Emmanuel Church Marsham St

Another set back. I'm not sure what my own rules are and I am dithering whether to write this, but with a short week because of the bank holiday, today was really my only chance to sit in a church and think. And I want to try and write a post at least once a week so I decide that despite the outcome I have to report it.
Though I am already worrying that I haven't really followed my own brief anyhow. I forgot most of the historic details from St Stephen's - the fact that Charles Dickens advised the Coutts heiress to build it in recognition of her Dad, that there is a possible Burne Jones window, that the tall steeple was struck by lightening and later bombed and then replaced, but most of this I learnt from the internet after the visit. More rules you see - I am not allowed to check details before going. I am not allowed any expectation. Each trip should be the journey from the street into the church and then what I see there. So. Perhaps, in fact I have answered my own doubts. I want to sit in a church and think, so if it isn't possible or is denied then it still describes the church.
This is a huge slab of a building. A brick edifice with high towers and domes, and gold letters above the door and for a while I wasn't strictly sure it was a church but I kept walking past to check and became certain it was. Though it always seems busy being something else. I have seen queues of school children outside, and groups coming and going and once a long time ago I was invited by one of the muslim mums at school to a mums and toddlers group there. But I never went. Though I remember being very pleased to have been asked and then increasingly embarrassed that I hadn't been. I had only just moved to the area, my elder son had just started at the school and my husband either lay in bed or disappeared and drank. He could drink three bottles of wine in the time it took me to take the boys round the corner for a quick go on the swings. He would say he was just popping out to get the car and not return for five hours, so drunk he would fall flat through the door. I never expected my life to look or feel like that life: a trapdoor-opening, white-knuckle, scooby doo existence and for a while I tried really hard to pretend it wasn't happening. I walked and walked with the boys and I smiled and smiled. My smile had the shine of armour. I understood suddenly all those empty miniature bottles of spirits dropped in the street, all the beer cans left by benches, all the empties casually thrown aside as the debris of someone's ritual. The 'I'm just popping out for a minute'. The top up, the beginning or middle or end of a bender. Though I did go to other mums and toddler groups with people I didn't know, singing 'if you're happy and you know it clap your hands'. And smiling.

Today. I decide I want less whimsy to the report. Less, oooh it is so hard to walk into an unknown space. I would like to be less of a drip. So I see from the opposite side of the road that the door is open, I see a woman come out, and then a man, and I cross the road so purposefully that the man looks at me, quizzically, as our paths cross on the pavement, as if he recognises something about me, as if it is a moment in a film when the hero and heroine meet. Except of course we don't. We're not. I walk up the couple of steps into the atrium of the church, a large airy space with vaulted ceiling and a table with a flowers and a man sat.
'Is it possible to just look inside the church.' I say politely.
'No.' He says.
'Is there a time it would be possible?' I say politely.
'Sunday.' He says as if I am a fool.



Amen.