PINES EXPRESS

A Coat of Wealthy Firs

I spent a couple of days in Bournemouth, to preach and attend a meeting. This was at the invitation of the Rector of Bournemouth, who is developing a Heritage Lottery Fund bid for the town-centre church, St Peter's, a church designed by G E Street, and with a chapel by Ninian Comper (sound familiar?), and it was a very pleasant stay. St Peter's, Bournemouth, is not Street's most adventurous church in terms of plan, but the details are gorgeous. It is mostly of a pale, silver-grey stone, but the clerestory is cream and red brick. The tower is massive, all of this silver stone, square, with big pinnacles on the parapet bearing statues of saints and holding flying buttresses going back to the spire. The spire is a lot like ours, but with more detailed decoration. The excellent Thomas Earp ("Street's hands") was responsible for lots of fine carving, both inside and out, particularly an exuberant pulpit and a fine churchyard cross. I got particularly excited at the lychgate, which has a rather domestic tiled roof and a series of seven black, ogee-shaped roof braces, which just make a wonderful sight.

The congregation on Sunday was quite large, and laughed generously at my jokes. I reminded them that John Betjeman loved both my church and their town and repeated his famous description of Bournemouth as a recumbent old lady "wearing a coat of fine and wealthy firs" (it's in "First and Last Loves") which is just such a good joke that I had longed to repeat it out loud. Read it, and laugh. I also pointed out various specific similarities between our buildings, and the bizarre coincidence that the choir were singing Durufle's "Cum Jubilo" Mass, which had its English premiere here at Mary Mags.

I made rather a lot in my sermon about Victorian Anglo-Catholics going to Bournemouth to die (which is of course unfair, they went when very ill, hoping to recover) which got a laugh, but it's true. They have a chapel dedicated to the memory of Blessed John Keble, who worshipped there in the winter of 1865-6, when it was his wife who was supposed to be ill, but him who died. They have a plaque on the choir stall in which Mr Gladstone sat for his last Communion in church (he was actually whisked off home to Hawarden to die). And of course, my great predecessor, the founder, Fr Richard Temple West, also went to Bournemouth and died, exhausted by his labours. All those high-church folk went to Bournemouth because they knew they could get sound religion there, which wasn't true of some resorts. Of course it's Brighton that was the famous Anglo-Catholic stronghold (what they called "London, Brighton and South Coast Religion") but actually Fr Wagner didn't transform Brighton's churches until much nearer the end of the century; for the mid-Victorians Bournemouth was the place for exotic religion.


Summer Heat

It has been hot in London the last two days, and madness seems to be in the warmth. Yesterday I watched a young man on a bicycle pull a wheelie down Chippenham Road, from the traffic lights almost to the end. Today a young man on a motorbike was also doing wheelies; I worried that he could not see me as he came towards me in Marylands Road, but that turned out to be fine. Then two minutes later he appeared at the Chippenham Road lights and pulled away, doing a wheelie, whereupon he turned round and came back through the lights at red. Quite bizarre.


No Need To Ask Why

I was struck by a BBC reporter in Manchester struggling over the reason why the terrorist should have killed so many young girls; surely there's no need to ask why. First of all, people were enjoying themselves, which puritans hate. Secondly, it was music, which is forbidden by the puritans. Thirdly, it was a shameless female pop singer encouraging young girls to behave in similarly unsuitable ways. We should never underestimate the deep hatred of these puritans for female liberation. In the bomber's mind, these girls were being corrupted, and their behaviour was shameful; they should have been at home learning to cook and clean and know their place. Remember, they shot Malala for getting an education (and she's actually pretty conservative). Remember the Beslan siege. They aren't sentimental about children like us, which they no doubt regard as one of our weaknesses. So, not difficult to understand. Entirely of a piece with their misogynist ideology. 

SHORTS

Goslings

I read an article recently that said that all sorts of Hollywood stars were trying to look like Ryan Gosling, and that ordinary men should follow their example. My problem is that I don't know what he looks like, but I suspect there's no point in finding out. Real goslings, though.. we do have them! A genuine sign of spring is the appearance of baby waterfowl, and a pair of Canada geese on the canal have produced two goslings, slightly comical fluffy yellow-and-charcoal things. I was fascinated to see one of the adults getting very aggressive, standing up and hissing, with wings akimbo, apparently because of a dog, which ironically was wearing a muzzle and paying them no attention whatsoever.


School Clubs

I was told the other day about a local primary school (with which I have no connection) which has a maths club for gifted and talented children. This club is run by a teaching assistant, who happens to be very well qualified; so well-qualified in fact that they offer private tuition in maths. Nothing remarkable about that, except that the only people allowed to be part of the club at school are those who employ the private tutor outside school. Let's just say that I'm pleased that the schools I'm involved with would regard that sort of thing as very foreign to their ethos.


Flower Arrangements

One of the things I enjoy least about being a parish priest is having to ask people to take on jobs for the parish; I'm just temperamentally bad at it. I'm embarrassed to ask someone to do a job I wouldn't want to do myself, and don't want to burden already busy and committed people. I'm also a poor talent-spotter compared to many clergy. The added complication, in parishes like my last one, is that sometimes someone is sitting there waiting to be asked, and so you run the risk not only of heaping an unwanted burden on the person you do ask, but of offending the person you didn't ask (despite the fact that you had no idea they wanted to be asked). Well, this week I had to find a new flower arranger for St Peter's. Our existing flower arranger has developed a painful medical condition that makes it all rather burdensome and she finally threw in the towel when she found that all her Easter arrangements had been interfered with, and the water removed from some, and hence expensive flowers that should have lasted three weeks were all wilted after a few days. As she had spent four hours doing them she wasn't best pleased. Our problem is that the building is in constant use, and most particularly three other worshipping communities use the church, none of whom have much interest in flowers, and two of whom move almost everything, and one of whom has children who hare around, poorly-supervised. It's one of the perils of having a modern all-purpose building that people just don't behave with the same respect as they might have for a more obviously churchy space. Christians from other traditions have other priorities: the Pentecostalists are uninterested in things of beauty but very exercised about big amplifiers, while the Ethiopian Orthodox have no place for anything not mentioned in their traditional formularies (though they'll happily burn any candle you leave available for them). Our normal defence is to lock things away, but obviously we don't lock away flower arrangements, and hence they got messed up. So, retirement of angry flower arranger. I have been successful, though, in recruiting a new flower arranger, who seemed happy to be asked.  


On the Doorstep

It seems to have got very busy on the doorstep since Easter. Among others recently I've had  the very drunk homeless man (who only ever wants a cup of tea and a sandwich), the Pakistani Christian who is also now homeless and was in court for allegedly causing criminal damage to a police cell, the Irish, Arsenal-supporting, self-harmer who needed to get back to his psychiatric in-patient unit, the plump man with missing fingers and stab wounds who needed help with his gas and electric, the big West Indian with multiple health issues who now has TB, and a young Hungarian who was looking to do odd jobs (and observed of one of the others, "Father, I think some people don't want to work.") And as I was writing this, the wife of the man who now needs a liver transplant.

FREEWHEELING

Changing Seasons

For me the mark of the real onset of spring is when my hay fever starts. This year we have moved seamlessly from cold to hay fever, and I never noticed the change. Cycling on Saturday I suddenly realised that the wind was blowing all sorts of pollen and tree debris into my eyes, which was all very unpleasant. It was an annoyingly cold wind as well. So there I was, in a winter jersey, with eyes watering from hay fever. Not fair!

I was struck by the sight of a fellow-cyclist on Saturday wearing full current Movistar team kit (not usual in The Regent's Park). Most people wear anonymous black, but then there are the club jerseys, and the randomly assembled obsolete team items (which is my style). Seeing this chap reminded me of possibly the worst replica kit I have ever seen, worn by a middle-aged (presumably Spanish) couple at the Tour de France last year.Now the thing you need to know about Movistar is that their kit is dark navy blue, with a blobby lime-green M (for Movistar, the mobile arm of the Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica); not the most striking kit in the peloton, indeed some might say dull, but with more dignity than many teams. Full disclosure: I own a Movistar jersey from about five years ago, but it's a team issue one made for Giovanni Visconti when he was Italian national champion, and so much of it is in Italian colours, with only portions in navy blue. The offending replica kit, a matching pair, spotted at the Ardeche time-trial, was firstly very shiny (which didn't seem quite authentic) but most strikingly, purple. Not navy at all, but violet. Vivid, glossy, mauve. Surely this wasn't sold by Movistar's real kit manufacturers? In which case are there really pirated cycle jerseys out there? We've all seen dodgy Manchester United and Real Madrid shirts  (you can buy them in every street market in the developing world) and obviously there are Chinese factories turning out millions of the things, but cycling jerseys? Really? Is there truly a big enough market? Actually, thinking about it, the really surprising thing was that they weren't just jerseys, but the full kit, with proper matching cycling shorts. Churning out a counterfeit jersey isn't so different from a football shirt (though it does have pockets and a zip) but shorts are different, being a very odd shape, but more significantly also containing an anatomically-shaped pad. Manufacturing those is not a trivial business, and would take a bit of investment. So can there really be sweatshops turning out counterfeits? You'd surely need to be manufacturing kosher cycling kit, and surely any European supplier would go bananas if they found their manufacturer was ripping off someone else's kit. Of course, it could just be that this was perfectly legitimate replica kit from the proper manufacturer, but really badly produced, but that seems unlikely in the perfectionist world of cycling accessories.


Sights and Smells

I routinely cycle around the Outer Circle of The Regent's Park, just doing laps, which means that I become accustomed to the environment. On a bike you notice smells, for instance. There is a place, just before the entrance to the Zoo, which is routinely enveloped in a miasma of fish-and-chips, but then as I was passing last week I realised it now smelt of chargrilled meat, which came as a surprise, but then (on a subsequent lap) I spotted that the Zoo was hosting someone's wedding reception, so perhaps that made for different catering. Most of the time there is no real olfactory sign of the Zoo's real purpose, but just occasionally, if the wind is in the wrong direction, you do get a pungent sense of the giraffes and warthogs. Catering is more obvious.

I was cycling round on Friday lunchtime, and suddenly found unexpected congestion where the road runs down behind the London Central Mosque. A bright gold Porsche made a series of unfeasible manoeuvres before parking on the double yellow lines, a few places down from a maroon Rolls-Royce, and straight after a BMW with diplomatic plates. At the weekend everyone parks legitimately down that stretch, but on a weekday the London Business School seems to attract illegal parking, and I was pondering why they thought they could get away with it when I came upon what was clearly the rush to Friday midday prayers. It occurred to me that I've never noticed a Westminster traffic warden round that side of the Park, though you do see Camden ones quite regularly on their stretch, though to be fair, it may just be that the Camden ones are more visible, in their green overalls.

I did several circuits past a parked funeral cortege, clearly killing time before collecting mourners, parked up near the old St Katharine's precinct. Not funeral directors I knew, and presumably from far away, given how much time they sat there. I wondered where they were heading, possibly St Marylebone, but you couldn't be sure because they hadn't picked up the family yet. The first time I came round I crossed myself and prayed for the departed, but then felt a little self-conscious repeating the gesture the next time round. On the third circuit I touched the peak of my cap as well, and was preparing to take my cap off the fourth time, but they'd gone by then, which was a shame.

On Saturday afternoon, in a secondhand bookshop, a man in a morning suit said to the girl at the till, "I'm sorry, I've lost philosophy?" which somehow seemed a very Bloomsbury thing to say.

Is there any more beautiful British bird than the jay? When the scaffolding was up round my house a jay took advantage of it to get up close to poke around for insects around my window frames and cladding, and clearly net curtains worked so he couldn't see me. It was absolutely stunning, that extraordinary pinky-buff colour, and finely-chiselled head. There seems to be a pair of them nearby, so I imagine they are nesting, but I don't know where.   

HOLY WEEK

Good Friday

On Good Friday I led a children's service at 10, then helped with the ecumenical service at Maida Hill Piazza at 12.15, and finally presided at the solemn liturgy of the day at 2pm. That's been the routine here for years, along with the service at St Peter's at 11, which my colleagues kindly look after. It seems like a lot of effort, but actually each of these meets some sort of need, and I'm not sure what I would change. Next year, when St Mary Mags is out of action, we'll have to come up with another plan, and see how that goes. In any case, being in church rather a lot seems appropriate on Good Friday. In fact this year I ended the day by going to the Barbican to hear Bach's St John Passion, which might be thought excessive, but I found a tremendous conclusion. As it happened I only heard about it because one of my congregation was playing in it, and he apologised that he wasn't around much for Holy Week, as he was playing it in Norwich and Cambridge as well as at the Barbican. I checked on the website, and found there were still tickets, so I just went along and got a nice central seat right at the back, and could afford a programme as well, which was, to be honest, pretty much essential. It was a lovely experience, with the excellent Mark Padmore singing the Evangelist and Simon Russell Beale reading T S Eliot and a psalm in an effort to make it feel a bit more like the act of worship that Bach wrote it for.

A moment of striking epiphany on Good Friday afternoon. It was bright sunshine, and I was looking out of the kitchen window. A goldfinch flew down and settled on the clump of santolina outside the back door. For several minutes he perched there, plucking off little shoots. I'm not sure whether he ate them or took them away for nesting material; if the latter, he will have a nice moth-proof nest, as santolina is a traditional insect repellent. The goldfinch is, in western Christian iconography, an indicator of the Passion of Christ (because of the little splash of red which brings to mind a wound) and so to see one, close to, on Good Friday was particularly memorable, and spiritually appropriate.

At the ecumenical service I was dressed as usual for the occasion, in cassock and cloak, with a little black hat. A woman I know slightly (she used to sing with Helen in the Community Choir) came up to me and said she hadn't seen me "all gussied up" before. I just laughed, but thought of saying, "You want to see gussied up? Come to church on Sunday morning!" When our repertoire extends to lace and brocade, being all in black doesn't feel gussied up! The hat, incidentally, was a Libyan chechia, bought in the souk in Tripoli some years ago, which has a distinctly square profile, rather like a Canterbury cap (which used to be worn by Archbishop Michael Ramsey, but which I haven't seen anyone wearing for years). The chechia folds up like a biretta and so can be slipped in the pocket if not needed, but no-one ever queries its appropriateness as clerical headgear. I confess I still choose the biretta if it looks like rain, as wet felt is not comfortable.


Public Witness

The Good Friday ecumenical event is meant as a piece of public witness, and we were about a hundred people from various churches demonstrating our faith to the market traders and shoppers, though even by lunchtime it's still pretty quiet on the Harrow Road on Good Friday. Last year we had a complaint about noise, but I think the complainer must have gone out this year, because we had no such attention this time, and we were certainly no less noisy. It was a lot quieter on Palm Sunday morning, when we walked in procession as usual from St Mary Mags to St Peter's, but we were stared at by people on an 18 bus as it stopped outside Betfred. We don't make a big deal of it, with marshals in high-vis jackets and so on, and we try not to be a nuisance, as we keep to the pavement, so it might be thought a fairly low-key piece of witness, but witness it certainly is. We process with cross and incense, and robed servers (and obviously clergy) with palm branches, and the congregation carry their palm crosses. For the ordinary congregation member it is standing up to be counted in a way that normally never occurs, as they demonstrate their Christian commitment very publicly, walking past mosque, betting shop and off-licence. Just before we came out onto the Harrow Road we stopped for prayer, praying for all the people going about their business, and I hope we all held the passers-by in our prayers, because it's quite easy for something like that to feel confrontational, which is not the idea at all. We are walking to enter into the spiritual experience of the last week of Jesus's life, and so an indifferent or hostile crowd isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we mustn't slip into an "us and them" view of the crowd, because we are all living together in this place, and we are all part of the humanity Christ died to save. The danger is that public witness can seem like aggression or provocation (and can feel like self-assertion) when in fact it should be proclaiming the presence of Christians in a community and our commitment to that community. We should be going out holding the community in our hearts.     


Catching the sun

I came back from a week in Jordan without any discernible effect from the sun. Last Saturday I went to Lords with my brother, to watch Essex playing Middlesex, and came away with my face completely sunburnt. My brother remarked that he had feared for my blood pressure until he looked in a mirror and found he was the same. Admittedly we were in the front row of the grandstand for eight and a half hours, but the sun seemed very weak, and it was never warm. The result is that I must now endure the ignominy of all the skin of my forehead peeling off in rather unseemly fashion. It wasn't a bad day's cricket, but not cheery for us Essex boys, as our fast bowlers were made to look very harmless in comparison with Finn, Murtagh and Roland-Jones. Play was really very slow, which was not helped by Roland-Jones starting his run-up somewhere in Maida Vale, and we were there until 7.30pm. The previous day they had gone off for bad light at teatime, which was frankly very surprising, but that meant we had to get through extra overs in the day to make up for those lost, but also that they couldn't start until the umpires' light meters showed a brighter light than had prevailed when they came off on Friday afternoon, so we were twenty minutes late starting. Discussion of bad light seems odd when you are looking at the Lords floodlights, but the planning conditions imposed by Westminster City Council mean that they can only be used for a limited number of scheduled occasions (such is the power of the St John's Wood Society) and so are purely decorative for county matches.   

A LIFE ON THE INLAND WAVE

Pretty Boats

Yesterday I saw a cormorant on the canal bank, which was handsome. but one permanent feature that makes the Grand Union Canal such an attractive part of our neighbourhood is the number of boats that you see, and that number has increased enormously in the past ten years. The big change came before the Olympics, when boats were turned out of the River Lea and the Bow Back Rivers in order to create a security zone around the Olympic Park; a lot of those boats came round the Regent's Canal and ended up around our way. There are a few permanent moorings round here, on Blomfield Road and Maida Avenue (and beyond Lisson Grove), but those are virtually all full. The great majority of boats here have people living on them permanently, but are moored in temporary berths. That means that they are supposed to move on every fortnight or so, which some do, but many do not. I conducted a wedding for a couple who live on a boat a couple of years ago, and we discovered that they were able to fulfil the residence qualification for banns by being moored on my stretch of canalside for the fifteen days in which the banns were called; I know that they move backwards and forwards on the canal between Paddington Basin and Southall. Others, observably, do not move very often. There is clearly an infrastructure problem here, because I'm not at all sure that the hygiene station by the entrance to the Pool can really cop with the demands on it now. I have no idea what people pay for permanent moorings, which have proper facilities, but clearly it suits some boat-dwellers not to bother with that, but to remain nomadic. They like the freedom, and they like it not costing too much, which is fair enough, but facilities are an issue (in our neck of the woods it is as simple as rubbish, great piles of which sometimes appear on the Green or the towpath).


Losing the Stakeholders

Now the Canal and River Trust seems to have fallen out with boat dwellers. The CRT was set up in 2012 as an independent charity to manage the assets of the former, publicly-owned British Waterways. The history is that the canals were built as private enterprises and mostly bought up by railway companies in the nineteenth century (with some idea of an integrated freight network), and so when the railways were nationalised after the second world war, the canals came too (along with a fair amount of housing in our area). Obviously British Waterways was an ideological affront to contemporary economic wisdom, but the successor body, CRT, was set adrift with not much capacity to raise the money it needs to maintain and run the canal network. It was an unusual privatisation, as CRT is a charity, but that's clearly because no-one could get the business model to be attractive enough for investors to put money in. CRT tried initially to raise income by issuing licences for people to cycle on towpaths, but that has been quietly abandoned, as they had no resources to police this system, and it implied that cyclists could expect safe, well-surfaced towpaths, which CRT was in no position to deliver. Now, they are looking to make money from selling public moorings off to private investors. Here in Paddington the plan is to sell 140ft of public moorings, directly outside the station entrance, to British Land, who will seek commercial tenants for them. British Land is the huge property developer who is responsible for the Paddington Basin development, having acquired all that formerly publicly-owned land long before CRT was created. Canal dwellers are unsurprisingly suspicious of British Land, whose stewardship of what appears to be public space is of course completely unaccountable. Meanwhile, over in east London CRT wants to sell off a whole batch of public moorings near Broadway Market as part of a regeneration scheme.


Cosying up to Shareholders

You can understand CRT's desire to raise some money to try to do the job that the government saddled it with, but it is clearly perverse to reduce the number of public moorings in central London when it is plain that the demand for them is growing hugely. Of course, the reason demand is growing is that canal boats offer an affordable form of housing (if you can bear the cramped conditions) which is increasingly being used by young professionals. That, of course, is just a symptom of London's deep housing crisis, but we know that the present government has no intention at all of doing anything to tackle it, because they actually believe that the overseas investment which has so overheated the market is a good thing.     

PIGEON POST

The Two Pigeons

Regular readers may remember that I am a grudging admirer of the feral rock dove, which we call the urban pigeon, but no great lover of them. As part of the development work at St Mary Mags we have just cleared a porch of pigeons, and I presently  have much more pigeon interaction than I would wish. So, the north porch had a brick wall built across it, some time in the 1950s, when most of Clarendon Crescent was derelict, and the porch had simply become a venue for working girls to take their clients. The porch was not, however, sealed up, because the odd configuration of the building made that virtually impossible, and an elaborate array of netting was installed above the wall to try to keep pigeons out. I have no idea when the netting failed, but it was a long time ago. My predecessors used to store things in the porch, and there were the remains of a rusty scaffold tower, rotten ladders and several school benches in there, but the main feature in recent years was guano. I used to tell people that it was one of the nastiest spaces in London, and when I opened the door they tended to agree. The stench in summer was terrific.

So, we had the porch cleared. It was great to see the steps, and to realise that it is actually a handsome little space. The evening that the contractors finished work, with brand new netting, there were forty pigeons perched around the porch and on the west end of the church, which was a bit disconcerting. It occurred to me that if they all came and landed on the netting together they could probably break it. The numbers diminished in the following days, but a lot were still sitting on top of the wall, and defecating into the porch (just to spite us) while noticeable deposits of guano were becoming visible on the cills of the west window.  It took the pigeons ten days to get back in; Lesley heard them, and when she opened the door she found three inside. Two got out, but one remained. There seemed only the tiniest break in the netting, but that seemed to be enough. A comedy interlude came when Lesley went out into the porch and pulled the door to behind her, using the handle on that side (so that they shouldn't go into the church) only to discover that the handle did not actually operate the latch on the inside. Fortunately she had a phone, and I was nearby. The contractors were recalled. The man came and shot the pigeon and repaired the netting. All very businesslike.

This week, though, there are tell-tale signs of dropped nesting material on the pavement, underneath the tower. Lesley has seen them going into the spire, which is bad news. Perhaps ringing the bell might disturb them. Today we saw a pair apparently looking to set up home in a rainwater hopper; even worse.There is no sign of rain, and it would need to be torrential.


Closing Offices

I suppose it seems to Westminster City Councillors that closing local housing offices is purely a question of streamlining bureaucracy, because they have to have had a major failure of imagination to embark on the plan which has been revealed, to close all their estate offices, and centralise the service. They clearly do not understand what the offices actually do, because they couldn't be so callous as to deliberately intend to increase the isolation of the elderly, vulnerable and marginalised. If they had actually asked anyone who works in the offices, or indeed lives on the estates, they would have learnt that the offices perform a valuable social function, being a local point of contact for all sorts of people. Those with mobility problems are the most obvious, but there are also the battered wives who are able to go to the office but wouldn't be allowed to go elsewhere, and there are the non-English speakers whose children can come with them to the local office. It is also simply more efficient to have housing staff who actually know the area, and can walk round the corner to see a problem for themselves. All this will be lost. The effect is to distance the people of the area still further from those who rule them. Westminster City Council put its housing into the hands of CityWest Homes, and so can disclaim responsibility for what happens, and so when you have a complaint it's not Westminster's fault, but CityWest. You could complain to a local housing officer, but now that facility is to be taken away, and so the sense that any human being is actually willing to take any responsibility is diminished even further.


Shouting

At nine o'clock this morning a bearded man with a can of beer was shouting at the world at the top of the park. By eleven-fifteen he had moved on to the bus stop on the Harrow Road, outside Betfred, with a different can, but still shouting. I know how he feels, but don't have as much energy.        

BACK HOME

Back Home

I return to London from a week in Jordan to find that it is quite as warm here as it was there, though the sun seems stronger there. It was certainly warmer here yesterday evening than any evening in the past week in Amman. I’m not complaining; I had a splendid time, and the weather was just right for sightseeing, of which I did a great deal. Helen and I saw the major sights a few years ago, so this was an opportunity to see some more obscure ones, in the company of friends who live out there. I’m afraid I put together a fairly demanding itinerary, but it all worked pretty well, and introduced them to lots of new places. We hired a car, and I was ferried around, barking commands like some colonial pro-consul.

Decapolis

The student of the New Testament is familiar with the Decapolis, the confederation of city-states that were part of the geography at the time of Jesus. The time that they break in most obviously is in the incident of Jesus and the herd of pigs, the “Gadarene swine” (of St Matthew), which St Mark calls “Gerasene”; those are the adjectives from the Decapolis cities of Gadara and Gerasa. Now neither is actually by Lake Galilee (Lake Tiberias as locals call it), but the gospels don’t mean the cities themselves, they refer to “the territory of the Gadarenes/Gerasenes” and we just don’t know how the territory of those city states worked. Well, Gerasa is Jerash, one of Jordan’s top two tourist attractions, and a very well-preserved classical city, which I visited thoroughly last time, and so was content to see (twice) from the road this time, but it doesn’t feel in any way close to the lake (it’s about 30 miles away). This time, though, I was able to visit Gadara (modern Umm Qais) which is on a hilltop from which you can see the lake. The story would make sense there, even if the swine were more likely to have plunged into the gorge of the Yarmuk river, which is nearby, as opposed to the lake, which is 5 or 6 miles away. That very top left-hand corner of Jordan is full of precipices, and so the story fits there. It’s one of the reasons to believe that Matthew used (and corrected) Mark, because “Gadarene” is just much more credible than “Gerasene”. When you’re there you can see that.

So I ticked off two of the Decapolis in Gerasa and Gadara, and I was staying in a third, because Amman was the classical Philadelphia (and they have considerably beautified the Forum). I also insisted that my friend take me to a fourth, Pella, which is on a hill overlooking the upper Jordan valley. Pella is the most extraordinarily evocative and lovely site, and we had it entirely to ourselves. You can look across the Jordan to the break in the hills that leads up to Nazareth, about 30 miles away on the Palestinian side, and simply wonder. Then I ticked off a surprise fifth, which I hadn’t expected, Capitolias. A local friend of my friends saw from Facebook that we were at Umm Qais and insisted we come to his family’s house, in Beit Ras, and in conversation it became clear that they too had a Roman theatre, and that Beit Ras was Capitolias, so we drove a few blocks, and there on a scruffy hillside was a pink stone theatre, recently restored but rather neglected (a characteristic Jordanian combination). We just managed to see it before dusk fell, with the assistance of locals who pointed out the hole in the fence. A happy piece of serendipity.

Stylites

Pella was exhilarating, but it was also really exciting to see a Stylite pillar at a place called Umm ar-Rasas, the Roman Castron Mefaa. There are some splendid mosaics in ruined churches, and an interesting expanse of ruins, but then about a mile away, across open country, is this amazing tower. It’s about 45 feet high, with a room at the top, (and what may be a room at the bottom) but otherwise solid, and with no means of ascent. Scholars believe this to be a Stylite pillar, built for a (presumably) 5^th century hermit to live on. I’ve been to Qalat Samaan, near Aleppo, where they built a vast church around the space where St Simeon Stylites’s pillar stood, but of that pillar only a boulder allegedly remained. Here was a structure that enabled you to understand the whole thing, because you could certainly have lived in the room at the top (though it would have been very windy). One of my friends was rather affronted by this showy sort of asceticism, and thought it a very attention-seeking and self-centred form of devotion; my own thought was what an enormous communal investment must have gone into this solitary enterprise, because obviously the Stylite always needed people to come and bring him food (which he would winch up), but what had never occurred to me before was that a custom-built pillar was a major (and expensive) construction project.  Perhaps he was a rich man and built his own pillar, but if not, then he must have had rich supporters paying for it. Either way, it suggests some communal investment in the spiritual exercise.

End of Term

Return to the schools to find my head teachers seriously looking forward to the holiday. I get vexed that they haven’t concentrated on doing the things that I want them to do, but then I gradually discover a litany of staff on long-term sickness, grievance procedures, capability procedures, accusations, staff giving notice and falling rolls. And these are two good schools. Both actually good, and “good” in Ofsted terms (which is not necessarily the same thing). I try to cheer them up by pointing out that they both stand to gain from the government’s new National Funding Formula, like most schools in Westminster, but unlike almost every other school in London, because of some obscure decision that was taken on the extinction of ILEA (back in the 1980s) which meant that Westminster schools have been much less well-funded than other London schools for thirty years. It may not happen, though, as Tory MPs in the shires are still complaining that not enough money has been taken away from the undeserving poor.