Sort of Restored

Back in January I reported on perhaps the saddest event of my nine years at Swanvale Halt, though less dramatic than the death during a funeral service - the attack on the icon of St John which took place when some thoughtless youngster held a candle to it and scorched the image. I took it away and put a printed photo in its place, and left the poor icon with the lady who's painting a pair of icons for the church on behalf of a member of the congregation. She examined it, gave it to a variety of other painters who also examined it, and came to the conclusion that nothing much could be done short of sanding the damaged portion down and starting again. How easy would it be to match the paint, I wondered. She didn't think she would feel confident in tackling it, at least.

I brought the icon back a little while ago, and after procrastinating for a while I used the photo I had of it to print and paste on another image of the face, as it was. It's now back in place in the church: I spent a little while praying in front of it, marked it with chrism, and left it. The damage is very visible and has become part of its story. I will see what happens to it, and how I feel about it now, watching from its scarred face in the corner of the church.

Best Dressed Ghost

All sorts of things end up in museum collections, but until very recently I had no idea that Bridport Museum contained a haunted dress. On her lovely blog DownbytheseaDorset Sarah mentioned it in her account of the recent show at the Museum, 'A Change of Clothes' in which the dress in question came out of storage. The story goes that it was pushed through the bars in front of the main door of the museum one night some years ago with no explanation, and no provenance. It's a nice piece - claimed in some places to be 17th-century, though it's not that - and perhaps it's speculating why such a fine item should have been anonymously dumped on a museum doorstep under cover of darkness which has led to the conviction that there is something wrong with it. 'A young woman is frequently seen guarding' the garment, and supposedly a former curator tried to have it exorcised. 

It reminded me that a former curator of the same establishment once told me that they'd been told a doll in the collection was also possessed of a presence. They tried to alert the Anglican authorities who 'treated me as though I needed psychiatric help' and in the end decided the safest thing to do with the object was burn it. I wonder how that fits under the Museums Association's model disposals policy. Did this same person also spread the tale about the haunted dress? For my part, speaking professionally, I think if an object does shelter a malign presence in it you may as well leave it there. At least you know where it is. 

Photo: The Bridport News

Back to Busbridge Lakes

To recover from a Rectory party yesterday - it would have been a garden party but for the weather, which converted it to a house party - I visited Busbridge Lakes, my local Gothic Garden, as in former years, taking advantage of its last opening for 2018, on the August Bank Holiday. The outlook was damp at first, then just overcast, but by the time I was sat next to the lower lake with a cup of tea and a sausage roll the sun was struggling to peek through the clouds. 

It's the tenth year since my first visit, and five years since I was there last. The owners, Mr & Mrs Douetil, have stopped breeding some of the more exotic birds and now concentrate on less rare species, so the lower bird pens are looking overgrown and run-down, but the grounds and pens nearer the house are fine. They're trying to encourage wedding bookings, weddings being where all the money is at the moment.

But I do worry about the follies. The curtain of ivy over the Hermit's Cave is almost reaching the ground ...

And the rest of the magnificent Ghost Walk is getting more and more overgrown. The walls are now almost completely ivy-covered and when you look from the turret on the top of the ramparts the great five-fanged arch of rough stone that forms the entrance to the Walk can't be seen at all (as it should be). The Ghost Walk is completely without parallel in English landscape gardens and someone should really be helping the owners care for this national treasure.

The path to the Doric Temple is blocked by a fallen tree - as I think it has been for a long time. At least it didn't hit the temple itself!

At the top of the hill, Hercules, as presiding genius loci, broods on his plinth.

In her amazing book Gothic Music, Isabella van Elferen (which is also a brilliant name if you're going to be a Gothic academic) suggests that a Goth club amounts to a ritualised means of rehearsing Gothic identity. As I've never been much of a club-goer, I find the same thing going round this Gothic Garden I know well. It is always the same, but not quite the same; I re-acquaint myself with the follies and walks, and observe how other visitors interact with them. There is a kind of calm and repose in doing this, not only due to the water birds making their slow progress across the lakes.

But look! I'm pretty sure I've never noticed this little archway before, glimpsed through the bird pens. I wonder what it was intended to be.

Praying Against

The monthly newsletter of Churches Together in Hornington came my way and with it the customary introduction from the chairperson. 'We need to get together more to work for the town, and to pray for the town', he said, as he does in some shape or form every month. 'I have heard', he went on, 'that there is a group of people who are meeting to pray against groups in Hornington which are not Christian.' 

I wasn't content to put that out. I presumed he was happy that said group of people was meeting, though without any context it was hard to work out. I had a suspicion he might have been thinking of the 'spiritual awareness group' which asked to use our church hall not long ago and whose money I refused on the grounds that what the organiser was actually planning to do was equip members to 'tap their psychic potential'; or the potential pagan-Wiccan-Druid meeting which is being bruited about on Facebook. He was indeed, so I altered the text to 'praying to reduce the influence of non-Christian spiritual groups', which made me a bit less uncomfortable.

I felt I could have a go, if called on, to explain my version to an ordinary secular liberal person who feels that all religions are basically alike, and can't everyone just get on with one another? You can't expect Christians to welcome people dipping into Wicca and psychic experimentation, I might say. Those people are God's beloved children who he longs to reach out to, and here they are wandering around in delusion of their own making which could even do them damage. So it makes sense to pray that the work of delusion and falsehood, as we see it, is impeded and the people who might be tempted to join in with it find their attention diverted in a more healthy direction by some conversation, some happening, some encounter. We're praying for angels to stand in their way and whisper in their ears, not for the organisers of the meetings to have a car accident or something. But that, you see, sounds less like praying against, and more like praying for.

'Don't worry,' an evangelical parishioner told me when the issue of the spiritual awareness group came up. 'We'll pray them down. We've done it before.' It's been a year and they haven't managed it yet, it must be said.

Pro-Something

Word on the Streets is a digest website of Christian news on whose mailing list I seem somehow to have got. It does come up with some interesting posts and today my eye was caught by the one that referred to policies in Hungary promoting the welfare of families. Unfortunately the source was Lifesitenews.com, a virulently anti-homosexual and anti-Pope Francis Catholic website (how amazing the world has become, when Catholics can set up websites so openly contemptuous of the Pope!), whose interest in the matter derived from an address given by the Hungarian minister for the Family to a schismatic Academy for the Family set up in the name of the late Pope John Paul II, in opposition to the official one still run by the Vatican. The speech majored on how abortion and divorce rates had fallen in Hungary as a result of public policy, and as I am not someone who regards divorce or abortion as positive things I was interested - notwithstanding the source or occasion of the article. But, equally, I have always felt deeply suspicious about Christian rhetoric surrounding 'family life', and I want to get my head around such matters. 

I knew that Hungary has a vigorously conservative government, yet many of the pro-family policies cited by Lifesitenews seem positively socialistic. In accordance with the privileged position of family life under the Hungarian constitution, they seek to balance the demands of work and family, and include generous tax allowances, paid holiday camps for children, and utility discounts. Some benefits which on paper seem astonishingly openhanded - the payment and interest-free loan, for instance, amounting to about £60K, for couples under 40 who agree to have three children - are not quite what they seem, but there is no doubt that, overall, Hungary has chosen to prioritise parenthood and childrearing over other social goods.

Yet this is not a recent thing. Paid maternity leave for three years has existed in Hungary since 1967 and in fact recent changes have been introduced precisely to encourage more parents back into work on a part-time basis, which is likely to raise the levels of children who take part in formal childcare, currently half the rate in Hungary of the European average. There is some controversy about the effect of current measures on the economy and the disproportionate benefit to nice, middle-class Hungarian families of the state's policies, as opposed to the poor and especially those from a Roma background. 

Not that the Hungarian government would be bothered by that. Although the pro-family policy has been a consensus matter for decades, its current bite derives from Hungary's demographic decline, the emptying of its rural areas, and the perception among its nationalist politicians that the country is at the front line of Europe, called on to hold the line against Islam, and the immigrant tide that brings Islam with it. This comes across very clearly in the way the government promotes Hungary. I imagine the conservative Catholics of Lifesitenews wouldn't be bothered either: authoritarianism with a Christian gloss is just what they hunger for.

At first I was intrigued by what seemed like a strategy that reduced negative experiences for human beings - abortion and divorce - not by the usual right-wing approach of closing down access to these options, but by lessening the social stresses that led to them, that made it easier to look after children, and to contemplate looking after children. A little bit of reading, instead, leaves me feeling sullied by contact with the realities of 'Christian Democracy'. Headlines are one thing: but who is not having abortions and not getting divorced, and why?

Marrows & Marigolds

We wondered how the Swanvale Halt Village Show would turn out this year. Surely the gardeners and allotment holders of the parish would have laboured under insurmountably adverse conditions as the rain refused to fall and the ground grew ever harder under the pitiless gaze of Phoebus week after week. But no: entries were only marginally down on last year, and included festooned fuschias, a gargantuan marrow, and, for the first time I remember, cacti which of course have no issue with weather which is on the desiccated side. 

Deco Demolition

On Thursday I was in Poole for my aunt's funeral. It was all fine, thank you, and as she'd been very poorly for a long while it wasn't that sad an occasion. We drove to the Salterns Hotel in Lilliput where the wake was being held, me tailgating my sister who was being directed by our mum who actually knew where to go. The car park seemed to be full so I went and parked over the other side of the main road and then made my way back to the hotel. This took me along Salterns Way, where I boggled at the Modernist and Art Deco-styled buildings and took photographs of several. Then along Lagoon Road to the north I spotted a building which I was sure I'd photographed back in the early 2000s when I was doing my little survey of Deco buildings in southeast Dorset. When I got home I compared the photos I'd just taken with the ones in my archive, and realised how radically the streets had changed.

12 Salterns Way, South Haven, is still there: 

But, most curiously, many of the buildings have been extensively remodelled. Here are nos. 9, 11 (Seascape), and, in the process of being built, 13, back in the early 2000s. No.9 is now gone completely, but Seascape and no.13 ...

... now look like this. You can see the remains of the old buildings within the footprint of the new, but the slightly boxy Seascape now has curves and big vertical windows, while no.13's staircase tower is now higher, it has two sets of windows, and they're tinged green. The house is now called 'Decadence' (very 1920s, darling). 

Further along is no.30. Here is its appearance c.2003, a modest little property with a nice circular stair tower (you can see these elsewhere in the conurbation) and some horizontal windows:

It took me a while to identify no.30 still surviving - just about - inside the shell of the grandiose buildings which now occupy the site of it and no.32 next door: 

At least I think it does. The staircase tower seems still to be there, much refashioned and now mirrored by the rebuilt no.32. Round the corner in Lagoon Road is no.9, which used to be called Lucky Star. 

Boxy and not really very Deco, it still seemed to be in a genuinely 1930s idiom. It's now encased in something which looks much more the part:

But not every building I photographed fifteen years or so ago has made it through, even in an etiolated form. 1 Salterns Way, the most modest and lowly Deco structure in the area - and all the more interesting for it ...

... now appears to have been replaced by this jazzy Modernist experiment. Ah, all it needed was a lick of paint. Even the silver birch trees have been replaced by those awful palms that die every few years:

What this reveals is something very interesting for those of us who have an affection for Art Deco architecture, something I've noticed before. The general public, and the jobbing architects who build its homes, are aware there is such a thing as Art Deco, and that it signifies glamour and modernity. They know what it's supposed to look like; and when they actually encounter it, all too often it isn't Deco enough. The consumer wants more glamour and excitement than the real past can provide.