GOOD NEWS

Job Done

The Parks Department have pretty much completed the making good around the outdoor gym equipment. Sadly, they don't seem to have given enough water to some of the new turf, so that will need to be replaced, but otherwise they have done a good job. Most importantly, the equipment is getting a lot of use, and muscular people are doing press-ups beside it while their friends do whatever it is they are doing on the bars. It all encourages use of our public space into the evenings, which is all to the good.


Respect For The Jersey

Most of us who cycle round the Park wear nasty lycra, but every so often you see someone more elegantly attired. A couple of times now I've seen a chap in a Del Tongo-Colnago jersey which is clearly woollen, with buttons on the back pockets. They were a team in the 1980s, so if it's a real vintage item it's thirty-five years old, and I think it might be, because it is a peculiar shade of yellow, which is characteristic of photos of the authentic old jersey. If you had such a precious relic, would you wear it? Clearly I wouldn't, as I can't wear wool next to my skin. That has the good effect of making it impossible for me to buy the modern replica jerseys made in fine merino wool, which are staggeringly expensive. I just buy replicas in modern materials, less authentic, but more wearable.


Job Nearly Done

The church conservation works are going really well, and the scaffolding has come down from most of the south side of the church, so I open my front door and see clean brick and stone, and sharp edges where once there were lumps and bumps. There are intact windows, with nice clean guards on them. The most extraordinary sight, though, is the Undercroft windows, because at the moment they don't have their iron guard railings in place, because Cliveden's masons are busily repairing and replacing stone. This means that the four windows to the Chapel, which were altered by Comper when he created it in 1895 are suddenly revealed as deep stone caverns. It's a reminder of how much work Comper's creation of the Chapel involved, but it also demonstrates the thickness of the walls. Street's remaining window is by contrast inconspicuous. Cleaning also makes the way that Comper's arched windows have to divert the stringcourse upwards very obvious and unpleasing. I wonder how Historic England would have assessed Comper's scheme, had it been brought to them in 1894-5? They would surely have judged that Comper was doing "harm" to Street's building, and they would have been right, but those deep stone window embrasures remind one of how heroic Comper's intervention was. I regret the loss of Street's rather chaste original south elevation, but you can't deny the success of Comper's Chapel in its own terms.

Meanwhile, the scaffolding is being brought down inside the church. Visits now are accompanied by the clatter of scaffold poles, and are being restricted to a progressively smaller area. The excellent way that the nave ceiling tones in with the colours of brick and stone has also become clear. The colour is terrific.


That Wedding

I have been telling parishioners to watch the magnificent sermon. The funny thing is the stony face of the Dean of Windsor in the background. It was all wonderful, and few people seem to have spotted the Archbishop's error. It is always a danger when asking bishops to do weddings, because they're out of practice, so it's not surprising when they get things wrong. In this case, he failed to join their right hands together; he just looped his stole around their already joined hands, Meghan's right, and Harry's left. If you look at a recording you will see him make a pig's ear of the stole, and Harry help him, with his right hand! Still, it doesn't invalidate it, and it's pleasing for the professional observer to be able to spot something. Actually the big surprise was the modern Lord's Prayer, and I have seen no comment about that. Up until that point, every textual choice had been conservative, so it was a surprise. I was sorry they signed the registers in that old-fashioned way, as it creates a total anti-climax. It is much more satisfactory to do it in the modern position, before the prayers. Still, that was the Church of England, doing okay.  

FAITH SCHOOLS, TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY

Helen's book has finally been published, and that is the title. Please urge any librarians you know to order it for their institutions. If you review books, ask Palgrave Macmillan for a review copy. If you know any review editors, (especially of academic journals) tell them to ask for a review copy. I am, of course, hugely grateful to Palgrave Macmillan (a branch of the vast Axel Springer empire) for publishing the book, and am very pleased with the result (though Helen wouldn't have liked the colour of the cover much), but I can't help thinking that publishing has become a bit minimal. When they accept the book, they ask you how you can market it (on the basis that they're not going to) and now I discover that if we want a book launch we have to organise it ourselves; they'll give us some discount flyers, but that's it. Worst of all, though, for an academic publisher, is that they don't routinely provide an index; my co-editor Germ produced a lady in the Netherlands who is a professional indexer, and I paid her five hundred pounds to do the job.

So what does the book say? It presents the results of Helen's research into the effect that schools might have on students' attitudes of tolerance, and demonstrates that "faith schools" do no worse in that regard than secular schools, with the single exception of a Muslim independent school. She was interested to see whether you could identify a paradigm of "fundamentalist" education across religions, and so examined Roman Catholic and Evangelical Christian examples, as well as Muslim, but found that it was not so. Even in the Roman Catholic boarding school, where the children lived in a total environment, saturated with religion, they emerged with entirely mainstream, tolerant attitudes. One of the publisher's reviewers remarked that it was a pity that she hadn't studied a really right-wing Evangelical school, at which I exploded, because actually the school in question was pretty much as "extreme" as you can find in England, drawing all its pupils from a single large congregation, of very conservative Evangelical outlook, and actually you can't tell how right-wing it was from anything that Helen wrote. The students' views weren't particularly right-wing, and so the reviewer supposed that the school can't have been right wing; but THAT'S THE POINT! Schools aren't actually very successful in indoctrinating children. And frankly that school wasn't trying to indoctrinate its students, however theologically conservative it was. None of the Christian schools were. There are quotes in the book from students (from the hours of material that Helen recorded) demonstrating quite nuanced ethical reasoning, and some of the most impressive are from students from very "closed" religious backgrounds.   

One of the by-products of the research was to demonstrate the uselessness of the term "faith schools", which makes it ironic that we had to use it in the title. Helen pointed out that it's not an official term, though it was popularized by the Blair government and happily taken up by journalists; the official term is "schools of a religious character", but actually the category is not meaningful, because the "character" of these schools differs enormously. Helen excluded Church of England schools from her research (which make up the vast majority of "faith schools") because their aim is explicitly different from any others, in that they exist to educate the general population in a way that is congenial to the teachings of the Church of England, not to educate only the children of a specific group of believers. Now, it can be argued that Anglican secondary schools are increasingly educating only the children of believers (or at least attenders, the historian recognises "occasional conformists" here) because their admission policies allow them to select on that basis, and in the current climate they have to select on some basis, but that's not actually the ethos of the school, and so it does not result in a school climate which is narrowly sectarian. As we point out in the preface to the book, the problem there is selection, not faith. So Anglican schools are unlike the rest because they exist for the general population (and the great majority of Anglican schools embrace that wholeheartedly, though I know one locally that emphatically doesn't, which is frankly shameful). Even among the schools that exist to serve a particular religious group, Helen's research makes it clear that there is great variation in character.

The publisher's reviewer also thought it was a shame that Helen hadn't researched a wider range of schools, well, she thought that too, but there are limits to what you can do, and frankly her supervisors were anxious that she had taken on too many as it was. She conducted her research in six schools: state and independent Roman Catholic, state and independent secular (as a "control"), Evangelical independent, and Muslim independent. There were no Evangelical state schools (though an interesting discussion might be had about the academies belonging to the Emmanuel Schools Foundation in the north-east) at the time of research, so that category didn't exist. Helen tried at length to get access to Muslim state schools but was consistently rebuffed, which was a real frustration. In fact, getting into any schools to do research is a major struggle, as any educational researcher will tell you. It's easier to get into independent schools simply because head teachers have more freedom and there is less sense that the staff are so burdened by record-keeping and jumping through hoops that they need to be protected from anything else that makes their lives more complicated and might take up valuable time. Several of the schools used (and I think all those involved in pilots) were acquired through personal connections, which wouldn't have been open to the average PhD student in their twenties. I came out of this thinking that state schools should have an obligation to co-operate with state-funded research (as Helen's was) but that's never going to happen because the Department For Education doesn't actually believe in research. So she regretted not having been able to get into a Muslim state school, and I think she had mixed feelings about not having extended the study to Jewish schools, but realistically it just wasn't possible, as it would have been a whole lot more work, because there would have been a whole new literature to read as well as more children to interview.  

Colleagues said to Helen that she couldn't do that research because it was too sensitive, which only made her more determined, and perhaps one should say that it was all checked by the ethics people at the Institute of Education, so she had covered her back, but there was a feeling that it was dangerous to distinguish between religions (which is why opinion-formers are comfortable with the term "faith schools"). The truth is, though, that it was only in the Muslim school that most students expressed intolerant views, and it is possible to see how the school might encourage or entrench those views. Helen used Social Identity Theory to demonstrate how unsurprising that was in contemporary England, which I thought was interesting rather than inflammatory.

ANOTHER HERO

Eating My Words

You will have noticed my scepticism about the outdoor gym equipment being installed on the Green; well, I am happy to eat my words. Most of the equipment was in frequent use on the warm evenings ten days ago, and even in the cold people are out there. Lots of muscular young men seem to know what to do with the bars which, to me, are completely mystifying. This is very good to see. Clearly the contractors installing the equipment didn't regard it as their job to "make good" (as builders say) afterwards, as the grass remains badly churned up by their vehicles, and there are some very sharp concrete kerbs, which I imagine are intended to be mitigated by turf. Presumably the Parks Department will eventually do this, though it remains a hazard just now. Perhaps they feel they shouldn't do anything before the local elections on Thursday, in case the work gives a boost to the sitting councillors; Westminster applies the notion of "purdah" rather strictly.


On the Subject of Elections

The excitement caused by the poll putting Labour in the lead in Westminster has subsided somewhat. There seems to be a feeling that Labour may pile up votes in wards like ours but not manage to win the wards that could change hands. Outside Waitrose a couple of weeks ago, there were the Conservatives one side of the door, and the Lib Dems the other; the Big Issue seller had positioned herself beside the Tories, providing a pleasing vignette of contemporary London. Next door in K & C, although the enormous Conservative preponderance in the south of the borough is expected to return a Conservative council, I can't help feeling that the really appalling behaviour of Conservative councillors over the past years might yet come home to roost, now that it has been exposed by Grenfell. Anyway, I shall watch with interest. Vote early, vote often! (As we used to say at University).


On my Travels

I left warm, sunny London for a week in warm, sunny Tunisia. It ended up raining there too, but it was never cold like this. I foolishly turned my heating off and forgot to tell the house-sitter how to turn it on again. I was (perhaps a bit pretentiously) reading the "Confessions" of St Augustine, because a good deal of that is about his time living in Carthage, and I'd never read it before. Helen and I went to Tunisia ten years ago, so I had seen some of the places this tour was going, but it also got me to places that were impossible by public transport back then. Anyway, reading Augustine made Carthage (which is still rather underwhelming) more worthwhile, and we went to the Amphitheatre, (which we hadn't last time) which is where Perpetua and Felicity were martyred, which was moving. This time I got into the Cathedral in Tunis (which I remember being closed when we tried before) and saw the magnificent reliquary of St Louis (nineteenth century neo-gothic nonsense, but terrific). The big highlight, though, was Kairouan, which is very evocative, with a terrific early mosque, and a delightful shrine. I took far too many pictures, and bought incense at the shrine.


Meeting Your Heroes, Part 2

As I walked down the aisle of the plane at Tunis Airport, I was working out where my seat was, as you do, with particular anxiety as I had been stuck in the middle of a row. As I identified my place, I instantly recognised the man in the adjoining seat as Joe Mercer (champion jockey in 1979). I considered various cheesy opening gambits, but settled on leaning over and saying, "You signed a picture of Brigadier Gerard for me in 1972." He responded that I had a good memory, and we began a very pleasant series of chats. It really is difficult not to be in awe of a boyhood idol, whose autograph you once collected, but equally you don't want to be a bore. Still, he seemed very happy to chat, though we both read our books from time to time (his James Patterson, mine Mick Herron). He wisely avoided the lunch tray: I'm not sure how they made the ravioli that dry. They wouldn't give him a second glass of Coke, though. I wanted to shout at them, "Give the man anything he wants! This is not just some random old gent, this is one of the finest flat race jockeys of my lifetime! This is the man who rode the Brigadier!" but of course I didn't. We talked about Brigadier Gerard, and he (like me) regards him as a freak. I had no idea he had ridden the Brigadier's (rather ordinary) sire, Queen's Hussar, but he did. He expressed the view that the Brigadier's stud career was so undistinguished because it was mismanaged by the formidable Lady Macdonald-Buchanan, at whose stud he stood. It occurs to me that Royal Palace, another boyhood favourite of mine, also stood at her stud and was also a failure (this had never struck me before). I tentatively asked him how he could bear to go on riding when his elder brother was killed (that was in 1959 at Ascot, and led to crash helmets being made compulsory, though concrete fence posts weren't removed for another thirty years or so); he responded that you just had to go on. That was a response that spoke a lot about his generation; he is rising 84. A great jockey, and a fine man.