Friday 18 September 2015

When I Survey the Wondrous Cross



When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

There’s a chap who lives on the estate who has for years been nagging me about our war memorial. The war memorial is technically a wayside Calvary, that is a statue of Christ on the cross (under a little canopy) standing beside the street outside the church; it was erected in the 1920s to the designs of Martin Travers, who was the leading furnisher of Anglo-Catholic churches at that time. It’s a fine example of Travers’s semi-baroque style and a noble monument, but at the moment it's undeniably scruffy. 

The trouble is that Travers was neither an architect nor an engineer (though he did actually build a couple of churches) and in constructing our Calvary he committed a significant error. The figure of Christ is in cast iron (and was originally gilded) and hangs from a heavy oak cross, which emerges from a plinth on a stone bench, constructed  against the low brick retaining wall. Now if this was all happening in a churchyard it would be simple, because the foot of the cross would be buried in the ground, presumably sheathed in lead and sunk in concrete, but that’s not how it is here. The retaining wall, which is part of the church’s structure, closes an area which serves as a light well for the sacristy, which is below street level, so there is no ground in which to bury the cross; there is a sheer ten-foot drop immediately behind the retaining wall. Travers’s solution to this problem was to take down the retaining wall and rebuild it with a large cast iron beam at its base, into which he fixed the foot of the cross. That is all the fixing that the Calvary has.

Travers’s error was really twofold: the figure of Christ was so heavy that it would gradually pull the wooden cross forwards, and the cast iron beam would eventually rust. If he had provided another fixing point, anchoring the upper part of the crucifix to the wall of the church, then the whole structure would have been given much more stability, albeit at the expense of beauty, but he did not. Some fifteen years ago the Calvary was observed to be leaning forwards over the pavement and it was discovered that the cast iron beam had rusted badly, causing cracks in the brickwork of the retaining wall and the stone of the bench. The temporary solution was to erect a cradle of scaffolding to hold the Calvary up. That lime green painted scaffold has remained, a constant reproach to those of us who in the meantime have had to raise money to give the church a new roof, new electrical installation and new drains (all of which were felt to be more pressing than a war memorial). It looks really scruffy and gives quite the wrong message, and I don’t blame the chap who gives me grief about “not looking after Jesus”. Now, though, we are in the middle of securing the funding, not merely to make the war memorial secure, but hopefully to restore it to its former glory. I’ve tried to tell the chap this, but he sees no action taking place.

A few weeks ago I was pushing Helen across the Green in her wheelchair, on our way back from a pleasant outing in the Park, and I spotted the chap, who started haranguing me. He shouted to me that he commanded me to make Jesus look nice again, and that I shouldn’t paint Jesus gold, but black, because my house was full of gold, which was a bit of a surprise. He angrily denounced me for “profiting from a prophet” and yelled that he would pray that someone in my family should get cancer. Helen replied, “You’re too late! I’ve already got it!” but he didn’t pay any attention to that. He stalked off, still shouting abuse. Clearly he hadn’t been taking his medication, or something had upset him, and he was particularly unwell that morning, but the encounter was unsettling, and of course very upsetting to Helen.

A couple of weeks later, when Helen was in hospital, as I cycled off to get the morning paper I thought I saw something odd about the war memorial, and made a mental note to check it out when I got back. As I crossed Bourne Terrace my attention was struck by what seemed to be a tall, tanned lady with long black hair and bare feet, wearing an asymmetric black dress, and I thought, “Never seen her before.” When I came back with my paper I saw that the scaffolding around the war memorial seemed to be hung with washing, which seemed odd but harmless, so I didn’t investigate further. As I passed by later I spotted someone sleeping on the pavement in front of the war memorial, and assumed that explained the clothes. It was a sunny morning, and I thought it was hardly necessary to wake them up. At lunchtime I saw the clothes were still there and thought I really ought to investigate later, but my lunch was interrupted; the chap came hammering on my door and shouting, “There’s somebody has hung up his washing all over Jesus, and it’s a disgrace! You’ve got to do something! It’s disrespectful! It’s terrible! I’ll tell him he can’t do that!” To which I replied that I was busy just now, but he had my permission to say that to whoever it was, so he went off to do just that. A few minutes later came another knock on the door, this time from the owner of the clothes.

He turned out to be from Tenerife, very tanned, and with attractive, wavy, shoulder-length black hair, and his name was Luis. He told me that he had been cycling along the canal towpath the previous night when he had fallen into the canal. Obviously all his clothes were soaked, and he had looked for a suitable place to bed down for the night, and had (somewhat unwisely) chosen the bench in front of the war memorial. The police had found him there, and finding him neither drunk nor stoned had given him a blanket. Clearly it was him I had seen, presumably draped in the blanket, on Bourne Terrace. I said his clothes were not a problem, but asked him to be very careful and not to climb up on the scaffolding because it wasn’t safe. I apologised that the chap had given him a hard time, and he said it didn’t matter, as Jesus Christ had given him the grace to accept people as they were. “And I think he is … mentally ill,” he said, touching the side of his head in the international gesture. I concurred and silently gave thanks for charity and gentleness. He assured me he would be moving on when his clothes were dry, and sure enough he was gone by teatime.

I do hope the engineer comes soon to secure the war memorial, though.

Saturday 29 August 2015

I WANT TO RIDE MY BICYCLE



I WANT TO RIDE MY BICYCLE

Years ago (back in the early 80s) there used to be a bike racing team sponsored by DAF trucks; the great Roger de Vlaeminck rode for them in the latter stages of his career. I thought it an incongruous sponsorship at the time, because unlike Renault (who owned Gitane bikes) and Peugeot (who had always made bikes) there seemed no connection to the world of cycling, and indeed, some inherent conflict of interest. I was reminded of them the other day as I drove through Notting Hill (where I would normally be cycling) with a DAF truck filling my rear-view mirror. Now, of course, in London we are sharply aware of the mismatch between bikes and trucks.

Acute Irony
One of the ironies of being a cyclist in London is seeing the tipper trucks advertising Cycle Training UK, which is an organisation delivering safety training around cycling. The irony is that the lorries concerned belong to G.F.Gordon Plant Hire, who, working for CrossRail, have been involved in more cycling fatalities than any other operator. This feels like a very egregious case of victim-blaming. I know Gordons have some “tips for drivers” stickers on their lorries, as well as “tips for cyclists”, and are sending their drivers on courses with Cycle Training UK, but it does feel a bit odd to be lectured from the side of a lorry as it threatens you. The message seems to be that if only cyclists behaved better then they would be safe.

Acute Injury
The fact is, though, that while some London cyclists have died recently after making unwise manoeuvres, others have simply been mown down by lorries while cycling perfectly normally. Gordons are, I am sure, one of the better operators, and are perfectly sincere about this, but others in their industry seem less keen to face up to their responsibilities. It is scandalous that drivers with driving convictions are employed to drive HGVs, but it seems to be regarded as unreasonable to point this out. Drivers still omit to signal when turning left (or have non-functioning indicators), and I’m afraid I had an example of that just here the other day, from a Gordons truck! Too often drivers will sit in a queue at lights and only turn on their indicator when the lights change, which is not much help to the cyclist on the inside of a vehicle she thought was going straight on. Yes, perhaps we shouldn’t creep up through lines of stationary traffic, but drivers get very vexed if we occupy a car’s-worth of road space and then don’t instantly move out of their way. And sometimes, to be honest, cyclists are trying to get to the cycle refuge in front of the queue, which is meant to be safe.

Why Exactly?
The point which the haulage industry doesn’t seem to want to address is that the design of European trucks is simply unsafe, for pedestrians as well as cyclists. It would be interesting to learn why exactly our trucks are designed with such poor visibility, because it surely doesn’t have to be that way. How is it, for instance, that American trucks have quite differently-designed cabs from ours?

Sympathy for the (old) devil

Extraordinary sight the other day: a large plain, blue lorry, bearing the name “Ronnie Wood Ltd”. It turned out to be delivering new chiller cabinets to Waitrose in Bayswater (which is being rebuilt). Ronnie Wood, I thought? Chiller cabinets seem a very prosaic trade for a Rolling Stone to get into, a long way from rhythm guitar. Perhaps he’s fallen on hard times? Should we organise a whip-round? Somehow I imagine not.   

Thursday 13 August 2015

Jonathan Livingston...



JONATHAN LIVINGSTON…
You could tell it was midsummer when a series of “killer seagull” stories appeared in the news, because it seems to have happened pretty much every year recently. There is a widespread belief (in British cities) that gulls have recently invaded cities and are becoming much more common here. Every summer there are new reports of people having sandwiches and ice creams snatched from their hands by marauding gulls, and now those are emerging from city centres. Now the contention that gulls are invading our urban areas might be true, though the evidence is not clear, because whatever the RSPB may say, the statistics around bird populations over time are pretty shaky, but I cannot help thinking that there’s something else going on here. If I were to remark that seagulls were swarming into London it might make the connection clear.

The rooftops of Paddington
From Helen’s room on the eighth floor of St.Mary’s Hospital I was intrigued to see what was evidently a gulls’ nest. Two gulls kept returning to the same bit of roof, high up on top of the Cambridge Wing, and after a while I caught sight of their baby; well, I called it a baby, but more properly a juvenile, as its body was nearly as large as its parents, but it lacked a tail (so it looked like those odd birds you see in Egyptian hieroglyphics). Baby would stomp around his little roof and do a frenetic nodding routine when his parents were returning, presumably prompting them to feed him, which they did, regurgitating stuff dutifully. The thought occurred as to what on earth the parents were regurgitating for the baby; when you see them beside the sea, it’s fish, that’s obvious, but in Paddington? The only fish was likely to be the battered variety, with chips.

Scavengers with a social purpose
The thought of regurgitated chicken nuggets was a rather scary one, but of course gulls are scavengers. Herring gulls (which these were) are opportunist feeders, so not true scavengers (like kites or vultures) but liable to eat anything that presents itself. You can well imagine that in the tourist territory of central London there is actually plenty of potential food that presents itself, and see that they may very well be performing a useful social function by consuming rubbish (because if they don’t do it, the chances are that the rats will). So why do we get so agitated about them? Perhaps because we don’t like their manners; they’re noisy and rather pushy, aggressive even, and so they frighten us. But watching the pair of herring gulls and their solitary baby, I found myself sympathizing far more with them. In the abstract I can go along with those who write about invading seagulls, but when I actually saw a herring gull family unit I found my allegiance shifting.

Back in the day
That classic 1970s text “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was just going out of fashion when I was a student, but you still saw it on people’s shelves, and I fear I heard lots of the soundtrack album, because it was everywhere at one time. The book is a fable, with gulls standing for people, and it’s basically a sort of sub-Sufi self-improvement manual, but with all the faith and discipline removed (so very much of its time). I think our commentators are using gulls in a similar way, but for a very different end, in the contemporary discourse around the “seagull invasion”.

Birds and words
Those interested in birds will be aware that “seagulls” are not actually a species, but a generalising term, a bit like “migrants”. What I watched from that hospital window were not marauding seagulls, but a family group of herring gulls. Just so, when you actually get to meet a “migrant” you will find that they are an individual human being, with an individual story. It’s easy to demonize both birds and people, if you don’t understand their way of life very well, and make them live on rubbish dumps (for what else is “The Jungle” outside Calais?) and keep on regarding them as aggressive aliens. Actually, there have always been herring gulls in British cities, just as we have always had migrants. Yes, absolute numbers may be a problem just now, but do we really have more herring gulls than Germany, or migrants?   

Wednesday 29 July 2015

Parklife



PARKLIFE

Green Park
Westbourne Green Park is looking unusually green at the moment, but is still largely inaccessible to the public. This is a huge frustration, but I suppose we should be grateful that at least it looks green, even if we can’t actually get onto the grass. The reason it’s so green is that it has just been re-turfed, and there have been multiple sprinklers playing on it for the past couple of weeks. The re-turfing was actually quite impressive, with the fresh turf coming off a roller, like so much carpet, but the newly turfed area remains fenced off, accessible only to men in hard hats and high-vis jackets.

Thames Water
The reason the Green had to be re-turfed is that it has been dug up. Thames Water have just put an enormous sewage tank under our park, twenty metres in diameter and twenty-three metres deep. This tank is then connected by means of a deep-level tunnel to a major sewer junction about a quarter of a mile north, so that when sudden downpours overwhelm the system the excess sewage flows into the tank instead of into people’s basements, as had been happening.

Victorian Engineering
Now you will be objecting that rainwater has nothing to do with sewage, and that’s certainly true under modern regulations, which keep the two separate, but we are operating with a Victorian system, where rainwater does indeed flow into the sewer. In fact, the sewer in question is one of the great Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s pioneering works, and not only does it use rainwater to ensure a flow, but a natural watercourse as well, because our sewer is the old Westbourne River in a culvert. The river had already been dammed to create the Serpentine before Bazalgette got his hands on it, but he put it all into a culvert (and detached the Serpentine) and made it a main sewer emptying into the Thames at Chelsea. You can see its pipe crossing above the platform at Sloane Square tube station, but it’s deep beneath Westbourne Green, and far beneath the Canal. The problem in modern times has been that it’s just not big enough to cope with a sudden influx of rain, and people living in Shirland Road and Formosa Street have really been suffering. A second, smaller, tank has been dug under Tamplin Mews Gardens to address a second area of flooding, near the Chippenham pub. The noxious flooding went on for quite some time before Thames Water were pressed into doing something about it.  

Problems and Solutions
Obviously Thames Water needed to stop sewage flooding people’s flats, but some of us campaigned hard to try to achieve a different solution. A couple of years ago I appeared on the front of a local paper, looking very grumpy, alongside the chair of our Neighbourhood Forum and one of the councillors, under a “save our park” headline. The councillor (Labour) was very concerned that it was just us in the photo and so it looked like an “elite” protest rather than something coming from the community; I muttered that he shouldn’t worry because we were a vanguard, but he doesn’t seem to know his Marxist-Leninism. The point was that another section of the park had just been requisitioned by Westminster Adult Education Service for a temporary building to replace their local centre in Amberley Road which they had sold to property developers, and so people on the Warwick Estate were losing two chunks of open space. It was clear that Thames Water had looked for publicly-owned space on which to site their tanks because that would involve far less legal bother and potential compensation than private land, and that the perception was that placing one on the Warwick Estate would be fine because people there could just be ignored. We proposed a number of alternatives, but it was clear that the Westbourne Green tank was much easier and cheaper for Thames Water, and would create less traffic disruption than the alternatives. Some of us did feel that there was a bit of an injustice in blighting the lives of people in W2 to solve Thames Water’s problem in W9, but to be fair to them, some of the sufferers in Formosa Street would have been perfectly willing to have had the tank right there if it had been possible.

Seasons in the Sun
So our campaign then turned to trying to mitigate the impact of the tanks, and we extracted the assurance from Thames Water that the parks would not be out of use for two summers. That was true for Tamplin Mews, (where a much-improved children’s playground is being enjoyed as I write) but certainly not for Westbourne Green, where the actual work seems to have been finished some time ago, but handing back the park does not look imminent. We had also extracted a promise to renovate and landscape an area known as “The Pit” on the corner of Bourne Terrace, so that this could provide a bit more outside space for people to enjoy during the works, but incredibly, that has still not been completed. Thames Water say that was all held up by Westminster planners, and profess ignorance of the idea that it should have been done first to provide an alternative. We had provided evidence of groups that used the park, and so Thames Water were required to mitigate this loss of amenity, which they did by providing some extra sports facilities for young people, and some support to local clubs. The problem really was with informal use of the park, and its intangible benefits, because what Thames Water provided was never going to address the issue of the damage to people’s mental wellbeing from losing the open space. A colleague and I tried to fix something up, but our lack of facilities (and volunteers being stretched) made it a non-starter, and when I suggested that Thames Water might support the local community choir, which has a demonstrably good effect on wellbeing for a significant number of people, that was politely forgotten. It was frustrating that academic research proving the value of access to recreational space for mental wellbeing among the poorest in society has become available this spring, about two years too late for us, and that we couldn’t fix up more projects in mitigation for Thames Water to fund.

Development Opportunities
One of the people at Thames Water said to me that we could rest assured that Westbourne Green could not now be developed because of their enormous sewage tank, which I agreed was something, but it seems unlikely that the City Council would actually sell off one of their relatively few significant parks. In fact they are from time to time put under pressure for not having enough public parks (for, bizarrely, the royal parks don’t count) and so their planners are rather jumpy about public open space. It may be worth pointing out, though, that a large chunk of what appears to be park alongside the Canal is not: the canalside open space west of St.Mary Magdalene’s School is housing land, maintained by CityWest Homes (the City Council’s housing subsidiary) rather than the Council Parks Department. That land was part of a recent masterplan that failed to obtain sufficient public support to proceed, but there is nothing to stop the Council going ahead with piecemeal development in future (which would undoubtedly have fewer community benefits than were included in the masterplan).  


Wednesday 15 July 2015

We're Shopping...



We’re shopping…

As the Pet Shop Boys said, everything’s for sale. The trouble is that round here, the shops themselves are for sale. Not only shops, but pubs as well, in fact pubs in particular. On our small stretch of the Harrow Road we have recently lost the Neeld Arms, the Windsor Castle and the Prince of Wales, while a couple of blocks away the Chippenham Hotel (with its gorgeous interior of faience and mirrors) seems doomed, as it has been bought by the people who illegally demolished the Carlton Tavern, just up the road in Maida Vale.

Ex-pubs

The Neeld Arms commemorates the family who developed the area a hundred and fifty years ago; they were Wiltshire landowners, hence Chippenham Road. It is now to become fancy flats (“The Marylands Apartments”); I hope the prospective owners enjoy their proximity to the Paddington Fish Bar.

The Windsor Castle, with its battlemented façade, is a distinctive building, and has been closed for some time, pending development. The city council turned down an application to make it into an “aparthotel”, but clearly it isn’t going to be a pub again. It hosted music back in the seventies, and I’m told The Clash played early gigs there. A man on the 18 bus told me it used to have extended licensing hours, like a market pub, but I can’t see why that should ever have been the case.  It is certainly a building with a history. Curiously there seems to be a concentration of pubs with “castle” in their name around Paddington, but more of that another day.

The Prince of Wales is our current major talking point, as community action has, for the moment, thwarted an attempt to open a betting shop on its ground floor. It is a more than local landmark, standing on an important junction, where Elgin Avenue and Great Western Road meet the Harrow Road, and is an acknowledged bus destination. The building is adorned with an enormous relief of the Prince of Wales' feathers high up on the corner, and despite the council's best efforts to rename it Maida Hill Piazza, the spot is still generally called Prince of Wales Junction. The pub closed a few months ago when the Council revoked its licence after the licensee was convicted of a serious sexual assault on the premises. It’s not entirely clear why the owner doesn’t want it to be a pub any more, except, presumably, that he can make more money by selling up. So we ended up with BetFred applying for a licence for a betting shop.

BetFred

Now you may not know BetFred, but they are a business founded by a Mancunian, Fred Done (and his brother Peter) and are the most innovatively-run betting shop chain. They bought the Tote when that was privatised four years ago, which is how they came to acquire their present shop on Harrow Road (by the bus stop near Sutherland Avenue). Now when publicly-owned the Tote used to support horseracing in various ways, but BetFred has largely withdrawn from that. Fred Done apparently prefers football.  

Opposing the granting of a betting shop licence is quite a tricky task, because you have to convince the authorities that a new betting shop would actually increase crime and disorder. It isn’t enough to say that there are enough betting shops already, (three within fifty yards) or that they are obviously parasitical and sucking the blood of the poor. The bookmaking chains vehemently deny that they are targeting the poor and vulnerable, but it is perfectly clear to anyone with eyes to see that, in London at any rate, the presence of multiple betting shops functions as an index of the economic deprivation of an area. You can expect fried-chicken shops, payday loan shops and pound shops as well. To be fair to the bookmakers (“the leisure industry” as they like to style themselves) I expect that their policy for shop openings is based more on the cost of leases than on any targeting of the vulnerable. The thing is that betting shops are looking like an increasingly old-fashioned way of doing business now that gambling is so readily available online, so margins must be getting tight and hence shops with cheap leases are the way to go. Obviously the fact that Harrow Road has a relatively high proportion of residents who don’t have access to the internet at home is also a positive factor. So it’s not quite fair to say that the bookmakers target the vulnerable; it’s more collateral damage.

The main point that the community raised against BetFred was that there was a record of crime and disorder centred on one of the existing shops at Prince of Wales Junction, and that it was reasonable to suppose that this would only increase with another shop. The counsel for BetFred made the pleasing point that fights and drug dealing outside a betting shop were evidence that the shop was actually well-run, because the manager was ensuring that those activities didn’t take place inside his premises! He also asserted that crime and anti-social activity were the result of the neighbourhood harbouring a number of unsavoury individuals, and really nothing to do with the betting shops.

Temptation

Now it would be foolish to say that there is a necessary causal link between any betting shop and crime, but it’s more about climate and opportunity.  The presence of places dedicated to offering financial gain without any actual productive work is bound to create a particular climate, and it is not surprising that they should be especially attractive in communities where paid work is scarce. The prospect of disproportionate financial returns is an attractive one for any investor, but the reason this becomes immoral in a deprived district is that the temptation becomes greater the more desperate you are, and if you have no spare cash then losing has really serious consequences. 

Yes, of course nobody has to bet, it’s always a decision you make, just as you decide to drink, smoke or take drugs, but like those you can become addicted to it. It’s a temptation you may or may not be able to resist, and sadly that’s not just a question of lacking moral fibre. Like other addictions too, gambling can be presented in such a way as to lure people in, which clearly happens (and which legislation around alcohol and tobacco recognises), and that presentation normalises it. The difference is that while the others can only ever make you temporarily feel better, gambling offers you the illusion that you can actually escape from desperate circumstances, and so is somehow morally more insidious.  

It is, then, particularly perverse that a government that is so keen to end a “something for nothing” culture should also be keen on liberalising controls over gambling, which is absolutely predicated upon getting something for nothing. But then you could say that much of what takes place in the City is just gambling but with no sport involved. You might also observe that betting industry figures (Peter Done included) give lots of money to political parties.

Anyway, BetFred’s application was turned down, after much testimony about how many vulnerable people were liable to be affected. We thought this was a great victory for the public good, but the story now is that someone wants to open a payday loan shop on the premises!
       

Monday 6 July 2015

The Green, Green Grass...



The Green, Green Grass…

I don’t understand why open cannabis use has increased so markedly in this neighbourhood in the last couple of years, but it certainly has. If you walk along by the canal any afternoon or early evening your senses will tell you that cannabis is being smoked or has recently been smoked. I first noticed it when the numbers of more or less permanently-moored boats increased, but it is clear now that this is mostly happening ashore.

The policemen and PCSOs seem to take no notice. Now in a sense I can understand that; cannabis use is a fairly low-grade crime, and what is the point of antagonising, and ultimately criminalising, otherwise blameless individuals if they aren’t causing a nuisance or harming anyone else?

Fair enough, but some of the groups of people who seem to gather round here to smoke dope do actually seem rather intimidating, and come pretty close to being a nuisance. And surely it is, actually, against the law, isn’t it? More than that, my own experience inclines me to be rather less than relaxed about cannabis use.

A few years ago I conducted a funeral for a young man who had died suddenly and inexplicably (sudden death syndrome) but the striking feature of the household was the industrial quantity of cannabis consumed, especially by the young man. Of course it may not have had anything to do with his death, but it worried me, as it seemed to be the only unusual thing about him.

More recently I have been struck by how many of the mentally ill locally are also cannabis users, and how regularly one hears horror stories about bad experiences from skunk, the genetically-engineered high strength cannabis which seems to be the only sort you can get in London now. Yes, I know there are nice respectable people with MS who say it eases their pain, but there are also vulnerable, damaged people for whom it triggers psychotic episodes. So, pardon me if I’m a bit illiberal about this one.

Little Silver Canisters

The other morning I met one of the school staff putting a load of rubbish in the bins, which she had just swept up from near the church. It turns out that this was a large quantity of nitrous oxide canisters, sudden evidence of the craze for laughing gas reaching our estate. Perhaps that explains the noise that woke us up at 2am, though I don’t remember laughter being prominent. This seems a particularly futile exercise in escapism, as I am told the effects are very fleeting. Presumably that is why there were lots of canisters, which look a bit sinister, frankly. I suspect that’s part of the attraction for Gilbert & George, in whose most recent show the canisters were a repeated motif. Having a pile of them on the pavement doesn’t make the neighbourhood feel hip or edgy, I can assure you.

Mounting the Pavement

A young man who uses our support services needed our help to put pressure on his landlord because of an incident. A Range Rover had mounted the pavement and crashed into the front of their building, at 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. He says that shots were fired, and that a chase had taken place. He apparently knows the driver, who denies firing the shots, “Because if I had shot, I wouldn’t have missed.” Ho, ho, very amusing. The transport of cocaine was allegedly involved. I jokingly asked whether it was a black Range Rover with tinted glass, and was pleased to be told that it was! When we first came here, eight years ago, you could be confident that if you saw one of those on the estate it was bound to be a drug dealer, but now it’s much less predictable, because crazy property prices have meant an influx of wealthy Arabs and people with diplomatic plates. Still, this one conformed to type; having wrecked the Range Rover, he apparently came back in a Porsche.   

Friday 26 June 2015

The Common Cormorant or Shag...



The Common Cormorant or Shag…

Saw a cormorant beside the canal as I cycled along. It was doing that wings-akimbo thing that they do, which someone once told me was keeping the glare off the water so that they can see fish easier. If that’s the case then he had been badly advised; you can find many things in the Paddington Branch of the Grand Union Canal (including, recently, a body in a suitcase) but not many fish. We do, though, see a surprising variety of birds round here.

Herons often pass unnoticed simply by standing so still; dusk or dawn seems to be the most likely time to see them, and clearly they wouldn’t bother if there were no fish for them to harpoon, but this particular stretch is not popular with them; you see them more often on the island in Browning’s Pool.

I once saw a sparrowhawk on the grass between the tower blocks and the canal, who was, I think, eating a pigeon, but much as I would love them to set up home on one of the tower blocks (like the peregrine falcons at Charing Cross Hospital) I think he was only a casual visitor.

It’s odd that we don’t seem to have ring-necked parakeets on Westbourne Green, despite their presence very nearby. They are all over Kensington Gardens, which is less than a mile away, and there’s almost a corridor of trees connecting us, but the Westway is in the way, so perhaps that deters them. On the other hand, I’m sure I have heard them north of the canal, so perhaps they’ll come in that way; I gather that the peregrines find them tasty down in Fulham.

Go-Fast Stripes

Also seen while cycling, this time on Elgin Avenue, a tall young woman in long black robe and white hijab, bouncing a basketball. I was particularly impressed that her robe had a red side seam, which clearly functioned as a sort of go-fast stripe (as on 1970s motorcars). A sports abaya; a good thing to see. 

The Power of Legend

Today, the young man from the bakery asked me whether it was true that there was a secret tunnel linking St.Peter’s to the pub opposite. It is quite extraordinary how many times I have been asked this. People recognise that this can’t involve the current church (built in 1974) but perhaps the demolition of the old building has just served to give legs to the mystery. Both church and pub were originally built around 1870, and it was open fields before that, but no-one seems to ask why you would build such a tunnel at such a time.

We had a similar story when I was a country parson in Cornwall, but then both buildings were medieval, so it was a little less outlandish, though there was still no evidence that it was true. It seems to be something about the romance of old buildings, and people’s desire to invest the mundane with excitement. It’s interesting that such tales persist in contemporary London. I suspect the idea that supposedly virtuous clerics had privileged access to a den of iniquity may give spice to the legend, though I really don’t think “The Squirrel” does much in the way of iniquity; it all looks very well-behaved, and in fact I know another parish has had their book club meetings there in the past. Still, legends have their currency in this supposedly rational age.

Wednesday 17 June 2015

A day in the life...

I'm a parish priest, and my patch extends along the Harrow Road, in Paddington; that's W2 and W9 if postcodes are important to you. So that's why this blog is "Up and Down the Harrow Road". This is one of those anonymous areas of London, which does not really have a generally accepted name, but does have a distinct character. What I see around me here are a lot of people from all different backgrounds coping with many different varieties of adversity, often with great warmth, generosity and humour, but that's interspersed with bizarre and sometimes tragic episodes. My brother-in-law called it "vibrant" the other day, and that's a good positive word for it. Sometimes one feels a bit less positive, but such is city life.


Today was a bit of a Harrow Road sort of day, as I realised when there was a West Indian guy in a bowler hat shouting in the middle of the traffic at Prince of Wales Junction; I gave him a wide berth on my bike. I was on my way back from the Post Office where I had sent a document to the Royal Courts of Justice, guaranteed next day delivery (how much?). It had to get there tomorrow, because the person I was doing this for (let’s call her “A”) has had a judgement granting her social housing provider possession of her flat by tomorrow. Needless to say, A hadn’t attended the court, and only phoned me about this last week, without actually explaining what needed to be done by tomorrow, which was that she should enter a defence. I shan't go into it here, but A has multiple problems, and it is pretty irresponsible of her landlord to let her get into that position, since they know perfectly well that she has no legal source of income except benefits, and if they are to get any rent it must come from housing benefit. I suppose the problem arose because she moved from Westminster into Kensington and Chelsea, and since housing benefit is administered by boroughs she was able to disappear from the system. Since she resists the attention of social workers nobody was there to make sure the housing benefit was sorted out. I know that she had asked us for help with this months ago, and then didn’t turn up for her meeting with our volunteer and then dismissed the whole problem. I had assumed she had sorted it with the help of her GP’s surgery (who are amazingly patient with her) who handle most of her official correspondence, but evidently I was wrong. Anyway, she was quite subdued today, and I was able to sit her down and fill in the form, which was a bit comical, since it had zeroes in all the sources of income; they have no boxes for illicit income, but she’d probably exaggerate that out of bravado, which wouldn’t help. A has a way of making you feel really angry and yet guilty, but on this occasion I felt less bruised by the encounter, which was a bit more straightforward than usual. We shall see what happens.

The other rather Harrow Road encounter was with a congregation member who had asked me to call round. The ostensible reason was that someone at church has offended her, and she’s getting really uptight about it; it’s an essentially trivial thing, but she has every right to be upset; she needs to have it out with the person concerned. But that wasn’t all; as I drank my tea she told me of her despair at a family issue, and her worries about her mother's health. Then she told me she felt the flat was haunted (actually that’s not the language she used, but the fact that she’s not native British may have something to do with that). She appears a very capable person, but here she was with a whole string of problems, and suddenly rather vulnerable. I have quite failed to understand her, and I hope that blessing the flat will make at least some things feel better.    

Then to a school governors' meeting with a presentation about "Fundamental British Values"...