Blue Skies over Blandford

The beautiful weather over east Dorset made a drive to Blandford with my mum an undiluted pleasure. I love all the small Dorset towns, each of which has its own character; Georgian Blandford's splendour is the intersecting curves of its sweeping roofscape.

The town centre was largely rebuilt after a catastrophic fire in 1731, resulting in the replacement of the old church with a great Palladian fabric which, seen from some angles, wouldn't be out of place in an Italian city. The blue sky helps.

Inside the church is being restored - but it has taken years and will take years more. The plaster and paint peels and flakes.

The Age UK shop not only afforded me two nice ties but also a surprise in the shape of a spectacular plaster ceiling in a rear room. The building used to be the house of John Bastard, one of the brother architects largely responsible for Blandford's reconstruction, and the room was a showcase for the firm.

The Chips Are Down

It’s a good thing that Swanvale Halt isn’t just residential, but contains a variety of businesses, from a small supermarket right at the centre of the village, to a tattoo studio, including along the way a butcher and a baker. There are of course also the two cafés which make it a more sociable place.

But do we need so many fast-food outlets of different kinds? The same small row of businesses near the church includes, in addition to the cafés, a kebab shop and pizza takeaway of long standing, and now, joining them, a chicken outlet. I don’t know how else to describe it, as chicken is apparently the main selling point. ‘Shack’ doesn’t seem the right word, because it isn’t.

I have a conflicted attitude to these businesses. It’s good to see any commercial activity going on rather than every available property being converted into flats, no matter how welcome dwellings might be. Every business where people have to stand and wait to be served offers the chance of social contact which might not otherwise happen, and contributes to the development of a community conversation which would otherwise be poorer. I try to combat my snobbish dislike of the way they look (bright orange shopfronts in two cases) and concentrate on other factors such as the healthiness of the fare – the kebab shop has one of those rotating cones of unidentifiable meat which hasn’t been anywhere near an actual animal for a long time – or what the prevalence of such businesses implies about society, which is people having time neither to prepare their own meals at home, nor to sit and eat them somewhere else. And the kebab shop, even though it may be smarter than it once was since a minor refit and the new uniforms issued to its staff, produces the little polystyrene food boxes you find discarded remarkably widely across the parish, including in the churchyard and occasionally in the church itself, complete with the odd ketchup-daubed chip. Once, when we had a particularly troublesome set of youngsters hanging around, I had an angry encounter with a neighbour who threatened to ‘close the church down’ if we didn’t make more efforts to keep the teens away. Why us? I wondered. If it wasn’t for the kebab shop they’d be loitering somewhere else.

But of course, returning to a theme of my previous post, if there wasn’t a market for fast food outlets they wouldn’t exist, and if Chicken Empire (that’s not its name) doesn’t find one it won’t last. It’s social circumstance that produces them. When the supermarket opened, as long ago as 1930, the various grocers, greengrocers and other little shops around the parish were probably horrified, quite rightly in a way, but now we regard it as a cornerstone of community life and would rue the day were it ever to close. Perhaps the time may come when we will look back on the memory of a row of bright takeaways and shed a tear for things past.

Toddler Market

At Toddler Group on Friday we heard the news that one of the local nurseries, based in a little old tin chapel round the corner from the church, is closing. When I checked, the manager told me in a laconic email 'our business model was unsustainable'. Another 'provider' will be re-opening the nursery in May, supposedly, and the staff will have the opportunity to re-apply for their positions, but in the meantime the impact is not only on them, but also on the families who rely on an amount of childcare to manage their own work schedules. Hornington and Swanvale Halt have something of an oversupply of children at the moment, and all the other local nurseries are full. I have only a vague idea how early-years provision works but I gather the funding is a mixture of Government subsidy to parents and their own resources. I wonder whether a new provider will be able to do any better out of what's available.

Market economics says that wherever there is a need it will be supplied. I've just finished reading Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist which takes a breezily confident view of the market, from coffee stands on railway stations to sweatshops in developing economies, even hinting that a market system in schooling might be more efficient (economically speaking) than what we have now. I can usually see his point, even as regards the sweatshops - they may well be better than the alternatives on offer - but a complacency shines forth from the book's pages more than once. It would be good to have more of an acknowledgement of the waste involved in the market process, the losses into the swirling waters of adaptation and change. Here in Swanvale Halt, the losses resulting from the closure of the nursery could include the jobs of some of the customers, not just the staff, and there's every likelihood that could have a lasting impact on the lives of their children: it's hard to predict.

The market solution (I presume) would be to have more providers than the market can actually support at any one time, so when one of them folds (as they will) it doesn't impact the system as a whole. This is all very well, but the investment involved in opening a nursery is considerable. As well as the cost of the plant, there is the significant training and certification the State demands of at least some of the staff involved. You can't just magic trained childcare up overnight. It seems to me that there's a tradeoff here: you either have flexibility and standards enforced by competition, or you enforce standards by statute and inspection and sacrifice something in flexibility. Combining secure and qualified provision with flexibility is a very hard trick to pull off indeed. I suppose it boils down to a choice as to how important a society thinks a good is, and how much waste, and of what form, it's prepared to tolerate. 

Philosophical Challenge

I was due to lead Assembly at the Infants School on January 28th, and had no idea what to do. Nothing in the news apart from Brexit and I didn't fancy tackling that: nothing out of the ordinary happening to me, and nothing notable in the school calendar either. Normally I would resort in such circumstances to telling the children about the life of whatever saint whose feast-day it happens to be. Now, periodically I like challenging myself to tackle abstruse subjects in my assemblies, but a look down the calendar of saints' days made me baulk a little. Nevertheless, I felt the Holy Spirit pushing me inexorably into a corner. 

St Thomas Aquinas for six-year-olds it had to be.

Luckily the school began doing Philosophy a couple of years ago. The children couldn't remember what they'd actually done in Philosophy, but such is the life of an infant-school pupil: they can't usually recall anything further back than a fortnight, but it sort of sinks in somehow and is recollected through more subtle processes than mere brutal question-and-answer in an assembly. Still, Philosophy gave me an entrée into discussing the business of asking questions, how often Jesus asked questions back to people to encourage them to think, and oh look, here's another person who spent his life asking questions. Whether the blessed Saint would readily recognise his life from the somewhat summarised account I gave I'm not sure. Nor am I convinced that the children will be much enlightened though it is just about possible that one or two of them might have taken away the dim memory of a fat monk writing books. 

I know Thomas Aquinas was a friar, not a monk: I decided to tackle the difference between forms of the religious life another day.

Acquiring Faculties

Loyal readers may recall, seven long years ago nearly, the saga of the refurbishment of Swanvale Halt church, retold in a series of posts on this blog: one, two, three, four, and yea five, the relaying of the floor, and the installation of new seating and lighting. The work itself was the easy part: it was waiting for permission to begin that was taxing to the nerves, not least because there was a wedding to host which eventually had to go somewhere else. The official authorisation for changes to church buildings is a thing called a faculty. In theory the bishop is the guardian of all church property in the diocese, and therefore grants permission for all works. In practice they delegate this to the properties department and, ultimately, the diocese's chief legal official, the Chancellor, who issues the final imprimatur on the bishop's behalf. Chancellor of a diocese is not a paid position, nothing so straightforward. In 2012 the Chancellor of Guildford was a former High Court judge who, so we were told, devoted one Saturday morning every fortnight (or it may have been a month) to reading faculty applications. One day in the midst of our knuckle-gnawing process of waiting I phoned up the legal office, the Registry, at their intimidating Gothic premises of 1 The Sanctuary next to the west door of Westminster Abbey to ask how long it might take. 'How long,' came the helpful reply, 'is a piece of string?' The benefit of the faculty process is that churches don't have to go through local authority planning permission for their works; the drawback is that there's a great deal of volunteer labour involved so it takes ages. 

The scope of works under the faculty system expanded considerably in the 19th century as bishops tried to stop their naughty Anglo-Catholic clergy from installing shrines to the Left Big Toenail of the Blessed Virgin and that sort of thing, or at least gave them legal grounds to remove them if they found out, but nowadays nobody cares very much about that and considerations of heritage, aesthetics and not leaving headaches for future churchwardens is more on the minds of the powers-that-be. To this end, in 2015 a new system of 'A' and 'B' items was introduced: 'A' refers to routine maintenance for which no permission is needed, 'B' small works which the local Archdeacon can authorise, and then there's everything else which still needs a full faculty.

The frustrations of this system led to a demand to be able to do it online and amazingly that is now happening, which leads me to the point of this post: a couple of weeks ago I went to a training morning at St Paul's, Dorking, about the online faculty system which strangely seems to be very good. 35 dioceses have bought into it over the last few years already so unusually Guildford is quite slow off the mark. You can upload all your documents to the database and then get emails whenever your application moves on or you need to do something. The only bit that seems not to be working is the final completion form the parishes should be sending on when they actually finish the work they applied for, as hardly anyone does, leading to most applications still being technically registered as 'live'. 'I could chase them up,' said the young fellow who led the training, 'but as there are - I'll check - ah, there you go - 19,864 at the moment, I rather doubt I'll find the time.'

The only unsettling thought is that I've been blithely telling successive Swanvale Halt churchwardens that 'the Archdeacon doesn't want to be bothered' about this or that, and while I remain convinced this is absolutely true, in fact we seem to be supposed to bother him, even if we're just having a 'List A' item done like cleaning the gutters. I may have to apply formally to regularise some of the teeny tiny items I've introduced to the church over the last nine-and-a-bit years.

Over coffee I wandered into the church, now a mainstream Evangelical establishment whose altar was brought forward in about 1980 and popped on a dais in 2005 when the pews were disposed of. The old chancel is, as so often, resplendent with encaustic tiles. But the real treasure, and surprise, is an amazing gold reredos now, as is often the case, remounted on a side wall. It was painted by a quite well-known artist called Ivon Hitchens in 1922: he later became a sort of abstract impressionist landscape painter and this, done as a young man, looks nothing at all like the work he later produced. In fact it has the look of something painted a generation earlier, with a Symbolist or Art-Nouveau tinge. Quite extraordinary, and I hope they had a faculty for it in 1922 or a bishop may yet come and hack it to shreds.

A Long Run In

I was sat next to the minister of One Accord Church in Hornington at the induction of the new minister of the town's Baptist Church. Ultimately, and interestingly, even within this Nonconformist setting there are shadows of Catholicity, as it were. There's not much in the way of obvious ceremony but there is ritual of a bare and unadorned kind, the shaking of hands and making of promises, which all go to recognise that the minister is both sent by a body wider than the local church, and called by it. Some fellow from the regional Baptist structure administers the promises to the new minister, to the elders of the church, and the congregation as a whole, all of whom bob up and down exactly as they would in an Anglican service.

It was the length that caught me out rather than the form or the style. At one point a representative of the minister's former church described what she'd done there; the secretary of Hornington Baptist gave an account of how they'd recruited her; and she herself then went through the process from her own viewpoint. Each of these speeches took some time. The church secretary recounted how the church had set up the 'search committee' and who was on it, and how they'd looked up the manual how to recruit a new minister on the Baptist Church national website. They were given a list of fourteen potential ministers, she said, 'and they were ...' and I thought, My goodness, she's going to read the whole list. I had visions of a kind of Baptist version of that bit from Father Ted where Mrs Doyle tries to guess the name of the Presbytery's new house-guest and lists the name of every priest in Ireland: 'Father Pigling Bland! Father Dermot MacGaslight! Father Shaughnessy O'Bastard!' But no, the secretary just went on 'and they were a huge variety.' Sigh of relief breathed.

We stumbled out into the chilly February afternoon after two hours, the minister of One Accord and I. I will sit at the next Anglican induction service I go to, listen to a bishop give a leetle leetle sermon, hear the awkward words of welcome to the new priest from various community representatives, the clanking of church keys and the ringing of the bell, and feel myself to be in the antechamber of paradise itself.

DIY Darkness

Bernice is married to Mal, long-time Goth DJ whose involvement with that world goes back to the days when Goth didn't even know that's what it was. They both have a personal style which harks back to that time, too, when the Goth scene orbited around the Batcave nightclub in London (and the other cities it visited) - a punkish combination of leather and chains, spiky backcombed hair, and round-toed boots from before New-Rocks got going and began their towering skyward ascent.

In fact I think this jacket which Mal bought Bernice for her recent big birthday from Berlin-based clothing and accessory-maker Kathrin Moravcsics -  YoungBat - has more of the Psychobilly about it than the Deathrocker, with its zebra-stripe lapels, cartoony bats and crossbones, but it does follow that one-time-universal handmade ethos that took everyday garments and customised them to death, or at deathliness at any rate. Bernice hasn't had the easiest of times over the last year or so and deserved a bit of fun.