Travel Mode

It would have been nice to have gone to Robbie and Freida's housewarming, but it was in Bedfordshire and the rail strikes made the whole thing rather inconvenient. I could still have battled my way round the M25 for a couple of hours, but others such as MaisyMaid, Lady Wildwood and Ms Mauritia didn't have that option; Her Ladyship lives not far away, so I could conceivably have given her a lift, but the others have to come from central London. Had they been able to go, I would have braced myself for the drive; had they not but had the trains been running anyway, I would have got there that way. The combination of both, however, meant I elected to stay home. 

When my current vehicle gives up, I'll probably replace it with an electric car, but I'm not quite confident of the charging network and technological efficiency yet, and so for now I try to avoid driving if I can. Yesterday morning Churches Together had a Prayer Breakfast at the Baptist Church in Midbury, and I thought that really I ought to cycle there if I could. It's only about 3 1/2 miles and should take about twenty minutes. They turned out to be twenty long and arduous minutes although, as is curiously common, the return journey was noticeably less trying. Ironically as I wasn't going to Robbie and Freida's after all I used part of the time by taking some trash to the tip, which journey takes me along exactly the same route I'd done on two wheels earlier in the day.

I have a lot of driving to do next week, when I am off, popping down to Dorset and hopefully to Cambridgeshire. I'd rather go there on the train, but even though the Tube strikes have been called off the journey turns out to be off-puttingly expensive. A visit to Oxford looks feasible, though, although as the line down from Swanvale Halt is closed due to engineering works I'll have to go to the next station to catch it. I ought to cycle there, I suppose.

A Brief Visit

A familiar kind of encounter for me yesterday with a longstanding member of the church who, to all appearances, is about to leave this world behind. I zoomed over to the hospital in between a ministers' lunch and a virtual meeting to make certain I had a few minutes, at least, with Derek, former churchwarden and many other things. He and his wife had only just moved into a local care home when he had a cardiac arrest and ended up in hospital being told off for not eating food he has no inclination to eat. 'I go to sleep and each time I wake up - well, I don't need to tell you,' he said. 'I wish that clock wasn't right opposite my bed'. It isn't lack of faith, as Derek's thankfully remains intact, but he is very, very tired and knowing that his wife is being looked after relieves him of any anxiety to linger longer than he needs. This sounds like a bit of a grim encounter, but it wasn't: 'I've got a lot to be thankful for', Derek told me, 'All those years as a lay pastoral assistant. It was a great privilege. They were good times'.

I say I zoomed over to the hospital, but my zooming concluded with twenty minutes of crawling round the car park trying to find a space. As the line of vehicles ahead of mine didn't decrease with time, but rather extended, I realised I was going to be unlucky, and parked at the cathedral instead, yomping over grass and through underpasses to get to the hospital. I told the chaplains about Derek and asked them to keep an eye on him. In their email back, the lead chaplain said Derek had relayed my story of parking at the cathedral (poor fellow, he'd probably bent their ear about it) and said I should have gone to the superstore which is halfway between the cathedral and the hospital. I was surprised they would advocate such naughtiness. 

Moonbathing and Other Adventures

My visit to London yesterday had three purposes: to plot out the route for my proposed next history walk; to pop to the Victoria Library for the show of art by the late Paula Hibbert Lewis, who I didn't know but various of my Goth friends did and I'm sure I've been in the same space as her at various points; and finally to meet up with Lady Wildwood, MaisyMaid and Ms DawnStar to Moon-bathe, which I will explain shortly. The first obstacle was a signalling failure at Waterloo which basically closed the whole south-eastern rail network: 'What should we do?' I asked the helpful fellow at Swanvale Halt station, to which his answer was 'Go home and forget about it'. I thought that instead I could catch the Tube at Morden, the most accessible station on the Underground network to me. The most accessible - until it came to parking the car. That took about 45 minutes, longer than it did to drive there, and involved deleting the RingGo app account I didn't know I had, and setting up a new one. 

Anyway, I eventually got there. The route I'd worked out for the Walk was a bit too long: we will have to lose Carlton House Terrace, for instance, one of the more charismatic locations on the original plan. Together with my diversion to the Victoria Library I ended up traipsing about six miles at some speed and so it was no surprise I felt a bit footsore and achey at the end. Ms Lewis's pictures included some beautiful portraits and small, colourful collages, so it was worth the walk to pay a silent trubite to a soul from the Goth world. I even finished, amazingly, a bit early so I was able to have a tea at a little café in front of Kings Cross Station. Very oddly, the barista insisted to me that not only did they have no decaffeinated tea, but that such a thing didn't exist, so I gave in and had a full-fat one.

Lady Wildwood currently works at Kings Place, the Kings Cross arts venue which not that long ago hosted PJ Harvey discussing poetry with Don Paterson, and she alerted us to the Moonbathing event which is one of a series of sound installations. You lie, or sit, in a darkened room while a big inflatable Moon hangs impassively above you and your fellow audio explorers, gradually changing colour or lapsing into entire darkness, while noise goes on around you which I would describe as a kind of sonic massage. Like massage, it isn't always gentle and the floor vibrates and pounds before everything shifts a gear and the industrial noise is replaced by tinkly bells and the like. It rather reminded me at times of being in an MRI scanner, something which I have only done once and which I quite enjoyed but I know not everyone does. I felt it teetered on the cusp of the relaxing and the disturbing. This might be because of the images you end up thinking about - Lady Wildwood, who has done it before, found herself imagining 'alien creatures running across the ceiling and preparing to abduct you ... giant spiders scuttling at the edge of the room' while I was reminded of someone going through a drawer trying to find a pair of scissors. On the other hand, my sense of 'disturbance' came from the slight worry that all this aural pounding might not be doing me all that good. Has this been tested on mice first, I wondered? Anyway, it was worth doing (once).

The floor slabs at Kings Place have ammonite fossils embedded in them. Lady Wildwood had never spotted them before! I don't think they're Dorset stone, so I wonder where they come from?

Peace Be With You All

Returning to work after a fortnight’s break in the Autumn is always a bit of a rude awakening for me: no matter how much activity I may have packed into those two weeks, they very soon recede into the mists of memory. The last out-of-the-ordinary event of my holiday was attending a Goth night at Aces and Eights in Tufnell Park: I was glad I did, but the transport system has now made it very hard for me to manage nights out like this, as the last train for Swanvale Halt leaves London well before midnight. On Saturday I parked in Kingston and caught the train there, and even the Kingston trains ran no later than 0.42 unless I’d wanted to catch the one an hour after that culminated in a bus journey from Surbiton. I managed to make it to an 8am mass the next day, but the church I first tried was shut leading to a mad rush to the Cathedral. I’m not sure which edition of the Prayer Book the celebrant was using, but their prayer that the Lord might ‘so rule and govern the heart of thy chosen servant George our Queen’ suggests they’d been up late as well.

So Monday morning began with Bible reading. While I was away various things had gone slightly awry, people not being where others expected them to be, and allegations of unhelpfulness by some parties against others, and I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them (I shouldn’t have looked at the emails in advance). My eye was drawn to Christ’s instructions to the disciples in Luke 10, ‘First say, Peace be to this house’, and that seemed like a clear instruction if ever there was one. We mustn’t allow a high value placed on the Peace of God to obscure real problems in a Church community, but it does no harm for it to be the first word the pastor says to it. It reminded me what I am here to do, and I thank God for that.

Peterborough

The length of time that has elapsed since I last saw Ms Rainbowshunt is demonstrated by the fact that, on Thursday 25th when I did see her, her daughter had just received her GCSE results, and I'd never met the daughter at all. It took longer to get to Peterborough than advertised because the line had to be checked for safety: Ms Rainbowshunt reckoned that the checks would specifically have been on the drains, and ironically (having been a rail engineer since university days) she was working with various rail companies on a laser-powered AI thing that you can strap on the front of an engine and send it off to find things like drains that might get overloaded in heavy rain before it actually happens. 'You'll have to wait about five years for it, though', she warned. 

In Cathedral Square the fountains spouted intermittently across the flagstones and the children danced among them while the adults dodged the water coming from the sky rather than the ground. 

We'd booked our advance tickets for the dinosaur show at the Cathedral - a range of skeletons, fossils, information and animatronic creatures which were actually extremely impressive. The Tyrannosaurus rolled its eyes, blinked and wagged its tail in a very convincing manner. Why dinosaurs, I wondered? Was this making a comment about the Dean & Chapter? 'Why not?' was Ms Rainbowshunt's answer: the family has links with the Cathedral which, they told me, virtually went bankrupt a few years ago and is maximising its income as best it can. I don't mind religious buildings hosting educational or artistic events, even if the main focus is making money, but I did feel it was a shame that the dinos had taken the building over to quite the extent they had, meaning the side chapels and quire were closed off. In the south transept chapel the altar and associated kit were pushed to one side. I took the photo of the quire ceiling with its image of Christ Pantocrator by sticking my camera through the railings and hoping for the best.

The City Museum was fun. Set in a building which started off as a mansion house, then became an infirmary, and finally a museum in 1931, it had a big refurb a few years ago and as a result opened the old operating theatre from its incarnation as a hospital. It's more clinical and untheatrical than its older counterpart in Southwark, but you can still easily imagine the dramas of life and death that took place there. Equally stunning in its way is the decorated turtle shell over one of the doorways, apparently the source of the turtle soup served at a municipal banquet in 1688, and the very vessel in which it was served. Enough to make anyone gulp.

The Dorset Landscape, October 2020

When my intended Autumn trip to a folly in South Wales fell through thanks to epidemic restrictions I was extremely lucky to find an alternative in Dorset - a flat in the centre of Swanage, not my usual holiday fare but a strange pleasure to sit in the bay window and watch the good citizens of that seaside town go about their business, and then emerge from my secret doorway into the street. Access to the Isle of Purbeck can either be gained by going through Wareham to the west, or via the old chain ferry between Sandbanks and Shell Bay on the east. I chose the latter, for time's sake.

There are several Purbecks. Heathlands of sand and gravel slope towards Poole Harbour to the north of a narrow band of chalk hill - almost a single one, in fact - and then a small strip of fertile farmland separates that from the limestone plateau on the south which finally collapses into the sea. I spent a bit of time walking all of them!

Shipstal Point at Arne felt a bit like Barbados-in-Dorset.

Before the tourists arrived to paddle at Swanage or goggle at the ruins of Corfe Castle, the economy of the limestone area in south Purbeck rested on stoneworking. The landscape is still pitted with the remains of tiny shallow mines, like this one. Men and boys sweated and sometimes died in them. Loads of stone were piled on carts below ground and then winched to the surface by donkeys walking around great wooden windlasses. Heaven help anyone below if the chain broke.

Of course the economy is different now. There are great cruisers moored in Bournemouth Bay at the moment, surreal and slightly terrifying. They have nowhere to go.

This unexpected trip re-acquainted me with places I hadn't seen for decades: some were the same as ever, and others deeply altered, and I'll post about more of them later. Even the same place, of course, can alter significantly depending on the weather, as Ballard Down did on Thursday; on the way out, windblown and rain-shrouded, and on the return journey, bathed in sun (still windy, though). 

Constructively Obstructive

 

It is said that one of the topics which radio news programmes can always count on to arouse rage and vituperation is cycling. In fact just a few days ago I did hear an entire feature on this phenomenon, which the presenter put down to the way cycling is perceived in Britain as a sport rather than a means of getting human beings from one place to another. Like in fact quite a lot of people, I am both a cyclist and a motorist and conscious when I am on my bicycle of not getting in the way of motor transport, because I know how stressful it can be when you are in a car, and late.

Yesterday, I'm afraid, a modest amount of obstruction was part of the point when I went out with Hornington's chapter of Extinction Rebellion, cycling round and round the town's roads. It reminded me I need to buy a new bell, and have done for quite some time: there was no chance of me joining in with the mass bell-ringing. Mind you, my brakes are possibly an even higher priority even if, yesterday, I ended up cycling slower than I ever thought possible.

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.

Glimpses of the Presence

Friends of mine live in North Berwick. I was there last week and one evening went out and sat on the beach to watch the sun set. For some strange reason I was struck by the presence of God, a very quiet, thankful, but ecstatic experience. ‘Thank you for being here, how kind of you’, I felt constrained to say.

I looked out at the Bass Rock across the Firth, where sixteen or so centuries ago St Baldred had founded his monastery clinging to the cliffs. The Dark Age saints are often somewhat grim-set, granite-like presences in Christian history. What was it they experienced, all those years past, in between fishing and catching the occasional gannet which must have occupied so much of their time? Did it comprise – elation? Did God seem to them the way he does to me?

Christmas Cheer

I went to make my Advent confession on Monday. The snow is melting now, but two days ago it still lay deep and thick if not very even across the middle of Surrey. I caught a train which was twenty minutes late and then crawled its way to the city where it terminated, despite being scheduled to go on to Waterloo, because of some undefined technical fault. At least it got that far, it seemed touch and go at one stage. (The train home was amazing - jam-packed to a degree you usually only find on the Tube, literally with no room to move, at least in the carriage I was). I toiled up the hill to the cathedral and told my spiritual director all. He advised me to turn my negative thoughts into positive prayers for parallel virtues, and to be thankful for these insights into my faults, and gave me the Benedictus to read as my penance. I was on my way out of the chapel full of gratitude for this encounter with the Lord's mercy when S.D.'s voice rang out behind me. 'Don't worry', he called, 'Life just gets worse and then there's death'.