Tech Milestone

There was a baptism at Swanvale Halt church on Sunday, the younger daughter of a family whose older child was baptised a few years ago. She is already 3 and a bit, and missed out her original baptism date because of the pandemic. She took it all very seriously.

One of her godmothers gave a reading, as families occasionally do. 'Remind me what it is', I said to the little girl's parents before we started: 'ChatGPT wrote it', they told me. This is the first time this has happened here, at any rate. It was wordy and repetitious, though no worse than anything else a family might look up online and then adopt for their own use. Had it been me I would have cut it down a bit. What surprised me was that, in contrast to the absolutely vapid stuff I've read in various places that's very clearly AI-generated, it did have some content, talking about the 'limitless possibilities' ahead of little Amelia. Was that the brief they gave the system, or did it lift that from somewhere else? I can see that this might be very helpful for people who are not used to articulating their own thoughts and writing them down (and that means most of us) but ultimately it might be better if they did. 

You Cannot Go Back

During the pandemic I was able to book an appointment with my GP via their online system and I assumed that would be the same today. Not so: the sequence went as follows, more or less:

  - The GP's website relocates me to Patient Access

  - Patient Access tells me I do not have a GP registered on my account

  - Having selected my GP I must now prove my identity and I am relocated to NHS Login

  - My first photograph of my driving licence is unacceptable

  - My second photograph, exactly the same as the first, is acceptable

  - My face must be scanned to make sure it's the same as the person on the driving licence

  - It doesn't seem to be similar enough no matter the angle or arrangement of spectacles

  - I am offered the chance to record a video of my face instead, during which recording I have to repeat a code of four numbers

  - Despite making sure NHS Login can access my laptop camera, the video doesn't work

  - It is made very clear that I can't go back and try another driving licence photo

  - I give up and in the afternoon visit my GP so I can be issued with an access code

I suppose such obstacles are one way of putting people off making appointments!

Hearing is Believing

Once a year, the church I used to worship at in Chatham was graced by the presence of the Guild of the Servants of the Sanctuary ('Oooh, the Serpents!' I can hear Father Barkley declaring) who held an elaborate mass at which something always went ludicrously wrong. One year, it was the thurifer banging the thurible into the pulpit to the accompaniment of sparks and scattered charcoal; and another, it was music coming mysteriously over the sound system because it had somehow connected with the radio. In my memory I have turned this into the theme tune from The Archers but sadly I think this is a false recollection. That would have been even funnier.

I have had to battle with audio systems too. At Lamford I was always getting nasty crackling interference: Il Rettore maintained it was due to my insistence on wearing a trad cassock-and-alb, too many layers mucking up the signal, while Dr Bones argued it was the Devil trying to stop my sermons being heard. I was not completely sold on either explanation, I must admit.

Here in Swanvale Halt we sometimes get a horrendous rasping buzz which comes out of the speakers at the worst possible moment in a service and makes everyone gasp: it's a wonder nobody has ever gone into cardiac arrest (at least, not because of that). The company who installed our sound system can never identify any cause, of course: my car mechanic Dad always said the words any engineer dreaded most were 'intermittent fault', and I suppose sound technicians are no different. But it only seems to happen on weekdays, leading to the suspicion that somewhere nearby in a shop or something is a bit of kit that interferes with our system, which on Sundays is turned safely off. 

This Sunday the sound wasn't working at all. I flicked the mute switch on my mic set on and off, checked the little set of lights stationed high up in the rafters, and during the Gloria at the 8am nipped back into the Vestry to cast an eye quickly over the audio system, but nothing happened. For some reason any problem with the sound system makes me unspeakably anxious, and I find myself concentrating less on what I'm saying in the Mass than the way I am saying it, having to project and enunciate to maximise the chances of people hearing. It's massively distracting, and I am not really sure why I find it so distracting. It turned out that a crucial switch obscured by the edge of the cupboard holding all the kit in the vestry had been turned off when the PAT testing was done this week. 

Another little aspect of church life that you don't get warned about at theological college!

Distance Learning

One of the few boons of the pandemic period was that we all became accustomed to online meetings. Although they are, in form, horrible, they can sometimes be a great mercy: you don't have to drag yourself to a distant venue with all the palaver that entails, especially when rail strikes mean the alternative is driving to Woking, dumping the car somewhere, and sitting in a bleak independent church for an hour listening to the speakers at the Bishop's Study Morning. Had I been at home on my own with all the proceedings beamed in on my laptop I would have got on with some sewing, but, as it turned out, going to the neighbouring parish of Tunfield and sitting in Fr Jonathan's ancient church with him and retired SSM Jean in front of his laptop wasn't all that bad. 

The theme was 'Leadership and the Abuse of Power'. The first speaker, Debbie Sellin, used to be an incumbent in Guildford Diocese, but is now Bishop of Southampton and in fact Acting Diocesan Bishop for Winchester after the forced resignation of Bishop Tim Dakin. Frustratingly, if understandably, she wouldn't say anything about that. Nor would the next speaker up, Marion Peters, talk in any detail about her experience of 'spiritual abuse', just her reaction to it and what it felt like to be a victim. Finally our own Bishop Andrew came on to talk about Christian leadership styles with the aid of pictures of gardens. It was all completely irrelevant until the very last couple of minutes, when he mentioned accountability mechanisms, before running off the platform so that, we all agreed, the Director of Mission couldn't pray for him as he had for the other speakers before and after they spoke. Can't we give the Lord an occasional rest from our jabbering? 

I, Jonathan and Jean agreed three things. Firstly, and positively, it was remarkable that the Church was even dealing with this subject in such explicit terms: we couldn't imagine it being done even ten years ago. Secondly (and less positively), we noted the the focus on experience rather than theology which does seem to epitomise the approach of the Church to a whole variety of issues currently. Thirdly (and linked to the second point), there was very little analysis, and therefore very little advice. We thought it would have been good to have a psychologist, or a management consultant, to talk about exactly why and how abuses of power happen in church contexts, and what might be done about them. Instead - as the Church seems reluctant to draw on the insights of anything outside itself - the only advice we got was 'be more like Jesus', which is pretty useless as advice goes: we know that, thank you.

Unbeknownst to him, Bishop Andrew had already provided us with the high point of the event before he even began his talk by saying, invisibly and therefore completely out of context, 'I can never remember which way up these things go'.

Remote Access

Pastoral Assistant and local councillor Paula and her husband Pete are on holiday in Jamaica at the moment, and sent me this snap of their laptop and screen set up to join in with Compline over Zoom yesterday evening, while the blue sea ripples outside the window. It was a bit odd, for them, to be celebrating the Night Office of Prayer at 1.30 in the afternoon, but still.

This was really how I intended the online Compline to work, building on the experience of the pandemic and other, more sophisticated churches than ours, and of our former curate Marion’s son who became part of an online community of Christian teenagers that worked very well. But it hasn’t really achieved that. It’s rare that anyone, like Paula and Pete, joins in who hasn’t been in church already that day (sometimes more than once), so it is less outreach, or an alternative for people who can’t get to church physically, than yet another addition to the liturgical diet for those who already have plenty going on. My only attempt to use Facebook Live for Compline during the lockdown, as several colleagues were, was a bit rough, but had a lot of people joining in: I migrated to Zoom as everyone with a computer can access that, and Facebook is more limited, but the online Compline isn’t doing what I wanted it to. It’s been suggested that a weekday evening might be better. Certainly what I didn’t expect was to get down to the church at 7pm and find verger Rick there. I haven’t asked him yet whether he specifically came in order to take part in the service, which is completely the opposite of the point of it!

Power to the Laypeople

We weren’t sure whether Paula’s licence as Pastoral Assistant had expired, and it took ages before I was able to find someone at Church House who could tell me. Pastoral Assistant, it turned out, was no longer a licenced role: we should have had a letter from Bishop Jo about it at the end of 2019. Neither I nor any of the three people in the parish with PA licences could remember getting a letter from Bishop Jo, but fair enough. PAs were now PAs as long as they and their incumbent wanted them to be.

But that wasn’t, it seems, a one-off: the Diocese is completely changing the ‘Lay Training Pathway’, as I was told in a meeting on Tuesday. Once upon a time, Pastoral Assistants, Occasional Preachers and Worship Leaders were all trained centrally, on their own specific courses, and either ‘locally recognised’, ‘centrally authorised’ or ‘episcopally licenced’; now the intention is simply to let parishes get on with it in all these three areas and if people want to have any training they can take part in the relevant modules of the Local Ministry Programme, the training schedule for priests and deacons. When Sylv, the most active of our PAs within the church, did her lengthy and demanding course, she came out of it with an obvious sense of confidence and of being equipped for what she wanted to do, so it was worthwhile in her case, but the diocese maintains a lot of potential PAs are put off by the training and what they want to do is ‘empower the laity’. Mind you, they also want to avoid the situation where a church has half-a-dozen Occasional Preachers all stabbing their diocesan paper of authorisation with a forefinger and demanding their full entitlement of five sermons a year or whatever. I was baffled by the distinction between the new ‘Lay Pastoral Visitors’ and the old ‘Pastoral Assistants’ who have ‘done more training’, when you would that thought that the training was tailored to the role rather than determining what role you have. Oh well. A liturgical church is less likely to need ‘worship leaders’, and as for Occasional Preachers I allowed local teacher Tim to occupy the pulpit (if we had a pulpit) without a demur as I was sure he wouldn’t preach heresy or upset people too much. I’ve always thought I could do what I wanted in that respect anyway.

I had to explain that I was keeping myself muted because there was off-screen noise at my end, but I didn’t explain the noise in question was an online seminar on another screen with Professor Ronald Hutton talking about the contribution of occultists Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente to modern paganism. I think I managed to get the gist of both, but it was a close-run thing, I can tell you. 

Geeks Bearing Gifts

A book I have ordered seems to have gone astray, and when this little package turned up yesterday I was momentarily excited until I realised it was much too small for what I was expecting. Instead the mailing came from ChurchSuite, a company that runs a church-management software package that we don't use, and contained, as you can see, a bar of Green & Black's chocolate, which as it happens I rather like. As an attempt to capture my attention it definitely worked, but didn't have what I imagine was the intended result. Instead it made me feel very uncomfortable. I haven't done anything to deserve this bar of chocolate. How many were ChurchSuite sending out to random parish incumbents? How much profit do they make to enable them to engage in a marketing exercise like this? These sweets, as I know well, usually cost £2.20 from Messrs Waitrose & Sons (unless they're on offer).

I gave my chocolate to Rick the Verger, who had fewer qualms about it. It hasn't made me any more likely to spend a lot of the church's money on ChurchSuite.

Radical Traditionalism

'You know I don't go in for liturgy,' Emily wrote in an email, 'so I don't know why it's Compline that gets to me'. Emily turned up with her mum (all the way from South Wales in her case!) at our first Zoom Compline on Sunday evening. As I may have mentioned I have fought shy of simply shoving our ordinary worship online once the progress of the pandemic allowed us to meet in person again, partly because our kit isn't very good, partly because a standard Parish Eucharist isn't really a very involving business if you're watching it on a screen, and partly because I don't want it to get into people's heads that online worship is any replacement for the real thing, the real thing being Christians actually being in the same place where they stand a chance of forming relationships that lead them on in their spiritual lives. But I still felt I wanted to do something that allowed those at a far distance to access our worshipping life. Compline, the Night Office, once a month seemed an ideal thing to try.

And so I sat in the Lady Chapel with a candelabra lit having put the link and an order of service on the website. There were seven of us in the end, which I thought was fine. I greeted everyone and then muted them: my experience is that online worship where you can hear everyone else is horrendous as attempts to speak in unison inevitably mean the pace gets slower and slower until you can't see how you're actually managing to move forward at all. There was a space for people to chip in with their own prayers, but nobody did (perhaps they will eventually). We sang Te Lucis Ante Terminum, the antiphon and Nunc Dimittis - at least, I did, I don't know what everyone else did - and at the end I snuffed the candles: 'very evocative!' Emily reported. 

Apart from practicalities such as trying to read and simultaneously keep an eye on the Participants list for stragglers, and having the camera elsewhere than my computer screen, there was one unanticipated issue. As Compline is the conclusion of the liturgical day, worshippers are supposed to leave in virtual silence; but in our online lives since March 2020 we have begun accustomed to waving goodbye to each other as we leave a meeting, to the extent that not to do so feels strangely uncomfortable and rude. Worshippers physically in the Lady Chapel wouldn't have felt the need to wave to each other, but that is now an engrained part of our social etiquette, and so should probably be retained!

Invasive Tech

The picture of the church's livestream this morning was much improved on what I was able to achieve using my phone, and the sound was appreciably better thanks to the new microphone. Rejigging the signal meant there were no glitches or drop-outs, so it looks as though we've got this sorted now. The mike made its presence known by insisting on appearing in frame, as you can see bottom left. Just as well I don't work for the BBC.

I realised that there are now two lights in the church I instinctively check are on: the white light flickering in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and the blue light flickering on the blessed wi-fi booster.

It All Becomes Clear

My grapplings with technology are a minor theme of this blog and last year I related how my main image-processing program, CorelDraw, decided that it was no longer prepared to speak to Windows 10 and I would have to bring in its younger cousin which was better equipped for the system's new demands. 

I mentioned this to Dave, the Diocesan Mission Enabler, a few weeks ago. Our conversation was one of the earlier ones he had with parish incumbents, calling round to find out how things were going. It was a congenial enough chat, in which I described how the life of the church had developed since the pandemic began, the mixture of remote and in-person worship (when that was possible) and the sense that for a long while people had really been just hanging on and coping, but since the summer had gradually been finding it easier to manage again, negotiating their way around the maelstrom of change.

Some while later Dave sent me an email letting me know about an alternative to CorelDraw, Canva. 'Lots of churches use it', he told me. Canva turned out to be an online image-processing and design package, which is all very well but as your designs and documents are pinged into The Cloud to be stored (though you can download them) and I've already paid not only through the nose but other orifices for it, Canva doesn't bring me much advantage.

Lots of churches do use it, though. I suddenly realised that all the wonderful shiny posters and fliers I've seen on church websites, noticeboards and leaflet holders look so professional not because they've been designed by members of congregations up and down the diocese who work in advertising or something, but because they've been based on the templates Canva supplies. I'm not sure whether my feelings of relief at not being so inferior after all are outweighed by the sense that it's a bit of a cheat ...

Epiphany 2021

My first Epiphany in Swanvale Halt was celebrated in snow and ice; I would happily have swapped the pandemic conditions of 2021 for that. But ten of us managed to meet and celebrate, and pray especially for our Orthodox friends who keep January 6th as a higher and holier festival than December 25th.

I experimented with using my new laptop to record, and in fact livestream, the service - not that I told anyone else that it was being beamed onto Youtube! It worked, but the sound was muddy and the video indistinct. I have asked my friend Cara the vicar of Emwood's husband for advice as he is a wiz with these things and he has recommended a nice neat webcam which I think I may well ask the diocese for help with buying, given the price. Oh, nothing about this is easy.

As is customary (here, anyway), chalk was blessed and taken home to mark our door lintels, or anywhere else suitable. 'Mine are all white plastic', Martha from the flats next to the church told me. 'I'll have to be creative.'

Wrestling with the Digital World

'The problem is with this unit', said the man from the security company to myself and Hannah the churchwarden yesterday morning, tapping the newly-installed bit of kit, 'and what's happening is that custard flapdoodle velveteen theodolite round the back of the ionised abalone'. At least he might as well have done. The take-away message was that our long-awaited CCTV system wasn't going to work because one of the components had been supplied with a fault and would have to be replaced. He'd put in an order the moment he got back to the office, he promised. And after that he was going on holiday.

In a similar vein, several years ago we ran a short course for people interested in finding out more about Christianity. I didn't want to do what Alpha or even Emmaus did and try to impart a short version of what Christians are supposed to believe, but rather examine what it was like to be a Christian, to share experience in an effort to encourage understanding as much as anyone else. I did a couple of sessions and Marion the curate and Lillian the lay reader did one each. We had a sole, single attender. She became a Christian, though: 100% success rate, suck on that, Nicky Gumbel. 

Under the current restrictions I had the idea of perhaps adapting these sessions into video form so they could be used remotely, a first step towards online evangelism. Somehow I managed to find out that Powerpoint presentations could be converted into videos: and thus an adventure began. Powerpoint shows themselves provoke no fear in me but when I came to try to record audio and timings things got more complex. I found out how to play a single audio file all the way through the slideshow. At first I got hideous echoes rendering the audio unlistenable, then kept erasing the timings. I copied and recopied, recorded and re-recorded a slideshow using a variety of formats and methods, and found the apparent length of the show stretching when it was converted into a video, as though there was a law of relativity governing the nature of time which applied in this circumstance and which had remained unknown to Einstein, unsurprisingly as he didn't have Powerpoint, or indeed any Microsoft application. The diocesan evangelism advisor told me you can use Zoom to record slideshows (why not, as Zoom does everything else) and that seemed to offer a way forward, but try as I might I couldn't get the audio and the visual to marry up.

I suspect at the root of the matter is the antiquity of my laptop which probably has to be replaced: as so much of our lives has moved online over recent months, its limitations have been revealed in distressing detail. Finally, and in some despair, I split the audio up into chunks to be started at different points in the slideshow, and that seems to work, producing something which is basically watchable. Whether I'll be able to remember what I did to get there is another matter.

People will advise me on the best way of achieving this: you are kind. But refrain, as I don't think I can bear it ...

Distant Remembrance

 

I'm often very thankful that our War Memorial is inside the church and not in a chilly churchyard, or indeed at some distance. Today Rick the verger set the church up for a short Act of Remembrance which I could record for virtual use. Dean our Treasurer plays the trumpet and had recorded a faultless version of the Last Post & Reveille (with two minutes' silence in between to make it even easier for me) which I was able to team up with a generic recording of 'Nimrod' and 'O God our Help' on the organ, all played off my computer and routed through the church sound system, such as it is. It all worked perfectly and was very dignified, not that it's hard to be dignified if there's nobody else there. 

And then I discovered my phone had slipped and the Memorial and everything else was filmed at a positively Caligari-ish angle, so I had to do it all over again at 11.15. Don't tell anyone.

Life and Stories

What is James Blandford doing these days? I can't find out, not that I am inclined to spend much time trying. I've always resented the fact that the only sustained piece of prose written about my great idol PJ Harvey is, as I think of it, so substandard. Published in 2004 with a slightly updated edition in 2006 (PJH produced a new album in between the two), Siren Rising does its best to offend anyone from Dorset from the get-go, and, while it's as comprehensive as anyone could have managed at the time, you don't the impression that the author is doing it for love. By the end it's very much Polly-by-numbers: in August she went here, 'September saw her doing that', and so on. He wrote a biography of Britney Spears a couple of years before (now, if he'd taken on Diamanda Galás, that would have been more of a challenge). Now and again fans plead for an updated biography of Harvey: but not by Mr Blandford, please!

During the current restrictions I decided to write my own account of the maestra. Now, over the last couple of years we have seen something of a mild lifting of the omerta which has shielded her life for so long; we all suspect that Island Records demanded she start an Instagram account and post personal playlists on Spotify as a quid pro quo for doing no interviews at all to promote The Hope Six Demolition Project (apart from two sentences exchanged with Andrew Marr on BBC TV one Sunday morning). But, miraculously, PJH seems to have got into it, posting on Instagram some lovely self-mocking images during the tour and some much more revealing ones around the time of her 50th birthday in October and afterwards. As well as this, the unimaginable expansion of the internet since 2004 has made it perfectly possible to write a respectable nearly 100,000 words without having to visit a single library, so it was an easy lockdown and nearly-lockdown project. Yesterday I printed it all off and popped it into a ring-binder. Of course, I will never do anything with it, and I will ask you, gentle readers, to keep it to yourselves; even though every word in it is derived from material in the public realm, its subject would not be happy and I still cherish fantasies of bumping into her one day at St Catherine's Chapel, or a second-hand bookshop in Bridport, without too much guilt. I might let loose a reflection or two from it, but that will be all.

The exercise has taught me a number of things. Firstly, aside from my parochial duties it does me good to write history in some shape or form, and I should build that into my life. Secondly, it won't be biography. If concentrating even on someone I love and respect was maddeningly dull at times I will not want to go in that particular historiographical direction again. Thirdly, I discovered, much to my mortification, that two of my favourite PJH stories were actually the result of me conflating in my memory entirely separate incidents and therefore were entirely fictitious, or at least half-fictitious. How did I manage that? Beware the same trap, brethren, beware.

You Have Encountered an Irretrievable Error

Telling the tale more often won't make it any the less true, though I suspect that buried at the back of my mind is the thought it might. 

Over the last few days I've been doing reasonably well in my aim to turn the computer off before 11pm. Last night I thought I would do one more job, watch twenty minutes of the film I've got on the go, and then power down (myself as well as the machine). But the job proved impossible as Word wouldn't open. Very soon I discovered that no Microsoft product on my computer would open. 

As my renewed credit card had only just arrived I wondered whether having the old details would have invalidated my Microsoft account all of a sudden. Even validating the new card wasn't straightforward: the bank website wouldn't 'recognise the card', though the automated phone line did. But it made no difference. 

'Repair the application', suggested a help forum. I tried, and that didn't work either. Finally I surrendered to uninstalling and re-installing the whole Microsoft Office suite. That was no swift process, and was still going on near 1am, at which point I left it to its own devices. In the course of this, I'd managed to sit on my glasses - the pair I'd only had two months - and snap an arm. 

This morning Office was reinstalled, in a vile new version. That seemed like the end of the affair - until I tried to edit a photo in Corel PhotoPaint. That didn't work either. At the end of a long process involving various Corel Corporation employees I concluded that I will need the new version of what I already had. Corel has reorganised its products recently, and it will cost over £300. Ow.

Grappling with technology sends me into a tailspin. I can never get used to the fact that it takes ages and ages to do anything, and things happen apparently for no reason. The amateur is left powerless looking at a screen which appears to be doing nothing, and this amateur, at any rate, pleads, cajoles, and weeps absurdly at an indifferent machine. Once upon a time I would get Ms Formerly Aldgate to deal with this as she never seemed to be fazed at all, but this is no longer an option. Admirably she viewed new technology and even new versions of the old technology, produced by the children at Microsoft paid well to fiddle and noodle with code, as an opportunity for learning, whereas I see it as a potential abyss into which all my efforts and endeavours are about to be sunk.

The new Office doesn't allow me to turn off email notifications jabbing into my side, metaphorically, from the right of the screen. That tells you all you need to know!

Battling with the Tech

Ascension Day is one of the occasions in the year when Churches Together in Hornington & District tries to hold a joint service. This year I and the Roman Catholic priest were going to do Evensong & Benediction together but this being impossible it was suggested we hold Compline over Zoom. My heart sank a bit.

In fact although I was leading the service someone far more technologically literate from the RC congregation set it all up. I think the main problem I have with liturgy done via Zoom is the claustrophobic feel it has - in real life you are not quite so close to your fellow worshippers. Until the time for interaction comes, I don't really want to look at them: it's quite enough to know they're there. Christian communities always face the hazard of turning in on themselves and liturgy over Zoom can mark another step in that direction, shifting the balance from community being the context in which worship happens to worship becoming the language in which community is expressed. (We will leave aside how far this is genuine community: I am coming to the conclusion that 'if you can turn it off, it's not Church').

However you can avert most of this by the simple expedient of showing something other than lots of people's faces, or even the face of the person leading (mine doesn't appear on the photo here). For Compline we displayed a copy of the liturgy so people could follow it. How many warbled their way through Te Ante Lucis Terminum along with me I don't know, given that they were muted. I was far too busy coping with the Catholic lady who was reading the responses and alternate psalm verses for the benefit of the congregation. She was uncomfortably slow for my tastes, but I slowed down to try to shadow her. Then it occurred to me that she was in turn slowing down even further to coincide with me. It was like a liturgical slow bicycle ride. 

Cri de Coeur

After conducting a funeral earlier today, I'm not as miserable as I was at the start of the day; but though I joke to colleagues about having episodes where I feel 'everything I do is pointless, I'm going into the garden to eat worms', and much as I know those feelings existed long before the Current Crisis, our conditions don't help. 

Yesterday involved too many encounters with technology. A Deanery meeting over Zoom was followed by two Microsoft Teams gatherings in the evening. I thought I left myself ample time to get into the Infants School governors' meeting, but managed to join for thirty seconds before the computer froze completely. It took more than 25 minutes to gain access again; I think it had something to do with being offered two separate methods of opening Teams and picking at first both, then the wrong one. The wrong one for the school meetings seems to be the right one for the Air Cadets. My computer is probably too elderly to cope with this as effectively as it should.

But not as elderly as ex-Lay Reader Lillian's: she still operates in Windows 8 and asking her to record a Bible reading for this week's audio service turned out more problematic than it seemed. In the end I went down the hill and handed my laptop to her through the doorway so she could record her bit and then give back to me. 

I have tried to work out how to link my phone to Facebook Live, and failed. On my own, I gave up when the Motorola website advised 'to proceed with this you must enable Feature X' and presented me with a link; clicked on, the link took me to a page which informed me 'Feature X is not available'. Dr Bones tried to help, but for whatever reason the features she can see on her phone don't appear on mine. 

Other churches stage massive Zoom services and this and that. Some of my colleagues post photos online showing how they've managed to mock up the Sacre-Coeur in their spare bedrooms and got twenty thousand hits every time they post videos of themselves saying Vespers. Fr Thesis operates a food bank from his church and has been recording Youtube assemblies for his parish school. Fr Donald at Elmham has conducted six COVID-related funerals. Alice Whalley has written in the Church Times about dealing with the flow of needy people arriving on her London vicarage doorstep 'because they didn't know where else to turn', while she hands out food, tops up phones, and re-bandages an ulcerous leg. 

In my ten years here, I have had precisely one person turn up unexpectedly on the doorstep asking for help with food. Since lockdown began, I've offered to help at the school and been told it's not necessary; have asked whether they need extra assistance at the food bank and was informed they're fine, thank you; and responded to the diocese's appeal for temporary hospital chaplains only to hear nothing back after submitting my details. I suppose I shouldn't complain - but, reprehensibly, I do!

Open and Shut

Living a 'convenient' distance from Swanvale Halt church, there was never a question of me continuing to go there to hold any kind of service, even on my own, once public worship was suspended in Anglican churches, so it's not an issue in which I have any direct interest. I did note the diversity of practice. Once upon a time I and Dr Bones went to a dinner with two congregants in Lamford also attended by James Langstaff, who is currently Bishop of Rochester, and was then Suffragan Bishop of Kings Lynn. He seemed a modest and amusing soul. I wonder what's happened to him in the intervening fourteen years, because as soon as the ban came in he wrote to his priests saying that if they so much as went in their churches they'd be subject to the Clergy Discipline Measure. Why did he feel he had to state that? Meanwhile, in London, Bishop Sarah Mullally was allowing clergy to hold solitary services in churches provided they lived adjoining them, or didn't have to enter any public area to get to them, but last weekend she'd reversed that, clearly lent on by Archbishop Justin Welby for not toeing the line. The whole argument is mystifying, except that it presumably reflects prejudices on both sides. Clergy and bishops don't always trust each other, and in a relationship of mistrust any stress opens up the basic rift. Bishops expect to be defied by resentful clergy, and clergy expect to be ordered about by mean-minded bishops. Each provokes the behaviour they anticipate. But I do find it depressing that, given all the things he could have spoken about in these trying times, Justin Welby chooses to take to Youtube to denounce his priests for not doing as they're told. You don't find the Pope doing that; Pope Francis stands in an empty St Peter's and lifts a monstrance to bless the sorrowing World for which Jesus died. No wonder Lambeth Palace disabled the comments. 

I think some of my spiky colleagues have taken to the missa solitaria rather too readily (no pesky laypeople around!), but equally I don't like the sense that others (perhaps many bishops) are secretly enjoying the spurious sense of pioneer edginess that comes from holding services via Zoom and so forth, and allowing themselves to imagine that this is maybe superior to a collection of often elderly people meeting together in a draughty old building. It isn't. 'Church' involves real, embodied human beings, and when they can't meet, the Body of Christ is sundered. 

This morning I took part in the Chrism Mass which the Bishop of Dorking broadcast from her front room. All very well, and as I had the order of service on my screen and so could only hear the audio it was actually less distracting than having lots of other clergy around me. But it wasn't the real thing. Even though the Chrism Mass is one of my least favourite occasions in the year, and this morning I didn't have to make my way to the cathedral, find a seat or put up with my brethren for an hour and a half, I'd rather have done that. Moving worship by preference to the digital realm is a sort of capitulation to the age-old human fantasy of disposing of our inconvenient bodies, which is surfacing once again in the transhuman movement and with which Christianity should really not have anything to do.

I have felt very out of sorts the last day or two, but we'll leave that for another time. In fact a phone call to Dr Bones cheered me up. She has been attending virtual services at St Aldates in Oxford and finding it much more congenial than the days when she used to go there in person. 'Nobody trying to touch me, no having to look at anyone,' she enthused. 'Yes', I said, 'though there's a real service you can go to which is just like that, in most churches it's called the 8am'. 'Our local church has just got a new vicar, and I've found her online services,' went on the Dr, 'it's great, when she gets annoying I can just turn her off.' True, you can't do that at an 8am.

Remote Access

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were certain areas of our computers where very few of us had ever been; under the stresses of the times intrepid souls have ventured into those unfamiliar hinterlands and have discovered - Microsoft Teams. From never having participated in anything of the kind before, yesterday I attended two meetings via Teams in the evening. I couldn't get the program to recognise my computer's camera, which seems thoroughly suspicious but appears to be due to a box not being ticked on the Teams website. The school governors' meeting was calm and orderly, marshalled by the school secretary who'd worked out how to manage the program and then tutored individually those of us who were a bit clueless; the ATC committee meeting, in contrast, was chaotic as nobody knew quite what to do and everybody kept playing with the format. It was a bit like watching attenders at the Toddler Group battling over a favoured toy.

I could have attended a third meeting had I had the will, of the management board of our local ecumenical Christian youth work charity. That wasn't carried out via Microsoft Teams but Zoom, another application people have only just discovered. Unfortunately - having just mentioned the Toddler Group - I can't get out of my head one of the songs we customarily sing, 'Zoom zoom zoom, we're going to the Moon.' And now, friends, if you are familiar with that lyric, neither can you.

Virtual Reality and the Real

Many clergy confined to vicarages or just unable to meet their parishioners as they usually would are taking to livestreaming private masses and Compline and recitals of the Office. I am so far sparing the good people of Swanvale Halt the same. When I say the Office on my own I make so many mistakes I wouldn't want anyone to share it. Today I discovered at Evening Prayer that at Morning Prayer I'd read the Lectionary wrong and used the bits and pieces for Saturday's observance of Bd Thomas Cranmer (hem-hem) instead of St Cuthbert, as it should have been. Wrong psalm, the lot. I'm experimenting with recording something in the audio field, though, replacing our weekly newsletter and Sunday mass with a read version which I can send out by email and pop on the website (a podcast!!). 

The rhythm of Christian prayer affects not just the day, or the week, but the whole year. Holy Week and Easter will be very strange in 2020, etiolated and wan, a dim flickering light instead of the climactic outburst of joy which it should be. But then it has been that before, in different times and places, if not for us these last decades. Anything we can do to tend that flame is worthwhile.

It's not just the Church, of course. I was invited yesterday to a virtual Goth club being run by a German DJ, although I only made it through the door for the last two tracks; it'll be run again next week, all being well. It's called Isolation. 

I benefit from my garden, as I've said. This afternoon I went on a journey of five circuits as the wind strafed across the mossy grass, through the arch with the vine waiting to bud, past the Shrine of Bacchus and round by Melpomene and the Grotto, then up the path overlooked by the Philosopher's Seat, past the Armillary Sphere by the little area of woodland, across the main lawn with its damson and apple tree and the Temple of Reason to one side, skirting the Maze and into the little dell which the eucalyptus used to shade, and down the steps by the pond and Diana the Huntress to the start again. Right down near the front of the house, below the Secret Garden and Lady Julia's Bower, I found these lovely violets just poking above the soil. This is where the cats normally come and poo so I hope the little blighters have found somewhere else.