Garden Massacres

Pass this post by, if you are of a squeamish disposition!

Last year I realised my box hedges were under attack from box moth caterpillar. I have tried spraying them with supposedly eco-friendly anti-bug stuff but there is no sign that this particular liquid has that much effect on them. I experimented by taking a caterpillar away and spraying it in a pot: it died, but I suspect that it may have drowned rather than suffered any chemical effects.

A gardening website suggests ‘physical removal’ is the only way forward: you take the caterpillars away, and dispose of them. I quickly decided that physical removal, putting the insects into a bucket and, I don’t know, pouring boiling water on them, would be a bit of a waste of time, and I am afraid I have taken to squidging them in situ. If they have to die, squidging is probably quicker and more humane than the chemical or boiling options, and it helps that they don’t get bigger than about 15mm long. They are not hard to spot, although I rarely see them out and about, as they mainly stay secluded in their little webby shelters made by fastening leaves together. I don’t know why they bother doing this until they are ready to pupate, as one of the frustrating things about box moth caterpillar is that they have no natural predators: their green-and-black bodies are full of toxins which make the birds avoid them, when they would otherwise benefit greatly from the easy-to-eat protein crawling everywhere across the hedges. Possibly the funky smell that arises from crushed caterpillars gives a clue to their unpalatability. There would be enough to feed quite a few hungry birds.

It's all very unpleasant and not something I really like to admit doing; perhaps I rightly ought to let the caterpillars reduce my box hedges to bare sticks, which they will happily do if allowed. I do apologise to God, or nature, before beginning a few minutes’ murderous work over a lunchtime. At least, given the caterpillar numbers, I will not be stuck for a garden job for some time to come.

Building for the Future?

The house which for the foreseeable future is still only going to have me living in it has been the focus of attention of late, both official and unofficial. The latter came in the shape of a gentleman, and following him a lady who couldn't quite believe the information he gave her, so came to check for herself (I suspect it was the information I gave him that was wrong). They are compiling a survey of all the buildings in the area constructed from Bargate stone, a rather lovely honey-coloured sandstone widely used in Surrey where its main reserves lay. My house is one of these. It has quite a complicated history, beginning as a Victorian cottage, then doubling in size thanks to an extension which I thought was 1930s but is probably 1950s, and finally a second extension in the mid-90s which brought the kitchen to its current unnecessary size. To the rear of the older bit the stone courses are laid evenly and regularly like brick, but I hadn't noticed how even on the side of that portion they are all higgledy-piggledy like the more recent extension. Has that wall been taken down and refaced? It certainly has un-Victorian windows.

So much for the unofficial visits. Recently the diocese has become aware that it doesn't have a proper list of the property it owns and not unnaturally would like to rectify this, so a young man from a surveying company popped round before I was confined with covid to measure the house, a task which these days, notwithstanding my picture here, is done with lasers and cameras that measure things as they take photographs of them. Then yesterday a lady from an energy inspection firm called round to assess the house for an energy efficiency certificate. She didn't have a laser, or at least I didn't see her use one, but unlike the surveyor did need to go into the loft to check the insulation (she was quite pleased it has some, not that it seems to make a lot of difference to my chilly residence). I've always assumed the house was dreadfully inefficient energy-wise so it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

A couple of days ago someone on the big LiberFaciorum holy wells group asked about the Churches selling off assets and yet not being able to keep churches open or holy wells nearby them kept up, in the context of lovely Gumfreston church in Pembrokeshire which I happened to have visited last October. I briefly described the Church of England's financial issues and the fact that historically it's been lumbered with a number of unwieldy properties which it makes perfect sense to offload - even if clergy are left living in less picturesque houses as a result, they ought to be a bit more practical. For instance the incumbent of the parish next to Swanvale Halt when I arrived rattled around (after being widowed) in a ten-bedroom nightmare of a house, built by an Edwardian Lord of the Manor keen that his rector should live in a style befitting a gentleman; there was a decorative plaster frieze around the sitting room. It was no surprise that when he retired the diocese sold it, rented a cottage for his successor, and then built a sensible four-bed house for hers.

It could be that the diocese's current survey is the prelude to a further rationalisation of property. I assume that my freehold tenure here applies to the house as well as the church and I cannot be turfed out without agreement any more than I can be sacked. I did suggest a long while ago that I could move somewhere smaller and less embarrassing to live in, but if that were indeed to happen, could I come back and check on the fish? They seem to be doing quite well at the moment.

Give Us Your Huddled Masses

Having decided I wouldn’t be hosting refugees from Ukraine, but very keen to do other things – and for our local churches to have a more coherent approach to supporting refugees in the future, not just in this particular geopolitical event – I was setting great store by yesterday's meeting hosted by Tophill church who are big and well-organised compared to humble Swanvale Halt, and came away from it little the wiser. Sam, the rector of Tophill, described getting daily phone calls asking whether he could help house refugees and the assumption his callers (who are they?) seem to have that a suburban Surrey church will know what’s happening in disputed areas of Ukraine. Nobody has phoned me up, I thought, perhaps they know better than to try. He and his family have signed up to take someone in, but he thought that ‘if we wait for official channels we’ll be waiting forever’ and pointed to the informal community groups which are already trying to organise matches between refugees and hosts and thought the Church could do that. The members of the group who’d actually had past experience dealing with refugees thought this was not a good idea, and church communities should focus on providing help to refugees and hosts, whether those hosts come from within their congregations or the community more widely, rather than being ‘introduction agencies’ which they thought carried more responsibility than just saying ‘you are a host, and you are someone who needs shelter, here you are, you do all the rest yourself’. What would actually happen when someone arrived at Lille or wherever, heading for the UK and needing a visa? It turned out nobody knew for sure. Sam described spending forty minutes on the phone to ‘a helpful lady from immigration who couldn’t tell me anything’. Not knowing anything, however, didn’t stop everyone in the meeting having an opinion. In fact, once I checked gov.uk this afternoon, it seemed pretty clear that this is the ‘official channel’, and it sort of makes sense, even if the initial stage in the Government guidelines – ‘sponsor and guest find each other’ – is almost mystical. Clear, perhaps – I’m not saying it’s easy.

It eventually became apparent that I wasn’t going to get any concrete pointers to help me in what I wanted to do at all. By the end of the gathering we’d agreed that we wanted to make and facilitate contact with official and unofficial groups and potential hosts; to support hosts and refugees; and to identify a range of tasks to help make this happen. These were all things I assumed were givens before we’d started, not the results of 90 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing. My task is to contact some of the relevant charities to find out the very things I thought the meeting might tell me.

Our lay reader Gisele, who has transferred her licence from Tophill to us, was taking part. She and her husband have signed up on the official system as ‘phase 2’ hosts. ‘I lost the will to live’, she admitted to me, ‘though it’s good to know there are people who want to do the right thing’.

Sort Of How It Is Supposed To Work

Unlike last year when it all went a bit wrong, we had a full Mothering Sunday posy-making team and the posies were pleasantly presentable. Today the Roman Catholic congregation also distributed posies, which I can’t remember them doing in the past. It was almost back to normal as the children from the Infants School came to sing for us and brought their families with them, so we had about 120 people in the church for the main service. It was great and everyone enjoyed themselves. But where were our usual congregation members? Without the visitors I calculated we would have been few indeed, possibly fewer than 30. Yesterday I’d seen emails from members of the refreshments team appealing for help as all the people usually available were away or struck down by covid, and so before we began this morning I checked to see whether anyone was available to do it – no hands went up, so we saved on the biscuits. I haven’t heard of anyone newly afflicted by covid for a few days, so I wonder whether the peak is passing us, but it’s still having a noticeable impact.

Two Museums and a Graveyard

Apart from us all dropping from covid - and even that shows signs of tailing off - the parish is quiet, so it was as well that I went out sightseeing yesterday. Not many people identify the sights of Tottenham and Walthamstow as ones they especially want to visit, but I thought I might take in a couple of suburban museums, and so my journey took me to Bruce Castle and Vestry House.

Bruce Castle Museum in Tottenham sits in its own park. Buried somewhere in its current state is a Tudor mansion but it's been so mucked about with over the centuries hardly any of that is visible. As you go around the galleries hints of the manor house, and then school, the building used to be emerge in the form of its collection of fireplaces, staircase, and great iron kitchen range. I liked Bruce Castle because of its maximalist approach of absolutely packing display cases with stuff, boards with photos, and not-obviously relevant kit such as a statue of a small girl embroidering in a corridor (you almost fall over her). Tottenham is of course a very multicultural part of London but although this gets a mention here and there - there was a great display on textile designer Althea McNish and some information about businesses that served the black community - it remains to be integrated with the rest. Upstairs was a show about Edwardian artist Beatrice Offor, 'Sisters, Sirens and Saints', and I was delighted to find that one of those saints she depicted was kneeling next to a shattered wheel.

I remember Vestry House as having a good name in the social-history museum world once upon a time, but I was less taken with it. Its 'institutional olive'-painted hallways express something of the grimness the building might have had when it was a workhouse, and there was a very nice display about the local music scene in the late '80s and early '90s, colourful and full of personal history, but I was surprised to see the sheer amount of sunlight strafing the objects in the 'domestic life' rooms upstairs. That area is all hessian and 1980s captions and must surely be due a refurb!

But Vestry House is in the most picturesque bit of Walthamstow, even if the parish church was swathed in scaffolding. The view across the graveyard to the Ancient House, allegedly the oldest dwelling-house in London, is as pleasing as you could want.

Crossing That Bridge When We Come To It

As I said at the time of Forth Bridge, London Bridge will be an event of an entirely different order. No matter what you think of the monarchy, the departure of HM the Queen will mark a significant shift in our mental landscape, and arguably not just within this country. Things will suddenly feel different - though I suspect not very different, for the vast majority of people for whom the Queen is a warmly-regarded figure but not one who makes that much impact. Of course we know that London Bridge is approaching, as is the demise of all of us: an inevitable event, unlike the Major Disaster Plan I have in a file somewhere, that deals with something which might not happen at all. Yet it was still strangely disconcerting to get a call from the Council today to discuss how Swanvale Halt church might take part, hosting a book of remembrance, prayers on the day before the funeral, and being open for people to come in to pray and reflect. All this is fine with me: we're discussing the Chairman of the Board, after all. You might prudently think about arrangements for your own death, but it seems very odd to be discussing the death of someone you don't know and how you're going to react to it, not even emotionally but practically.

It was even odder when mere moments later I received an email from a different Council employee about how the town is going to be celebrating the Platinum Jubilee in June, namely with the lighting of a lantern at a suitable spot which I will be blessing, and 'a bit of a procession'. Presumably we all think HMQ can make it that far.

Isn't London Bridge a crushingly dull looking thing?

La Peste

It felt strange at 7am yesterday morning to go down the hill to the post box and then past it for the first time in twelve days. Even in the midst of my isolation I had ventured out to post letters under cover of darkness, slightly on edge in case Sir Chris Whitty or someone were to leap out from a bush and point an accusing finger at me. There was never anyone else around, though, to denounce or to potentially infect. Anyway, on Sunday I left the post box far behind me and went down to the church. At least I remembered where it was. 

There were fewer people at the 10am mass than for ages: in fact, barely half the numbers we had only a month ago when everyone coincidentally turned up at once. Then, and since, I have had a string of reports and emails announcing this or that person has covid or is steering clear of friends and relatives in case they do. One of them is Sylv our Pastoral Assistant, and her being out takes out a range of others as well, not just those she gives lifts to church but also those who were in the home group she took part in last week. So far, though, only one member of the church has had to go to hospital, and he has (praise God) just been released, sorry, discharged. I mention all this just to put my own sickness into the context of a very significant upsurge in cases, and one which is cutting a swathe through the older members of the community. Thankfully, though, none of them are all that ill, generally reporting nothing more serious than a heavy cold and mostly less than that. The great benefit is that really quite large numbers of people will have had covid before Easter and there will be no reason for them not to come. Or not that one, anyway.