VICTIM SUPPORT

CRIME VICTIM It was a stressful Sunday morning anyway,with my elderly assistant priest not having turned up for Mass, which makes me (and others) anxious, and means that things are not necessarily prepared properly before my arrival, hotfoot from St Mary Mags. On this occasion, though, I was distracted as I brought my bike inside and didn't check that the door was securely closed behind me. Apparently it wasn't properly closed, because when I came back up to the vestry after Mass was over, the bike was gone, and with it my phone, which was in the pannier. The feeling of frustration and disbelief was enormous. I couldn't see how this could have happened. I am never careless. I am not the sort of person who becomes a victim of crime, I thought. But this just demonstrated that it can affect anyone. I dutifully informed the police and got a crime number, which satisfied the phone company. The phone was insured, and a new one was miraculously provided a few days later, though of course I had to take it to the shop to get it all sorted out, as it was way beyond me. The bike, however, was more problematic. It should have been covered by my household insurance, but I invalidated that because I left it unlocked. The fact that it was indoors, in enclosed premises (securely enclosed, as I mistakenly thought)changed nothing; it was away from home and not locked securely to a fixed object. So I wasn't covered. Huge frustration. I was, however, covered by the church insurance, which covers us for loss of possessions taken from the church up to one thousand pounds (though with a two hundred and fifty pound excess). The bicycle rules don't apply there. So, God willing, I should at least get part of its value back. What can't be replaced, of course, are the associations and memories. That was the bike on which I rode to Paris, bought specially for the purpose. It had recently become my second bike, as I bought a new, faster, one this summer after a lot of looking at websites, but the loss of the Paris bike has made me very sad. FLOOD VICTIM On Monday 12th July the weather changed bizarrely in the course of the afternoon, and I was sitting in the office at St Peter's when the sky turned black and a deluge began. We soon had water coming under the main door and falling in sheets off the porch as people used donated clothes to try to staunch the flow into the church and hall. Then I got a phone call from the Grand Junction staff who told me that water was coming into the undercroft at St Mary Mags, apparently from the sewer. I couldn't cycle home in the deluge, so Fiona came (very gingerly) in the car and collected me. I found the Grand Junction staff, shell-shocked, having retreated from the undercroft which was now under nearly a foot of water, two steps were covered. I fussed around rather ineffectually and tried to call the fire brigade, but couldn't get through, as the water rose over another step. Lucy phoned Thames Water, and didn't get through until the next day, but that was necessary to be sure that they logged the existence of the flood, since we are not in a row of buildings, unlike the houses in Kilburn Park Road and Shirland Road, where multiple basements were flooded. Poor Fr Amos at St Augustine's had rather more water than us, flooding his nice new boilers. We watched it until it stopped rising, and then went home. Astonishingly, the next morning the water was gone, and the manhole through which it had entered (and seemingly departed again)was in the middle of a very clean patch of floor, ringed by a circular rampart of ballast. The water had come in through a drain that we blocked with concrete nine years ago, and that gravel was the remains of the concrete plug. The dark grey residue on the floors contained a lot of cement dust, evidently, but blessedly no sewage. The water had come in through the Comper Chapel, and had fortunately burst the plasterboard screens (which had screend off the chapel from when we were doing the building works in the main part of the undercroft) before it got much deeper than a foot. The conservator later reported that the flood had merely washed the painted surfaces in the chapel, not having been there for very long. In my nice new sacristy a bit of water had got into the bottom of the frontal chest, but that had then been lifted off the ground, so the water was just at one end; the force of water necessary to lift a nine-foot by four-foot by one-foot solid oak chest must have been quite something. So, several frontals were damaged, but not too badly. The vestment press is completely unusable, but only the bottom two drawers were actually under water, which mostly contained rather unimportant vestments. Just one precious one was inundated, and we hope to be able to get it restored, though the colour has run terribly in the embroidery. So the past few months have been spent drying out textiles, and moving them from place to place. They occupied chairs in the nave for a while, but when school broke up they were able to go onto the dining tables in the school hall, and dried out nicely there during the holidays. After school came back I have been moving them from place to place, which is a chore, as the sacristy is much too damp to bring anything back into. I just have everyday, synthetic fibre vestments in there for now, as we wait for the place to dry out. Noisy fans have been installed, but it will take a while.