Rotherhithe at Night

Katrin my god-daughter shares a house with two friends not far from the Thames in Rotherhithe, commuting from there to the Treasury where at the start of the year she began working in a department so obscure that even Dr Abacus hadn't heard of it despite working in the same building for many years. Monday was my first chance to see her since she started. She took me for a meal at the Mayflower, a clambering old hostelry overlooking the river which plays on almost certainly non-existent connections with the Pilgrim Fathers and contains the scrapings of several junk shops scattered over the walls, shelves and windowsills. The food was good but it was just as well Katrin had booked. 

Katrin led me around the area pointing out as much of its history as was visible in the dark: a pavilion in the park which had been located in several places before ending up where it was, a former workhouse now inevitably converted into a café, streets on the sites of wharves and docks, one lonely Art Deco building soaring upwards in amongst the converted warehouses and modern developments along a side street. We bought ice cream at her favourite gelateria but were thrown out as they were about to close, and finshed our desserts looking along the river. 'I think this is the best view of the river in London', Katrin said. 'I'm lucky to be here'.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

The Infants School children came to church this morning to deposit their Harvest gifts, sing some songs, and listen to me reflect on the season for a minute or two. I decided to think about work: the fact that at Harvest we focus on farmers (and the children often sing about them), and a younger cousin of mine decided she wanted to be one, but hardly any of us will have much contact with that kind of life. 'I wonder what you will be when you grow up?' I asked Years 1 & 2, and got a variety of answers. The traditional train driver was the first, followed by scientist, vet, police officer ('so I can stop bad guys being bad' the little girl in question claimed) - and fairy. I didn't ask the Reception class what they thought.

As they left, I remembered that although fairy may seem an unlikely career trajectory, there is a professional mermaid operating in St Ives in Cornwall. She was the one who posted the video of her priest uncle accidentally setting himself alight during an online service early in the first lockdown (the Revd Beach, to add to the sense that the whole thing was scripted by a higher power). In fact, trying to recover the facts today, I find there are quite a lot of professional mermaids about. Perhaps it's not inherently less likely than anything I do.

Rainbow Over Swanvale Halt

Or even a double rainbow, as has been pointed out to me. Rainbows are always a tremendous delight to me. They stand for renewal and optimism, quite apart from any resonances with the story of the Flood. I think it might be because of their gratuitous, and mostly entirely unexpected loveliness. 

If I worry in any existential way, it's about the amount of time I've wasted, and the chance that I could reach the end of my life and conclude that I might have taken the wrong turn at some point, and there was another place where I could have been more use. This is not to do with any problem of faith - that's a separate business - but it might be to do with my fitness to be a parish priest, as sometimes it feels that I'm no good at it at all. When we went on our ordination retreat from Staggers at Alton Abbey, the retreat conductor Bishop Timothy Bavin told us, among other gems such as the advice that there was no shame in going to sleep under the table if a meeting got particularly pointless and boring, that we might well conclude at some point that the Church had made a dreadful mistake in ordaining us, and if so we should (as a first resort, anyway), try to recall that despite appearances the Holy Spirit knows better than we do and that God would honour the call and equip us with what we needed even if something had gone awry with the process. I try to hold on to that. I suppose we all have shadow selves, paths we might have trodden and routes we could have taken had things been different, and we can't pursue them all. 

Tomorrow's Gospel is the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard from Matthew, the labourers who get paid the same by the landowner regardless of how late in the day they turn up. Perhaps I regret not getting going in my Christian life earlier, but then again maybe that brings me some insights I wouldn't otherwise have had. All in the end is harvest, and the Lord can work with the least we bring him, no matter how late we arrive.

Litter & Liberty

Wednesday was a varied day: communion at Widelake House, a funeral where everything went wrong including a downpour at the cemetery which left us all drenched, and Church Club at the Infants School. Somewhat wearily I got to the church, ready for a walk to the supermarket to do my shopping as it was too wet to cycle, and found the porch full of trash.

There's a certain amount of research examining why people litter, most of it (quoted, for instance, here and here) concluding that it mainly relates to the availability of bins. This can't be the case with the youngsters who hang around the church, as, every adult who comments on the matter points out, they leave rubbish about despite being directly alongside a rubbish bin. There must be something else going on. 

Imagine being a teenager, especially a teenage boy, in a group sitting outside Swanvale Halt church, or in the porch, with a bottle of radioactive sweet pop or a horrible spicy sausage in a packet with a strikingly low actual meat content. You're certainly not going to put the remains into a bin if nobody around you is - but the likelihood is that you won't do it even if you're on your own, and I know this is exactly what happens. It's not just group dynamics. 

Think of it like this. Putting your rubbish into a bin, provided for the purpose by a public authority, would show that you accepted a constraint on your behaviour. It would mean recognising that you are not completely free to do whatever you like, that you have to take other considerations, other people and their feelings and ideas, into account; that you are not utterly autonomous, absolutely the master of your own destiny. Trash is freedom. It's more than that, it's a symbol of freedom.

Imagine, again, being in a place where leaving a crisp packet on a paving slab is what it means to be free. Great.

Talking Tamara

Among the crowd at Cathi Unsworth's reading in Camden a few weeks ago was, I only realised afterwards, Lisa, the artist of a painting I bought at a small exhibition in Walton-on-Thames years ago. She's on the board of the Arts Society in Kingston-upon-Thames and had just achieved her ambition to get a talk about Tamara de Lempicka on the schedule, so last night I went along. 

Lecturer Pamela Campbell-Johnston, who was involved in the Lempicka exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2004-5 (which I think I saw) challenged us to consider which side of the divide we fell on: was she a genius who pioneered female artistry with a unique style, or (as Waldemar Januszczak claimed) a maker of 'creepy daubs'? 'Daubs' I couldn't agree with - that's a deeply unfair description for Lempicka's amazing technical proficiency, and her sketches show even better than the paintings what a brilliant draughtsman she was - but 'creepy' and 'genius' both seem equally just as epithets. Ms Campbell-Johnston illustrated the latter with images of the queasily erotic paintings of the artist's daughter Kizette, but it's there throughout the whole project: the transformation of humans into aloof, godlike beings composed of razor-sharp angles and metallic curls of hair falling like swarf off a lathe. Given the right-wing, aristocratic circles Lempicka moved in, this is art born of the 1920s lust for liberty which edges uneasily towards fascism. The glamour is often the glamour of cruelty.

What strikes me most is that Lempicka's most dramatic and memorable work was done in such a short period. By about 1927 she'd hit on a style which enabled her to make money, and work quickly with tremendous productivity, but it clearly excited her as well. Whether the pictures are gentle or whether they're cruel, there's a passion in them which energises and powers them. After about 1933 when she married Baron Kuffner and no longer had to work for a living, the steam goes out of the art, and all her ultramodern accoutrements of skyscrapers and telephones no longer seem as radical. For the next forty-odd years, she paints as someone who doesn't have to but thinks they should. The moment had passed. 

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Ockham & Burgh Heath

My accounts of Surrey church visits are nearing their conclusion. A while ago I saw two very contrasting buildings. All Saints', Ockham, sits on its own in a very rural setting, with not a lot to show from the Oxford Movement and its successors apart from antiquarianism; although, rather as Church Crookham has the only shrine of Bd John Keble to be found anywhere, Ockham's choice to commemorate local lad the medieval philosopher William Ockham is presumably unique as well. Not quite unique, but next to it, is the church's great treasure alongside all its medieval and later bits and pieces, the amazing seven-light east window which may have come from Newark Abbey after the Dissolution. Even with recent glass in it, it renders the chancel an amazing, affecting space.

St Mary's Burgh Heath, in contrast, is a breezy Edwardian brick barn, but had a Catholic tradition in advance of its parent church of Banstead at the time of its building. In fact, it was the scene of a bit of conflict when Mrs Colman, one of the church's chief benefactors, kicked up such a fuss about the liturgy at St Mary's that a weekly Sung Eucharist was abandoned by the second week after opening in 1909 (there were still Stations of the Cross on Good Friday and a eucharist on All Souls' Day later in the year, though). From the 1980s Burgh Heath shifted further and further to the ecclesiological centre, and is now moderate Evangelical (which is what 'centre' currently means). The plaque in the photo refers, intriguingly, to a sanctuary lamp which is no longer there!

In 1923 the Colman family sold Nork House and left the area and their phalanx of reserved seats in the church. St Mary's celebrated its liberation by converting the space where the Colman pews had been into a Chapel of St Monica, fitted out by no less than Ninian Comper. Not that I've ever thought glass design was really the great man's strong point!