Rerum Novarum

Even a couple of hours beforehand, I wasn't convinced about setting out to London to see the New Year in at Tarantella. It wasn't just the usual Sunday services in the morning, or even preparing for my week off to come (in fact today Il Rettore warned me he has covid, so I'll be doing the Tuesday mass after all), but I was a bit weary. It didn't help that I came to lock up the church at tea-time and found Carly on the Lady Chapel step surrounded by bags and charging her phone. Only on Friday I'd given her a lift from the shared alcohol-recovery house ten miles away where she has a room to Swanvale Halt, because she said she'd been beaten up there and her money stolen. She was going to stay with a friend and see her family for Christmas. This didn't go well: the friend also beat her up and stole from her, and she got into a row with her brother who hit her for good measure. Could I take her back to the shared house again? At least it being New Year's Eve the roads were quiet. 

Well. I set my teeth and drove to Guildford to catch a slow, late-running train that got me to The Albany on Great Portland Street at 10.45. And it was rather fine: the couple of hours I spent there were in the company of friends expected and unexpected and I learned a little about what's going on with them, in so far as you can grab some intelligible words in an environment of loud music in a dark, enclosed space. After the customary countdown to midnight, whoever was DJing put on 'Heroes' - most of the time I can't abide Bowie, but the song's melancholy defiance was most apposite and brought a bit of a tear to the eye. Back at Waterloo and dreading the usual exhausting diversion around the massive pedestrian gyratory system that, one time I and Ms Formerly Aldgate braved it, took us as far as Blackfriars, I found there wasn't one. I went straight up the escalator from the Tube and onto the concourse. I was so surprised and pleased I had to find a member of staff and congratulate them, much to their confusion.

I think I will be posting here a bit less in 2024.  I began this blog way, way back in 2009 because I found that clergy blogs essentially told you nothing interesting. I was especially thinking of someone who was at Staggers at the same time as me and whose posts on a blog that was supposed to be about hs parish essentially described whatever feast day it was according to the Roman calendar and then out of the blue announced he was crossing the Tiber, and that was that. I wanted to give at least a flavour of what looking after a small and unremarkable parish church is like, and after a couple of years settled into a discipline of posting basically every other day as all the advice in those days suggested that was how you built up an audience, even if I ended up showing readers pictures of the garden or some dimly-lit club as I am today. But all these years later, a blog of this kind is something of an anachronism - hardly anyone does anything like it now. Sometimes it's been a helpful mechanism for settling my thoughts on a particular topic, and just now and again I've posted something which people have been specifically interested in. 

Far and away the most popular of these has been my examination of fringe churches, as the algorithms pick up on David Farrant, Sean Manchester and the saga of the Highgate Vampire very readily. The runners-up are:

- My account of Chapel House, Blackfen, an East London folly;

- My speculations on the real identity of Witch House musician Hvcci Gvcci;

- A description of what happened to the burned-out church of St Saviour, Poplar;

- A post about a handful of holy wells in Norfolk;

- A few words about Anglo-Catholic artist Thomas Noyes Lewis; and 

- My visit to the Hascombe Dragonstones in 2020. 

Presumably this is because there's not much else online about any of them! Anyway, a little while ago I passed the symbolic milestone of 2000 posts and as themes and ideas begin to repeat themselves it's time to slow down a bit. I will still post when something occurs to me, but be driven more by events and concerns than by that alternate-day discipline. 

Every blessing in 2024 to any reader I may have!

Hac in Anni Ianua

A topsy-turvy New Year for me as I am off on New Year's Eve and at work on New Year's Day: I had a funeral yesterday on what would normally be my day off. That was unusual, too: a graveside ceremony for someone relatively well-known in the community (though not to me directly), assisted by the Council who provided a PA system and music, and with sloe gin to toast the departed. Seeing people line up outside the cemetery (a rather nice spot, our little local godsacre) was very moving and seemed much more pleasing than being at the Crem., or even, dare I say, in church. Today I have largely spent ordering books and managing to avoid employing the Evil Empire of Amazon to do so, and downloading music ranging from the orchestral accompaniment to the Golden Parade of the Pharoahs back in July, to early-1980s feminist punk, to 1940s Chinese jazz. This has a name, shidaiqu, so don't say you don't learn anything here, unless you knew it before.

I get slightly peeved when people I know speak as though calendar years have personalities, and it's both a mystery and a shock when one turns out unusually horrible, but I also get peeved when other people I know get very superior about not doing that. It's a natural if loose way of thinking. The annual ticking-over of one digit to another gives us a way of framing our outlook and perhaps amending our behaviour, though whatever life may presently be throwing at us pays no attention to it, of course. 

People ask me whether I think the pandemic will ever be over and I say, Yes I do, because human beings have been through this experience umpteen times and it has always followed, overall, the same trajectory. Pandemics never end with diseases eradicated: we've only ever managed that twice, with smallpox and one sort of polio. Instead successive waves of infection sweep across continents, or the world, and they get milder as resistance builds up among their survivors. What's different this time is twofold: first, we have far more information than ever before, and can analyse what's happening with the virus in a way we never could in the past, and secondly we are tackling this disease not predominately with natural infection, but with vaccines. We are not just shrugging our shoulders and letting lots of people die. That's a degree of progress.

I think it will all be all right, and it may all be all right sooner than we fear. Not everything will be. Democracy and freedom seem to me very fragile indeed - more fragile than they always are - and of course we're still heading, more likely than not, for the collapse of our civilisation and everything we love and value before the end of the century. You might have noticed this is the warmest New Year on record. That may well not be all right at all. But this will be. In a couple of hours time I will drink a small toast to it!

Future Facing

The New Year struck Swanvale Halt as it did everywhere else and even when you are on your own it is still worth marking the switch of the clock and giving thanks for everyone who means something to you - in my case, with a lantern, a couple of sparklers (one for me and one for everyone who was not there) and a little bit of fizzy liquid. It is small, but makes the point.

Changing the Calendar

I don't know how Swanvale Halt saw in the New Year this time round, as I was in London having dinner with Citizen Globaljumper who is over for a few days from Cairo where he is publications manager for the regional office of the World Health Organisation. We were meeting in Archway, not far away from the flat he used to share with his brother. I couldn't remember what the area around the Underground station used to be like, but it is currently what I suppose ought to be called a plaza with a few seats and a lot of empty space where, my friend tells me, there was a particularly hazardous road junction. The restaurant we went to was nearly fully booked although we were squeezed onto a side table (and fed some very pleasing fare), but the Angel, Highgate, our designated drinking hole afterwards, was surprisingly quiet.

Abandoning Mr Globaljumper at Archway I went to The Albany in Great Portland Street where Mal and a couple of the other longest-standing DJs in the Goth world had decided to stage a small event while the rest of that world gravitated towards Slimelight. Small it had to be, because the Albany's basement can't fit that many people. 'Tarantella' is a continuation of a string of occasional club nights Mal has run with others over the years. It reminded me a bit of how Tanz Macabre was in its Soho days though without the Arts Theatre Club's decadent elegance. Moments before midnight the music ceased and the PA system broadcast the bongs - isn't Big Ben still out of action at the moment? or perhaps it was turned on again for the occasion? - and we all toasted the year to come, hoping, as one always does, that it's better in some respects than the one past. I enjoy New Year and the sense of hope it brings, though of course January 1st and the clicking over of a date means nothing at all: the emotion and the aspiration are real enough. 

The journey back to Surrey was by no means as disagreeable as it had been in earlier years. The gyratory system around Waterloo didn't take us as far away from the station and the train, though crowded, was quite civilised. The guard kept up her announcements before and after each station doggedly, reminding passengers to check the folk around them weren't sleeping past their disembarkation point, and apologising for 'sounding like a broken record'. I thought she was perhaps a bit hysterical with weariness, but even that made the experience more tolerable. A Happy New Year to you!

Blue or Not, and Who Might Care

Here’s a recondite little liturgical matter for you. I was mildly surprised to see photos of a couple of my clerical colleagues from deeper in the Anglo-Catholic world than my own location having celebrated mass on New Year’s Day resplendent in blue for the BVM, which would never had occurred to me: at Swanvale Halt we kept it as the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus and, as a Feast of Our Lord rather than Our Lady, in gold.

I hadn’t picked up on the fact that in 1969 Pope Paul VI reclassified January 1^st as ‘The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God’, I suppose concentrating on the Virgin’s maternal role, which is all very well. However I do wonder whether this is less about her as such, and more about the slight squeamishness we moderns may feel in approaching the fact of Jesus’s, or rather his parents’, obedience to Jewish custom in this inescapable respect. The old Anglican Prayer Book collect is, as usual, brutally upfront about the whole business:

Almighty God, that madest thy blessed Son to be circumcised, and obedient to the law for man: Grant us the true circumcision of the Spirit; that, our hearts, and all our members, being mortified from all worldly and carnal lusts, we may in all things obey thy blessed will.

This is authentically medieval, reflecting the theology implicit in that wonderful New Year hymn ‘Hac in anni ianua’, that Christ’s circumcision is part of his perfect fulfilment of the Old Law and therefore the liberation of humankind from its curse – liberation to obey God’s will in the Spirit rather than by rule-following. The modern Common Worship collect is basically the same as the 1980s version which replaced the BCP, with a bit more inclusive language:

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was circumcised in obedience to the law for our sake, and given the Name that is above every name: give us grace faithfully to bear his Name, to worship him in the freedom of the Spirit, and to proclaim him as Saviour of the world.

You will note that, even though the circumcision of Jesus is mentioned, it’s no longer the major theme of the collect; it’s the element of Jesus being named which has taken over. It does seem very odd to be celebrating the genital mutilation of a small child, however culturally specific and theologically glossed. Perhaps the squeamishness, thinking about it, is less to do with taste so much as the prospect of small children in church (assuming there might be some) lisping innocently to a hapless parent, ‘Mummy, what does circumcised mean?’ However, our Lord’s de-foreskinification did happen (Luke 2.21), and at least the Anglican Church seems actually to be less reluctant to face the fact than our Roman brethren are, or were in 1969 anyway. 

Over on LiberFaciorum a friend-of-a-friend commented on this that ‘Our Lord must shake his head in bemusement at us all’. My question in reply of ‘What does he know about it?’ was only half-facetious. These feasts, fasts and seasons are all means by which we limited human beings encounter, understand and appropriate the unfolding mystery which is Him, and I imagine he is more than content to let us work out for ourselves what best achieves it. What we choose to do with this particular day depends entirely on what signals we might want to send about how we think of ourselves and the Christian communities we are part of. Now, I am no great Marian, and I think Our Lady is a retiring character anyway, surely as satisfied as I am without yet another feast day in addition to her Annunciation, her Dormition, Conception, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, all those peculiar Roman Catholic ones, and, my personal favourite, Our Lady of the Snows on August 5^th (inconveniently for Anglicans, St Oswald’s Day as well). The inescapable carnality of the Circumcision positively forces people to face up to things about Jesus I think they may sooner not, and so is worth it for that.

Swanvale Halt Ecouerée

There was once a Lebanese rapper who went by the name of Clotaire K: I am no fan generally of that genre but liked a couple of his tracks I heard John Peel playing in the early 2000s. French is an ideal language for rap, lending the fundamental daftness of the form a profundity by its unfamiliar distance: it may sound less impressive if you actually are French, of course. Clotaire K combined rap and the French tongue with a variety of (literally) Arabesque touches which added up to something quite beguiling. ‘Beyrouth Ecouerée’, one of the tracks was called, ‘Beirut made sick’, but literally ‘de-hearted’: a reminder of the days when that once-grand city and its long, gradual disintegration was at the centre of the world’s concerns, a time which seems a long way away now. It was a startling image.

As buses trundled out of East Aleppo evacuating those who wanted to leave I thought of ‘Beyrouth Ecouerée’ on my way down the hill to church, just before Christmas. The buildings of this parish are so familiar to me. It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to imagine mortar shells and bombs falling here, blowing them to bits, eviscerating a community and the familiar signs and marks by which it understands itself: there goes the butcher’s, the old cottage opposite the cul-de-sac, the railway station, the church. Or the children at the centre of it, not just general, abstract children but real ones, the ones I know from the Infants School and elsewhere, maimed and damaged by mines and bullets and rushed to the Royal Surrey Hospital, a hospital made chaotic and dangerous as bombs fall around it, too. The children here are not that much different from the ones there. Swanvale Halt with its heart cut out. Or anywhere, it could be.

Of course Beirut, once as much a byword for horror and destruction as Aleppo is now, is doing OK these days, a place where people flee to rather than away from. A heart refound. Happy New Year. 

New Year's Eve

We were determined to drag ourselves to the capital for Reptile's New Year's Eve party, as for residents living out beyond the suburbs it's the only night when one can stay late and still catch a train home before the following Sunday morning. It's also the night when Reptile takes over the whole of the Minories premises and the Goths can spread out in leisurely but obviously still pestilential fashion into the other half of the pub with its congenial cages and cubbyholes. For some reason there was a strange undercurrent of discomfort which several people remarked on. Apparently there was some kind of tantrum later in the evening after we left; the fire alarms went off at one point; and one friend remarked on the difficulties presented by having to wade through shoals of bustles to reach the bar. I put it down to the event being remarkably busy making it therefore harder to move around, to see, and to hear anyone even than it usually is.

'You could tell who were the regulars and who was there just for New Year', it was said, the line being between those who came wearing 'meringues' and those in more sensible attire. 'Goth does have an element of panto' commented another person, 'which is why I don't have anything to do with it any more'. Yes, it does indeed, and the dividing line, I prefer to think, is not to be found between this or that style or elaboration of dress or between people who are or aren't club regulars, but between knowing that it is panto and not realising the fact. And beneath the fanfalou and folderol of pantomime, remember, there are matters of deadly seriousness - and that juxtaposition is exactly what makes Goth both terribly amusing and quite interesting, quite apart from the pleasant individuals one might meet there.

We left the Minories at about 1.30 and fought our way through the Tube, out and into the one-way system which operates around Waterloo on New Year's Eve. This is the third year I have done this, and the route seems to grow more extensive each time. I could hardly believe it when, funnelled with the thousands of other lost souls stumbling through increasingly rain- and wind-lashed Southwark streets not quite knowing where we all were, I saw a sign pointing towards Blackfriars Station which we'd passed through about forty minutes before; we should have got out then. We must have walked for over a mile, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds began much earlier than last year. Arriving at Waterloo just before 3am only to find there was no 3am train to Guildford after all, we 'enjoyed' a bagel and execrable tea from one of the station outlets before spotting a train scheduled to leave, apparently, at 3.35 - a horrible, raucous, weary train as it happened, and one which meant getting back in to the rectory at 5, strongly suspecting that alternative plans may be made for next year.