

Dialogue of the Partly Deaf

The young man accosted me as I was returning home from Vespers, with a phrase (whatever it was) which is like the usual opening gambit from a cult: ‘Excuse me, sir, are you worried about the way our country is going?’ He told me there were ‘13 colleges in London where you can’t wish people Happy Christmas’ and that churches were being closed to be replaced by ‘mosques and synagogues’. If I’d had more time I would have tried to explore whether there was a genuine anxiety beneath these statements – I thought his stare and slightly ragged appearance suggested some kind of mental distress – but I hadn’t, I fear. I said things seemed very different in Swanvale Halt where I was doing work in local schools and so on and if churches were closing it was mainly because people didn’t go to them. Did he go to church, I asked? Yes, he said, ‘the main church’ in Guildford, which was an interesting way of describing what was clearly not Holy Trinity on the High Street or even the Cathedral, but Emmaus Road. That’s if it was true.

On Saturday I did a funeral visit. I knew the gentleman whose wife’s service we were discussing, and must have met his stepson before though I couldn’t remember. The deceased lady had been a Roman Catholic at one stage in her life, at least, and her son had attended a convent school and been an altar server in his teens before leaving that behind. ‘I have to say I think religion is a crutch for people who need it’, he said, while his stepfather believed that God had directed his life in various ways, not least leading him towards his wife via some unlikely coincidences. How the conversation got onto aliens and Neanderthal technology I wasn’t sure, but it felt like a talk I was supposed to contribute to but couldn’t find a rational way into, or indeed to steer back to what we were supposed to be talking about. It was absolutely exhausting.

As was the third unsatisfactory encounter within a few days. This one was at a friend’s early-retirement party where I found myself sitting next to a friend of his who had some potentially interesting things to say about her frustrated career as an engineer, being married to a soldier, running a club for bikers in Camden in the 1990s, and dealing with her son’s schooling. But it became clear that behind each story there was a point being made about the unreasonable behaviour of other people, and I was not so much participating in a conversation as being invited to agree. If I missed the narrative clues to how I was supposed to understand each anecdote there was no way back, and it was easy enough to do that in a loud pub. I was almost weeping by the end.

How rarely one has conversations that actually mean anything, in which the participants are listening to what each other has to say rather than simply speaking at one another. I do strive to view my encounters as opportunities to learn more about other people but they don’t always make it easy!

Quiet

2022 was, I think, the last time I spent a Lenten retreat at Malling Abbey. For the last couple of years I've instead gone to Clarissa and Simon's garden music room at Bortley for a quiet day of reading and prayer. There are various reasons: it doesn't take as much time away from the parish, it seems to be just as productive if more concentrated, and, being very honest, joining in corporate worship with the holy Sisters became harder as they themselves age and become more crumbly. There was a sense of sorrow, of something passing away, and I feel that keenly in life more generally. So Bortley Mill it is for the time being.

In fact my resistance to change and sorrow at the passing-away of things formed some part of my reflections. On the music room bookshelves was a copy of Patrick Bringley's All The Beauty in the World, his reflections on ten years spent as a warder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, finding solace in art and discovering other people also processing their own lives by means of the things they encounter in the museum. A small book laying out the experiences of an ordinary life: and it made me think of all the worthwhile books (meaning the worthwhile experiences of other people) I will never manage to read, and the beautiful things I will never fit in seeing or enjoying. I could live a thousand lifetimes and barely scratch the surface of the wonders the world has to offer. I felt ashamed at the times I have failed to feel grateful, failed to appreciate the tiny, tiny time I have to enjoy beauty and love. 

As it was a Friday in Lent, I was fasting until sunset. I arrived at the music room to find that Simon had laid out a plate of delicious shortbread biscuits which assailed me through the day with their aroma as I sipped my black, unsweetened coffee. But they would have gone soft being left out like that, so I took them home. 

School Day

The local secondary school, Widelake, isn't completely foreign territory to me, but I don't go there very often. I paid a visit back in 2013, and then again the year before last, when I spoke to an RE class about communion and then answered questions at a philosophy group. 'When you talk about the way prayer affects you', asked one girl, 'How can you be sure it's actually due to contact with something beyond you or is just the effect of long-term self-examination and reflection?' I felt like bringing in the politician's answer along the lines of 'That's a very good question and I'm very glad you asked me' before moving swiftly on. But now I seem to have an arrangement to offer seasonal assemblies before the main festivals. Before Christmas I spoke about the sense of history embodied in the Christmas Proclamation: 'today, the 25th day of December, untold ages after God created the heavens and the earth ...' And yesterday I delivered one of my strange discursions about Lent and Easter, fasting customs and evidence for the Christian story. We met in the sports hall, which has no heating apart from the presence of hundreds of teenagers, and a tiny projector screen at one end. Can they see it at the back? And can they hear me at the back, even if I'm quite used to projecting, myself?

In the afternoon I was in the very different surroundings of the Infants School, doing another assembly and then Church Club. The children are off on a sports day on Friday and so I decided to talk about rules and how Jesus didn't always follow them but remembered what they were there for. My illustrative material included a croquet mallet and ball from my battered old Jacques set at home. 'Oh I never come into school without a croquet mallet', I said in answer to Sandra's incredulity when she turned up for Church Club. 

The Churches of David Nye

The Bishop is supposedly keen on the concept of Borough Deans, clergy who will have regular conversations with local authorities and act as a contact between the Church and secular life. I offered to be one, and quickly learned with weary resignation that a role sold to me as involving ‘a couple of meetings a year’ actually implicates me in sundry other things, all of which so far I haven’t been able to attend. The Bishop should have written to me formally to welcome me, but hasn’t. One of these additional things was planning something called a Community Day. I came in partway through the process, wasn’t able to attend any of the meetings, and never received any notes, so I turned up at the event yesterday with no idea what was supposed to happen. It turned out to be a session encouraging churches to think about their community work as opportunities for evangelism. I was amused that the main speaker outlined a vision of encounters developing into church communities linked to the parish like the rim of a wheel to the hub, exactly the theme of my long Missiology essay at St Stephen’s House twenty years ago, while the new resources for adding spiritual content to community events pretty much mirror the things I am developing and thinking through in Swanvale Halt. But I found myself looking at the building we were meeting in, St Peter’s, Guildford, which I had neglected to visit in my great survey of the diocese over recent years. Ah, I thought, it’s another one of these.

David Nye, the architect of St Peter’s, is better known as a cinema designer, but his church work is relatively prolific too. Quite substantial buildings in Purley and Dulwich offer no clue to a personal style, but for Surrey – and a couple of other places, it seems – he developed a model of church based on pyramidal roofs, big windows, and glulam timber arches. The pattern could be scaled up to something like the Good Shepherd, Pyrford, or down, to St Stephen’s Langley Vale in Epsom, and could be adapted to a variety of church traditions; so St Peter’s is a joint Anglican-and-Methodist community, Pyrford is evangelical, while Christ the King, Salfords (which though in Surrey I haven’t seen as it’s in Southwark diocese) is Anglo-Catholic. The family resemblance, though, is very strong.

St Peter's, Guildford

Good Shepherd, Pyrford

St Stephen's, Langley Vale (from the church website)

Christ the King, Salfords (Photo © Stephen Craven (cc-by-sa/2.0))

Holy Spirit, Burpham

Some time ago, realising I would find it hard to get into another David Nye church, St Alban’s Wood Street, I went looking online for photos, and got thoroughly confused by what I found. Here is St Alban’s, from the church website:

And this was also ‘St Alban’s’:

It took me a while to twig that the second wasn't Wood Street at another stage of its development, but an entirely different St Alban’s: a church at West Leigh in Havant (so, the diocese of Portsmouth), but virtually a twin of the Surrey one. It’s not described as one of David Nye’s, but it must surely be. I wonder how many more there are? The list on the website of his practice, now Nye Saunders in Godalming, isn’t very comprehensive.

All Saints' Onslow Village in Guildford is another Nye church, but apart from being modernist stands apart from the above examples. Its roof is virtually flat with windows fitted into an upright section rather than along the walls. Neither does it have the big glulam arches:

Yet another research project for someone ... !

A Wave of the Wand at Burley

On my way back from a visit to my Mum in Dorset I called in at Burley in the New Forest, a place I haven’t visited in probably 35 years or so. It’s an odd sort of place: most of the dwellings are at some distance from the t-junction around which the centre of the village is organised, and as New Forest-style ‘commoning’ is still practised locally you can often come across ponies wandering around (though I didn’t). Two pubs, several tea shops, a couple of spas, a cycle hire outfit and a grand mock-Tudor mansion now turned into a hotel make for a collection of businesses largely orientated around tourism, or other sorts of visitors. But what most strikes the tripper to Burley (or this one, anyway) now is how witchy it is.

In what’s effectively two short streets there are four, or maybe five, witch-themed gift shops: it depends how you categorise ‘Away With the Fairies’, which has more of a fairy theme though it does overlap with the other four – ‘Witchcraft’, ‘The Sorceror’s Apprentice’, ‘Cobwebs and Crystals’, and ‘A Coven of Witches’. The last-named is the oldest store, beginning as an antiques shop run by the person responsible for all this, Sybil Leek. Ms Leek lived in Burley from some unspecified time until 1964, a familiar and flamboyant character often accompanied by her pet jackdaw, Hotfoot Jackson. In his history of wicca The Triumph of the Moon the great Ronald Hutton gives short shrift to her claims to have been trained by Aleister Crowley, or even to have met him, and even less to her historical sense, quoting a sentence ‘which manages in twelve words to confuse a nineteenth-century personality with a seventeenth-century one, and locate both in the wrong period’. Sybil Leek worked for a local TV station and for a brief period was able to promote herself as Britain’s chief spokesperson for witchcraft, before falling out with almost everyone else in the wiccan world, claiming she was under attack from Satanists, being evicted from her house in Burley, and relocating to the USA.

The stores share a family resemblance – they all have the same racks of crystals and incense and other knickknacks – but differ subtly from one another. At Cobwebs & Crystals, amongst the bottles of charged crystals and figurines I observed a vintage plastic telephone for sale not far from a small articulated toy of Matt Smith as the 12^th Doctor, while Coven is clearly catering for the serious wiccan practitioner as it sells altar tables, cauldrons and wands (the kit’s small as I suppose it has to fit in teenagers’ bedrooms a lot of the time). All those items are seriously kitschy but there’s a certain seductiveness about the whole aesthetic, which overlaps with Goth although not identical with it.

In my long-distant memory Burley majored more on saddlery and leather goods, and although the witchcraft connection is clearly longstanding, it’s intensified in relatively recent years. Those horsey shops have been replaced by witchy ones, and it would be an interesting project to trace exactly how it has happened.

On the way out of Burley I stopped and walked down a muddy track to pay my respects to the Lady Well, which I certainly hadn’t seen since 1987. It hadn’t changed at all, which was a bit disappointing as I thought someone had tidied it up!