REJOICE, REJOICE!

Not Blue Suede Shoes

At St.Peter’s people regularly leave bags of jumble outside the church (or on the steps of the Office, which annoys our colleagues) because they know that we have market stalls to raise money for our social projects. Sometimes it just seems like bags of rubbish, but it is all kindly meant. Now, though, odd things have started to appear outside St.Mary Mags, and I’m quite sure that no-one expects us to sell them. There were two smashed-up motor scooters some time ago, but they disappeared as quietly as they came. Last week, though, there appeared a child’s scooter, abandoned outside the church porch; not a particularly nice one, mostly plastic, but in working order. Today, however, we have a pair of shoes, coral patent, wedge heels, quite glossy, placed beside each other on the pavement, some time around Usain Bolt’s 100m final. Curious.

A Question of Etiquette

What exactly is the correct form when a (clearly stolen) Boris bike is left on your property? This has now happened a couple of times this summer, parked up quite neatly on my forecourt, out of sight behind the fence. I confess that my policy has been simply to drag the things out into full public view, and to trust that they will either be re-used, or somehow be dealt with. The vans servicing the docking stations do not routinely come our way (because obviously there is no docking station on the Warwick Estate), so is there a number I can call?

Success at Last

At St.Mary Mags, we are rejoicing. We have succeeded in our bid for funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. They will give us £3.6 million of a £7.3 million project, which is a brilliant result. We have also had tremendous support from Westminster City Council, who have been part of the process from the beginning, and so we are to receive a good chunk of what used to be called “Section 106” money, which is paid by developers to fund socially useful work in areas affected by their developments. From the start, officers from Westminster recognised that the project would deliver all sorts of desirable social outputs from their point of view, and made the project an integral part of their planning for the Estate, backing us when times were hard. Now that we have the recognition of Heritage Lottery funding it will be good to be able to repay their perseverance with us. Of course St Mary Magdalene’s PCC is not doing this alone; we have been in partnership with the Paddington Development Trust for about eleven years, and they will be the ones delivering the Project. For years we had meetings with representatives of the Council, the Diocese, the Primary School, and ourselves and PDT, inching the Project forward and keeping everyone on board. PDT carried out consultations, we had open days (one with a falconry display inside the church), we did market research. I think it’s seven years ago that we had the architectural competition to find designers for the new building, and the delay has made it clear that we picked winners, which is quite gratifying. Gradually the Project has got nearer and nearer to reality, but I’ve lived with it for so long that it’s hard to see it as totally real yet. Now the real work starts!

HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE

A Hostage Situation

On Monday morning a couple of police officers turned up at St Peter’s House, and rather apologetically explained that they had received a report that hostages were being held in the building, and asked whether they might take a look around.  Between us, the PDT girls and I unlocked as many doors as we could and they wandered around. I warned them that a self-help group session was in progress downstairs in the Hall, but said they could just open the door and peep in. Perhaps the trauma of having uniformed police officers peering in at their meeting was responsible for the fact that when the group left they hadn’t put the furniture back to normal, they hadn’t turned the water boiler off, and they hadn’t locked the front door! And the police wandered off without saying goodbye, which was a bit strange. I realised afterwards that I wasn’t clear whether it was supposed that we were holding some innocent citizen hostage, or whether we were meant to be the victims. Either way, they didn’t seem to have treated it with great seriousness, as they said the report had been made several days earlier (which since a Sunday had intervened made it hard to see how someone could be incarcerated) but I suppose they were doing their duty. Afterwards we speculated as to which particular mischief-maker might have invented this story, but didn’t reach any conclusion.

Irish Eyes

It was fun to go along to the Maida Hill Irish Festival on Sunday, even if the first person I saw was one of my own congregation who is no more Irish than I am. Lots of people were very friendly (albeit that some of that friendliness was lubricated by Guinness) but one lady harangued me at some length. At first she asked me what I believed in, and then told me what she believed in, to which I generally assented, but then she started berating me about the animals, and how we were doing nothing for the animals. I nodded sympathetically, not feeling that a discussion about priorities in a world full of war, starvation and terror would get us very far, but then she told me that she took direct action by feeding the pigeons! “Because they’re starving,” she said. At that point I made my excuses and left, or rather she told me to get up because her friend wanted to sit back down where I was, and I slipped away, but really! No they’re not! Urban pigeons do not starve. The urban pigeon, properly the feral rock dove, is an extremely resilient creature. When we were driving over the Himalayas, from Manali to Leh, a few years ago, I had been looking forward to the opportunity to see scarce wildlife, and fair enough we saw the bharal, or blue sheep, and we saw marmots (“Is rat,” said our driver, unimpressed), but hardly any interesting birds. And when we got to the highest part of the road, where there were only the tiniest sprigs of vegetation among the scree and rocks, what did we find, but rock doves! In the most barren landscape they were still scratching a living where there appeared to be nothing to eat. Hence, I don’t think Maida Hill presents too much of a challenge for them.

Canalside Living

A few weeks back I was looked in the eye by a heron as I rode my bike, which came as a bit of a shock. Fair enough, he was on the grass beside the canal, just along from the Harrow Road bridge, but on this occasion he was the wrong side of the path, nowhere near the water at all. I suspect he may have been attracted by the pile of food waste which some café-owner (I presume) puts out beside the path to feed the birds. Well, I say feed the birds, but the other day there was a pile of meat there (in midsummer, very nice) which I suspect may have been dumped to avoid inspection. Magpies, crows and gulls will have enjoyed the meat, but not so much the ducks and geese, while foxes and rats will have been delighted. This particular spot regularly smells like a Kathmandu rubbish dump, which makes a change from the smell of weed, but isn’t especially attractive.

Paranoid Style

Back in the last century, when I did my degree, I did a paper on American history, and was introduced to the work of Richard Hofstadter, who had died ridiculously young not so many years earlier. Hofstadter was a person of great wisdom (and scholarship) and I’ve just been reading his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. He wrote this originally in 1963, and published a revised version in 1965, taking account of Barry Goldwater’s Republican candidacy; it is reprinted in a 2008 paperback collection of essays named after it. Hofstadter’s argument is that there is a consistent strain in American politics, going back to the 1790s, of outbursts of extreme right-wing politics that share a “paranoid” style. The McCarthyite and Goldwater episodes were then the most recent, but his analysis fits the Trump phenomenon almost exactly. One fascinating point he makes is that these outbursts are largely about what he calls “status politics” rather than “interest politics”, where “interest politics” are the normal pursuit of your own (or your class’s) material or economic interest. “Status politics” meanwhile, are about moral outlooks, or identity, or culture being under threat; critics misunderstood the notion of status and objected that the poor whites who supported Goldwater enjoyed no status to lose, but the point is that they thought the Republic had enshrined their values (which perhaps gave them some psychological status) but was now disowning them. This means that just using the normal arguments about the economy doesn’t work for those people. It seems to me that this not only fits Trump very closely, but also fits the Brexit phenomenon in UK, which is perhaps an indication that for the first time mass immigration really is having an impact on our society, because people are beginning to behave like Americans, whose immigrant nature was, for Hofstadter, at the heart of the political behaviour he analysed. The big difference is that Brexit won, whereas Hofstadter was confident that the paranoid style would only ever appeal to a minority in the US. It remains to be seen whether we shall see Trump go the way of Goldwater, or whether paranoia has now edged over into the majority. Either way, read the essay!