GOOD NEWS

Job Done

The Parks Department have pretty much completed the making good around the outdoor gym equipment. Sadly, they don't seem to have given enough water to some of the new turf, so that will need to be replaced, but otherwise they have done a good job. Most importantly, the equipment is getting a lot of use, and muscular people are doing press-ups beside it while their friends do whatever it is they are doing on the bars. It all encourages use of our public space into the evenings, which is all to the good.


Respect For The Jersey

Most of us who cycle round the Park wear nasty lycra, but every so often you see someone more elegantly attired. A couple of times now I've seen a chap in a Del Tongo-Colnago jersey which is clearly woollen, with buttons on the back pockets. They were a team in the 1980s, so if it's a real vintage item it's thirty-five years old, and I think it might be, because it is a peculiar shade of yellow, which is characteristic of photos of the authentic old jersey. If you had such a precious relic, would you wear it? Clearly I wouldn't, as I can't wear wool next to my skin. That has the good effect of making it impossible for me to buy the modern replica jerseys made in fine merino wool, which are staggeringly expensive. I just buy replicas in modern materials, less authentic, but more wearable.


Job Nearly Done

The church conservation works are going really well, and the scaffolding has come down from most of the south side of the church, so I open my front door and see clean brick and stone, and sharp edges where once there were lumps and bumps. There are intact windows, with nice clean guards on them. The most extraordinary sight, though, is the Undercroft windows, because at the moment they don't have their iron guard railings in place, because Cliveden's masons are busily repairing and replacing stone. This means that the four windows to the Chapel, which were altered by Comper when he created it in 1895 are suddenly revealed as deep stone caverns. It's a reminder of how much work Comper's creation of the Chapel involved, but it also demonstrates the thickness of the walls. Street's remaining window is by contrast inconspicuous. Cleaning also makes the way that Comper's arched windows have to divert the stringcourse upwards very obvious and unpleasing. I wonder how Historic England would have assessed Comper's scheme, had it been brought to them in 1894-5? They would surely have judged that Comper was doing "harm" to Street's building, and they would have been right, but those deep stone window embrasures remind one of how heroic Comper's intervention was. I regret the loss of Street's rather chaste original south elevation, but you can't deny the success of Comper's Chapel in its own terms.

Meanwhile, the scaffolding is being brought down inside the church. Visits now are accompanied by the clatter of scaffold poles, and are being restricted to a progressively smaller area. The excellent way that the nave ceiling tones in with the colours of brick and stone has also become clear. The colour is terrific.


That Wedding

I have been telling parishioners to watch the magnificent sermon. The funny thing is the stony face of the Dean of Windsor in the background. It was all wonderful, and few people seem to have spotted the Archbishop's error. It is always a danger when asking bishops to do weddings, because they're out of practice, so it's not surprising when they get things wrong. In this case, he failed to join their right hands together; he just looped his stole around their already joined hands, Meghan's right, and Harry's left. If you look at a recording you will see him make a pig's ear of the stole, and Harry help him, with his right hand! Still, it doesn't invalidate it, and it's pleasing for the professional observer to be able to spot something. Actually the big surprise was the modern Lord's Prayer, and I have seen no comment about that. Up until that point, every textual choice had been conservative, so it was a surprise. I was sorry they signed the registers in that old-fashioned way, as it creates a total anti-climax. It is much more satisfactory to do it in the modern position, before the prayers. Still, that was the Church of England, doing okay.  

FAITH SCHOOLS, TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY

Helen's book has finally been published, and that is the title. Please urge any librarians you know to order it for their institutions. If you review books, ask Palgrave Macmillan for a review copy. If you know any review editors, (especially of academic journals) tell them to ask for a review copy. I am, of course, hugely grateful to Palgrave Macmillan (a branch of the vast Axel Springer empire) for publishing the book, and am very pleased with the result (though Helen wouldn't have liked the colour of the cover much), but I can't help thinking that publishing has become a bit minimal. When they accept the book, they ask you how you can market it (on the basis that they're not going to) and now I discover that if we want a book launch we have to organise it ourselves; they'll give us some discount flyers, but that's it. Worst of all, though, for an academic publisher, is that they don't routinely provide an index; my co-editor Germ produced a lady in the Netherlands who is a professional indexer, and I paid her five hundred pounds to do the job.

So what does the book say? It presents the results of Helen's research into the effect that schools might have on students' attitudes of tolerance, and demonstrates that "faith schools" do no worse in that regard than secular schools, with the single exception of a Muslim independent school. She was interested to see whether you could identify a paradigm of "fundamentalist" education across religions, and so examined Roman Catholic and Evangelical Christian examples, as well as Muslim, but found that it was not so. Even in the Roman Catholic boarding school, where the children lived in a total environment, saturated with religion, they emerged with entirely mainstream, tolerant attitudes. One of the publisher's reviewers remarked that it was a pity that she hadn't studied a really right-wing Evangelical school, at which I exploded, because actually the school in question was pretty much as "extreme" as you can find in England, drawing all its pupils from a single large congregation, of very conservative Evangelical outlook, and actually you can't tell how right-wing it was from anything that Helen wrote. The students' views weren't particularly right-wing, and so the reviewer supposed that the school can't have been right wing; but THAT'S THE POINT! Schools aren't actually very successful in indoctrinating children. And frankly that school wasn't trying to indoctrinate its students, however theologically conservative it was. None of the Christian schools were. There are quotes in the book from students (from the hours of material that Helen recorded) demonstrating quite nuanced ethical reasoning, and some of the most impressive are from students from very "closed" religious backgrounds.   

One of the by-products of the research was to demonstrate the uselessness of the term "faith schools", which makes it ironic that we had to use it in the title. Helen pointed out that it's not an official term, though it was popularized by the Blair government and happily taken up by journalists; the official term is "schools of a religious character", but actually the category is not meaningful, because the "character" of these schools differs enormously. Helen excluded Church of England schools from her research (which make up the vast majority of "faith schools") because their aim is explicitly different from any others, in that they exist to educate the general population in a way that is congenial to the teachings of the Church of England, not to educate only the children of a specific group of believers. Now, it can be argued that Anglican secondary schools are increasingly educating only the children of believers (or at least attenders, the historian recognises "occasional conformists" here) because their admission policies allow them to select on that basis, and in the current climate they have to select on some basis, but that's not actually the ethos of the school, and so it does not result in a school climate which is narrowly sectarian. As we point out in the preface to the book, the problem there is selection, not faith. So Anglican schools are unlike the rest because they exist for the general population (and the great majority of Anglican schools embrace that wholeheartedly, though I know one locally that emphatically doesn't, which is frankly shameful). Even among the schools that exist to serve a particular religious group, Helen's research makes it clear that there is great variation in character.

The publisher's reviewer also thought it was a shame that Helen hadn't researched a wider range of schools, well, she thought that too, but there are limits to what you can do, and frankly her supervisors were anxious that she had taken on too many as it was. She conducted her research in six schools: state and independent Roman Catholic, state and independent secular (as a "control"), Evangelical independent, and Muslim independent. There were no Evangelical state schools (though an interesting discussion might be had about the academies belonging to the Emmanuel Schools Foundation in the north-east) at the time of research, so that category didn't exist. Helen tried at length to get access to Muslim state schools but was consistently rebuffed, which was a real frustration. In fact, getting into any schools to do research is a major struggle, as any educational researcher will tell you. It's easier to get into independent schools simply because head teachers have more freedom and there is less sense that the staff are so burdened by record-keeping and jumping through hoops that they need to be protected from anything else that makes their lives more complicated and might take up valuable time. Several of the schools used (and I think all those involved in pilots) were acquired through personal connections, which wouldn't have been open to the average PhD student in their twenties. I came out of this thinking that state schools should have an obligation to co-operate with state-funded research (as Helen's was) but that's never going to happen because the Department For Education doesn't actually believe in research. So she regretted not having been able to get into a Muslim state school, and I think she had mixed feelings about not having extended the study to Jewish schools, but realistically it just wasn't possible, as it would have been a whole lot more work, because there would have been a whole new literature to read as well as more children to interview.  

Colleagues said to Helen that she couldn't do that research because it was too sensitive, which only made her more determined, and perhaps one should say that it was all checked by the ethics people at the Institute of Education, so she had covered her back, but there was a feeling that it was dangerous to distinguish between religions (which is why opinion-formers are comfortable with the term "faith schools"). The truth is, though, that it was only in the Muslim school that most students expressed intolerant views, and it is possible to see how the school might encourage or entrench those views. Helen used Social Identity Theory to demonstrate how unsurprising that was in contemporary England, which I thought was interesting rather than inflammatory.

ANOTHER HERO

Eating My Words

You will have noticed my scepticism about the outdoor gym equipment being installed on the Green; well, I am happy to eat my words. Most of the equipment was in frequent use on the warm evenings ten days ago, and even in the cold people are out there. Lots of muscular young men seem to know what to do with the bars which, to me, are completely mystifying. This is very good to see. Clearly the contractors installing the equipment didn't regard it as their job to "make good" (as builders say) afterwards, as the grass remains badly churned up by their vehicles, and there are some very sharp concrete kerbs, which I imagine are intended to be mitigated by turf. Presumably the Parks Department will eventually do this, though it remains a hazard just now. Perhaps they feel they shouldn't do anything before the local elections on Thursday, in case the work gives a boost to the sitting councillors; Westminster applies the notion of "purdah" rather strictly.


On the Subject of Elections

The excitement caused by the poll putting Labour in the lead in Westminster has subsided somewhat. There seems to be a feeling that Labour may pile up votes in wards like ours but not manage to win the wards that could change hands. Outside Waitrose a couple of weeks ago, there were the Conservatives one side of the door, and the Lib Dems the other; the Big Issue seller had positioned herself beside the Tories, providing a pleasing vignette of contemporary London. Next door in K & C, although the enormous Conservative preponderance in the south of the borough is expected to return a Conservative council, I can't help feeling that the really appalling behaviour of Conservative councillors over the past years might yet come home to roost, now that it has been exposed by Grenfell. Anyway, I shall watch with interest. Vote early, vote often! (As we used to say at University).


On my Travels

I left warm, sunny London for a week in warm, sunny Tunisia. It ended up raining there too, but it was never cold like this. I foolishly turned my heating off and forgot to tell the house-sitter how to turn it on again. I was (perhaps a bit pretentiously) reading the "Confessions" of St Augustine, because a good deal of that is about his time living in Carthage, and I'd never read it before. Helen and I went to Tunisia ten years ago, so I had seen some of the places this tour was going, but it also got me to places that were impossible by public transport back then. Anyway, reading Augustine made Carthage (which is still rather underwhelming) more worthwhile, and we went to the Amphitheatre, (which we hadn't last time) which is where Perpetua and Felicity were martyred, which was moving. This time I got into the Cathedral in Tunis (which I remember being closed when we tried before) and saw the magnificent reliquary of St Louis (nineteenth century neo-gothic nonsense, but terrific). The big highlight, though, was Kairouan, which is very evocative, with a terrific early mosque, and a delightful shrine. I took far too many pictures, and bought incense at the shrine.


Meeting Your Heroes, Part 2

As I walked down the aisle of the plane at Tunis Airport, I was working out where my seat was, as you do, with particular anxiety as I had been stuck in the middle of a row. As I identified my place, I instantly recognised the man in the adjoining seat as Joe Mercer (champion jockey in 1979). I considered various cheesy opening gambits, but settled on leaning over and saying, "You signed a picture of Brigadier Gerard for me in 1972." He responded that I had a good memory, and we began a very pleasant series of chats. It really is difficult not to be in awe of a boyhood idol, whose autograph you once collected, but equally you don't want to be a bore. Still, he seemed very happy to chat, though we both read our books from time to time (his James Patterson, mine Mick Herron). He wisely avoided the lunch tray: I'm not sure how they made the ravioli that dry. They wouldn't give him a second glass of Coke, though. I wanted to shout at them, "Give the man anything he wants! This is not just some random old gent, this is one of the finest flat race jockeys of my lifetime! This is the man who rode the Brigadier!" but of course I didn't. We talked about Brigadier Gerard, and he (like me) regards him as a freak. I had no idea he had ridden the Brigadier's (rather ordinary) sire, Queen's Hussar, but he did. He expressed the view that the Brigadier's stud career was so undistinguished because it was mismanaged by the formidable Lady Macdonald-Buchanan, at whose stud he stood. It occurs to me that Royal Palace, another boyhood favourite of mine, also stood at her stud and was also a failure (this had never struck me before). I tentatively asked him how he could bear to go on riding when his elder brother was killed (that was in 1959 at Ascot, and led to crash helmets being made compulsory, though concrete fence posts weren't removed for another thirty years or so); he responded that you just had to go on. That was a response that spoke a lot about his generation; he is rising 84. A great jockey, and a fine man.

SPRING IS SPRUNG

In the Springtime

It is genuinely warm. Hooray! I was able to cycle in a normal jersey and shorts on Saturday. The urchins (sorry, dear little children) have started their summer game of ringing my doorbell and running away. The overwhelming sickly scent of the laurel blossoms keeps me out of the garden, and, if I open the back windows, invades the house. There was a dapper gent walking along the Harrow Road the other day in a smart pearl-grey suit and a yellow fedora (matching his yellow tie).  Cricket books are being published: I see there’s one about E.W.Swanton and John Arlott (sort of “compare and contrast”) which I’d quite like to read. I wonder whether the author has picked up the fact that both were active Christians. Jim Swanton was an Anglo-Catholic, and lodged at Pusey House when he was an Oxford undergraduate. John Arlott wrote hymns (one quite often sung at harvest, which is pleasing to imagine in his Hampshire burr).

The weather has been pleasant enough for someone to be willing to clear the garden at St Peter’s (for payment, of course). He worked very diligently on Monday, but did not finish. I didn’t really register the fact that he left bags and piles of dead leaves on the ramp down to the church door, or rather, I dismissed this as a potential problem, because I didn’t think it would inconvenience anyone. That was because I didn’t know that the Brownies have a member with cerebral palsy. To be fair, I’d forgotten the Brownies would be there at all: it’s hard to hold all the bookings in one’s mind, and ones that aren’t there every week I find especially hard to remember. So, when on Monday evening I took a young woman down to see the church, who had just filled in a banns certificate for us (she’s not getting married here, but at the Grosvenor Chapel, so I expect she wanted to be reassured that she had made the right choice) I was seriously told off by the Brownie leaders. I wasn’t sufficiently apologetic, but I was a bit confused.

A Surprise

One of London’s surprises to me is the way that contractors can just close roads without warning. So, on Monday I cycled out onto the Harrow Road perplexed by a queue of stationary traffic, only to find that it was caused by the fact that Sutherland Avenue was closed, entirely, at the Harrow Road end, so lots of vehicles were approaching, expecting to turn in, and then going on with great uncertainty. The next option for them is Marylands Road, and that is being dug up outside the undercover Greek restaurant, so I imagined we would have total chaos, but in fact very few have been trying to go that way (which is just as well, as it would only get you to Elgin Avenue).

A Conundrum

I spent some time the other day listening to a parishioner’s story. It’s complicated, so please bear with me. They are a member of one of my congregations, with a spouse (who doesn’t come) and children (who do). Now, my parishioner was brought up as a Christian (of another denomination) but has another religious heritage, which they regard as important to them. Their spouse was brought up in a third faith (and observes it to an extent). They don’t feel able to go to worship in their “heritage” religion, because of all the questions that they would be asked, and because their spouse would be very uncomfortable about that, but this makes them feel sad, as they have found that very culturally affirming in the past. Now, though, they listen to spokespeople of the “heritage” religion on satellite TV, who say that people like them are traitors to the faith. They are happy coming to church, but don’t feel the same depth of mutual feeling as in the “heritage” faith, which now seems to be rejecting them. I am disappointed that they don’t feel we are more supportive, but I am more exercised by the exclusivist religious attitudes that give them such pain. We live in a world where religious groups, feeling threatened (by secularism and by each other), draw ever more rigorous boundaries; it doesn’t have to be like that.

Historically, in many societies, people of different faiths have coexisted without demonizing each other but have lived with mutual respect and harmony. However, most of us come from societies which have historically been more or less monocultural, and broadly uniform in faith, and that makes us ill-equipped to deal with other faiths. Western Christians mostly met other faiths in a colonial context, and so our understandable reaction was to try to convert them; we’ve mostly moved beyond that, but other faiths have had very different experiences. If, historically, you’ve always been a minority (periodically oppressed) then that breeds a particular mindset. Equally, if your history has been of always living in societies ruled by your co-religionists, then it’s hard to find resources in the tradition to equip you for living as a minority (beyond an imperative to convert the majority or rule them). Our conversation reminded me of how very Christian the idea of choosing your religion for yourself is; most faith traditions assume something quite different, that one way or another, your birth gives you a religious identity.

Up the Scaffold

A day of leading tours yesterday, taking some of our local supporters up the scaffold to see the saints in the roof at close quarters (among other things). It was notable how warm it was in the top of the roof, which can’t be very comfortable for the conservators (who have worked for the past few months in barely tolerable cold). Everybody is thrilled to see the conservators at work with their cotton buds, and it was particularly good to be able to show people the change in appearance of the saints happening before your very eyes. The scaffolders were just bringing down a floor in the chancel, so now conservation is moving lower there, which at least means that you can visit the vault while remaining upright, which is a pleasant change (the conservators had brought a couple of Sunday school chairs up there, which at least enabled you to sit for a while). Without the conservators’ lights the chancel vault still looks muddy, so how we light it is going to be crucial. Anyway, we had lots of enthusiastic reactions; it's going very well.

LOW WEEK

Easter Break

My colleague Toby Gale, who is the Director of the development project, has gone off for several weeks' break, to Indonesia and Australia (he has gone all the way to Australia not to go to the Commonwealth Games, which, to be fair, are happening a thousand miles away from where he's staying). This causes us all some anxiety, as he is the person who pulls all the various aspects of the project together (and so there are lots of things he would normally do that the rest of us are trying to keep on top of and feeling very inadequate about), and he's very keen for us not to make particular decisions without him. In the meantime, everyone keeps copying him in to emails, and so every so often he responds to something, which is not the idea at all. You are on holiday! Ignore it all!

The trouble is that it is really hard to do that. Last summer in France I used to check mail but only actually read a few things that looked both urgent and important, but the result of that was that I came home to a backlog of a hundred messages, but still hadn't switched off properly from work. Working through the backlog was the first thing to do on return, and absorbed a whole day, and there were loads of time-limited messages that were pointless by then. It was all fine in the past, when we weren't available anywhere in the world, so why do we have to remain connected now? Why do we feel obliged to do so?

It's not just Toby who is away. We had a "Family" Mass on Sunday with hardly any families present, so my preacher reverted to the adult sermon she had just preached at St Mary Mags. With most schools still on holiday, London remains quieter than usual, and I can lie in, not being disturbed by noise from the school breakfast club, and not having to do things to fit into the school timetable.

The second Sunday of Eastertide is traditionally called "Low Sunday", despite the insistence of liturgists that it is the end of the Octave of Easter, and should be celebrated like Easter Day, as a truly "high" day. In the Roman observance the title "Divine Mercy Sunday" is being encouraged, but I've never heard anyone actually call it that. The Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference traditionally meets this week, and it's always referred to as their Low Week meeting! General Synod meetings happen according to the months of the year. not the ecclesiastical calendar.


Works on the Green

The installation of the gym equipment is still not finished. One day recently they had three vans, three pieces of motorized plant and a full-size lorry all parked on the Green, and last Saturday morning they were once again driving vehicles across the path, with fences removed and no regard at all for pedestrians. I hope it's worth it. The equipment all looks very large, designed for adults, and large adults at that. We shall see.


Can I ask Whether we can Count on your Vote?

I was asked this outside Waitrose a couple of Saturdays ago, to which I responded, "Of course you can ask, but I couldn't possibly comment." It seems that the recent YouGov poll putting Labour ahead in Westminster has energized campaigning for the local elections. The Sunday Times ran a scare story saying that Jeremy Corbyn was on course to run Wandsworth, Barnet and K & C as well as Westminster, which should put the wind up complacent Conservatives (though I seriously doubt whether he will have any input himself, never having run anything, as far as I can see). I notice that efforts are going on to get EU nationals to register to vote, as they are entitled to do in local elections, which surely cannot be good news for the Conservatives, who seem to have embraced the xenophobic line rather too enthusiastically.


When in Leeds

Let me recommend Akbar's restaurant in the centre of Leeds (Eastgate). Open all hours, a vast menu, and (to this Londoner's eyes) jolly cheap. It was also excellent food. They brought an extraordinary metal hatstand sort of affair to the table, on which they then hung your naan, which was a novelty to me. We had dinner after the ballet with Javier Torres of Northern Ballet and his family, Javier having just danced in "Las Hermanas". I'd never seen it before, but studied "La Casa de Bernarda Alba", on which it is based, for A level, so knew what was coming. Fairly standard Kenneth Macmillan themes (sex and death) but all very compressed. They carried it off well, but it's not a particularly enjoyable piece, unlike "Gloria" which they also danced, which is quite upbeat despite being Macmillan's evocation of the Great War. Javier apparently goes regularly to Akbar's.

HOLY WEEK

More Pubs

I had thought of saying something about the Truscott Arms, in Shirland Road, which closed some time ago, but now it has been pointed out to me (by a social-media enabled friend) that this is undergoing a refurbishment and looks to be going to reopen under the name of the Hero of Maida, which is great for the perpetuation of a historic pub name, but will be very confusing for people in the future.

It may be worth pointing out that the Royal Oak, after which the tube station is named, was the pub which is now called the Porchester, on the corner of Bishop's Bridge Road and Porchester Road. No idea why it was renamed. There was a pub right by the station, on the corner of the Harrow Road, of which old photos exist, but that was the Red Lion, curiously.


Meanwhile, on the Green

The works to install the new outdoor gym equipment are proceeding very slowly. Their contribution to the delight of our Easter weekend was to have blocked the storm drains on the path across the green, resulting in a puddle inches deep across the path and saturated grass beside the path producing ankle-deep mud. At least when going towards Royal Oak one could divert out onto the Green and go behind the contractors' fenced enclosure on the grass, which although a bit poached was still reasonably solid. If one was coming from Royal Oak unawares one would meet the puddle after walking for fifty yards between the contractors' fences, and have no unmuddy means of progressing.

More serious, though, is the contractors' cavalier attitude to safety. Their working site is to the east of the path, their compound, with storage containers, is to the west. Every morning they open the gate from Bourne Terrace and drive a van up onto the path, which they usually then park on the grass. During the day they manoeuvre a small digger and a small dumper truck across the path, often at speed, with no banksman or supervision of any kind. There are no signs warning that this might be taking place, and frankly no evidence of safety-consciousness at all. They seem to have embarked on this job on the basis that it was in a private place, whereas in fact it straddles an important pedestrian route (though that may have been the fault of the WCC Parks Department, who often close their eyes to important routes across their parks). What vexes me in particular is that we have insisted that our contractors employ two traffic marshals to look after the interaction of vehicles with pedestrians around our site, whereas these people working for the Council do nothing.


Holy Week

Our Holy Week services were not much curtailed by the building works. On Palm Sunday we always walk in procession from St Mary Mags to St Peter's, and we were able to start the procession from the Vestry just as well as from the main body of the church, so that was fine. We were a respectable number, but I never thought we would be so many as to make the Vestry uncomfortable, and we weren't. I forgot my biretta, but we had a good number of robed servers, so I think we put on a decent show. We also had incense, for the first time in months (since we were outside for all but two minutes).

Stations of the Cross was again a success in the Vestry, though in truth I think it was actually better when we did it over at St Peter's, so I think we shall have to do that again in future years.

On Maundy Thursday we always just have one service, which alternates between the churches, so this year we were at St Peter's, so the works made no difference to that. The only slight clumsiness was the Sufis arriving for their meditation session in the Hall well before we had finished, but everyone was sensitive to each other's needs, so that was fine. I then ran my churchwarden home as she was carrying loads of bags, and then got home to find that she had lost her handbag, so I cycled back up to the church and searched everywhere I could think of, and asked the Sufis, but all to no avail. Churchwarden walked back up to the church, asked the Sufis and was told, "Oh, yes, we found that when we started and put it in the cupboard." So she was fine; all was well. But why couldn't they tell me that?

Good Friday was slightly altered, as we didn't have the usual Children's Stations at St Mary Mags. It was just as well, since I had no assistance, and so had to do the 11 o'clock at St Peter's alone. Straight after that finished there was the Ecumenical Service at Maida Hill Market, which I was leading, and then the Liturgy at 2 o'clock at St Mary Mags (with no prostration, owing to the restricted floor space). The service at the Market still managed a crowd of fifty or so, despite the horrible weather, but the lashing rain decided us against using an electronic keyboard, and so the hymns were hard work. Frankly, leading without a microphone was hard work too. The nice little sheets for us to hold up, saying "Jesus is Lord" (prepared by one of my neighbours) sadly just became a soggy mess. Cloak and hat kept me relatively dry, but we were all pretty cold. The volunteer holding up the cross put a Sainsbury bag over his head at one point, but my churchwarden came and held an umbrella over him. There was only one market stall and hardly any shoppers, so I'm not sure how much impact our witness made. Someone managed to turn up an hour late for the Liturgy because of a confusion over times (but then someone came a week early for the Palm Sunday procession, and so arrived at the end of the Mass for Lent 5). Not really my fault, but I feel really bad about it, because I try quite hard to see it doesn't happen.

The one thing we didn't do this year was the Easter Vigil, on Holy Saturday (with its accompanying party in the Vicarage). It just seemed logistically impossible in the Vestry, while St Peter's is in use by a Brazilian Pentecostal church on Saturday evenings. The result was that I was able to take two confirmation candidates to the Cathedral, for the confirmation at their Easter Vigil. It was great for them, and I found myself somewhat moved. The full choir were there, singing Mozart, so that helped. Fr Graham Buckle (St Stephen's, Rochester Row) sat beside me. He was at St Peter's as his first incumbency, and it dawned on me that he had presented, on Easter Eve 2000, the mother of one of my candidates this time. He was very excited by this, and they met up afterwards.

Not doing the Vigil meant that we lit the Paschal Candle on Easter morning, in each place. I hadn't anticipated how dark the Vestry would be with the lights turned off (on a very overcast morning) so that was a bit more hamfisted than I had expected. I also sang the Exsultet for the first time in many years, not very well. The second time, at St Peter's, was better, but not by much. At the Cathedral I had heard a choirman do it properly, so I had had a recent reminder of how it's meant to sound, but that doesn't stop your voice doing things you can't control. A decent turnout in both places, and I take refuge in the certainty that very few of them have any idea of how the Exsultet is meant to sound (though some may suspect that it is at least meant to sound nice).

After I came home I went out on the bike for an hour or so just to wind down, and to disperse the adrenaline.       

LOCAL PUBS FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

I read in the SEBRA news that The Redan, on the corner of Queensway and Westbourne Grove, is threatened with closure. This is very bad news. Apart from anything else, it's a living connection with the Crimean War. The Redan was a celebrated feature of the battlefield of Sebastopol, and the storming of the Redan by Windham's Brigade on 8th September 1855 was one of the great British feats of arms of that shabby war, which was the first to gain modern media coverage and so created legends and celebrities in a very modern way. The trouble with a redan is that it's a military earthwork which is open at the back, so it's not actually defensible once you've stormed it; you need the whole enemy army to run away, otherwise they will just regroup and come back at you, which sadly is what happened to Windham's Brigade. Nevertheless, the Russians withdrew the next day, and the battle was won, so it became a great triumph, and it was certainly the scene of much bravery. The pub sign has a painting of the battle, and this was clearly the original name of the pub, from the time of its building, so it would be a shame to lose it.

The Marquess of Anglesey is a pub that has disappeared, but at least the building remains, because it has an important part in social history. It was on the corner of Ashmill Street and Daventry Street, between Edgware Road and Lisson Grove, and on my cycle route home from Bloomsbury or the City. This was the pub (it's now architects' offices) where the campaigning journalist W T Stead bought a thirteen-year-old girl for £5 in the summer of 1885. Stead was exposing child prostitution, and was sent to prison for three months for his pains, but the series of articles he wrote was instrumental in getting the age of consent raised from thirteen to fifteen. The girl was called Eliza Armstrong, and the pub was where her mother met Stead's accomplice, a reformed brothel-keeper, to effect the transaction. If you remember "My Fair Lady" (which is the musical of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion", written in 1912) you may recall that Doolittle offers to sell his daughter Eliza to Henry Higgins, and that Higgins when he first meets Eliza identifies her accent as being from Lisson Grove: Shaw was one of Stead's closest supporters.

The Squirrel, across the junction from my office at St Peter's, is what used to be The Skiddaw (it was still that when we were first here) and never seems terribly busy. I hope it survives, because it is where the Victorian poet Francis Thompson used to spend his evenings when he lived in various sets of lodgings along Elgin Avenue and Goldney Road in the 1890s and 1900s. Thompson, who was a failed seminarian and morphine addict, used to sit in the corner by the fire to keep warm. He was kept afloat in his career as a poet by the wealthy Roman Catholic man of letters Wilfrid Meynell, who lived in Palace Court, off Bayswater Road, and it gave shape to Thompson's days to walk down there to see him.    

I don't think I ever saw The Yorkshire Stingo, but it was in the list of pubs in my "Nicholson's London Guide" which I was given as a child and continued to use through teenage and student visits to London. Mother and I never came that far north, because it was on the Marylebone Road, just at the angle where Old Marylebone Road turns south-west; and it was demolished in 1970 as part of the works for the Marylebone Flyover, which takes off at that point. The Yorkshire Stingo was the western terminus of Shillibeer's Omnibus, London's first scheduled bus service, in 1829; the bus is always described as going from Paddington to the Bank of England, but although the pub was on the edge of Paddington it was technically in St Marylebone, being the wrong side of Edgware Road, which is the historic boundary (being the Roman Watling Street). Not only that, but The Yorkshire Stingo also had a place in London's black history, as it was one of the places where the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor handed out relief to the unfortunate black loyalists who had fought for Britain in the American War of Independence (and who didn't qualify for relief under the Poor Law because they weren't born in an English parish). It seems that in 1786 it was somewhere that black Londoners met.  

The Waterway, my nearest pub, used to be The Paddington Stop, a landmark for canal boaters. It was totally rebuilt and given a new character shortly before we moved here, and I'm not sure you would call it a pub today. I have received a very grudging welcome when only wanting drinks, and they seem to employ some of the least well-informed bar staff you could imagine. Essentially it's an eating place, under the same management as the Summerhouse, further along Blomfield Road; you sometimes see kitchen staff wheeling trolleys from one to the other. It does staggeringly good business when the weather is pleasant.

The Elephant and Castle, on Elgin Avenue, just before the Harrow Road, has finally been redeveloped as flats, an enterprise that must have taken seven years. It was a nasty 1970s building that is little-mourned, but I imagine it perpetuated an older name, because that's not the sort of name breweries were giving new pubs at that time. The elephant and castle was the badge of the Royal African Company, one of the pioneers of the slave trade between West Africa and the West Indies. Lest we forget.