On The Road
Waiting on my bike to come out onto the Harrow Road one day last week I was horrified to see a black-headed gull being hit by a car. It happened this way: foolish cafe owners deposit unwanted food on the grass near the canal, which usually includes lots of stale bread, and on this occasion a flock of gulls had been helping themselves. By the time I came along they were squabbling in mid-air, and the brawl spilled out into the air above the road, which, since this is exactly where the road crosses the canal on a humpbacked bridge, meant that they were not very high in relation to the traffic. They wheeled and skirmished, and one of them dropped a sizeable chunk of baguette onto the road, whereupon a succession of gulls tried to pick it up without being run over. Finally this black-headed gull swooped down and managed to lift the chunk of bread, and tried to fly up and away, but didn't have enough time; he was right in front of a car coming over the bridge. I was transfixed as the car's numberplate smacked into the gull and he cartwheeled under the chassis. I was expecting to see a bloody mess on the road. Instead, when the car passed out of my line of sight, there was the gull, still holding the bread, taking off perfectly successfully, and wheeling away out of danger.
I should add that many years ago I hit a buzzard when driving in Cornwall (it was standing in the middle of a lane). I was only going at 20mph but hit it firmly as I came round a corner. I didn't stop, reasoning that there was nothing I could do for an angry, injured buzzard and not wanting to make his acquaintance in those circumstances, but when I reached my destination I examined the front of the car and found a new crack in my numberplate. I returned the same way an hour later after doing a baptism interview and did stop. There was no sign of the buzzard at all. I always believed he had just brushed himself down and gone his way, and now I am quite sure.
The Lonely Londoners
For our book group we are reading a novel called "The Lonely Londoners", by a man called Sam Selvon. He was a Tamil/Scottish Trinidadian, and the book is about the experiences of West Indian men living in London in the 1950s, in the era just before the notorious Notting Hill riots. Published in 1956, it is written entirely in Patois, and I found myself saying sentences out loud to see what they sounded like, and recognizing their authenticity. It is a remarkable piece of work and you instinctively accept the truthfulness of the picture it paints. This is not an angry, bitter, or campaigning novel, but is matter-of-fact about the atmosphere of the times. Of course it's particularly interesting for us as it is set almost entirely within a radius of a mile from my house; they go and hang out in the Park, or saunter along Bayswater Road, but most of them actually live in Harrow Road, "what the English call a working-class area". It feels like really authentic local social history, but then you ponder that this is actually self-consciously a "Beat Generation" novel, in the Kerouac mould; does its consciously literary identity compromise its truthfulness? I'd say not, and contend for the importance of the novel in giving us a picture of the past. Of course a novel doesn't tell us everything; you learn nothing of the Napoleonic Wars from reading Jane Austen, but actually Pride and Prejudice does tell you something about the experience of having troops billeted in the neighbourhood in wartime, and tells you a very great deal about the society those troops were meant to defend. After all, no accounts, however objective or drily factual they seem, are actually unmediated; there is always a writer, who has chosen to record one thing rather than another, and has drawn his own conclusions from the events he chooses. So take that as a health warning!
Tuesday 31 January 2017
Monday 23 January 2017
BRICKS AND ICE
Confirm, O Lord
This morning I went to school. All sorts of unpleasant ghosts came back to me, and it evoked all sorts of uncomfortable memories as I waited for an early bus and then joined a throng of children heading for school. In this case St Marylebone School, the local Church of England girls' secondary, once a grammar school, now an academy growing its own subsidiaries. I was going to the school confirmation service. Now generally I don't really approve of school confirmations, because I think confirmation is about mature membership of a particular Christian community, and that should be the parish church where you worship on a Sunday, but I will put my hand up and say this was an exception which demonstrates the value of doing it this way. Because I had been alerted to this service by the school chaplain, who contacted me to check the baptism details of one of the candidates; it turned out that this was a girl who had been at St Mary Magdalene's School, and who we had baptized, at her request, when she was ten. I was highly delighted that she was now getting confirmed, because she is someone whose home circumstances never made it possible for her to come to church on Sunday when she was younger, but now that the opportunities of faith have been put in front of her at St Marylebone she has made it her own. By all accounts she is an enthusiastic worshipper and her charm has made an impression on the clergy there (who have every reason to be cynical). I hope that we can continue to support her.
The confirmation was taken by Bishop Robert Ladds, who is a retired Bishop of Whitby, but who is also Provost of St Marylebone School. Those familiar with Anglican education might be aware that the Woodard Corporation has a Provost; I can only suppose that St Marylebone has adopted the same title in emulation. The Woodard Schools are a group of Anglican public schools, originally founded by a cleric called the Revd Nathaniel Woodard, which remain much more self-consciously ecclesiastical than most Anglican schools, and include places from Lancing to Ellesmere. Being involved with the Woodard Corporation is the sort of thing that the more establishment high-church clerics have on their cv. I imagine that Bishop Robert has done his time there as well, but now he's St Marylebone's tame bishop, and so laid hands on a dozen girls this morning. He preached an entertaining sermon, involving an impressive chemical reaction, which is fair enough since he's a scientist by training, but I'm not sure how many of the girls were actually well-enough up on Star Wars to follow some of his references. Still, it all went very well, despite chaos being unleashed at the Peace. The Chaplain was flapping ineffectually, so the Rector bellowed the announcement of the next hymn, which put a stop to all the fraternization. It was a pleasure to be involved.
Ice Bound
London has been freezing for the past few days, and the Canal was frozen over yesterday and today. Yesterday I watched two Canada geese come into land and be surprised by finding themselves landing on ice rather than water. It wasn't so thick, though, as one of them managed to break the ice by merely sitting down rather forcibly and kicking a bit. Today I was told that the pond in Regent's Park was frozen, which is unusual. It was a beautiful day for cycling on Saturday, but I had a heavy cold and so couldn't go riding, so I drove out into Oxfordshire and was impressed by places where the frost had clearly been lying for days, and was as white as snow on some roofs. Gloria was wearing her tee shirt for the Women's March which she couldn't go on.
Another Brick in the Wall
Last night we had the local service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, at Emmanuel Church in Harrow Road (by the bus stop, opposite Iceland). It was commemorating both the five hundredth anniversary of the start of the Reformation, and the end of the Berlin Wall, and we used the symbolism of a wall as part of the liturgy, which would have been easier with almost anything other than the water-smoothed stones we had for the purpose. Still, it was a strong idea, a wall built of prejudice, isolation, hatred and so on, being broken down and put into the form of a cross. We sang Luther's "Ein Feste Burg", which was very appropriate, as well as something of Timothy Dudley-Smith's to "Danny Boy", which I enjoyed but found defeated the range of my cold-addled voice. The good people of Emmanuel even provided rice and peas. A genuinely diverse occasion, with a real variety of voices expressing something of the variety of Christian experience round here.
This morning I went to school. All sorts of unpleasant ghosts came back to me, and it evoked all sorts of uncomfortable memories as I waited for an early bus and then joined a throng of children heading for school. In this case St Marylebone School, the local Church of England girls' secondary, once a grammar school, now an academy growing its own subsidiaries. I was going to the school confirmation service. Now generally I don't really approve of school confirmations, because I think confirmation is about mature membership of a particular Christian community, and that should be the parish church where you worship on a Sunday, but I will put my hand up and say this was an exception which demonstrates the value of doing it this way. Because I had been alerted to this service by the school chaplain, who contacted me to check the baptism details of one of the candidates; it turned out that this was a girl who had been at St Mary Magdalene's School, and who we had baptized, at her request, when she was ten. I was highly delighted that she was now getting confirmed, because she is someone whose home circumstances never made it possible for her to come to church on Sunday when she was younger, but now that the opportunities of faith have been put in front of her at St Marylebone she has made it her own. By all accounts she is an enthusiastic worshipper and her charm has made an impression on the clergy there (who have every reason to be cynical). I hope that we can continue to support her.
The confirmation was taken by Bishop Robert Ladds, who is a retired Bishop of Whitby, but who is also Provost of St Marylebone School. Those familiar with Anglican education might be aware that the Woodard Corporation has a Provost; I can only suppose that St Marylebone has adopted the same title in emulation. The Woodard Schools are a group of Anglican public schools, originally founded by a cleric called the Revd Nathaniel Woodard, which remain much more self-consciously ecclesiastical than most Anglican schools, and include places from Lancing to Ellesmere. Being involved with the Woodard Corporation is the sort of thing that the more establishment high-church clerics have on their cv. I imagine that Bishop Robert has done his time there as well, but now he's St Marylebone's tame bishop, and so laid hands on a dozen girls this morning. He preached an entertaining sermon, involving an impressive chemical reaction, which is fair enough since he's a scientist by training, but I'm not sure how many of the girls were actually well-enough up on Star Wars to follow some of his references. Still, it all went very well, despite chaos being unleashed at the Peace. The Chaplain was flapping ineffectually, so the Rector bellowed the announcement of the next hymn, which put a stop to all the fraternization. It was a pleasure to be involved.
Ice Bound
London has been freezing for the past few days, and the Canal was frozen over yesterday and today. Yesterday I watched two Canada geese come into land and be surprised by finding themselves landing on ice rather than water. It wasn't so thick, though, as one of them managed to break the ice by merely sitting down rather forcibly and kicking a bit. Today I was told that the pond in Regent's Park was frozen, which is unusual. It was a beautiful day for cycling on Saturday, but I had a heavy cold and so couldn't go riding, so I drove out into Oxfordshire and was impressed by places where the frost had clearly been lying for days, and was as white as snow on some roofs. Gloria was wearing her tee shirt for the Women's March which she couldn't go on.
Another Brick in the Wall
Last night we had the local service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, at Emmanuel Church in Harrow Road (by the bus stop, opposite Iceland). It was commemorating both the five hundredth anniversary of the start of the Reformation, and the end of the Berlin Wall, and we used the symbolism of a wall as part of the liturgy, which would have been easier with almost anything other than the water-smoothed stones we had for the purpose. Still, it was a strong idea, a wall built of prejudice, isolation, hatred and so on, being broken down and put into the form of a cross. We sang Luther's "Ein Feste Burg", which was very appropriate, as well as something of Timothy Dudley-Smith's to "Danny Boy", which I enjoyed but found defeated the range of my cold-addled voice. The good people of Emmanuel even provided rice and peas. A genuinely diverse occasion, with a real variety of voices expressing something of the variety of Christian experience round here.
Wednesday 11 January 2017
BUSES AND TRAINS
Vegan Buses
As the buses stand waiting for the traffic lights to change outside the Parish Office I often read the adverts on their sides; "La La Land" is being well-promoted. In the last few days adverts have appeared from a vegan organisation, GoVeganWorld.com, which have come as quite a surprise. There is one with a cute calf being nuzzled by its cuddly mother and the message "Dairy takes babies from their mothers". Now this irritates me on several levels. First, there's the sentimental anthropomorphizing; "babies". No. Baby as a noun refers to human infants; we might indeed talk about baby calves, but that's using baby as an adjective, because what you are talking about is a calf. The cute picture is part of the sentimentalizing as well, the attempt to provoke an emotional rather than a rational response. Then there's the assumed high moral tone, the implication that vegans are more moral than the rest of us. Most of all, though, I object to the idea that this is about animal welfare, when it manifestly isn't: if the dairy industry is abolished the result will not be lots of happy cows, but lots of dead cows, and then no cows at all, because why would there be any cows if we weren't milking them? If existence is better than non-existence (which seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial point of view) then veganism, which implies the extermination of all farm animal species, can hardly claim moral superiority. Of course humans have obligations to treat other sentient beings responsibly and kindly but it's perfectly possible to have a dairy industry and an egg industry that aren't cruel; cruelty and abuse are not inherent in consuming milk or eggs. The extermination of whole species really would be implied if the world did truly go vegan!
Thanks To Keble
Last week I had a couple of very pleasant days at Keble College, Oxford. Keble are the patrons of the living of St Mary Mags, which in the past meant that they appointed the vicar; nowadays it's all more consultative, but they still have a role. Like good patrons they want to support their incumbents, and so put on a biennial conference for us, and that was what I went to last week. We heard from two CSMV sisters about prayer, which was helpful, and it was a good opportunity for me to re-establish links with them, as CSMV sisters worked in the parish for many decades, up to the 1950s, and it would be very good to get them involved in the heritage project. It was great to meet other Keble incumbents, and encouraging to see priests with a very wide range of experience, and lots of learning. It was also good to meet a couple of ordinands who are at Keble, and the Chaplain, also Fr Everett (though he rejoices in the Christian name Nevsky).
New Lines
Going to Oxford I tried for myself the new route from Marylebone, and can thoroughly recommend it. There is a half-hourly service, which is as quick as the First Great Western trains from Paddington, and they are pleasantly uncrowded. The grotesque overcrowding on the Paddington-Oxford trains has been a feature of the line for years, so this great boost in capacity is very welcome. The stop on the new curve at Bicester is for Bicester Village, the vastly popular retail outlet centre, and you can tell where its popularity comes from by the fact that the on-train announcements when you get there are in Arabic and Chinese as well as English! Sensible enterprise from Chiltern Rail.
As the buses stand waiting for the traffic lights to change outside the Parish Office I often read the adverts on their sides; "La La Land" is being well-promoted. In the last few days adverts have appeared from a vegan organisation, GoVeganWorld.com, which have come as quite a surprise. There is one with a cute calf being nuzzled by its cuddly mother and the message "Dairy takes babies from their mothers". Now this irritates me on several levels. First, there's the sentimental anthropomorphizing; "babies". No. Baby as a noun refers to human infants; we might indeed talk about baby calves, but that's using baby as an adjective, because what you are talking about is a calf. The cute picture is part of the sentimentalizing as well, the attempt to provoke an emotional rather than a rational response. Then there's the assumed high moral tone, the implication that vegans are more moral than the rest of us. Most of all, though, I object to the idea that this is about animal welfare, when it manifestly isn't: if the dairy industry is abolished the result will not be lots of happy cows, but lots of dead cows, and then no cows at all, because why would there be any cows if we weren't milking them? If existence is better than non-existence (which seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial point of view) then veganism, which implies the extermination of all farm animal species, can hardly claim moral superiority. Of course humans have obligations to treat other sentient beings responsibly and kindly but it's perfectly possible to have a dairy industry and an egg industry that aren't cruel; cruelty and abuse are not inherent in consuming milk or eggs. The extermination of whole species really would be implied if the world did truly go vegan!
Thanks To Keble
Last week I had a couple of very pleasant days at Keble College, Oxford. Keble are the patrons of the living of St Mary Mags, which in the past meant that they appointed the vicar; nowadays it's all more consultative, but they still have a role. Like good patrons they want to support their incumbents, and so put on a biennial conference for us, and that was what I went to last week. We heard from two CSMV sisters about prayer, which was helpful, and it was a good opportunity for me to re-establish links with them, as CSMV sisters worked in the parish for many decades, up to the 1950s, and it would be very good to get them involved in the heritage project. It was great to meet other Keble incumbents, and encouraging to see priests with a very wide range of experience, and lots of learning. It was also good to meet a couple of ordinands who are at Keble, and the Chaplain, also Fr Everett (though he rejoices in the Christian name Nevsky).
New Lines
Going to Oxford I tried for myself the new route from Marylebone, and can thoroughly recommend it. There is a half-hourly service, which is as quick as the First Great Western trains from Paddington, and they are pleasantly uncrowded. The grotesque overcrowding on the Paddington-Oxford trains has been a feature of the line for years, so this great boost in capacity is very welcome. The stop on the new curve at Bicester is for Bicester Village, the vastly popular retail outlet centre, and you can tell where its popularity comes from by the fact that the on-train announcements when you get there are in Arabic and Chinese as well as English! Sensible enterprise from Chiltern Rail.
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