SLEEPERS WAKE!

When I got to the office door yesterday, hurrying to try to open up for the breakfast club in place of the organiser who had been delayed, I met not only a volunteer for the club, but also a complainer, and I’m afraid I didn’t give him the attention he wanted. This gentleman, a resident in the sheltered flats beside St.Peter’s, wanted to complain that we had a rough sleeper in the church doorway. I needed to know that this was a good neighbourhood, (hmm, matter of debate) a residential neighbourhood (not strictly true) and that this was very bad. I would have agreed that it was very bad that in a staggeringly wealthy city, in one of the richest countries on earth, some people are forced to sleep on the street, but that wasn’t what he meant. I might also have said that the rough sleeper had been in the vicinity for several days, but he’d only become noticeable when he’d come under the church porch when it poured with rain. Clearly his presence wasn’t so bad when he didn’t make the place look untidy. The rough sleeper has very little English and is some sort of refugee, which is ironic, since the gentleman complaining about him is himself the son of Jewish refugees.

Not Melodious At All

As I was crossing to the church the other day there was a tremendous racket from magpies, several of whom were swooping around. Now and again I heard a different call, once from one of the trees, and then closer, and then I saw the source of that call, a handsome jay, and it became clear that there was another one nearby. The second jay looped out of the tree and came to rest beside the first, on the planters beside the school carpark. Almost at once the magpies started to mob them, and the jays flew off. I’d never supposed that there would be this degree of aggression between jays and magpies, who are, after all, sort of cousins in the corvid family, but it was clear that the magpies objected to having the jays on their patch. Today, I spotted it happening again, in the trees on the Green.

The magpies, despite their numbers, never seem to try to impose their will on the crows which have recently appeared on the Green. At least I say they are crows, but I remember being told in Cornwall, “If ‘ee see an old rook on ‘is own, ‘a’s a crow; but if ‘ee see a load o’crows all together, they’m rooks”. They are there in quantity, but I’m pretty sure they’re crows, neater trousers and no bald patch on the face. But why are they here? They are scavengers, so where is the carrion they feed on? And why were they not on Westbourne Green in the past?  One of the favourite films of my youth was “Excalibur”, and there is an extraordinary scene in a wintry forest with the decaying bodies of knights hung from bare branches, being pecked at by rooks. One always thinks of them as crows, but from memory I’m pretty sure they are rooks (which are noticeably more unattractive). I don’t think there are any decaying medieval corpses to attract the crows to Westbourne Green, so their appearance is a bit strange. I notice that they are patrolling the grass, and probing with their big, strong beaks, so they are presumably looking for live food in the ground, so perhaps the newly turfed area contains lots of nourishing leatherjackets and worms.

Prison Chaplains

Had an excellent session with Muslim and Christian chaplains from Wormwood Scrubs this week; we are planning an inter-faith event in church. They are very impressive people. I contemplated, but in the end didn’t ask them about a young man currently inside the Scrubs, who is known to me. He’s a relation of a church member, and was recently shot by two boys on a moped, not far from here. I’m being deliberately vague, as these things have unknown ramifications. But it may have had to do with where he was, or he may have “been a naughty boy” as it has been reported. Either way, there is a whole life going on beside us of which we know nothing, only bumping up against it when it bursts in on the lives of people like my church member.  Wormwood Scrubs, despite its fame, is only a local prison these days, so it’s full of men on remand from local boroughs; the only trouble is that if someone wants to hurt this young man he has nowhere to run to now, and is intensely vulnerable. The local prison just reproduces the life on the local streets, but with all the law-abiding bits taken out. It’s all very worrying for our member.