'To Bring You My Love' at 28

A nicer anniversary falling today (as well as being Lady Arlen and Madame Morbidfrog's birthdays) is that PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love was released on February 27th in 1995. Many moons ago now I told you about my first encounter with it. For lots of souls it was the moment they first met the Corscombe conjuror-of-storms, wrapped in red silk or her shocking-pink catsuit or whatever costume she might have been wearing at the time, and it has lost none of its haunting power over subsequent years. At the time, reviewers gulped at the inconceivable about-face the album represented, as its author seemed completely to junk everything she'd done up to that point; some hated it, Time awarding it their title of worst recording of the year, a 'hopelessly mannered CD' produced by an 'utterly graceless singer'. Nicholas Barber for The Independent, though, thought he could sum it up in six inspired words: 'imagine "Siouxsie and the Bad Seeds"'. 

In view of subsequent events, TBYML did seem a bit like PJH's audition for the job of Nick Cave's girlfriend, and many commentators were keen to draw the comparison at the time. But though it and the output of the Bad Seeds at the time seem to share an imaginative universe, they aren't very close together in it. If we think of TBYML as pastiche Americana, we are reading into it settings that aren't there, as its lyrics are marked by distinct unspecificity; and, with the possible exception of 'Working For the Man', Harvey sings for women characters, while the women on Cave's records are usually the victims of the characters he voices. And it was a good dozen years after the album was released that the maestra told Gary Crowley on BBC Radio London about a much more important consideration in her mind at the time, the writing of Flannery O'Connor. In 2020 she posted a picture on Instagram showing her with a copy of O'Connor's Wise Blood, taken, she said, around the time TBYML was being composed - though more recently she told Rolling Stone that she was already reading the American's work in her late teens (I'm not sure she isn't misremembering that, she is not always careful about dates).

Flannery O'Connor was an artist thought little of for many years, who seems to have ascended to general acclaim just at the point that aspects of her work - and, even more, her person, if the two can be separated - start to become unacceptable to those who decide what to celebrate and what to denigrate, aspects which shouldn't really be news. O'Connor was only 39 when she died in 1964 of systemic lupus, the same disabling disease that killed her father - a sardonic, thoughtful writer of morality tales with a taste for the violent, her attitudes drawn deep from Catholic Christianity, and yet an author who refused to proselytise, instead depicting her characters engaged almost unawares in the battle for goodness and transcendence the Faith outlined; and one who also resisted any attempt to locate good and evil in simple, obvious places. O'Connor's is a fallen world penetrated with grace. 

Harvey says that O'Connor's work taught her about storytelling: it 'was also shaping the way that my third-person narrative was becoming in the whole record'. Now, the curious thing about this is that, like most of her music, TBYML's songs don't embody stories. It's only really on her subsequent record, 1998's Is This Desire?, that she turns to such structures, and some of the tracks on that record do have specific lift-off points in tales by O'Connor. The protagonists of TBYML give you glimpses into their history - the obsessive of the title track who was born in the desert and has crossed wasted landscapes to meet the listener, the murderous mother of 'Down By the Water', 'The Dancer's' desperate abandoned lover on her deathbed. But each is speaking from a single moment, rather than laying out a narrative as Nick Cave's characters from around the same time do.

If Flannery O'Connor has sketched the landscape TBYML inhabits, what it takes from her writing isn't the third-person device which Harvey doesn't adopt until a few years later; and, while you can see the same interests in both artists, Harvey's music dealt with religion, violence, and extremity right from the start. Instead, what O'Connor seems to have provided her with is the permission to bolt them all together, to imagine characters whose lives move around religion and sometimes lead them in violent directions. And, as always, Harvey's imagination takes her deeper and wilder than virtually anyone else.

A Year On

Yesterday Hornington Town Council was planning a Pause for Reflection at 10am to mark a year after the invasion of Ukraine, and I couldn't make it because I was doing a funeral. At the last minute, or nearly, the Government announced there would be a national Pause for Reflection, at 11am, so the Council hurriedly shifted theirs. I couldn't make at it the later time either, because I had Toddler Praise which didn't major on Ukraine, funnily enough. I did manage to get to the evening vigil organised by the local Ukraine Support Group, opening the door of the community centre just as everyone was blowing out their candles. They made me do impromptu prayers as a punishment. 

My friend Lara, kind, liberal ex-BBC employee who is half-Finnish by blood and all Finnish by choice, told me a long while ago the Finnish proverb 'A Russian's still a Russian even if you fry them in butter'. Yesterday she posted on LiberFaciorum that what she felt mostly was 'hatred ... I recoil whenever I hear Russian being spoken on the Tube or in a shop ... I am lucky, I left Russia forever before I became an adult because my Finnish mother dreamt of leaving that wretched country all her life ... For now I can only hate, and donate a bit of money, and feel heartbroken'. Talk to my other Finn friend, anarcho-syndicalo-eco-activist Lady MetalMoomin, about the Russians and she becomes a Scandi-nationalist ready to pull the pin from a hand-grenade with her teeth. It's no surprise: they have been bad neighbours. 

Back when I was at college my mum's cousin worked for Oxford City Council and he and his wife regularly hosted foreign students, a good number of whom were decorative Russian girls called Olga and Natasha and so on who I quite enjoyed being invited to dinner with. There's a significant chance that some of them may now have grown-up sons of their own who are in Ukraine right now, trying to kill and not be killed. It amazes me that I can still speak on the phone to yet another friend, Peta, who teaches English in Moscow with her husband. They are South Africans so they're pretty safe there at the moment, though they'd quite like to go somewhere else. 'Please pray for the young men of Russia', she asked me the last time we spoke. 

As well as the physical dangers in this as in all wars, there are spiritual dangers too. War arises from delusion and falsehood, and is powered by pride and often despair: it unleashes hatred even where it did not exist before (at least Lara names it, rather than pretend). The ancient Russian conviction that they are eternal victims now combines with a terrifying nihilistic despair to take the country to a dark place indeed: it's only fascists who go on about how great death is. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, occupy the ground of hope and humanism, but they face the temptation any combatant confronts: to chase victory by turning, in subtle ways, into your enemy. Prayers for them must include a desire to preserve them from such a fate. War does all of this; it is hateful, even when it's necessary.

Two Little Girls

The fact that it was Ash Wednesday hadn't been mentioned at Church Club, but Etta spontaneously raised the subject. 'You didn't come to do the crosses this morning', she upbraided me, and it was true, I hadn't, because I ran out of time to arrange it with the school. Etta also reminded me of a story involving my elder niece which I had no idea I'd told the children. 'Yes, she has a photographic memory', her mum told me when the parents came to collect them, 'It can be quite disconcerting'.

At the evening mass the Swallow family came, mum, dad, baby daughter, and Edie, who is eight. When the Swallows first arrived in Swanvale Halt, Edie too was a babe-in-arms. They came to the main Sunday service and as soon as the singing started she bawled the place down, and did it again on every occasion they turned up. Discerning child, you might think, but it meant that they beat a retreat and didn't come back until Edie was old enough to see things differently. Now she seems to be growing very religious. 'I'm not saying we didn't want to come', said her dad, 'But it was Edie who insisted that we did'. I have seldom seen a more solemn recipient of an ash cross, and when the family knelt at the rail for communion and I blessed her sister, Edie reached along to touch the baby's hand with hers. Just as well I am a hard-hearted soul impervious to such sentiment or it might have been embarassing. 

Renewing An Interest

Fr Donald, the retired hospital chaplain, and I met in the café opposite the church after mass to sign the form to apply to renew his Permission to Officiate. This has to be done to make sure there are not retired clergy knocking around and illicitly doing stuff . 'Why do they want to know this?' he boggled, pointing to the demand that he specify the number of times he has presided at the Eucharist, preached, or done anything else that might fall within the remit of our agreement as to how his ministry should be exercised in the fair parish of Swanvale Halt. We agreed there could be any number of reasons. Positively it could be a way of making sure that a retired clergyperson's incumbent sticks to whatever it is they've agreed they should be allowed to do - not much, in the case of Donald and myself, just him being available when I might need him - to rule out them being sidelined or overworked. But I've never heard of the diocese intervening in such a case. The diocese could want to know what human resources they have available which they don't have to pay for, or how many fees are disappearing into the pockets of Retireds rather than the coffers of Church House. We weren't sure. But we did agree that him speaking to a group over Zoom at the intervention of an incumbent somewhere else he knows probably didn't need to be reported to the Bishop as it was difficult to see what harm he might be doing. Unless he's spreading heretical opinions, and in that case it's the business of the Bishop of London rather than His Grace of Guildford.

Talking Catholic

Back in November I began my series of talks about elements of what (in my opinion) it means to be a Christian and specifically an Anglican who includes the word catholic in their sense of identity and purpose, inspired by the story of the empty aumbry discovered in a nearby church by a former Area Dean: I've just completed it, in a rather hurried fashion as I wanted to get it all done before Lent begins. My aim was to escape from any impression that Catholic Anglicanism is primarily about incense and vestments - despite any appearances to that effect - and instead talked about The Communion of Saints, The Real Presence, Authority, Tradition & Obedience, and The Prayer of the Church, about the Office and how it works. The fifth and final talk, however, did major on worship and its features, thinking about how what churches like ours (and further up the candle) do is a way of helping embodied, fleshly beings meditate on the saving mystery of Christ, and reflects the fruit of long spiritual experience in the past. As well as The Beauty of Holiness, I also touched on Spiritual Disciplines and how they help anchor our worship in reality and stop it all wafting away into self-indulgence. 

Has it made an impression? People have certainly been interested, but if they also show an increased knowledge of these themes and self-awareness of our particular charism within the Church of England, I will be pleased. I started today's talk with this image: I can always rely on Fr Thesis's west-end church if I need a nice splurge of high-churchery to share.

A Waste of Everyone's Time Pt.2

The troops (of Swanvale Halt's disaffected youth) were out in force on Wednesday evening and I said Evening Prayer to the accompaniment of whoops and cheers and loud music from the churchyard. On the way out I did mention to them that this wasn't the right place for such celebrations because of the surrounding flats, but I didn't hold out much hope of my remonstrances having any effect. I didn't positively tell them to move on, because once defiance has been offered that's my arsenal exhausted, apart from excommunication which I fear holds few terrors.

I came past the church yesterday and cleared up the mass of detritus in the churchyard: fifteen or so teenagers can leave a lot of trash behind them. Among the remains was a somewhat rusty bicycle; I left that behind, and also delayed clearing up the broken glass until today, when I was formally at work and had my church keys with me. The bicycle had gone, and looking at the CCTV I was intrigued to see a man in a beanie hat come and wheel it away. What was the story there? Was it not in fact stolen as I assumed, but actually belonged to one of the children and then retrieved by their father?

We've been through this cycle (of behaviour, not the bicycle) many times before, and I don't want it to happen again. Groups of youngsters congregate, increase, drink and smoke weed, and it escalates into problems for local residents and the businesses. The answer is to make the churchyard a less comfortable place for them to gather, and the only way to do so while preserving its friendliness to other people is for the police to swing by every now and again. I filled in a report online and pointed this out, and the reply was swift and polite, though not that helpful: the police have a set routine of patrols to monitor anti-social behaviour, and these can't be altered until it's clear that there is a pattern of behaviour in a particular spot. From the point of view of thinly-spread police resources this makes sense, but such an inflexible approach does feel a bit like saying 'We can't act to forestall a problem until we can prove there's a problem'. 

Having said that, there was noone around yesterday evening, nor tonight. So perhaps the youngsters really have gone somewhere else!

A Waste of Everyone's Time Really

There are a number of dull things I have to do in the course of my work, but I find none of them as dispiriting as dealing with the periodic disorder that centres on the church building. Yesterday, for instance, I was so disgusted and depressed at the trash distributed along the road as far as the railway line that I went along with a litter-picker and a bag and, even though there was new detritus apparent by the end of the day, that felt like a reasonable contribution to make to the local community. Less so scrubbing what seemed to be barbecue sauce off the vestry windows on Monday morning, obviously sprayed up the wall in an attempt to spatter the CCTV camera. I couldn't get the sauce off the stonework without a ladder and a scrubbing brush, neither of which I had access to. 

Yesterday evening I came down to the church to check the hall ahead of the cleaner coming today, and decided to cast an eye over the CCTV. That camera to the rear of the church wasn't working, not because it had been sprayed with condiments, but, as a glance back through the recorded footage revealed, because it had been attacked. A figure in a parka was very visible putting a ladder against the wall, going away and then coming back with a shovel, before banging the cage around the camera. I don't think either implement belongs to us, which raises the question of where they came from and how planned this was. The young gentleman's face is very clear, and the images will be usefully attached to the crime report I will fill out, another very boring activity given the number of times I have done it. As Chloe our bookkeeper said, 'If they had brains they'd be dangerous'.