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"...