HOLY WEEK

Good Friday

On Good Friday I led a children's service at 10, then helped with the ecumenical service at Maida Hill Piazza at 12.15, and finally presided at the solemn liturgy of the day at 2pm. That's been the routine here for years, along with the service at St Peter's at 11, which my colleagues kindly look after. It seems like a lot of effort, but actually each of these meets some sort of need, and I'm not sure what I would change. Next year, when St Mary Mags is out of action, we'll have to come up with another plan, and see how that goes. In any case, being in church rather a lot seems appropriate on Good Friday. In fact this year I ended the day by going to the Barbican to hear Bach's St John Passion, which might be thought excessive, but I found a tremendous conclusion. As it happened I only heard about it because one of my congregation was playing in it, and he apologised that he wasn't around much for Holy Week, as he was playing it in Norwich and Cambridge as well as at the Barbican. I checked on the website, and found there were still tickets, so I just went along and got a nice central seat right at the back, and could afford a programme as well, which was, to be honest, pretty much essential. It was a lovely experience, with the excellent Mark Padmore singing the Evangelist and Simon Russell Beale reading T S Eliot and a psalm in an effort to make it feel a bit more like the act of worship that Bach wrote it for.

A moment of striking epiphany on Good Friday afternoon. It was bright sunshine, and I was looking out of the kitchen window. A goldfinch flew down and settled on the clump of santolina outside the back door. For several minutes he perched there, plucking off little shoots. I'm not sure whether he ate them or took them away for nesting material; if the latter, he will have a nice moth-proof nest, as santolina is a traditional insect repellent. The goldfinch is, in western Christian iconography, an indicator of the Passion of Christ (because of the little splash of red which brings to mind a wound) and so to see one, close to, on Good Friday was particularly memorable, and spiritually appropriate.

At the ecumenical service I was dressed as usual for the occasion, in cassock and cloak, with a little black hat. A woman I know slightly (she used to sing with Helen in the Community Choir) came up to me and said she hadn't seen me "all gussied up" before. I just laughed, but thought of saying, "You want to see gussied up? Come to church on Sunday morning!" When our repertoire extends to lace and brocade, being all in black doesn't feel gussied up! The hat, incidentally, was a Libyan chechia, bought in the souk in Tripoli some years ago, which has a distinctly square profile, rather like a Canterbury cap (which used to be worn by Archbishop Michael Ramsey, but which I haven't seen anyone wearing for years). The chechia folds up like a biretta and so can be slipped in the pocket if not needed, but no-one ever queries its appropriateness as clerical headgear. I confess I still choose the biretta if it looks like rain, as wet felt is not comfortable.


Public Witness

The Good Friday ecumenical event is meant as a piece of public witness, and we were about a hundred people from various churches demonstrating our faith to the market traders and shoppers, though even by lunchtime it's still pretty quiet on the Harrow Road on Good Friday. Last year we had a complaint about noise, but I think the complainer must have gone out this year, because we had no such attention this time, and we were certainly no less noisy. It was a lot quieter on Palm Sunday morning, when we walked in procession as usual from St Mary Mags to St Peter's, but we were stared at by people on an 18 bus as it stopped outside Betfred. We don't make a big deal of it, with marshals in high-vis jackets and so on, and we try not to be a nuisance, as we keep to the pavement, so it might be thought a fairly low-key piece of witness, but witness it certainly is. We process with cross and incense, and robed servers (and obviously clergy) with palm branches, and the congregation carry their palm crosses. For the ordinary congregation member it is standing up to be counted in a way that normally never occurs, as they demonstrate their Christian commitment very publicly, walking past mosque, betting shop and off-licence. Just before we came out onto the Harrow Road we stopped for prayer, praying for all the people going about their business, and I hope we all held the passers-by in our prayers, because it's quite easy for something like that to feel confrontational, which is not the idea at all. We are walking to enter into the spiritual experience of the last week of Jesus's life, and so an indifferent or hostile crowd isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we mustn't slip into an "us and them" view of the crowd, because we are all living together in this place, and we are all part of the humanity Christ died to save. The danger is that public witness can seem like aggression or provocation (and can feel like self-assertion) when in fact it should be proclaiming the presence of Christians in a community and our commitment to that community. We should be going out holding the community in our hearts.     


Catching the sun

I came back from a week in Jordan without any discernible effect from the sun. Last Saturday I went to Lords with my brother, to watch Essex playing Middlesex, and came away with my face completely sunburnt. My brother remarked that he had feared for my blood pressure until he looked in a mirror and found he was the same. Admittedly we were in the front row of the grandstand for eight and a half hours, but the sun seemed very weak, and it was never warm. The result is that I must now endure the ignominy of all the skin of my forehead peeling off in rather unseemly fashion. It wasn't a bad day's cricket, but not cheery for us Essex boys, as our fast bowlers were made to look very harmless in comparison with Finn, Murtagh and Roland-Jones. Play was really very slow, which was not helped by Roland-Jones starting his run-up somewhere in Maida Vale, and we were there until 7.30pm. The previous day they had gone off for bad light at teatime, which was frankly very surprising, but that meant we had to get through extra overs in the day to make up for those lost, but also that they couldn't start until the umpires' light meters showed a brighter light than had prevailed when they came off on Friday afternoon, so we were twenty minutes late starting. Discussion of bad light seems odd when you are looking at the Lords floodlights, but the planning conditions imposed by Westminster City Council mean that they can only be used for a limited number of scheduled occasions (such is the power of the St John's Wood Society) and so are purely decorative for county matches.   

A LIFE ON THE INLAND WAVE

Pretty Boats

Yesterday I saw a cormorant on the canal bank, which was handsome. but one permanent feature that makes the Grand Union Canal such an attractive part of our neighbourhood is the number of boats that you see, and that number has increased enormously in the past ten years. The big change came before the Olympics, when boats were turned out of the River Lea and the Bow Back Rivers in order to create a security zone around the Olympic Park; a lot of those boats came round the Regent's Canal and ended up around our way. There are a few permanent moorings round here, on Blomfield Road and Maida Avenue (and beyond Lisson Grove), but those are virtually all full. The great majority of boats here have people living on them permanently, but are moored in temporary berths. That means that they are supposed to move on every fortnight or so, which some do, but many do not. I conducted a wedding for a couple who live on a boat a couple of years ago, and we discovered that they were able to fulfil the residence qualification for banns by being moored on my stretch of canalside for the fifteen days in which the banns were called; I know that they move backwards and forwards on the canal between Paddington Basin and Southall. Others, observably, do not move very often. There is clearly an infrastructure problem here, because I'm not at all sure that the hygiene station by the entrance to the Pool can really cop with the demands on it now. I have no idea what people pay for permanent moorings, which have proper facilities, but clearly it suits some boat-dwellers not to bother with that, but to remain nomadic. They like the freedom, and they like it not costing too much, which is fair enough, but facilities are an issue (in our neck of the woods it is as simple as rubbish, great piles of which sometimes appear on the Green or the towpath).


Losing the Stakeholders

Now the Canal and River Trust seems to have fallen out with boat dwellers. The CRT was set up in 2012 as an independent charity to manage the assets of the former, publicly-owned British Waterways. The history is that the canals were built as private enterprises and mostly bought up by railway companies in the nineteenth century (with some idea of an integrated freight network), and so when the railways were nationalised after the second world war, the canals came too (along with a fair amount of housing in our area). Obviously British Waterways was an ideological affront to contemporary economic wisdom, but the successor body, CRT, was set adrift with not much capacity to raise the money it needs to maintain and run the canal network. It was an unusual privatisation, as CRT is a charity, but that's clearly because no-one could get the business model to be attractive enough for investors to put money in. CRT tried initially to raise income by issuing licences for people to cycle on towpaths, but that has been quietly abandoned, as they had no resources to police this system, and it implied that cyclists could expect safe, well-surfaced towpaths, which CRT was in no position to deliver. Now, they are looking to make money from selling public moorings off to private investors. Here in Paddington the plan is to sell 140ft of public moorings, directly outside the station entrance, to British Land, who will seek commercial tenants for them. British Land is the huge property developer who is responsible for the Paddington Basin development, having acquired all that formerly publicly-owned land long before CRT was created. Canal dwellers are unsurprisingly suspicious of British Land, whose stewardship of what appears to be public space is of course completely unaccountable. Meanwhile, over in east London CRT wants to sell off a whole batch of public moorings near Broadway Market as part of a regeneration scheme.


Cosying up to Shareholders

You can understand CRT's desire to raise some money to try to do the job that the government saddled it with, but it is clearly perverse to reduce the number of public moorings in central London when it is plain that the demand for them is growing hugely. Of course, the reason demand is growing is that canal boats offer an affordable form of housing (if you can bear the cramped conditions) which is increasingly being used by young professionals. That, of course, is just a symptom of London's deep housing crisis, but we know that the present government has no intention at all of doing anything to tackle it, because they actually believe that the overseas investment which has so overheated the market is a good thing.     

PIGEON POST

The Two Pigeons

Regular readers may remember that I am a grudging admirer of the feral rock dove, which we call the urban pigeon, but no great lover of them. As part of the development work at St Mary Mags we have just cleared a porch of pigeons, and I presently  have much more pigeon interaction than I would wish. So, the north porch had a brick wall built across it, some time in the 1950s, when most of Clarendon Crescent was derelict, and the porch had simply become a venue for working girls to take their clients. The porch was not, however, sealed up, because the odd configuration of the building made that virtually impossible, and an elaborate array of netting was installed above the wall to try to keep pigeons out. I have no idea when the netting failed, but it was a long time ago. My predecessors used to store things in the porch, and there were the remains of a rusty scaffold tower, rotten ladders and several school benches in there, but the main feature in recent years was guano. I used to tell people that it was one of the nastiest spaces in London, and when I opened the door they tended to agree. The stench in summer was terrific.

So, we had the porch cleared. It was great to see the steps, and to realise that it is actually a handsome little space. The evening that the contractors finished work, with brand new netting, there were forty pigeons perched around the porch and on the west end of the church, which was a bit disconcerting. It occurred to me that if they all came and landed on the netting together they could probably break it. The numbers diminished in the following days, but a lot were still sitting on top of the wall, and defecating into the porch (just to spite us) while noticeable deposits of guano were becoming visible on the cills of the west window.  It took the pigeons ten days to get back in; Lesley heard them, and when she opened the door she found three inside. Two got out, but one remained. There seemed only the tiniest break in the netting, but that seemed to be enough. A comedy interlude came when Lesley went out into the porch and pulled the door to behind her, using the handle on that side (so that they shouldn't go into the church) only to discover that the handle did not actually operate the latch on the inside. Fortunately she had a phone, and I was nearby. The contractors were recalled. The man came and shot the pigeon and repaired the netting. All very businesslike.

This week, though, there are tell-tale signs of dropped nesting material on the pavement, underneath the tower. Lesley has seen them going into the spire, which is bad news. Perhaps ringing the bell might disturb them. Today we saw a pair apparently looking to set up home in a rainwater hopper; even worse.There is no sign of rain, and it would need to be torrential.


Closing Offices

I suppose it seems to Westminster City Councillors that closing local housing offices is purely a question of streamlining bureaucracy, because they have to have had a major failure of imagination to embark on the plan which has been revealed, to close all their estate offices, and centralise the service. They clearly do not understand what the offices actually do, because they couldn't be so callous as to deliberately intend to increase the isolation of the elderly, vulnerable and marginalised. If they had actually asked anyone who works in the offices, or indeed lives on the estates, they would have learnt that the offices perform a valuable social function, being a local point of contact for all sorts of people. Those with mobility problems are the most obvious, but there are also the battered wives who are able to go to the office but wouldn't be allowed to go elsewhere, and there are the non-English speakers whose children can come with them to the local office. It is also simply more efficient to have housing staff who actually know the area, and can walk round the corner to see a problem for themselves. All this will be lost. The effect is to distance the people of the area still further from those who rule them. Westminster City Council put its housing into the hands of CityWest Homes, and so can disclaim responsibility for what happens, and so when you have a complaint it's not Westminster's fault, but CityWest. You could complain to a local housing officer, but now that facility is to be taken away, and so the sense that any human being is actually willing to take any responsibility is diminished even further.


Shouting

At nine o'clock this morning a bearded man with a can of beer was shouting at the world at the top of the park. By eleven-fifteen he had moved on to the bus stop on the Harrow Road, outside Betfred, with a different can, but still shouting. I know how he feels, but don't have as much energy.        

BACK HOME

Back Home

I return to London from a week in Jordan to find that it is quite as warm here as it was there, though the sun seems stronger there. It was certainly warmer here yesterday evening than any evening in the past week in Amman. I’m not complaining; I had a splendid time, and the weather was just right for sightseeing, of which I did a great deal. Helen and I saw the major sights a few years ago, so this was an opportunity to see some more obscure ones, in the company of friends who live out there. I’m afraid I put together a fairly demanding itinerary, but it all worked pretty well, and introduced them to lots of new places. We hired a car, and I was ferried around, barking commands like some colonial pro-consul.

Decapolis

The student of the New Testament is familiar with the Decapolis, the confederation of city-states that were part of the geography at the time of Jesus. The time that they break in most obviously is in the incident of Jesus and the herd of pigs, the “Gadarene swine” (of St Matthew), which St Mark calls “Gerasene”; those are the adjectives from the Decapolis cities of Gadara and Gerasa. Now neither is actually by Lake Galilee (Lake Tiberias as locals call it), but the gospels don’t mean the cities themselves, they refer to “the territory of the Gadarenes/Gerasenes” and we just don’t know how the territory of those city states worked. Well, Gerasa is Jerash, one of Jordan’s top two tourist attractions, and a very well-preserved classical city, which I visited thoroughly last time, and so was content to see (twice) from the road this time, but it doesn’t feel in any way close to the lake (it’s about 30 miles away). This time, though, I was able to visit Gadara (modern Umm Qais) which is on a hilltop from which you can see the lake. The story would make sense there, even if the swine were more likely to have plunged into the gorge of the Yarmuk river, which is nearby, as opposed to the lake, which is 5 or 6 miles away. That very top left-hand corner of Jordan is full of precipices, and so the story fits there. It’s one of the reasons to believe that Matthew used (and corrected) Mark, because “Gadarene” is just much more credible than “Gerasene”. When you’re there you can see that.

So I ticked off two of the Decapolis in Gerasa and Gadara, and I was staying in a third, because Amman was the classical Philadelphia (and they have considerably beautified the Forum). I also insisted that my friend take me to a fourth, Pella, which is on a hill overlooking the upper Jordan valley. Pella is the most extraordinarily evocative and lovely site, and we had it entirely to ourselves. You can look across the Jordan to the break in the hills that leads up to Nazareth, about 30 miles away on the Palestinian side, and simply wonder. Then I ticked off a surprise fifth, which I hadn’t expected, Capitolias. A local friend of my friends saw from Facebook that we were at Umm Qais and insisted we come to his family’s house, in Beit Ras, and in conversation it became clear that they too had a Roman theatre, and that Beit Ras was Capitolias, so we drove a few blocks, and there on a scruffy hillside was a pink stone theatre, recently restored but rather neglected (a characteristic Jordanian combination). We just managed to see it before dusk fell, with the assistance of locals who pointed out the hole in the fence. A happy piece of serendipity.

Stylites

Pella was exhilarating, but it was also really exciting to see a Stylite pillar at a place called Umm ar-Rasas, the Roman Castron Mefaa. There are some splendid mosaics in ruined churches, and an interesting expanse of ruins, but then about a mile away, across open country, is this amazing tower. It’s about 45 feet high, with a room at the top, (and what may be a room at the bottom) but otherwise solid, and with no means of ascent. Scholars believe this to be a Stylite pillar, built for a (presumably) 5^th century hermit to live on. I’ve been to Qalat Samaan, near Aleppo, where they built a vast church around the space where St Simeon Stylites’s pillar stood, but of that pillar only a boulder allegedly remained. Here was a structure that enabled you to understand the whole thing, because you could certainly have lived in the room at the top (though it would have been very windy). One of my friends was rather affronted by this showy sort of asceticism, and thought it a very attention-seeking and self-centred form of devotion; my own thought was what an enormous communal investment must have gone into this solitary enterprise, because obviously the Stylite always needed people to come and bring him food (which he would winch up), but what had never occurred to me before was that a custom-built pillar was a major (and expensive) construction project.  Perhaps he was a rich man and built his own pillar, but if not, then he must have had rich supporters paying for it. Either way, it suggests some communal investment in the spiritual exercise.

End of Term

Return to the schools to find my head teachers seriously looking forward to the holiday. I get vexed that they haven’t concentrated on doing the things that I want them to do, but then I gradually discover a litany of staff on long-term sickness, grievance procedures, capability procedures, accusations, staff giving notice and falling rolls. And these are two good schools. Both actually good, and “good” in Ofsted terms (which is not necessarily the same thing). I try to cheer them up by pointing out that they both stand to gain from the government’s new National Funding Formula, like most schools in Westminster, but unlike almost every other school in London, because of some obscure decision that was taken on the extinction of ILEA (back in the 1980s) which meant that Westminster schools have been much less well-funded than other London schools for thirty years. It may not happen, though, as Tory MPs in the shires are still complaining that not enough money has been taken away from the undeserving poor.