BIG FOOD RESCUE

Big on the Small Screen

St Peter's appeared on the television today, and may do so again this week, on BBC 1 at 9.15am, in a series called "The Big Food Rescue", which is all about The Felix Project. Readers of the Evening Standard will already be familiar with this excellent project, which collects waste food from businesses and directs it to those feeding the needy. It seems to be an idea whose time has come. This week they are getting five morning slots of documentary on BBC 1 telling their story. Needless to say, there were minor inaccuracies on the voice-over, but never mind. It did show the Lunch Club (and Jacqui) in action, which was good; the bizarre spectacle of the Lunch Club feasting on asparagus had a certain surreal quality, but fortunately they concentrated on nourishing soup, which was a bit simpler to eat. Who knows whether they will use any more of the footage they took: one of our users throwing his plate at his carer perhaps?


An Odd Encounter

I was invited to a reception in the Lord Mayor's Parlour last week, apparently nominated by the councillors, and found myself with a very assorted bunch of people. I was chatting to two locals when someone came over who asked if I was from "The True Church" (the capital letters were implied!) to which I replied that obviously everyone in my business has to think his is the true church. I assumed this was a light-hearted conversational opening, but soon found that they meant it. I wanted to think they were pulling my leg, but this just went on, and it became clear they were not joking, and obviously thought I would be pleased because the True Church, in their view, was the Church of England. Turns out that their taste is for Matins at the Abbey at a civilised hour on a Sunday, so I don't think they will be joining the flock here soon, but I came away marvelling at what some people regard as acceptable discourse. Perhaps it shows how soft and liberal I am, but I don't think claiming absolute truth for one's religious denomination is a normal feature of cocktail party conversation. In the religious melting-pot which is London, we muddle along pretty well with one another, but on the basis that none of us makes truth claims in the public space. You can assume that the practitioners of any religious system believe it to be true, and it is polite not to try to enforce your view on them, because we can live perfectly well side by side; co-existence rather than competition is the way to harmonious relations. The jihadist, of course, would take an opposing view. It might be supposed that my interlocutor would do the same, but I'm not so sure, because I think they didn't mind co-existence as long as we just patronised other faiths.


The Pastor and the Imam

So our film show will be happening on Monday, something for which we owe the (multi-faith) chaplaincy at Wormwood Scrubs a debt. The film comes from Nigeria, and is an encouraging story of reconciliation in a situation where Christians and Muslims sometimes do actually end up killing one another. It is plain that the clerics in the film (and our two friends from the Scrubs) are sincere believers, and not woolly liberals, but they demonstrate that respect and common humanity are at the heart of all religious faith. The film exists online, but we are showing it in the splendour of St Mary Mags at 6.15 on Monday 5th, with a question session and refreshments afterwards.   

THE CONCRETE AND THE CLAY

 CONCRETE CITY

One of the most obvious features of our neck of the woods at the moment is the enormous amount of concrete being transported about. Because of restrictions on turns at the Prince of Wales junction it all comes up to the traffic lights outside St Peter’s and lumbers around, gradually destroying the traffic island. This traffic comes (I presume) from the Tarmac company’s concrete batching plant next to the bus garage on Great Western Road, beside the railway, and involves both concrete mixer trucks and huge tipper trucks. Lots of concrete obviously means lots of building work; the last big spike in activity was in the early stages of Crossrail, but I think this is not destined for that scheme, which seems to be past the big concrete stage. It’s clear that the property boom continues unabated, despite recent events. You just have to look at the skyline, where you will always see cranes somewhere. Wherever you go in London there seems to be “development” taking place, with old buildings being swept away and new, shiny ones taking their place, or the existing buildings being extended or “basemented”. With all this building going on, one might ask, why do young people find it so hard to get a place to live?

Both my churches were put up during a previous building boom, in the 1860s and 70s, when, I have read, Chippenham Road was surfaced with wood blocks (I don’t think that lasted long). St Mary Magdalene’s features an early use of poured concrete, in the vault of the undercroft, a patent fireproof product, which shows how progressive the neo-gothic architects actually were. Much as I may fear and resent today’s concrete traffic (as a cyclist) I have to concede that life must have been much worse then, when there was far less regulation, and you had wooden scaffolding, steam-driven piledrivers and far more workmen. You only have to look at the photos of the digging of the Circle Line on display at Paddington Station to become aware of how ghastly it must have been. The Circle, remember, basically follows the street pattern, and was built in a huge trench dug down from the existing road; think what that would have done for traffic on Marylebone Road! Health and safety was rudimentary, and consideration for residents seems to have been very limited; you just had to put up with it as they tunnelled past your house. Meanwhile, the speculative builders were putting up whole new districts, like ours, with cheap, meanly-built housing. They look quite solid and respectable, but were often built in a hurry and ended up being let by the floor or the room as they weren't actually nice enough for the imagined target market. The planned development of Queen’s Park was a reaction to the free-for-all that had gone before, somewhere orderly and decent rather than the wild west of St Peter’s Park. It can still feel a bit like that!

THE HERON KNOWS

As I was taking a bite to eat at Clarence Gate the other day (in a break while cycling round the perimeter of Regent’s Park) I was watching the herons. I have mentioned before that there they now seem to have adapted to humans being an easy source of food, and they join the geese and gulls in looking for bread; well, on this occasion I was watching with fascinated horror as a tourist held out his hand towards a heron’s beak. Have you no imagination? Have you not seen what they do to fish? (Probably not, of course). They stab their beaks through fish a good deal thicker than your hand, so watch out, mate! Blessedly, nothing happened, but then I turned to watch one heron standing on his own in the middle of a flowerbed, stock still, classically immobile. Then a jogger came into view. She was short and extremely skinny, and dressed entirely in grey. As she came past him the heron clearly turned his head to follow her progress, as if not entirely sure that she was of a different species.

A FUNNY OLD YEAR

For All Souls’ Day we invite the families of people whose funerals we’ve done in the past year, and so I was going through my records to find the names and addresses. Now I haven’t done any more funerals than normal, but this year’s have been pretty memorable. I’ve been doing funerals for thirty years, but had never done a stillborn child until last November; and now I’ve done two. Stillbirths are not as uncommon as we suppose, but as parish clergy we tend not to do the funerals, as the hospital chaplains generally look after most of them. Fortunately I got to know the excellent Rosie at St Mary’s pretty well last summer, and so when the first one came to me last November I was able to pick her brains, and she directed me to her colleague, Michele, who specialises in this particular ministry. So, I had appropriate words to use, and it wasn’t too terrible. The more recent one, where I knew the family (slightly) and the funeral was in church, was pretty traumatic, and they remain traumatised by it all. There is clearly still work to do. So I’ve had two neo-natal deaths, and as well the funeral of a fourteen year old who died from an acute asthma attack. She was a twin, and I baptised them both and gave them their First Communion when they were altar servers, before their mum sent them to boarding school. That funeral involved a white, horse-drawn hearse, and a Pentecostal music group, but the thing that really sticks in the memory is the remaining twin sitting at a keyboard and singing a song she had written for her sister. Remarkable. Beside that, going back to Colchester to do the funerals of an old friend (aged 90), and my sister-in-law’s mother (also over 90) seemed more or less normal. As did the burial at Kensal Green of one of our most notable characters at St Mary Mag's. But it has been a funny old year.         

LIGHT PERPETUAL

THE LORD LOVES A CHEERFUL GIVER

The trouble is that I’m a pretty graceless giver; I wish I could get better. On Tuesday morning I came to St.Peter’s to get ready to say Mass, and Linda, the cleaner, told me that the homeless guy was in the church foyer. He’d asked to come in and use the lavatory, and then had curled up on the easy chairs in the warm. No problem there, but I hoped he’d wake up before I was finished. Linda just cleaned around him. Then, as I was going backwards and forwards preparing the altar, a young man waiting for an appointment with the Enterprise Centre said, “Oh, sorry, there’s someone at the door for you.” So, up I go and find a local man who is known to me, brandishing doctor’s letters about an inguinal hernia, and saying he has no money for his fare to the Charing Cross Hospital and if he misses the appointment it’ll mess up his benefits. This is 9.55. I am due to say Mass at 10. I haven’t dressed yet. I haven’t opened the safe. This isn’t the best time! Ungraciously I end up making a point of bringing out my wallet and giving him a fiver “from my own money – nobody else’s”. I am mortified to realise a moment later that the young man waiting for his appointment has heard the whole conversation, and witnessed my grumpiness.

At the end of Mass, the homeless man is still asleep, and after I’ve bumbled around clearing up I have to wake him because I need to lock up. He  goes to the lavatory again and then says he’s diabetic and needs food, so I find some crisps and fruit bars and give him a fiver as well.

THANKS TO FELIX

We discovered the Felix Project a few months ago, or rather, they discovered us. They give waste food from supermarkets to groups feeding the hungry, and they have transformed our lunches. They don’t do meat, so we still have to find that, but they give us all our vegetables, and all manner of excellent extras. The only trouble is that sometimes the enthusiastic staff on the van are just too keen to shift stuff, and force food on us that we can’t realistically use. Three cartons of Rooibos tea anyone? A couple of weeks ago we had a young man making a TV film about the Felix Project who came in to see the lunch club in action, and did interviews. Whether any of it ends up being shown is quite another matter, and I wonder whether his pretty committed work is necessarily what his editors want, but we shall see (or at least we will if they warn us when it is to be broadcast).

GIVE THEM REST

Last night was All Souls’, our big occasion at St.Mary Mags. We had orchestra and choir, and about four hundred in church. We sang Fauré, in memory of Helen, and I presided in the black High Mass set that we bought in memory of Ian McPherson, a dear old Mary Mags regular a couple of years ago. I always invite families for whom we’ve done funerals in the past year, and each year some of them come and really get it. This year a young mum, who lost a teenage daughter to an acute asthma attack came, along with the daughter’s twin, and they loved it. She was absolutely blown away by the experience, which is as it is meant to be. The music, which is sublime, in that beautiful setting, and with the solemn mystery of the liturgy, takes people to a better place. We had lots of positive comments afterwards, from Warwick Estate families as from Little Venice grandees. The Music Society has been putting on a French Romantic Requiem for All Souls’ Day here for nearly fifty years, and we must be one of the very few places where it happens with full orchestra, which is really special. My mission has been to make it clear that this is an act of worship, not a concert, and so I’ve managed to get a second congregational hymn into the order, as well as making sure the order of service is designed to help people participate. We always invite people to add names to the list of departed to be read out at the intercessions, while the musicians want to suppress the list, so there’s always a little tension there. To be able to preside at All Souls’ Day at Mary Mags is a great privilege in my ministry.