REJOICE, REJOICE!

Not Blue Suede Shoes

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

A Question of Etiquette

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

Success at Last

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

HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE

A Hostage Situation

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

Irish Eyes

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

Canalside Living

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

Paranoid Style

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

HEAVEN KNOWS I'M MISERABLE NOW

The Morning After

Yes, of course the sky has not yet fallen in, though that’s partly because chaos in the financial markets doesn’t have immediate visible effects, but I cannot help but be sad. Today we have an exhibition opening in the Crypt of St.Mary Mags, “Magic of Light”, which is organised by Tomek, a Polish artist. On Sunday I am going to a party given by Germ, Helen’s old supervisor, who is a Dutch academic. It is no surprise that London voted heavily to remain in the EU, because here we actually see the value that our European brothers and sisters bring to our lives. Most particularly we also reject the poisonous politics of division that are signified by this result. It’s no surprise that Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen think it’s a great result because they recognise what it says. Mr Farage may insist that his voters are “decent people” and of course most of his voters are, but he cannot escape the fact that the people with really despicable views will also have voted for him, and he has given plenty of signs that he understands and welcomes them.

The Revolution

Round here we still have some revolutionary Socialists, and I know some who have proudly voted to leave the EU, which they regard as a bourgeois conspiracy. They are delighted at the fall of David Cameron, as they relish the prospect of his being replaced by a more nakedly right-wing figure whose tyrannical rule will motivate the workers to rise and overthrow the bourgeois regime. But this is fantasy. The Referendum result demonstrates that the workers are much more ready to form  mobs to hound out foreigners than they are to turn on the bosses. Watch the hedge-funders and currency speculators (Nigel?) getting rich as the markets boil over, and see whether the workers mobilise. My revolutionary friends think it will be absolutely fine for Prime Minister Johnson to scapegoat immigrants, and repeal workers’ rights and employment protection because that will hasten the uprising of the proletariat, and as Lenin said you had to break a few eggs, but actually the revolution isn’t just around the corner, and real people will suffer. The poorest and weakest are always the victims, and so it will prove, comrades.

R.I.P. Amjad Sabri

And just in case you thought things couldn’t get worse, look at the news from Pakistan. Amjad Sabri, a musician, has been murdered by the Taliban in Karachi. He was part of the world famous Sabri Brothers ensemble (the “Brothers” were his father and uncle) who perform qawwali, the Muslim devotional music of the Indian subcontinent. The Sabris are hereditary musicians, descended from Tansen, the court musician of the Mughal Emperor Akbar back in the sixteenth century, and while they perform on secular stages (I saw them at the South Bank once) their art is entirely based on the worship of God. Listen to a Sabri Brothers CD and appreciate the devotion. Amjad had broadened the repertoire to engage with new audiences (a bit like Youssou N’Dour has done, and just as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan did) but the core of their repertoire was still the traditional qawwali sung at Sufi shrines every Thursday night for hundreds of years, which are love songs to God. Helen spent time in Karachi two years ago and reported how lawless it is, but there is still something profoundly shocking about the murder of a singer of devotional music.          

EURO 2016

You Got This One Wrong, Boris

Last night two leaflets came through my door from the Vote Leave campaign. One is headed “Thursday is Polling Day. Your street is one of the most likely to Vote Leave in the country”. Well, sorry to break the bad news, Boris, but no it isn’t. You see, when I go to the polling station on Thursday and the poll clerk looks up my address, he will find just one name in my street, mine. I remember that the Conservatives at the last General Election tried some targeted leaflets with a similar idea, so presumably some research has told them that people are more likely to vote if they believe that their vote will make a material difference, and that their neighbours are thinking the same. Well, you don’t need research to tell you that people vote more enthusiastically if they think it matters, but doing the same as your neighbours? I’m not sure about that. And frankly, I’m not sure they’re right anyway. I seriously doubt whether anyone has actually surveyed the Warwick Estate to see whether the residents favour Brexit, and so this must be based on some sort of extrapolation. I suspect that the logic is that some research has suggested that the poorer you are the more likely you are to vote Leave, and since we are one of the most deprived wards in London someone at Vote Leave has assumed that means we will support them. The flaw in the logic is that there are multiple factors, and their research represents findings about white British people, who are quite thin on the ground here. We have a lot of residents who weren’t born in the UK, and most of them will not vote enthusiastically for Brexit, especially when it is represented by posters of queues of migrants represented as a threat, whom they regard with empathy.

…And Statistics

The research does seem to show that the less well-educated you are, the more likely you are to vote Leave. It’s worth pointing out that lots of our local residents have degrees and professional qualifications that are simply not recognised here, which may deceive the statisticians. No statisticians are deceived by the notorious “£350 million a week” claim, though, and I am staggered that Vote Leave continue to use it. It is simply a lie. The leaflet states “We send the EU £350 million a week” which Vote Leave know is not true, and which has been exposed as an untruth. Sure, we send a lot of money to the EU, but that figure is simply a lie. And as for the next line, “Let’s fund our NHS instead”, that’s simply shameless, as Farage would happily dismantle the NHS altogether, while Gove and Johnson have been part of a government that has persistently undermined the NHS, and has had the chance to fund it better but has chosen not to do so. The leaflet also bears the inflammatory map showing the “accession” countries that are applying to join the EU at some indeterminate point with the untrue claim that they are “joining soon”. No they aren’t. I’ve been to Albania, and to suppose that they will be ready to join the EU in thirty years would be optimistic. And it is perfectly clear that Turkey has no chance of joining until the division of Cyprus is resolved, which seems unlikely in our lifetimes. If you think the bureaucrats will fudge that one, think again; it cannot happen. It will be vetoed. But not only is this untruth promulgated, but alongside it is the map, with the accession countries coloured red, and Syria and Iraq coloured orange, with no explanation whatever, just prompting the thought in your mind that  they are somehow connected. This is shameful, using the plight of those countries to provoke xenophobia and fear.

Ourselves Alone, or not

Brexit thrives (like ISIS and Donald Trump) on crude identity politics, promoting the idea that we each have just one essential identity that overrides all others. You don’t have to have studied Social Identity Theory to see that this is nonsense; in real life we all have multiple identities which we use or privilege at particular moments. Well, on the Warwick Estate you can see this demonstrated. If you take a walk along Senior Street just now, during Euro 2016, you’ll find plenty of flats with flags draped from their windows, but several flats have both an England flag and an Ireland one. I know some of the families concerned and I can quite understand; both identities are meaningful for them. It would have horrified Michael Collins and the other leaders of the Easter Rising, but it shows how far we have come in a century.   

UGLY DUCKLINGS

Ugly Ducklings

A pair of swans on the Canal have produced a brood of cygnets, six of them, and at present they have succeeded in keeping them all alive for a fortnight. I imagine they are taking them onto the island in the Pool overnight, which is at least safe from foxes. Usually they get picked off while still small by foxes or dogs. A pair of Canada geese had a couple of goslings about a month ago, but considering how many of them are on the Canal we see very few goslings. A first for me last Saturday was seeing a baby Egyptian goose in Hyde Park, a delicate thing covered in black and white fluff (unlike the Canada geese, whose goslings rejoice in lemon and grey fluff). I have a soft spot for the rather charming Egyptian geese, who always go round in pairs rather than gaggles, and don’t try to bully you, like Canada geese; we sometimes have a pair on the Canal, but they don’t seem to be permanent, so perhaps they fly up from the Serpentine (following the course of the Westbourne River, maybe?)

Alright for Fighting

Yesterday evening I came to the Parish Office at a quarter to seven and was transfixed by an enormously loud row going on outside the pub opposite (The Squirrel, formerly The Skiddaw). A youngish woman was screaming abuse at the top of her voice at a woman seated at one of the tables outside the pub with a companion, who were responding. I was on my bike, so not really in a position to give my full attention to proceedings, but people waiting outside St.Peter’s for the self-help group meeting had been watching for some time and reckoned that the standing woman was drunk. Remarkably, it hadn’t progressed to actual violence, but the fury was of such a level that you feared that it could escalate at any moment. The landlord seemed to be trying to stop it, but without much success, though I presume he must have succeeded eventually. It was the volume that was so striking, together with the (presumably alcohol-fuelled) disinhibition in a public place in broad daylight. A reminder of the fragility of social stability.

Pining for the Fjords

One of my Churchwardens was called to the public lavatories in Maida Hill Market a few weeks ago, because “There’s someone dead down there.” She was understandably anxious, and so went down with caution. She ascertained that the woman in question (lying on the floor) was not in fact dead, but drunk or high, so she gave her a slap to wake her up, which was effective. Getting the woman out of the loos and set on her way home was a bit less easy, but some help turned up after a while. You’d think people would be able to distinguish between dead and dead drunk, but apparently not. Sometimes, in an environment like this where chaotic things do occur, people leap to the most melodramatic conclusions.

Franglais

I’ve noticed that the English have a tendency to pronounce any apparently foreign word as though it were French (I guess it’s because French is the default foreign language for us). For instance, my mother used to pronounce bergamot (the oil which flavours Earl Grey tea) as “bair-zha-moe” (which ironically wouldn’t even be correct in French). Another example is Farage, a name that appears French and so gets pronounced “Fur-arzh”, but why? It’s not quite the same as the genteel pronunciation of garage which seems to have won out over “garridge” (which was quite normal when I was a boy) but that’s not natural English either. Surely it’s the same syllable as at the end of manage, salvage or porage? It’s very odd; why is he not Mr “Farridge”?

The BBC gets itself into terrible confusion over some French names, with a desire to be correct, but not be too pretentious (and actually pronounce things in a French way). A recent test case was the rugby team Racing 92, who the BBC scrupulously called “Rasseeng Ninety-Two”. Could they not spot the illogicality? “Rasseeng Quatre-vingt-douze” would have been okay, but not “Rasseeng Ninety-Two”. Just saying Racing 92 in English would probably have been better. They seem to have abandoned their insistence on pronouncing the first S in Catalans Dragons which they persisted with for some time, but that one is a total mix-up, because if it’s French you wouldn’t pronounce the S, but if it’s Catalan you would, but either way “Catalans” is an adjective which ought to come after the noun it qualifies. Their website proclaims them to be Dragons Catalans, which makes sense, and surely that (pronounced in a French way) ought to be their name.  

VA PENSIERO

Va Pensiero

I wonder whether anyone else has noticed what seems to be happening to “Italian” restaurants? Not the traditional back-street trattoria with red gingham tablecloths and chianti bottles made into lamps, but the chains of restaurants with supposedly Italian names which occupy glossy premises on our high streets (or St.Martin’s Lane, or Paddington Central, to be precise). They are developing a cuisine entirely their own, which is now only loosely based on Italian, and involves adding chilli to almost everything. Some time ago I decided to avoid one chain after being served a pizza that was fearsomely over-chillied, but recently I visited another, twice with different friends, and realised that this one had now become no fun any more. Every dish was over-elaborate, and most of them involved chilli; what are “piquillo chilli pearls” by the way? One of my friends, unattracted by anything on the menu, asked whether they couldn’t do a steak with mashed potato (something was served with mash, and a steak salad was advertised), but it turned out this was impossible. “The steak is sliced in the salad” was the answer. “Surely you could just take one and cook it and not slice it?” but that was not possible. Clearly the “steak” arrives at the “restaurant” ready cooked and sliced. These places are not restaurants, but serveries. I wish they’d grasp, though, that Italian cooking doesn’t involve chilli. Ever. Yes, there’s a bit in that Calabrian sausage, ‘Nduja, that they are so keen on, but you never see that on a menu in most of Italy, and chilli is just never added to normal food. I am told that this is all a response by the corporate owners of these chains of restaurants to what their market research tells them that British people want, which is sugar and chilli with everything. I must clearly stick to the old-fashioned type of Italian, but the trouble is finding one in a convenient location which can actually accommodate you.

In Kilburn

I joined our neighbours at St.Augustine’s, Kilburn, for their Patronal Festival last week, which was a good do. We processed through the streets reciting the rosary, and it was interesting how people responded. Mostly people had no reaction whatsoever, and one gentleman in particular made it very clear that he wasn’t going to go round us, so we should go round him. There weren’t that many people about, but we attracted neither reverence, nor astonishment. It as all quite matter-of-fact. Oh, just some more crazies… We passed the ruins of the Carlton Tavern, illegally demolished by its speculative owners, but I’d better not say more, as the Planning Tribunal has just met to consider the owners’ claim to overturn Westminster City Council’s order that they should reinstate it, and while it’s not technically sub judice, apparently everyone was warned against doing anything to influence the decision while it is awaited.

On Oxford Street

I also joined All Saints, Margaret Street, for their Corpus Christi celebrations last week, which involves the procession of the Blessed Sacrament going down onto Oxford Street. We had a brass ensemble, as well as a choir, and a congregation of about a hundred, so there was lusty singing. We were greeted mostly by frank astonishment from those having after-work drinks outside the many bars. Just occasionally a tourist (of Latin origin) would drop to their knees or cross themselves when catching sight of the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance, but mostly they stared or took photos of this unexpected local colour, for which their guidebooks had not prepared them. It was actually a powerful act of witness (and very well organised by the parish, with marshals in high-vis tabards, and even a doctor on hand) and an assertion of Christian identity. Outdoor processions are rather interesting in terms of social anthropology, because they are about territory, and asserting ownership of it, as well as identity. You only take a church procession out onto the street when you feel confident that you won’t be attacked (or that you can cope if you are) and that you will make a good show. Here, we process along the Harrow Road on Palm Sunday (going from St.Mary Mags to St.Peter’s), which works quite well, though it would be much improved by a brass band. Perhaps I can encourage the primary school brass players I heard last week…    

HAPPY EASTER

Happy Easter to ALL our Readers

No, I’ve not gone completely mad; it’s still Eastertide for all Christians, despite the strangeness of Orthodox Christians celebrating the resurrection of Christ five weeks later than the rest of us. Eastertide lasts until the Feast of Pentecost, Whitsunday, the fiftieth day after Easter, so we’re still just in it, though that’s a recent recovery of an ancient notion, because in our parents’ days Eastertide was assumed to finish with Ascension Day (last Thursday). But our Ethiopian Orthodox colleagues, who use St.Peter’s, were keeping Maundy Thursday only a week before we kept Ascension Day, which was very unsettling. Two years ago our Easter celebrations coincided, but this year, they kept the Great Feast on 1^st May.

People sometimes ask me to explain why Orthodox Easter is different from ours, and my stock answer has been, “It’s complicated” but that was mostly to gloss over the fact that I wasn’t clear myself, but this year, with renewed public interest in fixing a date for Easter, I have set myself to understand the conundrum. Here goes.

Lunar Months and Solar Years

Obviously, the basis of all calendar problems is that we use a solar year (the earth takes about three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days to go round the sun) and a lunar month (the moon takes twenty nine and a bit days to go round the earth); hence twelve lunar months don’t actually make up a solar year, so we lengthen our months to fudge it, and then add in a leap day every four years to make up for the quarter of a day (except when the year is divisible by 400). The particular Easter problem is further confounded by the fact that we want it to approximate to Passover, which is (broadly speaking) the first full moon after the (northern hemisphere) spring equinox, so combining lunar and solar calculations. In the Gospels it is clear that Jesus was crucified and rose again around Passover time, so that is when Easter should be.

Quartodeciman or Not

So the Church’s earliest argument over the date of Easter was whether it should be on a Sunday, or whether it should simply follow Passover on the 14^th of the Jewish month Nisan. Since the Jewish calendar was (and is) simply a lunar one there is a problem of that date jumping forward by 11 days or so every (solar) year, and so quite quickly it will predate the equinox (which the Jews also regard as important, as Passover is a spring festival). The Jewish solution is to add in an intercalary month before Nisan in years when Passover would come before the equinox. This was felt unsatisfactory by the Fathers of the Church, who also felt that the symbolism of Sunday was vital, since Sunday had been the initial celebration of the resurrection. Hence from the end of the 3^rd century Christians had to find a method of calculating their own date. 

Julius or Gregory

So it was agreed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 that Easter Day should be celebrated everywhere on the same day, but without definition. This came to be the Sunday after the first full moon following the equinox, which was defined as 21^st March. Therein lies the problem. The Orthodox churches insist on continuing to use the Julian calendar, which was in use at that time, (invented by Julius Caesar) and so tie their calculation of Easter to 21^st March in the Julian calendar, rather than the actual equinox. To be fair, none of us want to be bothered with real astronomical observations (notice the problems that Muslims get into over the start and finish of Ramadan, over the question of whether or not a new moon has been observed where they are) and so all Easter calculations are based on notional events in order to be predictable. The Julian calendar is too long, compared to the actual solar year, by 3 days every 400 years, and so eventually the Gregorian calendar was introduced, (by Pope Gregory XIII) which corrects that error. Rome adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, England (always progressive) in 1752. In our century, the Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian, and so the starting point for the Orthodox calculation is 13 days later than the starting point for ours.

But Not Just Thirteen Days

Unlike Orthodox Christmas, which is simply 13 days after western Christmas, Easter might be only a week later, or it might be 5 weeks later, or it might even be the same, and that’s of course because the theoretical full moon intervenes in the calculation. Matters are made more obscure by the fact that there are different methods for calculating the theoretical lunar cycles, and of course the Orthodox use a different (and older) method from the west. If you were, like me, taken to church as a child where the Book of Common Prayer was in use, you may remember the Golden Numbers and the inexplicable tables that were printed in the back of that volume to enable you to calculate the date of Easter, well that’s how complex it is! I don’t pretend to understand all that, nor why the variation between the western date and the Orthodox date is almost never 3 or 4 weeks. There are, in the end, things that can remain a mystery!