Open Door Policy

Notices on the church door, red arrows delineating entry points on the floor, big red round dots showing you where you can sit safely to pray - the parish church of Swanvale Halt is open for business again! Or open for piety, in any case. Much to my surprise the advice from the Church nationally (which seems to derive from former Chief Nurse Bishop Sarah Mullaly, a 'dove' in this respect) has not specified that we need anyone on duty to supervise those who might come into the building to pray unless we deem it necessary for security or other practical reasons, so I was quite happy to set everything up this morning and walk away. The main consideration was not losing our hand sanitiser, and so Jack who does so many small construction jobs around the church knocked up the little box you can see in the picture. Somehow it seems only appropriate that we should have a wooden hand sanitiser dispenser. I wonder whether there's an appropriate saint whose image I can put on it.

I came back to lock the building again after three hours. I don't have any evidence that anyone actually came in ...

Dib Dib Dubious

Before doing my Museum Studies course at Leicester, I spent a summer volunteering at the Museum Service in Poole. The first job I was given to do was cataloguing a box of objects that had been sitting in the office for a couple of years. They all related to a recently-deceased Poole resident who'd been, among many other things, heavily involved in the Scouting movement. I went through the programmes, tickets, badges, and other bits and pieces, and found a medal: a brass swastika in a circle stamped on the back HitlerJugend 1934. Actually I can't swear to the date, but you get the idea. It caused quite a jolt. But if you were a 1930s Boy Scout leader without that much political awareness (or just enough to make you a Conservative), the Hitler Youth looked like a parallel organisation. Young fellows went out into the woods and tracked animals and lit fires. Mr Hitler will be a breath of fresh air for the Germans. Don't go along with him on everything, of course, but they probably need a bit of that sort of thing over there. That's what the Germans are like. 

I do feel a bit bad for Baden-Powell: he was hardly the only prominent Briton to be taken in by Mr Hitler, and his dreadful hierarchical views were no worse than a lot of his contemporaries'. His Poole statue strikes me as rather a humble object, as these things go: he sits looking out at Brownsea Island and passersby look down at him. As for Mr Gladstone, his fall from grace on the grounds of the origin of his family's wealth seems more than a little unfair. Not only do few lives stand up to that kind of scrutiny (a truism we all know), but dig beneath the surface of virtually any well-off individual's background between the late 17th- and early 19th-centuries and you'll find some connection or other with the Triangular Trade. Picking individuals for public obloquy beyond those most directly involved in it is a bit invidious.

But there lies the problem. For a century and more we British have told ourselves a story that begins in Tudor maritime exploration and derring-do, and continues through the Industrial Revolution into progressive modernity. I certainly remember that from my distant childhood. In so far as slavery comes into it, as soon as the Trade was abolished we spent our time congratulating ourselves for having done so and castigating any nation that was tardier than we were; the fact that it needed abolishing was apparently easy to forget, as was the way its colossal profits underwrote the investment that went into mines, textile factories, railways, and everything else that made Britain the world's first industrial power. Racism wasn't the point of any of this, really. Notions of racial hierarchy, and the appropriateness of one category of human beings owning members of another, or ruling over another, were justificatory veneers laid over the economic and geopolitical competition of European powers. That was what it was all about.

We can't extract this from who we are: it runs through the whole post-Reformation history of this country and has brought us here, to this point. There are public monuments to the people who made this history happen, surviving from the time when we we had no suspicion of the self-serving ideology that underlay the business of Trade and Empire, and their survival amounts to a denial in stone and bronze that it happened, or that it mattered. Removing them, though, I suppose might also be a form of denial. We've only just begun facing who we really are, and that's the real task.

(Photo snipped from the Dorset Echo)

You Have Encountered an Irretrievable Error

Telling the tale more often won't make it any the less true, though I suspect that buried at the back of my mind is the thought it might. 

Over the last few days I've been doing reasonably well in my aim to turn the computer off before 11pm. Last night I thought I would do one more job, watch twenty minutes of the film I've got on the go, and then power down (myself as well as the machine). But the job proved impossible as Word wouldn't open. Very soon I discovered that no Microsoft product on my computer would open. 

As my renewed credit card had only just arrived I wondered whether having the old details would have invalidated my Microsoft account all of a sudden. Even validating the new card wasn't straightforward: the bank website wouldn't 'recognise the card', though the automated phone line did. But it made no difference. 

'Repair the application', suggested a help forum. I tried, and that didn't work either. Finally I surrendered to uninstalling and re-installing the whole Microsoft Office suite. That was no swift process, and was still going on near 1am, at which point I left it to its own devices. In the course of this, I'd managed to sit on my glasses - the pair I'd only had two months - and snap an arm. 

This morning Office was reinstalled, in a vile new version. That seemed like the end of the affair - until I tried to edit a photo in Corel PhotoPaint. That didn't work either. At the end of a long process involving various Corel Corporation employees I concluded that I will need the new version of what I already had. Corel has reorganised its products recently, and it will cost over £300. Ow.

Grappling with technology sends me into a tailspin. I can never get used to the fact that it takes ages and ages to do anything, and things happen apparently for no reason. The amateur is left powerless looking at a screen which appears to be doing nothing, and this amateur, at any rate, pleads, cajoles, and weeps absurdly at an indifferent machine. Once upon a time I would get Ms Formerly Aldgate to deal with this as she never seemed to be fazed at all, but this is no longer an option. Admirably she viewed new technology and even new versions of the old technology, produced by the children at Microsoft paid well to fiddle and noodle with code, as an opportunity for learning, whereas I see it as a potential abyss into which all my efforts and endeavours are about to be sunk.

The new Office doesn't allow me to turn off email notifications jabbing into my side, metaphorically, from the right of the screen. That tells you all you need to know!

Three Rowans

When my mind isn't in a fit state for much detailed musing (and it's not) I turn to the garden. A couple of years ago my beautiful rowan tree had to be felled. The rowan is one of my favourite trees - I'm moved by its delicate leaves and red berries - and I was so sorry to lose mine, which soared gracefully up at the side of the Rectory. So I was anxious to replace it - and replaced it has very much been. The tree surgeon who removed the previous one, along with the great eucalyptus, brought a sapling he'd grown. It was a few encouraging feet high, but then the foxes stripped off all its bark. Thankfully it failed to die, and has come on healthily this year.

But not as healthily as one that I discovered soon after, that had just happened to seed itself in a convenient pot. It has positively rocketed, and I hope next year might thicken up a bit!

Finally there is a tiny rowan, currently in a little pot. It's only about six inches high so far. It already has the profile of a miniscule tree, and after seeing some lovely bonsai trees at Wisley Gardens with Ms Brightshades last year (the second photo you can see here is a bonsai) I thought that eventually I might have a go at bonsai-ing this one. I could take it with me, eventually.

St Catherine with the Spindle

Years ago an eBay shop called Putuco's Alpaca Warehouse used to sell Peruvian colonial religious art - they still do, though not in the exciting variety of those days. I bought two pieces from them, my wooden retablo of St Catherine and an image of St Jude, the patron saint of the church at Goremead which I looked after for a few months, because it didn't actually possess an image of him. I liked the naivety and gaudy joyfulness of the images. They revelled in life.

The other day I found this picture of St Catherine, apparently from 19th-century Spanish California so a bit north of Peru but still originating in the same cultural milieu. Although the blessed Saint is the patron of wool-workers because of the wheel which is her emblem (and therefore also of unmarried women, whose main occupation is of course spinning), I've never seen any reference to this aspect of her work in representations of her, so this picture is unique as far as I know. I'm not sure whether Catherine is being shown as a child here - that would be equally unusual. Hard to tell, isn't it?

I'm not going to buy it as the antique store wants $2500 for it!

UPDATE: It isn't St Catherine at all! It is in fact an icon of the Virgin, 'The Child Mary Spinning', a very unfamiliar image to most of us now, but not so in 17th and 18th century Peru, apparently.

Escape!

Now we are allowed to meet someone we don't live with in a private garden, I felt emboldened to visit my mum for the first time in months. She sat in the conservatory and I was outside. We had shop-bought sandwiches and I brought a flask. Typically the blazing sun of recent weeks is now gone but it wasn't too disagreeable. Afterwards I popped down to Sandbanks and sat on a wall for a few minutes. There were quite a few souls about, but all keeping apart from each other. Some ventured out into the water to do so. Look, it's the sea! Well, Poole Harbour anyway.

Public Service Broadcast

It has always been my custom to ring the church bell before Morning and Evening Prayer (concluding the latter, towards 6pm, with the Angelus). Of course that didn't happen during the two months no prayers were said in the church building, but now I am glad to be adding the tintinnabulation once again to the Swanvale Halt soundscape.

Lots of people have told me how comforting it is to hear the bell ringing again. Among these is Clarrie who is mother to Rob, our sort-of-under-verger when he is around (he used to be verger at another church before they moved to us). 'When I hear the bell in the evening', she told me a couple of days ago, 'I always know it's time to begin our tea.'

The unexpected sense of responsibility was one I found very disconcerting and I stressed that she shouldn't rely on me, because especially in the evenings I am sometimes late. 'That's all right', she assured me. 'If you're late, then it's really time to begin our tea.'