Monday 30 December 2019

CULTURE AT CHRISTMAS

Another mark of age is the discovery that an event that you think of as quite recent actually occurred thirty-five years ago. This happened to me on Saturday when I visited the current Stubbs exhibition, "George Stubbs: all done from nature", which announced itself as the first major show of the artist's works for thirty-five years. "Surely not," I said, "I went to the last one, at the Tate, and the catalogue is in the sitting room. It wasn't that long ago." So I checked from the catalogue when we got home; the last Stubbs show was indeed at the Tate in 1984 and in Yale in 1985. You may not have noticed the current show, because it is at MK Gallery, the municipal art gallery in Milton Keynes, but make no mistake about it, this is a serious show, put on in collaboration with the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it moves in a month's time. Sadly, the MK Gallery doesn't seem to have a publicity budget, so the gallery was virtually empty when we went, for a show that in London would be attracting thousands. It's ridiculous, it's only half an hour from Euston on the train (and admittedly a stiff walk up Midsummer Boulevard once you get there) and it's a brilliant show. Go while you can! They've even got the skeleton of Eclipse, the first great racehorse, which I think used to be in the horseracing museum in Newmarket, and which belongs to the Royal Veterinary College. Stubbs painted Eclipse at least twice and as they are showing a lot of the material from his "The Anatomy of the Horse" it is particularly appropriate to have the skeleton in the show. I still remember the impression that the Tate show made on me all those years ago, a great sense of wellbeing flowing from those serene embodiments of Whig Britain, and this show did much the same on Saturday. Stubbs is still a really top-notch artist, persistently undervalued because he painted so many dogs and horses, but he's so exciting with his bold plain backgrounds and radical compositions. Those are classical friezes there. And how on earth does he get aerial perspective while painting in enamels, for goodness' sake?  His people are usually convincing portraits, too, but I suspect he found animals rather better company than the Whig landowners he was working for. In the end, a lot of those pictures are just absolutely ravishing, and it will enhance your life to spend a couple of hours looking at them.

Milton Keynes, on the other hand, is not so life-enhancing. It's a demonstration of how far we have come that this place, which seemed so progressive and futuristic in the 1980s now seems like a dinosaur. I remember passing through it by various different routes in the years when I used to take the bus from Oxford to Cambridge (and vice-versa); the bus company seemed not to have settled on the best route, and so you saw different bits of Beds and Bucks each time, but I remember pausing outside Milton Keynes Central more than once. Now the whole place seems hopelessly dated and very uncongenial, totally lacking a human scale, and devoted entirely to the motor car. I would have supposed that it would be a good place for cycling, being flat and spacious, but there was no evidence of that when we were there.

"Rembrandt's Light" at Dulwich was the other recent show. Another excellent piece of work, brilliant curatorship, making something quite special out of quite a small show. The highlight is the Queen's "Christ and Mary Magdalene", which is shown on its own under changing light conditions. The picture of course depicts dawn, and so they bring the lights up to replicate dawn. You see a tremendous amount that way, not least because the lights end up being brighter than you would normally have in a gallery, and so you see things you wouldn't otherwise notice. It's one of my favourite pictures anyway, but I loved that. My friend John painted an "hommage" to it, in the style of Van Gogh, which now hangs in our Sacristy at Mary Mags, as his thank you to us for giving him a show.

Our other Christmas treat was "La Traviata" at Covent Garden, beautiful. Simon Keenlyside on good voice as Germont, and two young Armenians as Alfredo and Violetta. Terrific music, beautifully played, and a great staging (by Richard Eyre, twenty-five years old). I reminisced about seeing the Zeffirelli film, with Placido Domingo as Alfredo, but I knew that was back in the eighties, 1982, as it turns out. We treated ourselves to dinner in the opera house restaurant, and I was amused to see that the menu is ten pounds more for the opera than it is for the ballet. Of course they will be able to justify it, but I rather suppose it's just more expensive because everything connected with opera is routinely more expensive.    

Friday 27 December 2019

I GROW OLD...

Obviously, one of the signs of getting older is that people stand up to give you a seat on the tube, but I am still very surprised when a young woman offers me her seat. Just possibly wearing the collar may have something to do with it as well, but that doesn't seem very likely in contemporary London.

More alarming though, is to discover that your contemporaries are now occupying great offices in the land which are positions of eminence and seniority. This is very concerning when you have always believed, as I have done, that these are positions for grown-ups, who are a distinct species, quite different from you.  So, as you can imagine, it was a bit disconcerting to discover that Bishop Stephen Cottrell (the current Bishop of Chelmsford) has been chosen to be the next Archbishop of York, because I knew Stephen very well when we trained together at St Stephen's House. He is two or three years older than me, and was in his final year when I started at Staggers, and he was my group leader. Groups were a feature of institutions in the 1980s; we were all organised into groups across the years, with a tutor vaguely supervising us, and we were expected to socialise and support each other. Mostly, though, it was a way of ensuring that certain domestic tasks got carried out (like serving dinner). You got to know your group pretty well. Your group leader could make your life less than pleasant. Stephen was my bishop for a while in Reading, having been appointed to the post instead of the unfortunate Fr Jeffrey John, when the irony was that their views and theological approach were virtually the same, but Stephen was judged acceptable because he is married with children, while Jeffrey was not because he is a gay man in a (celibate) relationship. From Reading Stephen was advanced to the diocese of Chelmsford, which is his (and my) home diocese, for he grew up in Southend, or rather Anglo-Catholic Leigh-on-Sea (which is posher than Southend). I am slightly surprised that Stephen should be put in charge of the Northern Province, as he has spent almost the whole of his working life in the south-east of England, and has always been rather the professional Londoner, speaking a sort of Estuary English  that comes very naturally to him. To be fair, he was diocesan missioner in Wakefield for a while (a diocese which no longer exists), but that's his only contact with the north. I have no doubt that he has been an effective Bishop of Chelmsford, and clearly the Archbishop of Canterbury sees him as a suitable collaborator for York, but you would have expected someone with more experience of the north (especially after Archbishop Sentamu, who is also pretty un-northern). It is amusingly ironic that a life-long Socialist like Stephen should be sent to York at exactly the time that vast swathes of the north turn Tory.

For me, the Archbishop of York should be someone older than me, whom I can respect. Still more does this apply to the Governor of the Bank of England, and I exclaimed with surprise on the tube the other day when I realised from the report in the standard that the Andrew Bailey who has been appointed the next Governor was the same Andrew Bailey whom I knew at university. I remember he was jolly bright, and he was certainly the sort of person who would have gone to work there, but it still came as a jolting surprise, mainly in realising how ancient I must have become. I remember bumping into Andrew in Florence in the summer of 1981, when we were both doing the cultural thing, thanks to cheap student rail fares, but we weren't ever particularly close. We both read History; he was at Queen's, I was at Emma, and he was in the Labour Club while I was in CUCA, but we moved in similar political circles. As I recall, we had common enemies, a coterie of "moderates" in both organisations who hung around together and shared backgrounds of similar wealth and privilege (among them, amusingly, Sir Bernard Jenkin, who is now my brother's MP). We provincial grammar school products gravitated together.        

Thursday 12 December 2019

GUNS AND HOUSES

It was horrible to learn of a shooting on Walterton Road last week, on the edge of the parish. A young man  remains in hospital, critically injured, after being shot in the neck by someone passing, apparently on a moped at 8.30 in the evening. Details remain sketchy, and contradictory, as some people thought a car was involved, and either two shots, or seven were mentioned. A member of the congregation who lives on the street had heard and seen nothing unusual. The previous evening we had been told by the local police that our silly youths on the Estate have decided that they want to have their own gang, instead of being disputed territory between the Harrow Road Boys, the Lisson Green Men, and whatever they are called on the Mozart Estate (the virtuosi perhaps?) and so they have taken to taunting other postcode dwellers on social media. The result of these taunts apparently was that ten of the Lisson Green "Men" turned up at the youth club on the Amberley Estate with machetes. We really do not need this. Of course we can reassure people that you are unlikely to have any problem if you are not a young black male, but young black men are actually human beings too, and part of the community.

Bizarrely the line that the Evening Standard chose to take on the shooting was that this was a nice street in prosperous Maida Vale, where "Regency townhouses sell for £3 million". This is laughably misleading.  First they need a history lesson; nothing on Walterton Road dates back to the Regency (1811-1820). This area was developed after 1870. And when I looked on Zoopla, the average price of a house was £1.3 million, but that was only an estimate because so few houses are actually sold; almost all the houses are divided into flats, and almost all the property is social housing. Most of the property belongs to our local housing association, WECH (Walterton & Elgin Community Homes, the clue is in the acronym) which is a remarkable thing, a well-run housing association, run for the benefit of the residents. Many of those in Walterton Road are Bangladeshi families, as the older Caribbean families are gradually moving out, but the street is pretty diverse; it was one of the great centres of squatting back in the 1970s, and several of The Clash lived there before they achieved success.

WECH was set up in the wake of the "Homes for Votes" scandal, the notorious episode of gerrymandering by Dame Shirley (later Lady) Porter, when as Leader of Westminster City Council in the 1980s, she moved council tenants out of marginal wards and sold off those properties. Many of those moved out were transferred into the Harrow Road and Westbourne Wards, which were regarded as hopeless, and some homeless people were even housed in two semi-derelict blocks of flats on Elgin Avenue which were full of crumbling asbestos (a fact well-known to council officers). The Thatcher government had created mechanisms to encourage housing associations, and tenant buyouts, but Lady Porter was much discomfited when the council tenants in Elgin Avenue and Walterton Road (and streets round about) organised themselves to acquire the property. So WECH was born, and it has remained tenant-controlled and has worked hard to improve housing conditions (the asbestos-riddled flats were demolished). Lady Porter was found to have acted illegally and ordered to pay a surcharge of over £42 million, but the council later accepted a settlement of £12 million, on the basis that legal action would not be cost-effective. She fled to Israel.

In my experience most housing associations are pretty unresponsive to their tenants' problems, and are in fact more difficult to put pressure on than council housing departments (which at least respond to complaints from councillors) as they are not actually accountable to anyone. They pose as community-focussed organisations, but are in fact raising money by mortgaging their properties and playing the US property market. Anyone involved with community issues in this part of London will tell you horror stories about Genesis and Notting Hill, which have now merged (into an organisation whose two computer systems are incompatible). but they seem to be typical. Sadly, Genesis began life as the Paddington Churches' Housing Association, but the churches gradually lost interest, and the management manipulated the rules to take control from them, with the result that an organisation that had been set up on Christian principles (in the wake of Rachman) turned into an entirely secular and indeed entirely godless company, which asset-stripped former Church property. Both St Peter's and Emmanuel churches are built into blocks of Genesis flats, which gives us endless troubles, as witness the spectacular damp here in St Peter's House, which Notting Hill/Genesis are doing nothing about, as our cupboards fill with mould, and the paint drops off the corridor walls. I'm just glad I don't have to live there, as some of my predecessors did.     

Friday 15 November 2019

THE DAYS GO QUICKLY

It's been a heavy fortnight. We hosted the AGM of the Ecclesiastical Architects' and Surveyors' Association, which happens alongside a joint awards ceremony with the National Churches Trust, and I had to speak to them, with Biba Dow, our architect, about the Project. We were also shortlisted for the Presidents' Award, which we didn't get. The winner was St Augustine's Priory Church, in Fulham Palace Road, which was a worthy winner. The field was a lot stronger than last year, though I do think it is hard to judge new work inside old buildings against whole new buildings. Last year I thought the runner-up, a lovely brand new church in Scotland, which was the only actual new building, should have won. This year there were beautiful refurbishments, like the winner and St Andrew's, Holborn, as well as whole new buildings, like the runner-up, in Bethnal Green, and ourselves, all of high quality, so I wasn't surprised no to win (though obviously I thought we should have done). The logistics of this event were very complex, involving keeping the people just coming for the awards ceremony separate from the EASA members' AGM, and feeding them first, so that EASA members could look at the shortlisted projects in their lunch break, along with the Duke of Gloucester and Prince Nicholas von Preussen, the chief judges. Obviously, HRH had to have special provision as well. All went off very smoothly, (though the royal protection officers grumbled about the size of lunch) and people were very kind about our talk. NCT still like us, which is very good.

The next day we had the boys of Sussex House School rehearsing for their processions at the Requiem, which is always a bit of a circus. This year, they have a new music master, much younger and less scary than his predecessor, so some of the dynamics were different. Then the excellent Sheila, who arranges flowers and cleans, had to be let into the church (and let out again) late at night to prepare for the Requiem. I successfully unset and reset alarms, and Sheila made wonderful, huge flower arrangements. The Requiem is always a little easier when All Souls' Day falls on a Saturday, as it did this time, because you can devote the day to preparations, and also we do it at 6pm, rather than the normal 7.30pm, and so clearing up afterwards is much less traumatic. They sang Durufle, which is lovely, and I was joined by the Vicar of St Augustine's, Kilburn, who brought a competent thurifer with him. All very good. The sanctus and benedictus of this setting work tremendously well with the canon of the Mass in the (deeply old-fashioned, but authentic) way we do it. The only down-side of Saturday is that fewer of the Sussex House families turn up than they would on a weekday. Still, it was a big congregation, and a superb act of worship. Also our new heating worked wonderfully well.

Then on the Sunday, after our own worship, we went along to All Saints, Margaret Street, for Fr Alan Moses's final service, Solemn Evensong and Benediction. Fr Alan has been there a long time, and has always been a good friend to St Mary Mags, looking after our huge monstrance when there was nowhere secure to store it here (and kindly restoring the lunette). There was a real sense of reverence and joy about the worship, although I was sorry not to be able to hear much of the sermon, seated at the back of the nave. The preacher was Bishop Allen Shin, who is suffragan bishop of New York, and was attached to All Saints twenty years ago. He was Chaplain of Keble when I first came here, so he presented me when I was licensed. Fr George Bush, seated at the side, but mush closer to the pulpit, heard it all, and said I didn't miss much. I thought it was a problem with the sound system, but old members of All Saints said they could never understand what he said when he was a regular preacher.

On the Monday morning after that, it was straight off to France for the Two Cities Area Clergy Conference, held at Merville, near Lille, in what had been the seminary of the Archdiocese of Lille, a vast, echoing brick pile of the 1920s. The rather handsome chapel had clearly been stripped of all decoration in the reforms, and there were a couple of mosaics in corridors just to tantalize you with how it might have been, but it suited our gathering, seventy clergy from the cities of London and Westminster. It was a surprisingly enjoyable few days with excellent input from Malcolm Guite, poet and Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge.

Straight off the Eurostar I put on smart clothes and mingled with donors at an Emmanuel College drinks party in St Mary Mags. I arrived just in time to give a little talk about the Project, which the Master, Dame Fiona Reynolds (who used to run the National Trust) was very kind about. The lead up to this had been bizarre, as the Emma development office had arranged the event with our caterers without realising that it was my church, and then didn't invite me. I sent in a donation I had long promised, but the penny didn't drop until Robert Folkes emailed them to point it out. I was in France when the development office finally emailed me to invite me along, so I thought I should make the effort. There were a couple of old faces I knew, and other people were kind about our works.

This week we hosted a visit from the Ancient Monuments Society, who had to be divided into three groups, so many of them were there, so Oliver Caroe (our conservation architect) and I had to do our tours three times over, as well as an introductory double-act. This was good fun, but it would have been more enjoyable had it not been arranged for the same day as the Grand Junction Launch Party, which meant that preparations for that were going on around us. Still, AMS said they wanted to see the church at work, and they certainly did.

The Launch Party was well-attended, and everyone enjoyed themselves. Blondel Cluff CBE spoke for the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and we were very impressed with her (except that she continually referred to us as "St Mary's"). Bill Jacob did the thanks, and I just welcomed everyone and reminded them how far we had come. The community team had produced a nice little 3 minute film about the community projects. The Area Dean, Fr Paul Thomas, spoke for the Diocese, and the excellent Graham King spoke for Westminster City Council. At least some of the major donors were there, which was good, along with lots of our volunteers. We had a singer and a poet perform, before an interval at which most people left, which was a shame, as we then had a hip-hop artist called Kitch, who was quite remarkable, as he had a terrible stammer when speaking, but became entirely articulate when rapping. The last band were just a bit weird for my taste. A fair amount was drunk, and lots of the people involved with the Project were there and were able to celebrate together, which was nice. One of the designers presented me with two little tiles, uniform with our signage, of my initials, which was sweet.

In the meantime, I have had two PCC meetings, a management board meeting, First Communion preparation and anxious discussions with a school head about the mental health of a member of staff. Now I've got a funeral to arrange.  

Wednesday 30 October 2019

OF LIFE AND DEATH

Yesterday the carcass of a dead Canada goose was lumped on the towpath, bedraggled and broken. A sad sight. I can only suppose a fox killed it, but it had clearly been in the water and been fished out. Rather odd.

A new goose has appeared, just a little larger than a Canada goose, and very similar, but with a white neck,white markings on the head, and orange bill and legs. I suspect it is a cross between a Canada goose and a white farm goose; but how has this happened? And how did it end up on our canal?

Today a colleague told of a firm of undertakers who didn't pay him, saying after the funeral, "Oh, we thought it was up to you to sort that out." No! It certainly isn't. The undertaker is meant to "undertake" all the arrangements on your behalf, and pay all the bills for you (the clue is in the name). That's how it has always worked. A rather alarming development if they are routinely doing that. I was also told there is a firm of undertakers whom the crem will only take a booking from if paid upfront.

A fox has started excavating my garden, but I can't understand why. It doesn't seem to be digging a hole to live in, nor is it succeeding in digging anything up, but it's certainly turning over a lot of earth. I don't want Casimir to disturb it, though he'd probably send it packing. He is a little subdued at present after getting a nasty wound in a vicious fight last week. I imagine the other cat had wounds at least as bad, as Casimir seemed to be winning, and chased the other when it made its getaway. Still, two nasty tooth marks in his cheek have resulted in antibiotics that need to be smuggled into his food. I also bathe it with saline. Of course we didn't see the wound until it started to suppurate and stink. Lovely creatures, pussy-cats!

I was in Sainsburys at Maida Hill the other Sunday, collecting my paper, and was queued up behind a young woman with two baskets of shopping, food and cleaning materials, that suggested to me that she had just moved into a new home. We were some time waiting for a person to negotiate for cigarettes and  pay, and during this time a large woman with a plastic carrier bag appeared at the far end of the tills and hovered. When the till was free the Sainsburys employee called the young woman in front of me forward, but the large hovering woman immediately marched in front of her. The employee said, "There's a queue," and pointed, but the large woman said to the young woman, "Oh, but I was here first before you pushed in." The young woman was understandably taken aback and said, "Did I push in?" to which she got the reply, "Well I was here. Don't get upset." The Sainsburys employee clearly didn't want to serve her, but she was occupying the till, removing items from the random plastic bags she was carrying, and the young woman just shrugged, being told again, "Don't get upset." She was eventually served after the large woman left, and with that a second till was opened; as I presented my paper, I leaned across and said to her, "Welcome to the Harrow Road." It really was a thoroughly Harrow Road incident, with an eccentric claiming black is white and making you feel guilty for being rational. 


The roads are now being dug up for fibre broadband, in a sudden outbreak of activity. At least the contractors seem to work quickly, but they just appear out of nowhere, and suddenly your route has turned single-track. It's quite disconcerting to return from an appointment to find this has happened. I'm sure it will be a good thing, but will it actually make any difference if your actual connection from your house to the network is old-fashioned copper wire?

We are preparing for our big event of the year on Saturday, the Requiem for All Souls' Day, with choirs and orchestra. This year our neighbours at St Augustine's, Kilburn, are joining us to commemorate all the faithful departed, which will be good. Some people don't approve of prayer for the dead, but it makes perfect sense to me: we pray for everyone we care about, living or dead, and are linked with them all in that great network of prayer. People regularly say how moved they have been by the service, using great music in its proper spiritual context. We always have a French Romantic setting of the Requiem Mass: sometimes it is a little-known one, but sometimes it is a great setting. This year we are using the setting by Durufle (who was president of the St Mary Magdalene Music Society in the 1960s). It should be a powerful act of worship.

Wednesday 23 October 2019

THE HEART OF THE NATION

Migration Watch

There were two Home Office immigration enforcement vans parked in Goldney Road yesterday. I saw no activity, but no doubt the Border Force officers were in a flat somewhere. A few weeks ago I saw a similar van cruising along the Harrow Road. I wonder whether they are regular visitors to Belgravia as well?

Meanwhile, the Anglican Communion Office at the United Nations (who knew there was such a thing?) urges us to pray for forced migration because of climate change. This causes me some discomfort, as it is frankly tendentious. Most of the world's migrants are looking for a better life, or fleeing war or civil strife. Anyone migrating because of climate change at the moment (and I'm not sure there is anyone) is choosing to do so, not being forced. If Bangladesh or the Seychelles are flooded, then people will certainly be forced to migrate, but unless I've missed it, I don't think this has happened yet. It is the case that people are being forced to leave their homes on the Suffolk coast as they fall into the sea (as they have been doing for hundreds of years) but that's not what we're being asked to pray about. Our friends at the Anglican Communion Office are attempting to establish the notion that climate change is responsible for migration, and that therefore we in the West are guilty, and so can't complain. We are expected to feel guilty for the effects of colonialism, which have been alleged to be responsible for migration in the past, and now for climate change as well, and so the idea is being presented that we should just accept migration as the consequences of our own sinfulness. Well, I'm all in favour of a generous immigration regime, but I'm afraid I don't buy the guilt. In fact, people choose to migrate to the West because these are prosperous, peaceful and relatively uncorrupt countries where people have a chance of getting on in life. That's fine. Most Western countries need immigration for economic reasons thanks to our low birth-rate, and it's of course our duty to give refuge to people fleeing war or tyranny, but none of this adds up to a completely open door imposed on us as a punishment for sin.

This morning comes the news of thirty-nine migrants found dead in the back of a lorry in Thurrock. That really is a sin. People-trafficking is thoroughly evil, and those who seek to maintain national borders are not responsible for it. The callous criminals who do it are totally responsible. One of the main pieces of learning I took away from our involvement with looking after migrants in Reading, was that these people are totally heartless and deeply manipulative.


The Abbey Habit

We went in pilgrimage to the Abbey on Saturday, and changed our route to avoid the "People's Vote" march, but fortunately we started a lot earlier than them. There were already people around in silly blue berets, and I noticed that there were enterprising sellers of merchandise, rather like a pop festival, but during the morning they were easy to avoid. Most of the time that we were in the Abbey we weren't conscious of them, even as they filled Parliament Square next door, but when we went out into the College Garden at lunchtime we were conscious of a sort of hum beyond the garden wall. It was rather surreal to think that we were immediately behind the BBC's tent. When we were sitting waiting for Evensong to begin there came a loud cheer which was clearly audible, which was for the passage of the Letwin amendment. After that the remainers went home happy.

Our parish party was smaller than last year, which was a shame since the weather was so good, but I had enthused some Deanery colleagues, so Paddington Deanery was well-represented. It is great to see the Abbey given over to worship and prayer, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. Picnics in the Cloister were very jolly (something that of course is normally verboten). The Abbey makes much of its position offering faith at the heart of the nation, but it genuinely felt like that, with this strange juxtaposition. The Archbishop of Canterbury preached, not very well. It was mostly about leadership, and he didn't really seem to have embraced the occasion, which was a shame. I guess he was thinking about what was going on across the road, but didn't dare say anything clear. His chaplain had not embraced the occasion to the extent of sitting there in scarf and hood when everyone else was wearing a stole. Oddly ungracious. I hope she enjoyed the copious quantities of incense!

Monday 30 September 2019

IN TRANSLATION

St Jerome

I  write this on the feast of St Jerome, who translated the scriptures into Latin around the turn of the fifth century. Jerome was a pugnacious old character, some of whose views (as for instance on the moral superiority of the single to the married state) I find a bit distasteful, and he was very unkind to the memory of Origen, a great earlier theologian. The really positive point about Jerome, though, is his fervent desire to translate the scriptures, so that they could be understood. Christianity had emerged in a Greek-speaking environment, and in New Testament times Greek was the language of the people among whom Christianity was expanding, but three hundred and fifty years later this was no longer the case, and Jerome saw the need for an authoritative Latin translation of the scriptures. By Jerome's lifetime, although reading Greek was a badge of scholarship in the Roman world, it was no longer essential, as Latin had conquered the academic as well as the administrative world. For example, his great contemporary Augustine did not read Greek. More importantly, ordinary people in most of the Empire knew Latin rather than Greek.

There was a Latin New Testament before Jerome, which the scholars call the "Old Latin" text, the "Vetus Latina", only, confusingly, it was written in what linguists call "Late Latin" not "Old Latin", nor was it strictly "a Latin New Testament", because there were many different translations of separate books. So Jerome's work on the New Testament was partly about establishing a single, authoritative, version, in a consistent prose style, and he worked from the Vetus Latina, correcting translations against the oldest Greek manuscripts he could find, and generally improving the grammar. When it came to the Old Testament, although there were Vetus Latina versions for some books, Jerome was essentially starting from scratch, producing his own new Latin version, and going back where he could to Hebrew texts, rather than just the Greek. to work from.This was controversial in itself, as the Greek Septuagint was regarded by some of his contemporaries as itself a divinely-inspired text (rather as some Christians today regard the King James Bible) and Hebrew texts were, in some eyes, tainted by their association with Judaism. For Jerome, though, it was obvious that getting back to the oldest versions of biblical texts would reveal the most authoritative text, and enable the translation to be reliable.

Ironically, Jerome's Latin Bible (the "Vulgate") only finally officially displaced all the Vetus Latina versions in the sixteenth century, at just the moment that Reformers were translating the scriptures into vernacular languages under exactly the same impulse. Liturgy and scripture need to be understood by the faithful, was Jerome's view, and that of the Reformers.

At the school Mass this morning I took the Year 4 class into the middle of the nave and got them to look up at the ceiling to see the portrait of St Jerome up there. He is, of course, easily recognisable, as he is dressed in his broad-brimmed red hat and red robes as a (completely anachronistic) cardinal. I didn't bother with the anachronism, but asked them to find a man with a big red hat and red cloak, and a big black beard. They were very pleased to find him easily. Talking about putting the scriptures into different languages makes sense in this environment where there are more than fifty different home languages among the pupils.

I was struck while I was doing this with the thought that our attitudes to translation go to the heart of the difference between Christianity and Islam. In Islam, the text of the Qur'an is believed to have been uttered by God in classical Arabic, and taken down as dictation by the Prophet Muhammad. While translations exist, they are never allowed to claim to be the Qur'an, but "versions" of it, and essentially the believer is urged to learn classical Arabic in order to approach the text. The text is given; it is the person who must change. A perfect example of the "submission" embodied in Islam. Christianity meanwhile, maintains a notion of the sacredness and inviolability of the scriptures, but accepts that translation has always taken place (even in Old Testament times) and believes that the scriptures need to be translated into the languages of humanity so that humanity may hear the message properly. We don't even know for sure whether Jesus spoke Greek; we assume he taught in Aramaic, which means that the Gospels contain translations of his teaching. He could almost certainly read and speak Greek, but the evidence suggests he generally spoke Aramaic to ordinary people, because that was their language. So Christianity has always wanted to be accessible to different cultures on their own terms (despite remoulding Christianity into a European shape in colonial times, and an American shape in the modern world).        

Monday 16 September 2019

TOWN AND COUNTRY

Wellness, or not.

Writing last Sunday's sermon was derailed on Friday lunchtime when I got a call from the PDT staff in the church, saying there was a lady there who was asking for the priest. So I went over. Three hours later I returned home. When I went into church one of the junior PDT staff said to me, "I'm pretty sure she's having a psychotic episode," so I asked them to please stay around while I talked to the lady. That turned out to be a correct observation, but the lady didn't seem dangerous, just very distressed. Fortunately the staff member thought to call someone who had delivered mental health first aid training for them, who came at once, and we spent the rest of the afternoon essentially trying to interact with the lady. She would talk about God, but not about herself, so we couldn't get any of the sort of information you need to help someone, It soon became clear that we weren't getting anywhere, so an ambulance was summoned, but it took the best part of two hours to get to us. This enabled the lady to have a rest, and she was more switched on when they arrived, but she wouldn't tell them her name, or let them look in her bag. She went outside with them, but then ran away when she saw the ambulance. They went after her, in a gentle way.

The last time we had someone as unwell as that at the church he ended up impaling his foot on the railings, trying to climb over them. The fire brigade had to be summoned to cut him loose, because apparently you aren't allowed to lift someone impaled off whatever they are impaled on in case it causes catastrophic bleeding. Actually the blood vessels in your foot aren't huge, so this wasn't much of a danger, but they had to follow their procedure, so I was reduced to saying, "That's a Grade-1 listed gate, be careful! And make sure I get it back." I was delighted to find a charming police officer on my doorstep later that evening (a Westcountryman) who gave me back the portion of gate, which St Mary's A&E had removed from the foot, and said, "Sorry, if I was back home, I'd weld it for you myself, but I haven't got my gear here." We found a blacksmith who did the necessary. It was at that point that I noticed that the gates and railings had clearly had extra spikes welded onto them at some point. Not the way we do it today.


Saturday night

Saturday night involved a lot of noise outside the house. When I went over to say Morning Prayer I observed a load of fast food cartons on the road, and about 50 nitrous oxide canisters. My virtuous churchwarden decided to sweep it all up, as you did have to pick your way through it to get to the church door, which she thought wasn't a great look for us. Cycling over to St Peter's to collect all the service sheets (which I would have done on Friday if I'd had an afternoon) I ran over a rat on the Canalside; it was spooked by a bike in front of me and ran straight under my front wheel. Still, it wasn't there when I came back, so I concluded that I didn't injure it much.


Music night

On Thursday, the Music Society celebrated the completion of our building work with an organ recital interspersed with talks from Nicholas Kaye and me, a recipe that worked generally very well (though I underestimated the length of some of the passages from G.E.Street's Life that I was going to read). This was very well received, so I think we shall use a similar recipe again, maybe featuring Betjeman, for instance. James made a very good choice of music, with a piece by Bill Lloyd Webber, who was choirmaster at St Mary Mags in the 1930s (before going to Margaret Street) as well as a Durufle piece that made reference to his "Messe Cum Jubilo" which had its first UK performance here in 1968 (and other rousing items). We were told that both Jean Langlais and Flor Peeters (famous composers for the organ) came here in the 1960s, which gives us some more repertoire.   


At the Museum

On Friday evening (somewhat shell-shocked) to the British Museum for the historian Tom Holland giving a lecture to launch his new book "Dominion"; the perfect antidote. I have rarely been at an event when I so thoroughly agreed with the speaker's every word. It is an account of how everything good in our civilisation comes from Christianity (I simplify, obviously). I bought the book, and he signed it. As he did so, I said that I had expressed some of what he had said in a recent sermon, which might worry him. He did look a bit worried. Still, buy the book!


The Thames Valley

On Saturday we thought to go out into the country to take advantage of the nice weather. A friend had an exhibition of his pictures in Henley-on-Thames, and so I thought we would go there and meet friends for tea. As a late afterthought, I decided to pop into All Saints, Boyne Hill, in Maidenhead, another major work by G.E.Street, on the way. We spent an hour and a half in Maidenhead, chatting to an enthusiast and looking carefully. That meant we didn't have long to get to our tea date in Henley, but I thought it would be easy, as it isn't far. However, traffic has got heavier in the Thames Valley since I lived there, and we spent forty-five minutes in queues and trying to park. This did not make for an enjoyable time. Still we managed to meet up with our friends, and had a very pleasant riverside walk in the end. Henley is a bit manicured for my taste, but the upper Thames is very lovely.  

Wednesday 14 August 2019

OF MICE AND MEN

Mice and Other Rodents

Casimir killed a mouse the other day, and left it right in the middle of the kitchen floor, so it was there for me when I came down in the morning. I know, I should be grateful that he didn't put it on the carpet outside the bedroom door, so that we might find it with our bare feet in the night. Be grateful for small mercies, and all that. That's mistaking his motivation, though. This wasn't anything to do with us; a present to show how much he loves us, or a little snack should we be peckish in the night, or even something for us to play with. but which has unaccountably got broken. This was simply him doing his guard-cat job. It was one he killed earlier. The only problem is that he doesn't have a cat-flap, so this was a mouse from inside the house. I didn't know there were any mice inside the house. Perhaps there aren't now?

My experience is that mice are persistent. We have been having regular visits for some time at St Peter's from Wes, who we call "the rat man" (but not in his hearing). He tells us that no bait has been taken for a couple of months, and then someone sees another mouse. Tedious.

It's curious how mice have a largely positive image (especially when compared to rats) because they are just as grubby, and able to get through unfeasibly small gaps. You can clear up mouse droppings when you see them, but their urine is not so conspicuous, and as for their little footprints, the less said the better. We call poor old Wes the rat man because he was called in to deal with the rats that were living under St Mary Magdalene's School bin store, and running riot from there (school, church, my garden). He dealt with them pretty successfully (though that may be tempting fate), more successfully than the previous school site manager who had tried to fill the holes with cement, which the rats just chewed their way through. I think Wes has cleared the rats from school, but there are any number along the canalside, encouraged by all the waste food produced by the boat-dwellers. You regularly see them scuttling around.

A few years ago the BBC filmed a sequence for their reality show "I'd Do Anything" in our then-dingy undercroft. The show was to find an unknown actress-singer to take the role of Nancy in Andrew Lloyd-Webber's revival of "Oliver", and they took the young women out on various tasks as well as just singing and acting. The task that they faced at St Mary Magdalene's was to deal with rats. I can't remember whether the desired result was that they should act convincingly horrified, or that they should be able to keep their cool. Anyway, I encountered the animal wrangler unloading his stage rats from his van, and remarked that if anyone had asked us, we could have provided local rats because it was always good to provide opportunities for residents of the Estate. He didn't seem impressed. His rats were white and black, and not at all menacing.   

The real PR kings of the rodent world are the squirrels of course. London squirrels seem to be habituated to posing now, as they are the object of so many tourist photos, and are completely fearless. Or at least they seem fearless, but that may be a function of their reputedly poor eyesight. It's always amusing to see a dog chase one, because however dozy the squirrel seems, it is never so far from a tree or wall that it cannot escape by climbing, but that never deters the dog. Squirrels are making a big comeback on the Estate, having vanished completely for a couple of years, but I still wonder where they sleep, as there don't seem to be any dreys in the trees.


Men

On Monday someone used the church porch as a lavatory. I was clearing up (gloves, boots, disinfectant) when an Australian priest came to enquire about visiting; "Ah, the duties of the job," he said, smiling ruefully as I carried a pair of heavily soiled pants. I'm just grateful we now have running water in the building, as that made it a bit easier. One of those pressure washers would have been ideal, but I managed, thanks. The surprising thing was that it happened in the daytime, some time in the afternoon. Had the person been desperately hoping to make it to the loos in our new building and been thwarted by the building being locked? I wonder. Surely the nice new bin store would have been more discreet than our porch? Or did they choose us? Either way, the result did not improve my mood at Evening Prayer: it's quite hard to love the human race sometimes.  

Wednesday 7 August 2019

NORMAL SERVICE IS RESUMED

Apologies for the delay.

A week after my last post we got married, and that took a bit of organising. Then we went away to Rome for a week, and when we came back Fiona's belongings were moved into the Vicarage. I hadn't really thought about how difficult it might be to put two adult households together in one house; a failure of imagination, I suppose. So the house was filled with boxes, and duplicates of everything are slowly being uncovered, and decisions made about what stays and what goes. It all takes a while. Then I went off to Provence, my usual trip (organised last autumn, before I'd even met Fiona) to stay with friends and watch the Tour de France, on which Fiona was able to join me for the last weekend. So, it's been a busy time, and I haven't had much time to write this blog.

Returning to Paddington I am struck by the randomness of some of the driving you see here. This morning I watched an Asda delivery van indicate right as if to turn off the Harrow Road into Amberley Road, but in fact execute a u-turn, in front of a bus. Amazing. Each day you see something that surprises you.The local belief that yellow lines are just advisory seems to be even more widespread in August, and there's a car outside the church more or less permanently. Westminster's lack of interest in enforcing anything except residents' parking restrictions clearly contributes to people's attitudes, as no-one expects any consequences. I wonder whether some people have simply no idea what single yellow lines mean;  it would be useful if Westminster used their glossy magazine to publicise the rules.

I am pleased to report that the Grand Junction Cafe is now open. We haven't got the fancy permanent furniture yet, but what we do have will do for the moment. It turns out to be a complicated process to get beautiful results when printing on formica table tops, but I'm sure they will be worth waiting for. We're gradually getting signs produced, so everything is looking a bit more finished. We still haven't quite got rid of the builders, though; are we now in month 26 of a 12 month contract?


Saturday 15 June 2019

AND MORE EVENTS...

An Irish Hooley

At the end of May we staged our first big event as a venue, the annual "Irish Hooley" for Irish Music and Dance in London, an admirable organisation devoted to fostering traditional music and dance among the Irish diaspora here in London. They do two things: they put on a festival in the autumn, which used to be in Camden Town (but is now in Cricklewood), for which the Hooley is a fundraiser, and they organise classes for youngsters in traditional Irish music and dance, year-round. We first made contact with them about four years ago, and it seemed to everyone that we would be a suitable venue for their music classes. Not dance, though (not with our tiled floors and their hard shoes and stamping feet!) So, in the interim, they have kindly invited me to the Hooley each year, where I have had a good time, but felt a bit of a fraud. Finally, this year we thought the building would be finished, and it would be a good test event for us, and so it was booked in. As you already know, everything was not finished, but at least we had the loos and the lift working, which was the basic minimum. PDT organised volunteer stewards, and we observed carefully as Tommy and his hugely professional team of riggers turned the nave into a suitable venue for the Kilfenora Ceili Band and 200 people. They started bringing in the staging at 10am, had it up for afternoon sound checks and rehearsals, and took it all down as soon as the performance finished at 10.30pm, and were all out by midnight.

The Ceili Band were the big draw, but the first part of the evening was a showcase for some of the children learning traditional Irish music, who were really good. Their musicianship was really impressive (there was a particularly good young fiddler) and they were obviously well-taught, but clearly nobody was teaching them how to perform in public, as they all looked rather solemn, and one particularly prominent girl looked deeply miserable. It hadn't occurred to me before, but obviously performance does actually need to be taught, as most people are not natural performers.

The Kilfenora Ceili Band were genuinely impressive, and you can understand why their reputation spreads far beyond County Clare. I also learnt a useless fact, which I hope to deploy at a later date: that the first ceilidh took place  not in Ireland, but in London, in 1896 at the Bloomsbury Hall (a venue I'm afraid I don't know, but which Fiona assures me is still there).


Ecclesiologists

A few days later, we hosted a visit from the Ecclesiological Society, for whose journal I have written an article about the project. This event was bedevilled by confusion, as much of the content was due to be the same as we had done for the Victorian Society two weeks before, and many people are members of both. They were quite charming about making the arrangements, but charmingly vague; I suppose I have learnt the lesson to get everything nailed down beforehand. It was good to have the lift working, as we had some less mobile ecclesiologists. Bill Jacob, the former Archdeacon, is a member, and was hugely helpful. giving a talk about the genesis of the project. They were all very appreciative, and said kind things about the new building, and our vision.   


Giving Thanks

Two days ago it was finally time for our Solemn Pontifical Mass of Thanksgiving for the completion of restoration and building works (notwithstanding the non-completion of those works in reality). 20 choirboys from one prep school, 31 choirboys and adult singers from another prep school, 30 stems of lilies, the Bishop of Fulham, visiting clergy, visiting servers, and about 150 other people in church, participating in one way or another. The Durufle Missa Cum Jubilo was indeed lovely (though I should have checked how long the Sanctus and Benedictus would be) and so was the Notre Pere. The choirs sang very well. James played superbly.The Bishop, unfortunately, had a summer cold; normally he sings much better than me, and he would have benefitted from a mic in the pulpit (another thing we haven't yet done). Still I shall post the text of his sermon on the website. It was a great and joyful occasion. I was delighted that lots of the conservators who worked on the ceilings and doors were there. There were also friends from my old parish in Reading, and people who have worked on the project for years, as well as local supporters of various sorts.

One of the servers said to me, "Father, we live in liturgical luxury!" (delivered in a tone rather like, "Ambassador you are spoiling us") when learning that the Bishop would say the canon quietly while the choir sang the Sanctus. His excitement at learning that we were also doing the traditional blessing of lilies on St Anthony of Padua's Day was visible. I have to confess to enjoying myself there; I found a translation of a traditional responsory of St Anthony, which, with a bit of editing, could be made to fit to Parry's "Jerusalem", so we sang that at the shrine. Very multi-cultural, I felt.

I say shrine, but it's only a statue on a rather grand plinth. The statue has been in my sitting room for the past two years, and didn't come back into church with the others because the table he used to stand on was needed for other purposes. I gave him a bit of a clean and touch-up, but wasn't sure whether he could go back into church. Recently it dawned on me that the base of a portable font that we have recently replaced at St Peter's might serve as a suitable plinth, and so it has proved. A little gold paint has improved things, and no-one recognised it. It fits very well, and we can continue to venerate the excellent St Anthony, whose magnificent shrine in Padua I have visited very happily.


Yesterday

So yesterday, having had the celebration Mass the previous evening, Fiona and I took ourselves down to deepest Surrey for my aunt's hundredth birthday party. A couple of weeks ago my aunt had phoned me, and said that if we caught the 11.03 out of Waterloo there would be transport waiting at the station to take us to the party, as it had been arranged for some other people coming by train from London. So that's what we did, and found ourselves travelling with Gillian Reynolds, the doyenne of radio critics, and three charming people from The Archers staff at the BBC, we came back with them as well, and  very amusing travelling companions they proved. The venue was the reception room of a theatre, which if I remember rightly, my aunt opened some years ago. Lunch involved coronation chicken and baked potatoes, so I was always going  to be happy. I was very taken aback to be asked to speak at the end of lunch, but my brother and I managed to say a few things, which were well-received. It really didn't matter much what we said, since the focus was Auntie June's speech, delivered standing, without notes, and perfectly audibly, to a roomful of people on her hundredth birthday. Frankly, everyone was in awe. I'm not sure that my aunt entirely appreciates the BBC's description of her as "the world's most durable soap actor", but she was very gracious about it all. She was most apologetic that she was not going to be able to make it to our wedding next week, but my cousin is making sure she has a rest after all this.  

Wednesday 29 May 2019

EVENTS, DEAR BOY...

Eminent Victorians

We were delighted to be able to host the Victorian Society for an event last week. The idea was that they should be able to experience our new extension and appreciate its architectural logic and beauty, but of course the builders hadn't finished, so we had to concentrate on the Victorian building (which was in truth what they wanted anyway). We would give them a talk about G.E.Street, and a talk about the new building, I would take them on a guided tour, and they would get food and drink.The theory was that there should be a limit of thirty for the group, as we could then sit them down in the education studio and talk to them there with all mod cons, but as that possibility receded into the middle distance, so the number wanting to come increased. In the end we had sixty, and sat them down in the nave, with slightly ad hoc audio-visual arrangements.

We will be getting a sound system, but not just yet, so speakers have to overcome the acoustic, which I am used to. People know that it is a good acoustic for music, and so assume it helps you, but actually the spoken word on the floor of the nave can be really hard work. You become much more audible if you are elevated, which is why I now always use the pulpit, and why, despite being a bit further away, placing the altar in the chancel makes sense. We used to have a block that readers stood on, (legacy of a film crew) but that was discarded with the junk when we emptied the church for the builders. I realised soon after our return that readers were now much less audible than before, but I am reluctant to have more blocks made, as we shall eventually have the sound system, and blocks would be constantly being moved and stored (in a building with no storage space). I think sometimes I give visiting speakers a false sense of security, as I am reasonably audible (when making the effort) but they then talk down into their notes and are completely muffled. It's actually annoying when you are trying to have a conversation across an empty church in normal life, and find the echo obscuring what your interlocutor is saying; it encourages the good discipline of actually going across to people and talking directly to them. So, for Vic Soc, we hired a sound system as well as a projector and screen (which would have been in the completed education studio).

Anyway, the Vic Soc event went well. Geoff Brandwood, an architectural historian, talked about Street, with some nice pictures, and set the building in context. Biba Dow, the architect of the extension, gave an excellent presentation explaining its relationship to the Victorian building, which seemed to meet with some understanding. I stressed to them how grateful we were for their (eventual) support in negotiating the process of getting permissions, because it was thanks to Chris Costelloe (their current Director) that we were able to demonstrate that we weren't actually vandals. I hope we communicated our love for the building.

I was expecting them to drink lots of wine, but they were quite moderate in their intake; much more respectable than clergy. I had the great pleasure of seeing again a chap who had been on my trip to Sicily; it seemed like a great coincidence when we discovered he was booked in for this, but of course (as the odious Cecil explains in "A Room With A View") it shouldn't be any real surprise, as we're the sort of people who like these sorts of things.


Cum Jubilo

I am now sending out the invitations to our Mass in celebration of the completed works. I know the loos will be usable, so it doesn't seem too premature (at last). On Thursday 13th June (at 6.30pm, do come!) we shall welcome the Bishop of Fulham (an old friend and neighbour from my time in Reading) and shall have the benefit of the school choirs of Caldicott (where James, the organist, teaches) and Sussex House (whose head is supremo of the Music Society). We shall celebrate St Anthony of Padua, a great and popular saint, whose lovely shrine I have visited with pleasure and devotion, and give thanks for the conservation and new building. The choirs will sing the Cum Jubilo Mass by Maurice Durufle, whose first British performance happened at St Mary Mags in 1968 under the composer's direction. They will also sing a setting of the Lord's Prayer which Durufle told Denis Hunt, the founder of the Music Society, was "for St Mary Magdalene's". Quite how we were going to use a Lord's Prayer in French seems not to have occurred to him! It is, apparently, a beautiful piece.

The secular celebrations, with "official opening" of the new extension, will happen in the autumn, and I expect we'll have a service of some sort then as well, but I knew that if we were to get the boys' choirs then June was the ideal time, after Common Entrance but before activity weeks and trips, and with long enough to practice. It will, of course, be unlike our normal worship, but it is really important to affirm our musical heritage, and our continuing relationship with Sussex House. It is also important to do something which is a full-throated affirmation of our Anglo-Catholic identity; we can do something which is vanilla on another occasion.


A Turning Point

When I was in Bologna for the start of the Giro I was struck by the number of fans of Primoz Roglic, the Slovenian rider, there were. Many were wearing matching mint-green teeshirts in their support of the ante-post favourite, who duly took the lead with an imperious time trial up to San Luca. It's great to be able to watch the highlights programme on Quest, and so I have been watching out for Slovenians in teeshirts, but haven't spotted any, possibly because the weather has been pretty foul and everyone has raincoats on. Roglic finally began to look vulnerable on that magnificent stage into Como on Sunday (when he nearly went over the crash barriers on a descent) and then was actually distanced by his rivals on the fearsome Mortirolo yesterday. But for me, the turning point was when Sean Kelly on the commentary began to pronounce his name the same way as the rest of us. Well, except for Italians, obviously, who pronounce it "Rolyee". The rest of us say "Rog-litch", but Sean Kelly, for the past fortnight, has been sticking to "Rodj-lik". Now Kelly is a great man, a hero of mine when I first discovered bike racing thirty-five years ago, and one of the hardest athletes you could ever find. I imagine he must have spoken at least French when he was riding, and probably Spanish and Dutch too (given who he rode for) because in those days no-one spoke English in the peloton as they do now, but he doesn't strike one as a natural linguist, and I don't suppose he had any occasion to learn any of the Slav tongues. I rather admire the cussedness that continues to broadcast a totally unique pronunciation, and rather hope that "Rodj-lik" may come back into the race.        

Thursday 23 May 2019

USES OF INCENSE

CHARLES JAMES...

Let me advise you never to trap a fox inside your premises. They are very adept at hiding and will try hard to get out when you're not around, but have poor bladder and bowel control. I spent the best part of last week repeatedly censing the nave at St Mary Magdalene's in an attempt to cover up the pungent odour of fox. I was reasonably successful, but used a lot of charcoal and incense.

Originally, I had thought that someone had brought a dog into church and let it run amok at one of PDT's public events, as when I came into church one Sunday I found James (the organist)'s slippers distributed around the chancel, and one of the sedilia cushions on the floor of the sanctuary with the corner chewed off. On the cushion were tell-tale dusty paw marks, which indicated small dog or fox. Then the next day, Liz from PDT was in to supervise a group and discovered fox droppings, which was conclusive, and also demonstrated that the fox was staying over. I was mystified as to how it had got in, until I went down to the undercroft and found that the two openings connecting the undercroft to the new extension were no longer sealed, but boarded up from about a foot above the floor, an arrangement that would exclude most humans, but none of the wildlife to be found on the Warwick Estate. I then had the idea of closing the staircase doors, so that the fox was confined to the nave, and would be easier to flush out if it was still inside. The contractors organised a team of men to try to find it, but they failed. Nevertheless, the fox was still in the nave, and could not then get out. It made more than one vigorous assault on the plasterboard that sealed off the opening from the nave into the extension, and destroyed a brand-new doormat in trying to dig its way out of the north door. Eventually, the excellent Liz sat in her car outside the church after dark and lured it out with cat food, closing the door behind it when it came out.


GRANDE PARTENZA

Much of the fox saga took place while I was away. I had gone to Bologna for a long weekend, taking in the Grande Partenza of the Giro d'Italia, but was unable to escape from the fox. Some people seemed just amused by this, while others had sympathy for the trapped creature, but I knew what my church was going to smell like, so it was not relaxing.

They call it "Bologna the red", which is partly for politics, but partly also because it's largely built of brick. Last time I was there San Petronio, the great civic church in the Piazza Maggiore, was closed because they had recently had an earthquake and they weren't sure how stable it was. Well, I say it was closed; there weren't any services, but they would let visitors go inside, about ten metres in inside the main door, which didn't seem very rational. Anyway, the result was that I had never properly been inside San Petronio until my recent visit, when I put that right. San Petronio was started in the 1390s, and they went on building until the sixteenth century to the same Gothic plan, so the vaults are an anachronistic marvel. Like many great Italian churches they never finished the facade, but what they did complete is very lovely. The point, though, is that San Petronio is a vast brick basilica; it is said that the burghers of Bologna in the fourteenth century wanted to build the biggest basilica in the world. You could fit three or four of St Mary Magdalene's inside it, but looking at it you can see some of G.E.Street's inspiration.


IT ALL MAKES WORK..

No, the contractors haven't finished yet. There were nineteen vehicles on site today, seventeen yesterday, and twenty on Tuesday, so they are certainly putting men on the job. There are some polished concrete floors in evidence. All the faience is fixed, and looks beautiful. The lift shaft has acquired doors at most levels. All the glazing is in. The lights are fixed. Most of the joinery is fixed. But there still seems an unfeasibly large quantity of kit sitting in the undercroft waiting to be fitted inside the extension. They are working very hard, but it is touch and go for our education programme which swings into action after half-term. Just keep praying.     

Thursday 25 April 2019

HE IS RISEN INDEED!

A Happy Easter

Importantly, we have now celebrated our first Holy Week and Easter in the newly-refurbished church. We still had to clean and polish everything, as the amount of dust in the atmosphere is still tremendous, but everything is looking much better, and I was not ashamed to welcome the Archdeacon of London, Fr Luke Miller, who spent Holy Week with us. Having someone else to share the preaching (and reading the Passion on Good Friday) makes a surprising physical difference.

With some repaired and refurbished candlesticks we were able to create a much better altar of repose on Maundy Thursday, and then to make a bigger, better splash on Easter Day, and frankly St Mary Mags looked splendid. We also used the old marble paschal candlestick for the first time since I've been here (as we had builders' labourers to move it) which looks impressive in the sanctuary. That still needs repair, but it's quite safe, so it's good to use it. 

We also used our new Stations of the Cross, which I am very pleased with. I bought them in Palermo, and had them shipped over, which was fine, except that the package was just left on my doorstep. The old plaster-of-Paris ones were past repair, and looked very tatty. They would inevitably have got even more damaged, and if we had tried to put them up and take them down it would have been a terrible chore, resulting in more damage. They also take up a lot of space in storage. The new ones, on the other hand, are in silvered bronze (and so pretty resilient) and are virtually flat (and so store easily). They are also silver, which looks very striking on the dark walls of the church. Their design is contemporary, but not aggressively so, and they are framed by a stylized thorns pattern, which works very well in a gothic setting.


Deliverymen

The person delivering the Stations left them on my doorstep, but at least he delivered them in a timely fashion, unlike a Hermes deliveryman, who took a fortnight to find my house, despite having "The Vicarage" in six-inch-high letters outside. I discovered through this that Hermes is not really a delivery company at all, but essentially an internet device, matching up deliveries with self-employed deliverymen. This would be fine if they were all competent, but mine wasn't. I actually saw him on one of his failed visits, trying to get into the school one evening, little imagining that this was for me. His vehicle was distinctive, and it is even more ironic that I have since seen it overnight a few hundred yards away in St Peter's parish. He claimed to have tried to deliver, but never left a card, and simply failed to identify the house on repeated alleged attempts. Since there are only 3 buildings with my postcode, and the others are the church and the school, I was not impressed. Hermes of course takes no responsibility for failed deliveries and directs you back to the supplier you purchased from, so I had long email exchanges with Rapha (classy cycle clothing, ironically based about 4 miles away). The particularly annoying thing was that I have had numerous successful deliveries from Rapha before (via Royal Mail, I think) and so let them know that I didn't think much of their new contractor.


Nearly There

Of course the new building wasn't finished for Easter. Silly of me to have thought it would be. But we are genuinely close now. The scaffolding is coming down, and it looks terrific. New turf is going down where the compound has been. People are frantically fixing things. The lift car appears to have been manufactured the wrong size, which is more than a little vexing, but we trust that something can be done.There were a whole string of things that were meant to be done over the school holiday, to avoid annoyance, but which seem not to have happened then, which is a shame. I compared notes with my neighbour Jem, the Baptist minister, who has totally rebuilt his church (and has flats on top); his is even further behind than ours, and we should just about finish together!

Wednesday 10 April 2019

GLAZING

We're still putting windows into the new building; yesterday I found myself unable to watch as the glazing for the north lantern was being craned into place. The sheet of glass hung there from those huge suction caps in a way that seemed barely feasible, and it was all too much for my imagination. We walked around last Friday, with some senior officers from the City Council, and I was rather taken by surprise by how far from finished it all appeared, but apparently we are still due to finish in a couple  of weeks. I was a bit disconcerted by one of the council officers asking me whether the exterior was going to be brick, but of course what they were looking at was a large section waiting for its glazing to be installed. When I pointed out that the main facade material is our glazed faience, which is already complete, they understood and were duly impressed. At that point the faience was still concealed by scaffolding, so we took them to a different elevation where it is more visible, and they loved it; whenever we take people to see the faience at close quarters they get excited by it. I'm just keen now to be able to reveal the extension in all its glory.

I am preparing a couple of children for First Communion, and the only practical way is to see them individually in their own (or their granny's) home. Not especially efficient use of my time, but actually the only way to get it done. The weekend before last I was perturbed to hear mention of one of those two venues on the television news, and when I looked into it I discovered that it was not only the same street, but actually the same block, that had been the site of a stabbing. The victim died. At the time there was talk of a dispute over a woman, but now drugs and gangs are mentioned. When I asked my candidate's granny (who is my age, I should point out) about it, she remarked that it was a reminder that "although we live in St John's Wood" awful things could still happen here, as anywhere in London.

This conversation brought home to me how much perceptions matter in these things, because I wouldn't have supposed her neighbourhood to be immune, but nor would I have called it St John's Wood. Yes, her flat is just off St John's Wood Road, but it's also not far from Maida Vale, and is part of a sprawl of social housing that runs through to Lisson Grove. I dare say estate agents would call it St John's Wood, but why would we believe them? The whole point of St John's Wood Road is that it leads TO St John's Wood (unlike St John's Wood High Street, for instance) so it actually isn't in St John's Wood itself. It is, in any case, a sort of boundary, with much more prosperous territory to the north, but more diversity to the south, at least going east until you reach Lisson Grove. I once had a parishioner who insisted on telling people that he lived in St John's Wood, despite the fact that his flat was just off Edgware Road, near Church Street Market. I'm not even sure that he was in the right postcode, but nothing would shake him from the belief that he must be in a smart area. London neighbourhoods are amorphous things, but what you call your area can be bound up with your own perception of it (let alone other people's perceptions). For instance, I always say that I am in Paddington, whereas I could perfectly justifiably say Little Venice, but the latter just doesn't reflect the reality of the Warwick Estate, or the whole diversity of the area.

Organising a wedding is quite a faff, isn't it? I had thought we would make this a simple and informal affair, but all sorts of stuff seems to have crept in that requires choosing and organising (and paying for). Meanwhile, I keep wondering whether there isn't something which we have simply both forgotten as we are pretty much doing this by ourselves, unlike young people who always seem to have a gaggle of family and friends advising and suggesting. Still, if we haven't thought of it, it can't be important to us, can it?

We've had a couple of "test events" in the refurbished church. They were meant to be test events for the new facilities in the extension, but since that isn't finished yet, it was all a bit provisional. Anyway, we managed to host an immersive theatre production involving local teenagers (which was attended by the Lord Mayor and the MP as well as all sorts of local worthies), and a training day for the Waterways Chaplaincy (who had brilliant cake). Nobody died. Nobody fused the lights. The portaloos coped. That, in my view, was success. And, of course, loads more people came into the church and went "Wow!"   

Friday 22 March 2019

VICTORY!

Not Being Choaked

The big news is the success of the Royal Oak campaign. I was preparing a letter to Sadiq Khan when we heard that he had decreed that TfL would not locate the coach station here. It quite took the wind out of our sails, as we had been gearing up for a long and bitter struggle. Both Tory and Labour councillors, and the local MP, Karen Buck, were all part of the campaign, not to mention impressive Bayswater ladies, and we knew the proposal was ridiculous, but still it was a very pleasant surprise to succeed, and so quickly. Sadly I missed the victory drinks.


In the Home Straight

The windows are beginning to go into our new building, so it is starting to actually look like a building. This is positive, but less positive is the news that the lift doors were manufactured wrongly, and so have to be changed. The length of time that it takes to install a lift is extraordinary, so this may apparently delay us. Virtually all the equipment for the new building is now on site, and swarms of people are working very hard putting it in. The faience looks splendid, and is currently being grouted (or masticked, to be accurate). We are due to interview potential cafe operators next week, so everything is coming together and starting to feel real. There's still a significant repair to be done in church, but we're on track to be able to celebrate soon!


No Home

A story that I don't feel like celebrating has been playing out recently. There was a person who had been homeless, but was living in a flat near St Peter's, and came to our Lunch Club and Breakfast Club. Gradually, over many months, they started coming to church as well, and it seemed that they had sorted out their life; they were talking to me about faith, and I was happy that they found the church supportive. Then we saw them less frequently, and then suddenly, a few weeks ago, they appeared sleeping on a pavement, under some scaffolding. When we tried to engage we were told they couldn't talk, which was certainly partly shame, and so there was not much we could do. Fortunately the place they were sleeping was very public, and attracted a lot of attention, so they have now got some support. Disappointing. We ask ourselves how we failed them. In truth we were wrong to have been congratulating ourselves, because the situation was always more precarious than it appeared, and there was a very complicated back story.


Dog's Home

Meanwhile Angry Woman with Dog has loomed large again. Her housing provider sent her notice of eviction proceedings last August, and so I hurriedly helped her get a solicitor. Proceedings have still not started, but the housing association won't say that they are not going to.  Seven months it has been hanging over her. It is clearly being used as a threat, a device to try to get her to behave better. This seems to me to be cruel, and is deeply unreasonable for the solicitor, who won't get paid by Legal Aid if there are no actual proceedings. The trouble is that the main complaint against her is that she has a noisy dog, which is true. I have bought harnesses to try to make the dog  more controllable, and devices to try to stop it barking, even some sort of tranquilisers for it (for which I am confident there is no resale market, unlike horse tranquilisers). It's really not a suitable dog for her (too big for the flat, too strong for her) but she won't hear of getting rid of it, as although she shouts and curses at it, she really loves it. In a chaotic and dysfunctional life a companion animal is a lot more reliable than the humans around.  


Colour Wash

Last Saturday we went to the Bonnard show at Tate Modern, which caused us to discuss how modern is "modern", because Bonnard was a post-Impressionist who did his most characteristic work around the First World War and died in 1947. Of course it's the old Tate Gallery thing, that the Tate in the old days was the repository for British art, and international twentieth-century art, as the National Gallery basically turned its back on anything from after 1900. The other (more popular) show on at the moment is of the Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, and I guess she would seem more "modern", despite being practically Bonnard's contemporary, because Surrealism is recognisably "modern" because of its debt to Freudian ideas. Bonnard remained working in a way that didn't move on very far from Pissarro or Cezanne and so feels much more part of the great tradition. Still, he really wasn't very good. I am struck by the reverential hush that prevails in art galleries, and I fear I broke the hush with some critical comments. At one point I was giving my view when a young American woman next to me asked me a question, fortunately one which I was able to answer (I wasn't just talking out of my backside on this occasion). I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment, but I think dialogue and discussion are an appropriate part of the gallery experience, and so I don't think one should be ashamed of having an opinion.

My opinion is that Bonnard is a second-rank artist who painted a handful of very nice pictures and an awful lot of dull ones, and a number of real shockers. The Tate curators wanted to emphasise his use of colour,and that's why I went, but even that's not really very special; he's a great one for yellow and purple, but a lot of it just feels straight from the tube with no thought. My point which caught the attention of the American was that in his garden pictures he is too fond of viridian, a striking pigment which is not the colour of any plant in nature, but which he uses raw. He uses colour as a substitute for drawing, and the few drawings in the show reveal his draughtsmanship to have been strikingly weak. It's notable that his most convincing human figures have their faces obscured, because he really is very bad at faces, but sometimes his anatomy is rubbish as well. The curious thing about the show was that it was chronological, but only started in the artist's forties, when he had settled on his final style, and so there is no artistic development at all, though there are some very weak pictures from his last years which speak of declining powers. The trouble was that he thought he was Monet, and he wasn't.

I hadn't realised that he lived very near Monet in Normandy. Bonnard's house at Vernonnet (one of three homes, he was not a starving artist) is only a few miles from Monet's at Giverny; you'd get off the train at Vernon for both. Ian and I came very close to them on the cycle ride last summer, and perhaps I might do that one day in the future, but I'm not sure that Bonnard would detain me for long.  

Friday 1 March 2019

PARKS AND RECREATION

Falling Leaves

The cycle path across the Green, alongside the canal, runs past our contractors' compound, and they have regularly sent blokes out to clean the path up, hosing down any mud that delivery lorries have brought onto it, and sweeping up rubbish and leaves. There are, of course, lots of leaves, as there is a row of black poplars between the compound and the path, so, back in the autumn, our people were quite busy sweeping them up. The remainder of the path, however, beyond our compound, is a very different matter. Westminster Parks finally cleared the fallen leaves from the path this week; at the end of February. They had spent a couple of days working on it earlier in the month, but one section was left untouched until this week. Now, I imagine that they justify this by saying that it would need repeated visits if they were to try to clear the leaves when they were actually falling, but they made repeated visits anyway! I am perfectly sure that leaves which have piled up and then been rained on, partially rotting them down, are actually more effort to clear because they are much heavier. More to the point, as a cyclist, I am fed up with (in places) half the width of the path being covered by a mound of slippery dead leaves. Still, I must be grateful that it has finally been done; it's boring just to moan about the stupidity of the Parks Department.


Blurred Lines

It's quite boring to moan about the stupidity of people's parking round here as well, but forgive me, I feel the need. Some time ago I was one of several people who agitated for double yellow lines to extend over the Harrow Road canal bridge on the east side of the road (they already existed on the west) because cars parked there completely blocked the view of anyone coming out from the Green, either to cross the road on foot or to pull out on a bike (which I do every day). That was done, which is a great help, but the problem is that people just ignore them, particularly at night. There seems to be a general view that single yellow lines are just advisory, and don't apply after lunchtime on the Harrow Road, and that as long as you are not parking overnight then it's fine to park on a double yellow line as well. It may simply be the calculation that Westminster never sends "civil enforcement officers" out after dark, and so you are perfectly safe from a fine. It may be that civil enforcement officers are seen so rarely in our area that people gamble on their absence anyway, or it may be that people have observed that when they are here they are only really interested in cars parked wrongly in marked bays, and pay little attention to yellow lines or dangerously parked vehicles.

I sometimes feel as I zigzag around illegally-parked cars that vigilantism is justified in these circumstances; if I possessed a paintball gun I would be very happy to splat the windscreens of miscreants. It's an ignoble impulse, I know, but it would be so satisfying. Self-righteousness is a very unattractive emotion, isn't it!


Royal Choak

The campaign against the ludicrous TfL plan to put a coach station at Royal Oak gathers pace. There is a public meeting at the Porchester Hall on Shrove Tuesday at 7pm, which I am encouraging people to go to.The campaigners have set up a website, www.stoproyalchoak.com which has links to the two petitions against the plan, which are still collecting signatures. They want to submit the petitions on 14th March, so we are urging people to sign up quickly. One odd feature of this is that no-one actually knows when TfL will be making a decision about this; everything is shrouded in mystery. The campaigners are rightly concentrating on the pollution issue, (hence "Choak") because the plan promises to bring hundreds of extra coaches daily onto the Marylebone Road, which already has the worst air quality of anywhere in the UK.  The number of schools within a few yards of the road is ridiculous, and they stand to find their air quality becoming even more dangerous. On the Warwick Estate we shall be right in the firing line; how will people feel using our excellent outdoor gym equipment when the air is full of diesel fumes?

The thing that nice, polite people are not saying publicly is that  they really fear the social fallout of a coach station, because we all know that one of the factors in Victoria being a centre for rough sleeping is the presence of the coach station. It is on the coach that the penniless newcomer arrives in London (when not actually trafficked). Over the decades Victoria has developed an infrastructure to deal with this, which we simply do not have in Westbourne or Bayswater. We already have rough sleepers of our own who we struggle to support, without adding in a whole lot of newcomers. The Leader of the Council is eloquent in questioning Westminster's responsibility for all the homeless people who actively choose to come here, and while I may be a bit uncomfortable with that approach, I suspect we would all be agreeing with her if they appeared on our pavements in Westbourne.


Predictive Text

Our new building is faced with panels of glazed terracotta, or faience as it is sometimes called, a characteristically late-Victorian material. I have run into all sorts of confusion recently because if you try to type faience into your phone you will inevitably find it "corrected" to fiance; now I have a fiancee it adds even more potential for bafflement. The good thing is that the specialist facade contractors are making really good progress, and are hanging the faience panels on the Rowington Close front now. The faience is wonderfully highly glazed, and looks really good, even though it's hard to see it properly as it is still obscured by scaffolding. It really glittered on the sunny days we have just enjoyed. There is a relief pattern in the faience, which is going to look splendid, and which picks up a detail of Street's brickwork, which I am very pleased with. There is only one manufacturer in the UK who makes glazed terracotta, so we are delighted to have them making these panels to our specification; they have just made a much larger quantity of white faience for the restoration of the Victoria Palace Theatre, and we were always a bit anxious that our rather small order might get bumped down the schedule by another really big one, so it's a relief to see it all on site, and indeed going up on the walls. Nearly there! 
   

Wednesday 13 February 2019

CONTRACTS AND CONTRACTING

The breadth of our building project was demonstrated the other day when I passed the site and observed the vans of "Heritage Blacksmiths Partnership" and "London Concrete Polishing" both parked up. In fact the concrete polishers are there tonight, working through the night, as you clearly have to polish concrete at a particular point in its drying process. The heritage blacksmiths have been superb, rehabilitating all our Victorian doors, and even bringing to life an ancient door-closer that we thought beyond use. The loving care with which the ironwork on our doors has been treated is quite remarkable, and the results are great.

This is the season of spending out budgets, and so Westminster is full of minor works. There are road works all over the West End, while our neighbourhood is full of pavements being relaid. F M Conway, Westminster's preferred contractor, are suddenly very busy indeed. Inexplicably they turned up to repaint the Harrow Road bridge over the Canal, in order to do which they had to set up a little cabin on the entrance to Westbourne Green, and fence off each pavement in turn. Needless to say, pedestrians carried on walking, judging the bridge to be a small enough distance to brave the traffic, which was unwise.They departed this morning, called away to "an emergency at Marble Arch".

While Conways were at work on the bridge a green hire bike was left beside their works, on the road, on a double yellow line. This was the most extreme example I've seen of anti-social behaviour from hire bikes, but I do think we have reached saturation. Not only are there the Boris bikes with their docking stations, but now there are three different brands of free-floating ones, yellow, orange-and-silver, and green. These can just be abandoned wherever you fancy, because they contain a chip which will notify its location, which the user can then find on the app. I fear that we are becoming a sink for these, as they seem to linger a long time, often in tiresome places. I gather that the local young people have discovered that, with the yellow ones at least, a sharp blow to the lock will not only release the bike, but destroy (or dislodge) the chip, and so you can ride off with impunity (apart from the inherent shame of riding a clumpy canary-coloured bicycle).

Last night I went to the extraordinary Playground Theatre in Latimer Road, to see Steven Berkoff in "Harvey" (Weinstein, not the rabbit). This theatre has been going a year, in an old bus depot towards the North Pole end of Latimer Road, a very odd location indeed; I get my car serviced a few doors down. The theatre has a very smart cafe-bar, and does seem to attract a more prosperous clientele than you might imagine. Unsubsidised, they put on some very ambitious things; last summer I saw "Shirleymander", the play about Dame Shirley Porter and her shameful stewardship of Westminster Council, which was attended by a number of people who looked as though they might have known Dame Shirley, and many who clearly remembered her. Last night's show attracted a rather glamorous crowd, with a very tall, androgynous, white-haired young man in leather trousers, high heels and dark glasses only the most extreme. A "famous paparazzo" was also pointed out to me. 

The director of the theatre was at pains to tell us that this was a "workshop production" of a "work in progress", and they gave us all free drinks at the end (a free gin does help one's critical faculties) but I'm afraid it wasn't a total success. Steven Berkoff is a remarkable performer, but this was a very disappointing evening. He has great physical presence, but for all but thirty seconds of the play he was simply slumped in a chair. Only for a moment did you see those extraordinarily scary pale blue eyes glitter. Steven Berkoff has written and directed this show, as well as being the only performer, and I fear that there is no-one to tell him that it's a turkey. We were all expecting to be shocked, I think, but his take on Weinstein was really rather one-dimensional, and while the vocabulary was explicit there was no provocative insight on the issues involved. It was a performance, rather than a play, a monologue from Berkoff with a few recorded extracts from victims' witness depositions. It had no structure, no variety of tone, no dramatic development, and offered nothing very memorable. Still, I've now seen Steven Berkoff in the flesh, and I commend the Playground Theatre for having the nerve to put this on.

The Burne-Jones show at Tate Britain, on the other hand, was more successful than I expected. Yes, there were a lot of those rather drippy women he painted so many of, and some really bad pictures, but there were also some good ones. I found it interesting to see so many together and spot some themes. His treatment of architecture, for instance, is always really poor. He's most comfortable with some sort of shed, like in Botticelli's "Mystic Nativity", but once he has to construct anything more it falls into fantasy. Look closely at "The Golden Stairs" for instance; not only does the staircase defy all laws of construction, but the middle section is so steep and precipitous that it is impossible to imagine all those girls getting down safely. He quite likes girls, and there's a charming portrait of the daughter of George Lewis, Oscar Wilde's solicitor, but he really doesn't like women, he's afraid of them and regards them as sinister. He also follows Michelangelo and basically gives women male bodies (but then some of his men are pretty androgynous too). All this seems quite interesting. And "The Briar Rose" is exquisite, even if it is better in situ at Buscot. Really remarkable are the sequence of Perseus pictures he did for A J Balfour's house, most strikingly the one of the Graeae (look them up). There is a well-worked up painting of this, and then there is the same scene worked as a low relief in wood, gilded and silvered, with a massive gilt Latin inscription above it. This is a piece of decorative art of the very highest quality, and a real innovation. Rather surprisingly it is from the National Museum of Wales, which seems to have several decent works of his. 

I announced on Sunday that I am engaged to be married, which caused a good deal of surprise and confusion, and a lot of genuine joy, which was very pleasing. People are very kind.

Monday 4 February 2019

WORDS AND MUSIC

We finally launched Helen's book last week, many months after it was actually published. We had hoped to have all three editors present, but since Ed Vickers now works in a Japanese university this was always going to be a challenge, and it was one that we failed. Attempting to accommodate Ed, and Sadaf Rizvi, a colleague of Helen's who now works for the Open University and lives away from London, contributed to our delays, and in the end neither of them were there. Germ Janmaat, Helen's supervisor (the other editor) had arranged a room in the Institute of Education, and had arranged for their research group to provide wine and nibbles. No sumptuous publishers' party for an academic volume like this, "Faith Schools, Tolerance and Diversity", but a few bottles of cheap plonk in an anonymous teaching room on the eighth floor of the IoE. I got there first and moved the chairs out of the way (it's what clergy do). Germ spoke authoritatively about how important a book it is and then I said a bit about the process of the research and writing. Germ said I would be speaking "in a lighter vein" but I warned him there would be no jokes. I made the point that when Helen sent the thesis to people at the Department for Education they showed no interest at all, despite that being the era of "evidence-based policy". I hope I was suitably grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for actually publishing the book, and I didn't rehearse publicly my astonishment at the fact that they didn't routinely provide an index; I had to pay an Italian lady in the Netherlands £600 for the privilege. I do find it rather extraordinary that academic publishers should think it acceptable to publish a book without an index.

I had invited various luminaries of the Anglican education world, most of whom at least sent apologies, but none actually came. I should say, in fairness, that the Rector of Bournemouth (who is a former diocesan director of education, and included in my category of luminaries) tried to get there but couldn't find the room. He was in the building at the right time, but no-one he asked knew anything about it, and unless you got up to the eighth floor corridor there weren't any notices. He didn't have my mobile number, but sent an email, which reached me, but since I had (like a good, well-socialized human being) turned my phone to silent for the duration, I didn't actually read it until much too late. I dread that sort of thing happening to me and so usually carry the invitation with me, or a piece of paper with transcribed details: I once failed to do that and had the shame of taking the Superior of the Delhi Brotherhood to entirely the wrong place for a reception and then having no means of finding out the correct address without coming home, by which time, of course, the moment had passed.


Isn't London wonderful? I take it for granted too often, but after the book launch  I walked my brother-in-law down to Waterloo Station for his train back to Exeter, and was able to go to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall. I hadn't booked, because I didn't know when we would be finished, but I had checked online and seen that there were plenty of seats left, so I just turned up at the box office with confidence, and was able to have a choice of cheap seats. The London Philharmonic, under Sir Roger Norrington, were doing Handel's Water Music and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and it was a splendid evening. Helen and I sang in Dido and Aeneas with the Plymouth Polyphonic Choir some twenty-five years ago, and so it seemed very appropriate. The LPO's was semi-staged, as ours had been, though the Festival Hall is a lot grander than Plymouth Guildhall, though actually I think we "acted" a bit more than they did, and we even had the odd bit of costume (I remember creating a helmet with wings for "Mercury"). I rather expected to be in floods of tears, but I wasn't. Partly this was because the LPO had a man singing the role of the Sorceress, which Helen sang back then, which is common practice, but frankly a bit odd, and partly it was because I didn't much care for the woman singing Dido, who was (I think) French, and didn't have the clarity of diction you want in Purcell. The result was that "Remember Me" was not the tear-jerker that it should be, but a bit florid and comfortable.

I was shocked by how much of the words I still have by heart; why can't I remember things like that nowadays? I was only in the chorus, and our high point was marching around as we sang, "Come away, fellow sailors, come away". I remember us slapping our thighs as we did so, but I think that was only in rehearsal, because I for one certainly couldn't have slapped in time successfully, and that would just have looked comical (as well as camp). Our Dido was a teenage girl called Alison Chryssides, whose mother was the director of the choir, and she was superb. I got her to sing Mozart for me at an anniversary Mass I celebrated in Reading a few years later, but she has not become a professional singer, but a social psychologist. This is not so surprising, as her father was a fairly eminent sociologist, but I hope she still sings.