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It’s pathetic, the way one grasps at connection with celebrity: I caught myself the other day referring to “my footballer”. The fact is that we baptized the child of a professional footballer a couple of years ago, and he (the footballer, not the child) is now playing in the Premier League, and scored a spectacular goal a few weeks ago. Now the interesting thing is that he isn’t famous, and has only started appearing in his team’s starting eleven in the past few weeks, but has been with them for years, hardly playing, but constantly being injured. I had supposed he must be pretty good, or they wouldn’t have persevered with him for all this time, and it seems I was right. I felt a ridiculous glow of pride when he scored, and now watch out for him on Match of the Day. 

I remember when I was a country parson in Cornwall the great excitement when a footballer moved into one of my villages. Of course he played for Plymouth Argyle (the Green Slime or the Scum, for the Exonians amongst us) which made sense, as their ground was an easy twenty-minute drive away. The point nobody made at the time was that he was the only black man for at least five miles around, but then in Cornwall that wasn’t a cause for particular comment, since all incomers (like me) were expected to be strange in some way or another. Our footballer here in W2 does not stand out in that way, but his residence makes less sense; he must spend a lot of time in his car, but I suppose the Westway helps.

Generations

At another, more recent, baptism, one of my churchwardens said to me, “There’s a great-grandfather here.” The old gent was frankly easy to pick out, since he was obviously elderly and in a suit. He was also monoglot Portuguese, so after “Bom dia” I didn’t have much chance of conversation. This set me to thinking, though, because my churchwarden clearly thought this was special, but I’m not sure that it was, round here. Because I still do a fair number of baptisms for couples in their early twenties, whose parents are only in their mid-forties, and I can assure you that nothing makes you feel more ancient than discovering that you are older than the grandparents. I’m quite sure that we’ve had a great-grandparent or two present on some of those occasions, but it was perhaps less obvious because they weren’t amazingly old, and so didn’t stand out. Young women are  having babies generally older, but it remains the case that if your mother was young when she had you, you are much more likely to have a baby at a young age yourself.

Successive governments have orchestrated moral panic about “teenage pregnancy” (at one point when I was in Reading, my parish was supposed to have had the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe) but the fact remains that the late teens is the time when women are most physiologically suited to giving birth, and for some young women having babies is what they actually want to do with their lives. Yes, that makes them economically unproductive, but does that therefore make it an illegitimate choice? I desperately want people to fulfil their potential, but even I have to recognise that for some people that does not involve going to university; being a good parent and building stable families seems like a worthy aim as well.  

You Can’t Afford to Die

One of the strange things about ministry in central London is how few funerals we do. Partly that’s down to the totally atypical religious and ethnic diversity of the population, but also to its youthfulness. If you remember the song, “Capped Teeth and Caesar Salad” (by Don Black from Lloyd Webber’s “Tell me on a Sunday”) you may remember the lines, “The cost of land’s so high/ you can’t afford to die./ If you feel bad there/ you dial a prayer” which was about 1980s Beverley Hills, but you can say the same for modern London. There are few retirement homes, because, like pubs, they are relatively unprofitable ways of using land. Meanwhile, older people often move out of London to be near their families (who cannot afford to live here, or don’t want to bring up children in the metropolis). So the result is that we don’t do many funerals. 

There is also the slight suspicion that some funeral directors have their favourite clergy, who are undemanding, always available and sometimes allegedly from the same Lodge. I am constantly amazed at how little effort many undertakers seem to make to even find out the correct clergy to approach; you can discover anyone’s Anglican parish at the click of your mouse these days, but funeral directors are, as an industry, quite oddly resistant to computers. Meanwhile, the cost of a funeral continues to go up, and it’s not pushed by our fees, which are fixed by Order in Council and go up very modestly (and which go to the diocese to help pay our salary). The cost of burial plots in municipal graveyards is increasing exponentially, as the authorities run out of space (as we won't do as our forefathers did and simply go back to the beginning and start again, and we've got headstones), and cremation does have a genuine cost, which increases with the price of fuel. The fact is, though, that it is an industry with very limited competition, and a customer base who are not generally in the mood to shop around or argue the toss about prices. I should say that I know that I have got good deals from the undertakers I have dealt with, for which I am very grateful, but then I do know a bit more about the business than the average customer.    

DAYS AND NIGHTS

Open Day

We weren't able to take part in London Open House this year, as the church was still a building site, but now that we have the building back we are taking pains to show it off. Those who have been volunteering with the Project were among the first to see the restored interior, as we had a reception as a sort of "thank you" to them. That was also the occasion for the premiere of a series of short films made by local young people, responding to significant places in the neighbourhood, which will be shown on the screens in the foyer of the new extension. We had secured a little Arts Council money, which enabled us to employ a professional filmmaker who was able to work with the teenagers to turn their ideas into reality. They were generally interesting new takes on familiar places, with one that wasn't on our list; one group of youngsters made their film about Grenfell Tower, where they had lost friends. It's not Paddington, but it is only down the road, and very definitely a neighbouring community.

So, having given the volunteers privileged access, we threw a community open day, so anyone who fancied could come in, and lots did. My PDT colleagues did all the work, I just led some guided tours, but it was an excellent day. I was amazed at the numbers, and the variety of people who came; the first people I met were a baronet and his lady wife, and then I talked to an Eritrean mother. The conversations went on all afternoon. Among all the family activities (children making things from twigs) we also had a string quartet, and the delightful sight of a little Anglo-Caribbean boy dancing with the violinist as they played the Csardas will stay with me for a long time. We seem to be managing to continue to connect with a rich cross-section of local people, and the trick will be to continue to do that in the events and programmes that we put on when we're properly up and running (Easter, perhaps).


Infinitum Est...

That could be the motto of the building project (and frankly, most building projects) but actually it's the enigmatic message on the plinth of our War Memorial Calvary. An odd one, because it's not an obvious quotation. The Latin is simple enough, it means what it looks like, "It is not finished" or "It is endless/infinite". But the question is, what is "it"? Sometimes in Latin tags the verb is "understood", you don't need to write it because it's obvious, but that's less often the case with nouns, for obvious reasons. Here though, the subject of the sentence, the noun, is understood, though obviously we're not actually understanding it terribly well, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this. The two words we have tell us that the subject is singular ("est" is singular) and neuter (the "um" at the end of "infinitum" is the neuter ending) but whereas in English almost every noun is neuter, it's not the same in Latin, where masculine and feminine nouns are more numerous. So we are hunting for a singular neuter noun, that should be obvious when read on the plinth of a crucifix. Perhaps I am being obtuse, but it's proving difficult. Love, mercy, justice, suffering: all feminine. My ancient "O"-level Latin insistently supplies one neuter noun, "bellum" which means war. Could they have really meant that in 1929 when they erected the Calvary? If so, it was horribly prescient. There is a famous cartoon, beloved of historians, which was published at the time of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which shows Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister saying, "Curious, I seem to hear a child weeping," while behind a pillar is the crying child with the label "1940 class". The French general, Foch, famously described the Armistice as, "Not a peace but a twenty-year cease-fire" but I wouldn't have expected that analysis on an English war memorial.

I was rather expecting that someone would ask me what the inscription meant when we rededicated the Calvary the other day, but no-one did. Curious how words we don't understand become invisible. The whole school trooped out into Rowington Close, and I thanked everyone involved (including generous donors). Then the Acting Archdeacon re-hallowed the Calvary, and I led the Act of Remembrance. After the two minutes' silence, Year 4 presented a very affecting performance. I had been a bit concerned when I heard that two of the children were playing rats, but I should not have worried, as it was perfectly judged. Lucy Foster (our community involvement person for the Project) had achieved something really impressive with them. People were genuinely moved, and the children seemed to get the point.We were amazingly fortunate that we did this in the only dry sunny hour of a dark, wet, blustery morning.     


Paradise

Last night I went to another fundraiser for The Avenues Youth Club, this time at the very fancy pub called Paradise in Kilburn Lane. It's a stylish pub, but I hadn't expected a Ten Commandments board on the upstairs landing (so you can check how many you've broken as you wait to collect your coat from the cloakroom?). It's at the Kensal Green end of Kilburn Lane, and so the name is taken from the G.K.Chesterton poem, "The Rolling English Road" ..."we went to paradise by way of Kensal Green." It attracted a very different crowd from the Joan Bakewell/Margaret Drabble evening, with a selection of DJs performing, and very loud music. The place is a rabbit warren, and seemed to absorb a vast number of (mostly trendy young) people. I had expected more dancing, but you can't predict the dynamics of that, I suppose. People seemed to enjoy themselves, and I hope The Avenues did well out of it. I had a good time, anyway.

GOLD AND BLACK

Gold Medallists

Our conservation architect, Oliver Caroe (the Surveyor of the Fabric at St Paul's Cathedral) entered us for the King of Prussia's Gold Medal, the major national award for church conservation. It was very pleasant to be shortlisted (and so one's friends saw it in the Church Times) but utterly dumbfounding to win the prize. They only gave you three tickets to the awards ceremony, so I went along with Beth Watson (from Caroes) and Lewis Proudfoot, from Cliveden Conservation, who actually did the work. The ceremony took place at St Jude's, Collingham Gardens, (behind Gloucester Road tube) which is the home of St Mellitus College, the Diocese of London's ministerial training wing, and since that building was also shortlisted for our award we were confident that we wouldn't win. That confidence was increased when we discovered that Prince Nicholas von Preussen, who was presenting the award, has a son who works with one of the contractors involved in one of the other projects. We were perfectly relaxed by the time Prince Nicholas came round to look at our display boards and asked a few, desultory, apparently uninterested questions. So we were completely unprepared when Prince Nicholas announced that the medal was being awarded to a Victorian church, which could only be us (and was).

Beth had done all the preparation for the ceremony, producing the display boards and a Power Point presentation to be shown in the event of one's winning. She did as she was told and produced a 10-slide presentation, to last 5 minutes. Then, on the day, our sheet of instructions said it was to be no longer than 2-3 minutes, and the slides would be moved on accordingly, but of course that didn't worry us as we knew we wouldn't be delivering a presentation. We did confer, though, as Beth really didn't want to do it, and so I said that, hypothetically, I would, if she would advise me of what the slides showed (as I hadn't actually seen them). So, as we walked up to receive the medal (and cheque) I was putting thoughts in order. It all went very well.

The ceremony also involved the award of the National Churches Trust President's Prize, which is for new work in a church, and that was presented by the Duke of Gloucester, so our sheet of instructions gave us etiquette for dealing with the royals. The Duke was very pleasant, but everything was so informal (and he's not the most immediately recognisable of the royal family) that none of us got our "Your royal highness" in on first meeting. As for Prince Nicholas, I huffed to my colleagues that it was all a bit rich, since his family ceased to be royal a hundred years ago, and he's not actually a prince of anywhere, and his surname is not von Preussen but Hohenzollern, so I'm not quite sure what etiquette applies beyond common politeness. It has to be said, though, that he was totally upper-class British, utterly charming, and lives in Knightsbridge.

Next year, we shall enter our new building for the President's Prize!


Men in Black

The awards ceremony was on Thursday, All Saints' Day, so the next day, All Souls', was the day of the Requiem. Our biggest event of the year is a High Mass of Requiem on All Souls' Day, celebrated with choir and full orchestra, doing a French Romantic setting. We have a nice set of black vestments for this, bought from the bequest of a deceased parishioner, who loved it, and which replaced a set that were falling apart. My friend Fr Martin Quayle usually comes to help as deacon, and Fr Frank acts as subdeacon. An old-fashioned ritual is part of the evening, as we try to use a nineteenth-century setting in an authentic way, but in a modern rite. This year we were singing the setting by Alfred Bruneau, which remained unperformed in England between its controversial premiere in 1896 and its revival at St Mary Mags in 1986. It is exceptionally loud, and jolly long. We break up the Dies Irae (in what I genuinely think is quite a creative way) to make it a bit more digestible, singing two movements during the intercessions.

There is always a lot of preparation for the Requiem, and Nicholas Kaye, who organises it, gets very tense. This year, the main anxiety was having only the temporary heating provided by our contractors, because the musicians get very grumpy about getting cold. We had also disposed of some chairs (expecting that our new chairs would have been purchased by now, which they haven't) so Nicholas had to hire in more seating than usual. A few unfinished repairs were also not aesthetically pleasing, but I did my best to see that we followed health and safety rules. With four hundred people in church one has to be reasonably careful.

I have always felt that the way most places use traditional Mass settings is silly, because you stand around in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer while the choir sing the Sanctus and Benedictus, as a very long musical interlude (quite unlike a congregational setting, which is a snappy acclamation). In reality, the traditional way of doing it was that the celebrant continued the words of the Eucharistic Prayer while the Sanctus was being sung, as an accompaniment. In the past they weren't terribly concerned about the faithful knowing what was going on, but we provide a service sheet that explains everything and prints out the texts of what is being sung (and their translation) as well as what is being said quietly. The result of this is that we at the altar are going about the business of the Mass enveloped in this wave of sound, and you get some marvellous moments when the music reaches a climax (by pure chance) at the elevations. With Bruneau the Sanctus alone was long enough to cover the whole Eucharistic Prayer, so the Benedictus became a meditation for us (as it is meant to be). At the altar this is exhilarating, and spiritually uplifting, and often deeply moving. So at the end of the evening I was on an adrenaline high that lasted a while. It all went very well, despite my making a crass error (which fortunately had no consequences and hardly anyone noticed).