INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

With The Goslings

The Egyptian geese are doing well with their goslings; they still have five. They spend a lot of time near the Harrow Road, well away from Canada geese or swans, who are known to have murderous inclinations to  other birds' offspring. Actually there is a pair of swans with cygnets as well, but they don't seem to be resident locally. The Egyptian geese collaborate in the childminding, one sits alongside the goslings while the other scans the towpath for trouble, and honks loudly if trouble comes along. Some very perplexed dogs find themselves being dragged past a very noisy goose.


RIP JJN Part Two

My neighbour very kindly allowed me to assist him at  John Julius Norwich's funeral last Monday, at St Mary's, Paddington Green. The church is a late Georgian preaching-box with galleries, which was completely furnished anew, in repro-Georgian, by Raymond Erith and Quinlan Terry around 1970; it's all in the best possible taste. Fr Gary wore a black and gold cope of appropriately Venetian brocade. The church was packed, and I was amused to learn afterwards how little most people could see. The box pews are not very high-sided, but they do cut down vision, and if you weren't at the front of the galleries you could see nothing up there. That's the idea; that layout was designed for you to listen to a sermon, not participate in a liturgy.

Oddly, there was no sermon, nor even a eulogy. In fact, I was struck by how much the service had in common with funerals I have done with unchurched families here on the Warwick Estate. John Julius had professional musicians playing Schubert, instead of CDs playing hip hop, but the religious content was equally slim. Frankly, recognisably Anglican content was very scarce. The hymns were sung with great gusto: we had Crimond (Scottish), and Cwm Rhondda (Welsh), and the English offering was "I Vow to thee My Country", Sir Cecil Spring Rice's First World War recruiting song, set to Holst's "Jupiter", which isn't in most modern hymnbooks. Altogether a very public-school selection. We had readings from Shakespeare and Dryden's paraphrase of Horace, as well as Canon Scott Holland's "Death is Nothing at All". We also had two Schubert songs, and the "In Paradisum"  from Faure's Requiem (which obviously any right-thinking person would want), and we went out to the Widor Toccata (which didn't really suit the organ). So, it was a very full service, with lots of lovely things in it, but some would say more like a memorial service than a funeral.

The church was full of the great and the good. One of the reasons people couldn't see was that there were so many tall, distinguished-looking men in dark suits (not so much like the Warwick Estate). Among the mourners I spotted Simon Schama, Simon Jenkins, and David Attenborough, but no doubt there were loads more I failed to recognise.

St Mary's has a neo-Georgian church hall, also designed by Quinlan Terry, but this is let to a nursery school, and so the post-funeral refreshments were served inside the church. The vestry was full of sandwiches, and when I stood up to do the prayers, the reverential silence was punctuated by the clink of bottle and glass (which frankly would have amused JJN). After the service, the problem was one of circulation, especially since those in the galleries had to descend by one staircase which deposited them into the tiny lobby immediately inside the main door, so as they fought their way in to get a drink they met those already provided who were trying to get out to condole with the family in the graveyard. The phrase "fire regulations" leapt unbidden into my mind. You will understand that in our building and refurbishment works at St Mary Mags these questions have become very familiar to me.


Slowest on the Road

I always expect to be pretty much the slowest cyclist on any given road. Normally, the only people I will automatically overtake are those riding Boris bikes or Bromptons (and sometimes you meet a pimped Brompton, ridden by an enthusiast who can make it go very fast). Anyone in proper shorts, on a proper road bike, must be assumed to be faster than me. Anyone wearing a club jersey can be guaranteed to ride away from me. I reassure myself with the mantra that I am twice the age of many of them (certainly not all, though). On the last two occasions I have been out, though, I have been passed by small children, of about 10 or 11, riding small road bikes, alongside their fathers (in club jerseys). This is a bit tough to take, though I rationalise that they're shifting a lot less weight than me. Today, to cap it, I was passed by a father on a road bike towing a cart in which his small daughter sat.


Late Goals and VAR

I remember Helen saying, in despair, "But you don't like football," each time the World Cup came round; she didn't understand. At least Nigeria put in a performance worthy of their shirt against Iceland (is their mystique finally fading?) and there were two fine kits on display today. The Belgian gold and black with red details was classically fine, and I did like Mexico's change strip, white shirts with one maroon and one bottle green hoop, and maroon shorts. Pleasingly reminiscent of the classic West Ham sky blue with two claret hoops (though that was worn with pale shorts, which I think on balance is nicer). There was no need for the green detail on the shoulders, though. You have to keep watching to the end, though, because there are so many late goals (both of Brazil's against Costa Rica came after 90 minutes, for instance, and Son's lovely goal for South Korea today). I thought VAR was meant to stop arguments, but it clearly doesn't, because so many obvious infringements don't get referred. Great piece of punditry (a week ago) from Slaven Bilic, when asked to comment on some VAR decision, he shrugged his shoulders and said, deadpan, "Really, I don't care."       

FAREWELL, JOHN JULIUS

RIP JJN

It is with great sadness that I have to record the death of the patron of our development appeal, John Julius Norwich, who was a genuinely life-enhancing person. For people of my generation, he was one of those names you remembered from TV and radio in the seventies: I remember him on "Call My Bluff" and "My Music" on the television, and "Round Britain Quiz" and "My Word" on the radio, but the BBC also used him as a documentary presenter, and he was one of the first presenters on Classic FM. He also wrote dozens of books, mostly popular history, in fact the most recent one, a history of France "from Gaul to De Gaulle" only came out in the past year. I was going to say that he was a link with a more leisured age, except that gives the wrong impression, because John Julius worked extremely hard all his adult life, though he had the advantage of working at what he enjoyed. Perhaps what I mean is that he was a link with a literary and aristocratic world that has passed into history, but which retains a real glamour. His mother, you see, was Lady Diana Cooper, the quintessential "bright young thing" in the 1920s, daughter of the Duke of Rutland, and friend of Evelyn Waugh (who based characters on her). His father, Duff Cooper, was a bit of a rascal, who had been part of the Raymond Asquith set at Oxford before the First World War (the rest were mostly killed, he survived), and as an MP was Churchill's great ally in opposing the appeasement of Hitler before the outbreak of the Second World War. Duff Cooper ended the War as British Ambassador in Paris and was given the title of Viscount Norwich when he retired. So John Julius, who knew Churchill and De Gaulle (and heard Chaliapin sing when he was a boy) was a connection with that vanished world.

John Julius was also a friend of John Betjeman, and so for us at Mary Mags was a link with that great enthusiast for our church (who spoke at the centenary celebrations back in the sixties) and so we were delighted when he agreed to be our patron. What I didn't realise, though, was just how jolly he was, and how much he would bring to our appeal, even in his  mid-eighties. When he agreed to be patron, he said, "Well, I'll do it, but you understand I'll just be a figurehead, I can't actually do anything." Nothing could have been further from the truth. Of course he presided merrily at our receptions, recalling that Betjeman had called the church "a corker!", and cheerfully wielded a spade alongside a bunch of primary schoolchildren in hard hats and hi-vis at our groundbreaking ceremony, but he did more. Not only did he get involved with the fundraising by personally approaching elderly trustees whom he knew to empty out a couple of trusts for us, but he actually performed for the benefit of Mary Mags; we had a marvellous evening of anecdotes, recitations and songs, at which he accompanied himself on the piano. He was a real trouper, as they say.

John Julius moved last year from his house in Blomfield Road into a flat in Bayswater, having been a fixture in Little Venice for decades, but the point was that he moved there long before it was smart. When he moved in it was still a louche, rackety, rather bohemian area, with actors and artists, and not at all the home of pop stars and hedge funders that it has become. He may have been an aristocrat, but he was a bohemian by temperament, and had a fine sense of self-awareness; I remember him saying that he'd never had an original historical thought in his life, however many books he'd written. Above all, though, he was great fun, and was a great enthusiast. He loved beauty, and always wanted others to share his enthusiasm. We were lucky to be one of the last beneficiaries of that enthusiasm.         


On the Canal

More happily, I have to record that the Egyptian geese now have five goslings, cute little brown and white fluffballs. The whole family sit on the towpath and the parents honk aggressively at cyclists, dogs, and indeed anyone passing. I hope the little ones survive and thrive.


On the Pitch (part 1)

It's a very good story that the entire production run of Nigeria's World Cup shirt was pre-ordered within hours of their match at Wembley the other day. The odd thing is that the shirt is apparently the only one in the whole tournament with a really outrageous design, the hangover-troubling zigzags, green and white on the body and black and white on the sleeves. The shirt manufacturers seem to have invested a lot in texture this year, so there are lots of what would traditionally be called "self" patterns, designs that appear only in the texture of the fabric (there's one that is white and white diagonal halves, for instance, wow!) but I can't help feeling that this rather misses the point that the shirt needs to work on television. I've studied the full array (admittedly only on a computer screen) and couldn't really discern some of the alleged designs at all. Perhaps they are designed for vast TV screens in pubs, and will work on that scale, but I'm not convinced. Lots of very weak collar details, though.


On the Pitch (part 2)

In the barber's last week, I got involved in a very heated discussion about Raheem Sterling and his tattoo. This was before he (allegedly) took a dive in the Nigeria game and turned up late for the training camp; two stories that illustrate how much copy he generates. It's odd, because I don't quite understand why he attracts so much negative press. I did make the point that he knows how much he's under the microscope, so it was pretty stupid to have the tattoo done, if he didn't want a fuss.The haircut took a long time, as Dwayne the barber defended Raheem's right to put whatever he wants on his own body at great length and with much emphasis. A barber gesticulating with an open razor is my friend at all times!

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.