We have a new hamster. Sparky. Though we all keep calling him Buddy by accident. I had forgotten quite how anxious getting a new hamster makes me. Though probably the first time it coincided with a real low patch when I wasn't sleeping very well and I would wake to hear the poor caged thing running in its wheel. I am slightly phobic about hamster teeth and wee hamster hearts in their thin ribbed bodies. It just never seems much of a life. Though Buddy adapted reasonably well, getting a bit plump and weary, patient with the children's fingers and that crazy perspex ball. Then died young in his sleep, curled in kapok.
Who would of known how different hamsters could be? Or how a name picked so quick can hold so true. Sparky is fast and bright and intent on escape. He stands on the top green plastic platform within the cage and stares me in the eye with wild, brave reproach. He has an us and them attitude. When it is just me and him, the children asleep, I talk to him gently, sing-song like I did when the children were babies and he listens for a while and then skitters away. Though my eldest says sadly 'I don't think he wants to stay in our family' as we watch Sparky attempt to chew a Shawshank Redemption hole in the side of a cardboard box we have put him in to play in. 'He will.' I say. But for once I think I am lying. Exexdh is the only one daring enough to handle him and even then Sparky spins out of his hands like a bat in flight, legs stretched to land. Tonight, I come home from a concert, riding my Boris Bike around the wall of police vans, helicopters overhead, to find out Sparky bit Dad into his nail. Everyone looks grave. He has a beautiful face, big ears very inquisitive but no one wants to touch him. Strangely it is me that puts my hand in the cage, sorts out his food, puts his wheel into position despite my phobias. I corner PSM's ten year old son for advice in the playground, and he says, just let him run over your hand in the cage under the sawdust. Exexdh suggests gloves.
This Quaker meeting house is not open every day but will be open for a meeting on Tuesday lunchtime the sign says as I cycle past on a BB. I am meeting U,OL for a coffee, unexpectedly, on monday morning, and was hoping to visit it afterwards. Though I feel I look like I am stage managing things when I arrive late, pushing the bike, for I can't find a docking bay. As if I have become only the character that I write about. I am in my gold trimmed coat, red tights, with a bike. I have to phone my brother ( also a BB fan ) to find out where to park the bike. Yes, he says. You are in a Boris Bike black hole. But he works out the nearest place to park it and I do.
U,OL and I go to a model shop in Holborn - he wants to find polystyrene for a music case he is making, I want trees as stocking fillers for the boys to decorate a board we have made for battles. The inane detail and precise scale of the miniature world, is beautiful - a minute model of a house being built, a parade of terrace houses, fake moss, intricate trees- all of it fascinating but expensive. Another world that can be made, contained.
I have built this up to be my love story. But it isn't. Or is, because there is a lot of love in it. But I think it is just an old sad story of lives not going quite right, of people making bad choices, of timing just missing. Though part of me still wants a fairy tale ending. I want an easy doorway to open to happiness. To be a heroine to someone. But we have become different people. When we sit and drink our coffee, we are mainly silent. Though when we do talk about things we both nearly cry. Though for different reasons, we don't explain.
On Tuesday I ride up again on the Boris bike. The tarpaulin seems to be coming down around the peace camp in Parliament Square. Though I notice tents have appeared on the pavement by the ministry of defence. I do think I have come along way, as I just walk in to the Meeting House, twisting the tricky handle on the polished door, nodding to a man with a Roy Hattersley mouth, full of teeth and spit, 'yes, for the meeting house' I nod, and walk into the meeting itself. I feel no trepidation only purpose.
I sit on a simple chair in a beautiful proportioned room with a parquet floor. There is in the centre on a table a vase of daffodils under a warm lit light shade, some books placed alongside. When I walk in and sit down there are about eighteen people. And we sit in silence. A few more join. Opening the door, tip toeing in. Opposite where I sit is a huge tall oblong window looking out to bamboo. I am very happy to be there.
On R4 I had caught a scrap about middle aged women becoming increasingly attracted to retreats of silence with an interview with a woman who had gone for 30 days ( I think ) of no talking . She said how easy it was to feel irritation with others despite the silence. Sitting here I ponder it. Really, I think, looking at the beauty of the daffodils, wondering about spring, where they had been flown from, then out over the heads of people on chairs to the bamboo in the grey light outside, looking again at the man with the beard, the corduroy of the jacket infront of me, I can't imagine that. Then a woman in a bright knitted hat creeps in, with a jangly bag, and a cup of tea. A cup of tea! Any minute now I am going to hear slurping noises I think. Any minute now. I glower. Though she must be practised because there are none.
The only ornamentation to this lovely room is a clock. Sometimes 5 minutes of silence goes fast and sometimes slowly.
I think these things too. Can I sit here and not think about God, not about Jesus, what are the rules, I like it here, then a man with a long beard sighs quite heavily, I think about meditation but how that always has noise, a voice saying what to do, I think I would love to live in this room, I could put a kitchen in that corner and a platform for beds. I notice a small amplification system high up by the top recessed windows. Then look at the daffodils. Then the bamboo. A man in a red jumper stands and speaks. He says he went to a meeting recently about William Blake 'Jerusalem', and that they talked about Jesus walking here on this island. My heart sinks slightly that this peace is going to be distorted by nutty talk. He said that nothing was known of Christ's life between being a child and his thirties and it was quite possible he came as a merchant with Joseph of Arimathea. He said he himself, the man in the red jumper ( not Jesus! That would be quite a claim. ) was from Preston in Lancashire and he said that his father said the name came from Priest town and the Phoenicians came there. He said the message was Jerusalem could be built anywhere and within us. And that Salam meant peace. Salam is what I hear the mothers say every morning and every afternoon at the school gates. I thought it was just hello. Peace. It is a lovely thing to say. When he sits. There is still just silence. I see that the woman moves her cup to her face. As if for warmth. Here in this Central London room there is virtually no noise. No clue to lunchtime feet outside.
At the end we shake hands. As announcements are read out. I leave. A kind man in the corduroy signalling that it is ok to go. He waves silently to me as I close the door quietly. I think he means, take what you need.
I look for history about the place but there isn't much. The quakers in Westminster have met weekly since 1655. Even reading these words, I understand for the first time that all churches are connected by people showing up week after week after week. That is what makes the church. They turn up, they come. Former Meeting Houses were in Pall Mall, the Strand and near to Westminster Abbey. This building was bombed in the war and then re built in the 1950s
I read too,
'True silence ... is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.'
William Penn, 1699
'It is important that the waiting in silence and the listening are done as a group. The people taking part are trying to become something more than just a collection of individuals; they want to become aware of being part of a 'we', rather than just a solitary 'I'.'
Also, Patrick Newley's (the soho writer, raconteur and agent to the underbelly of the British entertainment scene) mother became warden of the meeting house in the 70s and he transformed part of it into a theatrical agency and PR office, acting chiefly for drag queens and a crony of the Krays.
Then the next day, the wednesday I go to, 'Towards Silence' John Taverner at St Martin's in the Field. I had picked up a leaflet when I had visited before, this concert part of an inter faith day of quiet within the church. I had wanted to take U,OL, with some plan of taking him to good things, to revive his spirit. But he couldn't come or chose not to. Though also I think later that isn't my job. He has the choice to revive himself.
Then I think about the chattiness of my whole project. The noise of me me me, me - on and on and on. Mainly I like to be very quiet about myself. Private. I have been surprised and mildly horrified by this insistence of telling, of attempting to tell my truth. Quite often, even writing it, I think SHUT UP, SHUT UP, STOP IT. Though strangely it feels like a silent thing, a black hole - this blog. I write, it sits, suspended, almost no where. But people are reading it. I have admittedly started sending it out, to people I know, but before that, I finally found the stats button, and there were readers. I was breathless.
Years ago I went on the tube to dinner at a friend's flat in Elephant and Castle. I think U,OL had just left for Russia and I was bereft. I sat in a nearly empty carriage alone. A mother and son got on and the mother, tall, very black, probably Ethiopian, with high proud cheekbones sat next to me, very close, swaying as if asleep and the child, as if in the same dream, sat on my knee, but not like he knew it was on my knee, but like he thought I was a chair or more exactly that I wasn't there. For some reason, as if they were sleepwalkers, which even now, I almost think they were, I knew I mustn't make a sound, mustn't disturb them in anyway though I think I held the child. So we sat tight together, not making a sound until they got off. Which they did. I remember thinking I must be dead, or not visible to them. I don't know. But I think now, we were just alongside, some strange trust together. And I almost think that is what this is like. A quiet space where I pour all these words. If you read it you are just alongside, with your own concerns that might, even briefly, match.
Anyhow, it is the day of the student demonstrations. The TV on at work is agog for violence. Which unfolds. A police van trashed, a beautiful girl with an old fashioned Anne Frank face talking eloquently for non violence. When I leave work, I think I will be able to go to the concert and then scout round on the way home to see what is going on. I am almost rubbing my hands in anticipation that I will have so much to write about. But as I walk up from Embankment tube against the tide of office workers, and into Trafalgar Square, I can hear chanting and dirty youths, like foot soldiers from an old, old battle, storm through the street, staves made from the spine of placards. They are not like the plush Millbank lot I saw, they have cheap dirty trainers and violent, hardened faces, they shout 'Don't visit London it is shit.' for they presume we are tourists, walking past on the pavements. And their voices are high on the new power of their old rage. Behind their stampede a fire has been lit in the street out of bollards and cardboard and rubbish is strewn. It is something medieval, a fire tossed casually but dangerously into the road. The traffic like a startled horse, nervy from the flames, holds back. And I, I don't know what to do, so I walk into the church, show my solo ticket and sit down, restricted view, behind a pillar for the concert.
It is calm and peaceful, full and plush. Behind, a man talks of icons, the British Museum, religious theologians his Kindle and a chapter in the Brothers Karamazof by Dostoevsky that he has downloaded (just the one chapter), because it is a philosophical debate of how things are. I just love gizmos he says. It is like an interior and exterior experience because all these things that seem fine and good and of wealth to the soul and spirit, seem also to depend on a lot of people not being there. Outside, even when the beautiful high, unaccompanied singing starts, harmonies of voice soaring, everyone intent, we can hear a steady angry chant and the pitch and squeak of the police amplified by megaphones. Blue lights revolve in the big windows of the church. 'Towards silence.' We have been asked not to clap when the concert that includes a tibetan bowl rung like a bell, ends to preserve the conversation with silence. I don't know. I enjoy it but I don't love it though I keep quiet, leaving, as the audience like a congregation flood out into Trafalgar Square, Police vans parked up. Helicopters overhead. Where the fire had been lit, there are more police vans packed like bricks and beyond that protesters that I can't see. I cycle back, nosing my way round the back of the ministry of defense, trying to find a short cut, trying to get a good look around. A policeman stood apart from his gang in a van, nearly lets me cycle down the last bit of Whitehall, but then says, 'Love, they have been breaking glass, You don't want to rip your tyres. A pause. 'Boris's tyres.' We laugh
This is my personal experience of the Tory cuts. At our school the Holiday play schemes no longer exist and probably after christmas the after school care play-centres will be cut. It doesn't work. Doesn't make sense. People who work. Who pay for this childcare. Will not have it. It may be that this childcare is funded, helped along. But no one is having a manicure while their children play Connect 4 in a bright lit school hall. They have jobs. They work really hard. They are trying, really trying, not to be on benefits. When exexdh had no unsupervised access to the children I had 7 minutes to do a 15 minute journey between the tube and the school playcentre after work. I did a soldiers run, jogging to the count of 15 and walking 15, dignity gone, slightly desperate, very tired.
I would never be violent but I am angry.
Tuesday 23 November 2010
Sunday 14 November 2010
Orange Street Congregational Church
Standing trying to shelter from the thin, cold rain in a narrow patch of dry pavement with the puffed-up, dirty pigeons opposite the Orange Street Congregational Church I text my friend to say I wish I was a normal person. She replies she is about to go into her dark cupboard under the stairs and she wishes she was a normal person too. And ps. her girlfriend has gone to TK Maxx. And despite our wishes I think we are both relieved that we are not there.
The boys are away with exexdh and his mum and I feel like an outsider within the day.
It is Remembrance Sunday and I have walked up and past the cenotaph. Stood silent wearing my poppy near Westminster tube. Hurrying, trying to get nearer to the war memorial as Big Ben started chiming 11am, a women's cockney voice came out of a souvenir stall saying 'stand still'. I did. Looking up to Westminster Abbey's rooves and thinking about the bombs raining down. Gathered crowds stood quiet. There is something really powerful to the collective silence. Though I wonder if it is possible to record all the inane thoughts in those few minutes. I find my mind wandering to baking bread and X factor. Then as the silence is coming to an end a South American lady asks me 'Can you tell me what is going on?' I shake my head. She stands, her head on one side, puzzled, staring into my mute face. Finally people begin to pull themselves out of the stillness and I say and my voice seems really loud 'It is the Remembrance Day silence.'
Then because all the roads are blocked off I weave up behind the Ministry of Defense, through narrow streets I have never been before. Over Trafalgar Square. Under the ship in the bottle sculpture on the fouth plinth. Did you ever see the Mark Wallinger Ecce Homo 1999? It was the most beautiful thing. A life sized christ on the plinth, naked apart from a loin cloth and a crown of thorns, his hands tied. Made tiny by the scale of everything surrounding. A vulnerable human standing still and quiet. I have a little picture of it in my bedroom.
'I wanted to show him as an ordinary human being.' Mark Wallinger said.
I think Mark Wallinger is my celebrity crush. (You see perhaps how ill suited I am to work on a celebrity magazine?) I love the humour and humanity to his work. I met him years ago on a Lord Snowdon photo shoot. Should I say well known royal photographer? I'm not sure. I used to work for a Sunday supplement that used Lord Snowdon a lot. It was my job (among other things) to help get the props, help the shoots run smoothly. Snowdon wanted a life sized model of a horse for this shoot. Though I've just remembered he insisted everyone call them 'sittings'. This was before the internet and I remember phoning round every prop house, every lead I had for a horse model. I think it was probably two days work before, just in the nick of time I secured one, arranged for it to be delivered to the studio.
It was around the time of the deterioration of my relationship with U,OL. He was going to Russia. I wanted to get married. Like magnets repelling both desires could not meet. Now I think how young I was, and how silly. But the night before the Mark Wallinger shoot we split up. Finally honest with each other, almost close again as we agreed to part, but we could not sleep, both weeping throughout the night. But a car was booked to take me to the shoot in the morning (I can't remember why - but at this time, with this magazine though not paid very well there were these grand gestures.) and I leave, still weeping. Though this wasn't in fact the end. I think there was another couple of tries before he finally left for Russia.
Anyhow, red eyed and exhausted I arrive at the studio. The huge plastic moulded horse is there. Snowdon is making asides about Mark Wallinger behind his back, saying he is a bit stiff and his paintings are boring, then he decides after a few shots of the artist in jockey silks with the horse that he wants to try the shoot outside. I have one of those out of body moments as I carry a surprisingly light, life sized model of a horse over a zebra crossing, followed by Snowdon limping and Mark Wallinger in jockey gear, my heart broken. When the shoot finishes Mark offers me a lift back to the office, but the few hours of smiling and charm, have been enough for me and I want to have a good cry on the tube before getting back to work. At that point, I don't really like his paintings either. I find them a bit stiff. So I say, no thank you, it will be quicker on the tube. Now I wonder what we would have talked about. Strangely, I imagine him offering me a boiled sweet.
Today, turning the corner into Orange Street the lights are on within the small church and a sign above the door is lit up. Good. I think. It is another old fashioned, smelly looking church, though the building is beautiful, a simple, white, low, one storey chapel. Outside there is a plaque that details the history of the site as a huguenot chapel built in 1686. There are also glass covered notice boards with long tracts about the state of the world and the state of the United Reformed church and some signs of notice of service in chinese. The second coming of Christ is imminent it says and we must repent. I open the door and stand in the narrow porch I can hear the sermon, an angry voice talking about peace. It is a little bit musty smelling but not too bad. I wait there wondering what to do. I can't march in while the service is taking place, so I decide to wait outside and watch for people coming out of the service and then hope I can slip in.
I feel like a private detective standing on the corner, by the back door of the National Gallery in the drizzle waiting. Cold, I walk round the block a few times, up into Leicester Square and back round. I am standing there for about an hour, and when I hear music straining out of the building I think oh good they are nearly finished. But still no one comes out. Then a chinese woman goes in through the door, dithers in the porch and enters. I am so cold I follow her. Though I can hear organ music playing and I am still worried that I am bursting in on something. 'Would it be possible just to have a quick look at the church?' I say smiling. Strangely the tiny church is empty, neat dark pews in rows, only a man, his face hidden behind a curtain playing the organ. Where did they go? I think. But perhaps I missed the congregation leaving when I went round the block. Or maybe there hadn't been a congregation and the man behind the curtain had been shouting about peace on his own.
The walls are bright orange red, and the organ at the end is ornate. I like the simpleness of the space, the old fashioned scrub of it. Though when I look on the internet there are homophobic rants that make my skin crawl. There is a very precise mind working away patching the bible to our world. Another tract which I barely understand is about the israelites, and their ancestors, including the royal family.
The chinese woman who I followed welcomes me kindly but suspiciously. Did I read about the church in a tourist guide? She asks. I say no, I live near here. There is about to be a chinese service she says, the organ still playing, the man covered by the curtain, but if I want to come again, I should come come at 11am on a sunday. Is there a leaflet I could have, I ask but she says no. Though on a revolving stand there are a lot of booklets to buy.
The original Huguenot church was called the Temple of Leicester Fields because it was then, as described before in the St Martins in the Field blog, a place only of fields. Huguenots were the french protestants, who escaped persecution by the Roman Catholics after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 which had given them religious freedom. Many went to Holland, some to South Africa, even America, and here, thousands to England - in this area and also Spitalfields. They were skilled people, noblemen, intellectuals and craftsmen bringing silk weaving to London. That original church was much bigger than the tiny chapel now. Also I remember looking at old pictures for St Martins in the Fields and realising that this place was initially only the outskirts, along the route between the city and Westminster, a place where religious freedom could be practised, new communities could be built. Sir Isaac Newton lived in the house adjacent and owned by the church. I just looked it up to find out Newton moved to London in 1696, and that he was an MP and also the warden of the Royal Mint. All that and a physicist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and theologian. Now I have just found an inventory of everything in this house (even though he wasn't living in it) when he died.
http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/ntheman/NTMinv
how completely fascinating - a description of a man by his things - his feather bolsters, his sword, forty articles in Dutch.
At the time of the Wesley's the church passed from French protestantism to English protestantism, and the hymn written by the then minister Toplady 'Rock of Ages' was first sung here. In 1787 badly in need of repair it closed, and then passed from the Church of England to the Non Conformists becoming a Congregationalist Church. Just before WW1 Westminster council passed a demolition order first on the church and then on Newton's house. The congregationalists led a nomadic life until 1925 when the council leased most of the site for a library and a temporary chapel was built, the building that still stands.
Walking home, there are old soldiers everywhere and it is really raining. Outside a pub I see two pearly kings drinking with a Chelsea Pensioner. My umbrella is broken and I stop and buy a 'I love London' brolly. It makes me happy.
Amen
The boys are away with exexdh and his mum and I feel like an outsider within the day.
It is Remembrance Sunday and I have walked up and past the cenotaph. Stood silent wearing my poppy near Westminster tube. Hurrying, trying to get nearer to the war memorial as Big Ben started chiming 11am, a women's cockney voice came out of a souvenir stall saying 'stand still'. I did. Looking up to Westminster Abbey's rooves and thinking about the bombs raining down. Gathered crowds stood quiet. There is something really powerful to the collective silence. Though I wonder if it is possible to record all the inane thoughts in those few minutes. I find my mind wandering to baking bread and X factor. Then as the silence is coming to an end a South American lady asks me 'Can you tell me what is going on?' I shake my head. She stands, her head on one side, puzzled, staring into my mute face. Finally people begin to pull themselves out of the stillness and I say and my voice seems really loud 'It is the Remembrance Day silence.'
Then because all the roads are blocked off I weave up behind the Ministry of Defense, through narrow streets I have never been before. Over Trafalgar Square. Under the ship in the bottle sculpture on the fouth plinth. Did you ever see the Mark Wallinger Ecce Homo 1999? It was the most beautiful thing. A life sized christ on the plinth, naked apart from a loin cloth and a crown of thorns, his hands tied. Made tiny by the scale of everything surrounding. A vulnerable human standing still and quiet. I have a little picture of it in my bedroom.
'I wanted to show him as an ordinary human being.' Mark Wallinger said.
I think Mark Wallinger is my celebrity crush. (You see perhaps how ill suited I am to work on a celebrity magazine?) I love the humour and humanity to his work. I met him years ago on a Lord Snowdon photo shoot. Should I say well known royal photographer? I'm not sure. I used to work for a Sunday supplement that used Lord Snowdon a lot. It was my job (among other things) to help get the props, help the shoots run smoothly. Snowdon wanted a life sized model of a horse for this shoot. Though I've just remembered he insisted everyone call them 'sittings'. This was before the internet and I remember phoning round every prop house, every lead I had for a horse model. I think it was probably two days work before, just in the nick of time I secured one, arranged for it to be delivered to the studio.
It was around the time of the deterioration of my relationship with U,OL. He was going to Russia. I wanted to get married. Like magnets repelling both desires could not meet. Now I think how young I was, and how silly. But the night before the Mark Wallinger shoot we split up. Finally honest with each other, almost close again as we agreed to part, but we could not sleep, both weeping throughout the night. But a car was booked to take me to the shoot in the morning (I can't remember why - but at this time, with this magazine though not paid very well there were these grand gestures.) and I leave, still weeping. Though this wasn't in fact the end. I think there was another couple of tries before he finally left for Russia.
Anyhow, red eyed and exhausted I arrive at the studio. The huge plastic moulded horse is there. Snowdon is making asides about Mark Wallinger behind his back, saying he is a bit stiff and his paintings are boring, then he decides after a few shots of the artist in jockey silks with the horse that he wants to try the shoot outside. I have one of those out of body moments as I carry a surprisingly light, life sized model of a horse over a zebra crossing, followed by Snowdon limping and Mark Wallinger in jockey gear, my heart broken. When the shoot finishes Mark offers me a lift back to the office, but the few hours of smiling and charm, have been enough for me and I want to have a good cry on the tube before getting back to work. At that point, I don't really like his paintings either. I find them a bit stiff. So I say, no thank you, it will be quicker on the tube. Now I wonder what we would have talked about. Strangely, I imagine him offering me a boiled sweet.
Today, turning the corner into Orange Street the lights are on within the small church and a sign above the door is lit up. Good. I think. It is another old fashioned, smelly looking church, though the building is beautiful, a simple, white, low, one storey chapel. Outside there is a plaque that details the history of the site as a huguenot chapel built in 1686. There are also glass covered notice boards with long tracts about the state of the world and the state of the United Reformed church and some signs of notice of service in chinese. The second coming of Christ is imminent it says and we must repent. I open the door and stand in the narrow porch I can hear the sermon, an angry voice talking about peace. It is a little bit musty smelling but not too bad. I wait there wondering what to do. I can't march in while the service is taking place, so I decide to wait outside and watch for people coming out of the service and then hope I can slip in.
I feel like a private detective standing on the corner, by the back door of the National Gallery in the drizzle waiting. Cold, I walk round the block a few times, up into Leicester Square and back round. I am standing there for about an hour, and when I hear music straining out of the building I think oh good they are nearly finished. But still no one comes out. Then a chinese woman goes in through the door, dithers in the porch and enters. I am so cold I follow her. Though I can hear organ music playing and I am still worried that I am bursting in on something. 'Would it be possible just to have a quick look at the church?' I say smiling. Strangely the tiny church is empty, neat dark pews in rows, only a man, his face hidden behind a curtain playing the organ. Where did they go? I think. But perhaps I missed the congregation leaving when I went round the block. Or maybe there hadn't been a congregation and the man behind the curtain had been shouting about peace on his own.
The walls are bright orange red, and the organ at the end is ornate. I like the simpleness of the space, the old fashioned scrub of it. Though when I look on the internet there are homophobic rants that make my skin crawl. There is a very precise mind working away patching the bible to our world. Another tract which I barely understand is about the israelites, and their ancestors, including the royal family.
The chinese woman who I followed welcomes me kindly but suspiciously. Did I read about the church in a tourist guide? She asks. I say no, I live near here. There is about to be a chinese service she says, the organ still playing, the man covered by the curtain, but if I want to come again, I should come come at 11am on a sunday. Is there a leaflet I could have, I ask but she says no. Though on a revolving stand there are a lot of booklets to buy.
The original Huguenot church was called the Temple of Leicester Fields because it was then, as described before in the St Martins in the Field blog, a place only of fields. Huguenots were the french protestants, who escaped persecution by the Roman Catholics after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 which had given them religious freedom. Many went to Holland, some to South Africa, even America, and here, thousands to England - in this area and also Spitalfields. They were skilled people, noblemen, intellectuals and craftsmen bringing silk weaving to London. That original church was much bigger than the tiny chapel now. Also I remember looking at old pictures for St Martins in the Fields and realising that this place was initially only the outskirts, along the route between the city and Westminster, a place where religious freedom could be practised, new communities could be built. Sir Isaac Newton lived in the house adjacent and owned by the church. I just looked it up to find out Newton moved to London in 1696, and that he was an MP and also the warden of the Royal Mint. All that and a physicist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and theologian. Now I have just found an inventory of everything in this house (even though he wasn't living in it) when he died.
http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/ntheman/NTMinv
how completely fascinating - a description of a man by his things - his feather bolsters, his sword, forty articles in Dutch.
At the time of the Wesley's the church passed from French protestantism to English protestantism, and the hymn written by the then minister Toplady 'Rock of Ages' was first sung here. In 1787 badly in need of repair it closed, and then passed from the Church of England to the Non Conformists becoming a Congregationalist Church. Just before WW1 Westminster council passed a demolition order first on the church and then on Newton's house. The congregationalists led a nomadic life until 1925 when the council leased most of the site for a library and a temporary chapel was built, the building that still stands.
Walking home, there are old soldiers everywhere and it is really raining. Outside a pub I see two pearly kings drinking with a Chelsea Pensioner. My umbrella is broken and I stop and buy a 'I love London' brolly. It makes me happy.
Amen
Monday 8 November 2010
St James the Less, Vauxhall Bridge Rd
St James the Less stands dark, slightly foreboding, set back from Vauxhall Bridge Rd, between an estate pub and a building site. Litter and leaves catch in eddies in the expanse of paving stones between the grimy main road and grimy church. I walk past once in the week but it isn't open and the only notice is the times of the services on Sunday.
So I go again on the Sunday. I aim to get there for 10.30 and have a look round before the service starts at 11am. I am taking the boys for lunch at my mum and dads with fireworks afterwards, so exexdh is to have them briefly, before we set out. But I am late. I hear 11 strike on Big Ben as I walk down Vauxhall Bridge Rd, a bit flustered, very slightly hungover, having thought I was being clever and taking a short cut but having gone the wrong way - though surprised to have done so, for I live here and know my way really well. Surprised too to hear the clock so clearly from this distance. I am starting to have to travel a bit further to visit churches but I can still hear Big Ben. I get as far as the porch under the tall four storey tower, with it's patterned brick arches, and intricately carved doorway and the wooden door open to a glass one where I can see a man standing just the other side, with a hymn book ready to hand out. I can make out people in pews and a large lit over head screen, and an unexpected richness of mosaic, and brickwork. But I can't sit through the service without being really late for my mum and dad's so I have to turn round and leave. But it feels unsatisfactory, I could see there was something fine to the detail of the church
My youngest son, (which seems as scripted as U'OL coming back on the scene), has started to demand to pray. He is five. He has been to church possibly, twice in his life, goes to a predominantly muslim school with no obvious religious worship, though they did a nativity the first year Gordon Brown's son was in reception ( the year before my youngest attended, and the year after the eldest started ), and beyond slipping out to visit churches twice I have barely mentioned my church visiting project at home. He started asking about two weeks ago, but I couldn't face mentioning it, it just seemed too much like an invented plot. Though years ago he had a dream he had stigmata. Of course he didn't know the word, but he described it exactly. Which scared the hell out of me. Anyhow we have started doing the Lord's Prayer each night. The old words incredibly soothing to speak out loud. And the youngest kneels and closes his eyes, beautiful in his pyjamas. The eldest initially sarcastic, has since asked for a prayer of trust. I find a prayer by Ignatius Loyola 1491-1556.
Saying the words, I wish I could believe something. I can see it would be good for us.
But in the back of the car, through the stop starting of traffic lights at the outskirts of London with a wildly inappropriate CD that we all adore - Leadbelly, Buddy Holly, The Damned, White Stripes, The Clash - the youngest sings 'I want to be a Christian, I want to go to Church' to the tune of I'm so bored of the USA. I wince at the combination. Though I promise I will take him.
Later, I look up St James the Less, to find out it is a celebrated Gothic Victorian Church. There is only a little bit of history - it was built by three sisters in memory of their father the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol between 1856 - 61 in one of the poorest areas. But there is an immense amount of architectural information - designed by G.E Street, a victorian gothic architect of note, he employed the best craftsmen for this, his first church in London- Thomas Earp for stone carving and Clayton and Bell for stained glass and the famous Victorian artist GF Wyatt painted the mural above the chancel, called the The Doom, later replaced by a mosaic he designed. I feel a bit of a fraud because I haven't really seen the interior. Also I discover, John Betjeman, a big fan of Gothic Victorian Churches, helped save it, writing letters to defend the church from demolition, which is amazing symmetry because I have just been reading 'On Churches' by JB, and how he saved loads of churches, writing many letters. Then I find a painting of St James the Less by John Piper in his book English Churches with an introduction by John Betjeman which includes:
'The more you look at churches the more you appreciate their varying atmospheres – whether the vicar is high or low or breezy or lazy or crazy. You notice too oddities of furnishing, hymn boards, oil lamps, electric lighting, pipes, wires and heating stoves.'
And I thought yes. Yes. Exactly.
But then I want to actually see the church, and it seems to suggest on a Victorian architecture history site that it is often open at lunchtimes. So I go back again. From a distance I can see the gate to the porch is chained shut, and I nearly just cycle away. But a man is walking up to the church so I follow him and see him ring the bell of a side door and disappear inside. I have to go and park up the Boris Bike and then come back. Another man rings the bell and disappears inside. I press the bell. The door buzzes and lets me in. Above the bell I suddenly notice two AAs in a triangle. Oh, I think, for after all I did look up all the local AA meetings for exexdh in the area when he first stopped drinking, I just didn't remember it here. Anyhow, I am in a hallway at the bottom of some stairs, with an empty dark kitchen with toddler toys stacked and no one and no noise. I see a sign for the office but when I open the door it is dark and closed. I move further into the building, I just want to ask someone if it is ok just to have a look around. I open another door, pushing it open into a bright lit empty room with chairs around a table. Only then do I really realise I could accidentally walk into the AA meeting and it would be hard to get the words out quick enough to explain the mistake.
I am about to chicken out, to leave, when I see a heavy wooden door to the side. I lift the latch, surprised it is open and feeling like I am in a fairytale I walk through into the dark, unlit church. The air is so quiet and still and subdued, I feel my lungs fill with the grainy peace. From very far away I can hear voices but no one challenges me and I walk quietly around. I am briefly worried that they will think I have got lost and come and collect me for the meeting and usher me out of the church and onto a chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit and everything to say about alcohol. Then I feel free, just allowed to be here under these high ceilings, in a huge space like finding lung capacity.
In this dull gloaming light, the church is pixellated with the patterns of red, black and cream bricks. There is an extraordinary font of wrought iron with a roof like a nutty hat at ascot. Then sofas crammed in the back. Beautiful stained glass, beautiful tiles, and the overhead screen hung from the high ceiling. The G.F. Watts mosaic is high up on the chancel wall picturing Christ in heaven. Far away, in the corner there looks to be a skeleton glowing out from the dark. Slightly wary, I get near, but it is a large figure of made out of parts of musical instruments, the body a squeezebox, the fingers keys from a piano, the legs saxophones. It is crazy loose-limbed - a strange, crude representation of Christ. I go back to look at the craftsmanship of the iron work, and the pulpit. But mainly I like the fact I shouldn't be here, there is no electric light, there is space and quiet to breathe deeply.
Then today at work on the TV above my head I see the scenes of fire and windows breaking, and demonstrators pouring into Millbank Tower. Just round the corner from us, just round the corner from the school. I watch fascinated, slightly admiring ( though later I think - of what? ) but anxious for my children. Also I know, having been to a children's birthday party at the Pizza Express in the wings of the building that diners, tucking into doughballs and a Veneziana would have surprise ringside seats to the burning of David Cameron and Nick Clegg effigies. Then cower at the back of the restuarant near the toilets (or watch - which would you do?) as windows were broken, youths showed their bottoms and young people overcame the police. I would have taken a photograph of those diners faces but I don't think anyone did.
Later, on my way home from work I think I will just go and see, getting off one stop early. Walking past the peace camp and the increased police presence at the Houses of Parliament, and in a straight line on. I wondered if I will recognise students in the normal crowds of tourists and office workers. But it is surprisingly easy. Young women wear DM's again and young men look earnest.
I get to Lambeth bridge where cars in a tailgated traffic jam are being diverted. It is dark and really cold. A runner flashes past and dips down the steps to the Thames path. There is police tape across the road, with a few coppers alongside but no barrier to the pavement. I think they will say 'Turn back now, lady' or some such. But no one stops me and I keep walking on an almost empty street. Above a helicopter hovers, as if focussing. I am carrying a Gap bag with a new coat for my eldest son, some jogging bottoms and pants for both, using one of those 30% off vouchers and a heavy tesco bag too. Nearing Millbank Tower, police like dark beetles in riot gear arch together herding the few demonstrators left. Apart from the helicopter, it is very quiet. Bystanders and students ( ex protestors?) stand on the pavement in the dark under the trees by the Thames, placards littered. Many are drinking. Cans or whole bottles. Better protest than drink, I think. But I worry about everyone's drinking these days, including my own, for it doesn't seem good for survival. You ain't the fittest if you are drinking and that seems to be how evolution works. Inside the foyer of the lit building I can see police in riot helmets and fluroscent yellow jackets jammed together, like fish in a tin. Too many and too big for the space. On the walls in surprisingly thin and ineffectual pen there is an anarchist A in a circle, 'Tory scum', and a drawing of a prick and a broken glass door with some girls taking photos on their phones, I walk on. It doesn't seem very substantial. Though I think the lib dems will not be trusted for a long time. Do you remember Nick Clegg's sudden credible status through the televised debate? - I think I had forgotten, I just thought he was a twit - but those young people had wanted to believe absolutely - and here they are disappointed. Combined with the gleeful cruelty of the Conservatives, I think people already feel trapped in having got what they didn't want.
Past the Tate and then circling back to home. I hear a young man say 'In the UK there just aren't many of the lower or upper classes' and I think maybe not where you live mate.
Behind the buildings, I look up and see the tower and I think there are still people up there. ghostly white against the dark night sky, with a helicopter coming in, really near as if herding. I imagine that they got in, went as far as they could and don't know what to do now. Though the power of having obtained the roof top, however briefly, must be amazing.
Amen
So I go again on the Sunday. I aim to get there for 10.30 and have a look round before the service starts at 11am. I am taking the boys for lunch at my mum and dads with fireworks afterwards, so exexdh is to have them briefly, before we set out. But I am late. I hear 11 strike on Big Ben as I walk down Vauxhall Bridge Rd, a bit flustered, very slightly hungover, having thought I was being clever and taking a short cut but having gone the wrong way - though surprised to have done so, for I live here and know my way really well. Surprised too to hear the clock so clearly from this distance. I am starting to have to travel a bit further to visit churches but I can still hear Big Ben. I get as far as the porch under the tall four storey tower, with it's patterned brick arches, and intricately carved doorway and the wooden door open to a glass one where I can see a man standing just the other side, with a hymn book ready to hand out. I can make out people in pews and a large lit over head screen, and an unexpected richness of mosaic, and brickwork. But I can't sit through the service without being really late for my mum and dad's so I have to turn round and leave. But it feels unsatisfactory, I could see there was something fine to the detail of the church
My youngest son, (which seems as scripted as U'OL coming back on the scene), has started to demand to pray. He is five. He has been to church possibly, twice in his life, goes to a predominantly muslim school with no obvious religious worship, though they did a nativity the first year Gordon Brown's son was in reception ( the year before my youngest attended, and the year after the eldest started ), and beyond slipping out to visit churches twice I have barely mentioned my church visiting project at home. He started asking about two weeks ago, but I couldn't face mentioning it, it just seemed too much like an invented plot. Though years ago he had a dream he had stigmata. Of course he didn't know the word, but he described it exactly. Which scared the hell out of me. Anyhow we have started doing the Lord's Prayer each night. The old words incredibly soothing to speak out loud. And the youngest kneels and closes his eyes, beautiful in his pyjamas. The eldest initially sarcastic, has since asked for a prayer of trust. I find a prayer by Ignatius Loyola 1491-1556.
Saying the words, I wish I could believe something. I can see it would be good for us.
But in the back of the car, through the stop starting of traffic lights at the outskirts of London with a wildly inappropriate CD that we all adore - Leadbelly, Buddy Holly, The Damned, White Stripes, The Clash - the youngest sings 'I want to be a Christian, I want to go to Church' to the tune of I'm so bored of the USA. I wince at the combination. Though I promise I will take him.
Later, I look up St James the Less, to find out it is a celebrated Gothic Victorian Church. There is only a little bit of history - it was built by three sisters in memory of their father the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol between 1856 - 61 in one of the poorest areas. But there is an immense amount of architectural information - designed by G.E Street, a victorian gothic architect of note, he employed the best craftsmen for this, his first church in London- Thomas Earp for stone carving and Clayton and Bell for stained glass and the famous Victorian artist GF Wyatt painted the mural above the chancel, called the The Doom, later replaced by a mosaic he designed. I feel a bit of a fraud because I haven't really seen the interior. Also I discover, John Betjeman, a big fan of Gothic Victorian Churches, helped save it, writing letters to defend the church from demolition, which is amazing symmetry because I have just been reading 'On Churches' by JB, and how he saved loads of churches, writing many letters. Then I find a painting of St James the Less by John Piper in his book English Churches with an introduction by John Betjeman which includes:
'The more you look at churches the more you appreciate their varying atmospheres – whether the vicar is high or low or breezy or lazy or crazy. You notice too oddities of furnishing, hymn boards, oil lamps, electric lighting, pipes, wires and heating stoves.'
And I thought yes. Yes. Exactly.
But then I want to actually see the church, and it seems to suggest on a Victorian architecture history site that it is often open at lunchtimes. So I go back again. From a distance I can see the gate to the porch is chained shut, and I nearly just cycle away. But a man is walking up to the church so I follow him and see him ring the bell of a side door and disappear inside. I have to go and park up the Boris Bike and then come back. Another man rings the bell and disappears inside. I press the bell. The door buzzes and lets me in. Above the bell I suddenly notice two AAs in a triangle. Oh, I think, for after all I did look up all the local AA meetings for exexdh in the area when he first stopped drinking, I just didn't remember it here. Anyhow, I am in a hallway at the bottom of some stairs, with an empty dark kitchen with toddler toys stacked and no one and no noise. I see a sign for the office but when I open the door it is dark and closed. I move further into the building, I just want to ask someone if it is ok just to have a look around. I open another door, pushing it open into a bright lit empty room with chairs around a table. Only then do I really realise I could accidentally walk into the AA meeting and it would be hard to get the words out quick enough to explain the mistake.
I am about to chicken out, to leave, when I see a heavy wooden door to the side. I lift the latch, surprised it is open and feeling like I am in a fairytale I walk through into the dark, unlit church. The air is so quiet and still and subdued, I feel my lungs fill with the grainy peace. From very far away I can hear voices but no one challenges me and I walk quietly around. I am briefly worried that they will think I have got lost and come and collect me for the meeting and usher me out of the church and onto a chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit and everything to say about alcohol. Then I feel free, just allowed to be here under these high ceilings, in a huge space like finding lung capacity.
In this dull gloaming light, the church is pixellated with the patterns of red, black and cream bricks. There is an extraordinary font of wrought iron with a roof like a nutty hat at ascot. Then sofas crammed in the back. Beautiful stained glass, beautiful tiles, and the overhead screen hung from the high ceiling. The G.F. Watts mosaic is high up on the chancel wall picturing Christ in heaven. Far away, in the corner there looks to be a skeleton glowing out from the dark. Slightly wary, I get near, but it is a large figure of made out of parts of musical instruments, the body a squeezebox, the fingers keys from a piano, the legs saxophones. It is crazy loose-limbed - a strange, crude representation of Christ. I go back to look at the craftsmanship of the iron work, and the pulpit. But mainly I like the fact I shouldn't be here, there is no electric light, there is space and quiet to breathe deeply.
Then today at work on the TV above my head I see the scenes of fire and windows breaking, and demonstrators pouring into Millbank Tower. Just round the corner from us, just round the corner from the school. I watch fascinated, slightly admiring ( though later I think - of what? ) but anxious for my children. Also I know, having been to a children's birthday party at the Pizza Express in the wings of the building that diners, tucking into doughballs and a Veneziana would have surprise ringside seats to the burning of David Cameron and Nick Clegg effigies. Then cower at the back of the restuarant near the toilets (or watch - which would you do?) as windows were broken, youths showed their bottoms and young people overcame the police. I would have taken a photograph of those diners faces but I don't think anyone did.
Later, on my way home from work I think I will just go and see, getting off one stop early. Walking past the peace camp and the increased police presence at the Houses of Parliament, and in a straight line on. I wondered if I will recognise students in the normal crowds of tourists and office workers. But it is surprisingly easy. Young women wear DM's again and young men look earnest.
I get to Lambeth bridge where cars in a tailgated traffic jam are being diverted. It is dark and really cold. A runner flashes past and dips down the steps to the Thames path. There is police tape across the road, with a few coppers alongside but no barrier to the pavement. I think they will say 'Turn back now, lady' or some such. But no one stops me and I keep walking on an almost empty street. Above a helicopter hovers, as if focussing. I am carrying a Gap bag with a new coat for my eldest son, some jogging bottoms and pants for both, using one of those 30% off vouchers and a heavy tesco bag too. Nearing Millbank Tower, police like dark beetles in riot gear arch together herding the few demonstrators left. Apart from the helicopter, it is very quiet. Bystanders and students ( ex protestors?) stand on the pavement in the dark under the trees by the Thames, placards littered. Many are drinking. Cans or whole bottles. Better protest than drink, I think. But I worry about everyone's drinking these days, including my own, for it doesn't seem good for survival. You ain't the fittest if you are drinking and that seems to be how evolution works. Inside the foyer of the lit building I can see police in riot helmets and fluroscent yellow jackets jammed together, like fish in a tin. Too many and too big for the space. On the walls in surprisingly thin and ineffectual pen there is an anarchist A in a circle, 'Tory scum', and a drawing of a prick and a broken glass door with some girls taking photos on their phones, I walk on. It doesn't seem very substantial. Though I think the lib dems will not be trusted for a long time. Do you remember Nick Clegg's sudden credible status through the televised debate? - I think I had forgotten, I just thought he was a twit - but those young people had wanted to believe absolutely - and here they are disappointed. Combined with the gleeful cruelty of the Conservatives, I think people already feel trapped in having got what they didn't want.
Past the Tate and then circling back to home. I hear a young man say 'In the UK there just aren't many of the lower or upper classes' and I think maybe not where you live mate.
Behind the buildings, I look up and see the tower and I think there are still people up there. ghostly white against the dark night sky, with a helicopter coming in, really near as if herding. I imagine that they got in, went as far as they could and don't know what to do now. Though the power of having obtained the roof top, however briefly, must be amazing.
Amen
Tuesday 2 November 2010
St Martins in the Fields. Trafalgar Square
I think it is the tube strike but it isn't. I get the wrong day, the day before, not the actual day. A little bit like weather reports I find it hard to take in such details. Listening to the news I think ok, concentrate it is coming - rain or winter coat? And then I blink, or turn the tap on to wash up, and the report has gone, and yet again I make an ill informed guess, just looking out of the window and we are down the flights of stairs, late for school and standing outside, the children and me under blue skies and sunshine in thin clothes feeling a little bit cold. If we go fast we'll be alright I say.
This day though, I go to Notting Hill on the bus thinking I have been really clever and aren't I lucky because it isn't too packed for a tube strike day. I have an appointment with a counsellor I have started seeing and I didn't want to miss it. For some reason I don't really want to write this. Though perhaps it is just another truth barrier to go through. Angry children. Counselling through a domestic abuse charity.
The day I rang the domestic abuse charity it was well after the worst - after separating, after the drinking stopped. I had been given the leaflet initially by the woman who came after I phoned for help after exdh disappeared drunk driving the children around and held onto it, though I can remember well before that looking at the poster on the wall at a toddler group thinking that is what it feels like. But there was never any physical violence so I was unconfident that it described what it was. But exexdh had shouted and sworn and ranted at me one more time and after soothing the children back to bed, back to sleep I lay on the floor and sobbed and thought I cannot allow this to carry on anymore. This is my home. The next morning shaky and weary I took the children to school and then came back, took the phone into bed, lay under the covers and phoned the number. I told my tale to a kind, warm voiced woman.
I have always felt that I was a powerful person so it is a surprise to be or have to tell this.
She said you need a solicitor. She said yes, you need to talk through what has happened to you for you have been so strong and you have had no support. Yes. You do not have to live in this way.
So on this tube strike day that isn't - I think - I know, I can walk back through the parks afterwards and then onto a church. I can go and have a look at the Anish Kapoor sculptures. What a treat, I think, and the day is beautiful, warm, crisp blue skies and the autumn trees are strutted peacocks, flame coloured in amazing display.
This is beautiful. I am glad of everything that has put me there at exactly that moment. Not knowing it isn't really a tube strike yet.
In a bit of Hyde Park I don't know very well I find the first sculpture. A Rothko dark pink curved disc in a grey pond. Reflected clouds moving across the sheen of metal and swans and geese scudding beneath, like their home just got a satellite disc. Quite nice I think and move to a huge curved rectangular mirror. But the concrete base it is on causes a funny angled reflection and the scrub of mud and worn grass where people have walked round is ugly. Ho, ho, ho I think at the fairground fattening and upside down of behind but mainly I'm just not sure, not convinced as I tack back across the park to the robocop liquid metal of a spire reaching up. OK. It is OK, for I like the heaven reference, the church reference and I am reading John Betjeman 'On Churches.' But I am surprised by my friend's recommendation. Then, walking down to the lake I see the huge disc like a landed moon, clouds made monumental by their framing, energetic, like thick painted brushstrokes. Oh, I think oh. It is beautiful, And then I turn behind to see the red disc now glowing like a red orb. I feel in a constellation between the two. Earth and the sky combined unexpectedly into wonder.
How much art can you take? Passing the Serpentine Gallery I dither about going in, worried I have got to get everything done and I am working 4 days this week not 3 and time is tight and I still have to get into a church. But, I reason as I am here I might as well just whizz in. An exhibition by Klara Liden.
In a dark room a grainy projected film shows a man ( I think ) but it turns out to be a woman, the artist, slipping slowly backwards, feet sliding a moonwalk through night time streets. It is haunting and repetitive, her journey ending back where she started. A loop. A circumference.
In another room, the same fleshy youth, the artist, beats a bicycle with a stick. It starts out just a knocking, like finding a note, almost a sensual tracing of the form, then increases, but not so much, for the violence is sidelong, casual, a little bit sly, loses momentum and then gathers again. There is no real frenzy to it. Though the bike does topple over, does break into pieces but it never seems inevitable.
These are just observations. I am not sure what I want from them.
I buy some postcards and set off across the park again. It is a long walk and eventually I take a Boris bike from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. I feel I am playing hookey on my own life to fit so much beauty into one morning.
I know St Martin's in The Field's has a cafe and has a lot of concerts but I don't know if I will be able to get in, I don't know if the actual church will be open.
But, walking up the steps, admiring the sky and view of Trafalgar Square which is so beautiful, letting light and space come into the heart of London, the doors are open. Though I still peer suspiciously in from the vestibule doors into the church. There are people sat at pews. I see people inside welcoming others. And walk in.
'There is a free concert.' The kind faces say. It starts at one o'clock. I am tempted to stay but think I will decide as I look around.
The church is beautiful. A huge space. Like an American church. I think, and then find out later that it's 1721 design was copied across North America Simple wood pews, a balcony above with more wooden pews, ornate chandeliers, and baroque white plaster ceilings with gold decorations and an amazing modern window at the end that later I find out to be by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. It has clear leaded glass that shapes into a patched cross in a hazy, optical illusion. As if there is a shimmer, a movement to it, like a vibration.
The first official reference to a church on the site was in 1222, when The Archbishop of Canterbury decided that William, the Abbot of Westminster had authority of the church over Eustace the Bishop of London. That church was surrounded by fields in an isolated position between the cities of London and Westminster. Imagine! Trafalgar Square! Though excavations in 2006 led to the discovery of a Roman aged grave from about 410. This body, so far outside the limits of Roman London burial has led to ideas that it was an early Christian centre. (possibly reusing the site or building of a pagan temple).
Much later Henry V111 around 1542 built a new church and extended the parish boundaries to keep plague victims being carried through his palace and this was enlarged in 1607 and then pulled down in 1721 to be replaced by the current building. designed by James Gibb. The Vicar of St Martin's Dick Shepherd during the WW1 saw St Martin's as 'the church of the ever open door' following the example of the patron saint St Martin a roman soldier, who became a christian and is remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, Dick Shepherd allowed soldiers to rest in the church on the way to France in WW1. And his open door policy led to the work with homeless people, then later the chinese population that arrived in the 1960s and this busy feeling of committed welcome that is apparent this day.
I discover too, on the internet that there is a CD of recordings from WW2 - THE BLITZ Vol 1 (1939-41)
Audiobook 2xCD on CD41 label
ISBN: 978-1-906310-00-4
'An evocative double-disc set, The Blitz (Vol 1) features 145 minutes of rare material recorded 1939 and 1941. Most of the 44 tracks cover the period of night air raids in British cities between September 1940 and May 1941, including the heavy raids on London known as Black Saturday (7 September 1940) and the Second Fire of London (29 December 1940). All the featured recordings are first-hand accounts made at the time, and include civilians, evacuees, ARP and civil defence personnel, RAF pilots, AA gunners and politicians, as well as actuality recordings made during raids and inside shelters.'
With a report from 'CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square during an air raid alert on 24 August 1940. The crypt of this famous church was used as a public shelter. On this night German aircraft bound for Rochester and Thameshaven instead dropped bombs over Central London, causing the first damage from enemy bombs since 1918.'
I am fascinated that I might be able to just choose to play tracks of this. That I can buy it like a greatest hits. Though I will.
Reluctantly I think I really don't have time to stay for the concert but I follow an open door down some steps to explore what there is. In the basement, in this space where people sheltered night after night from bombs, the cafe is packed under vaulted bricks. It is lunchtime. I move on to a huge modern underground expanse of space where there is a shop and a brass rubbing centre, then a sprial staircase that goes back up to the street. I have seen a mention of the Dick Shepherd chapel available for private prayer at any time and follow the arrows to find it. At the back, down some stairs, very quiet, behind glass is a modern simple chapel, two candles either end of a table and some chairs. I look through the glass, to a space cutaway in the earth under the pavement of busy feet, a very very peaceful room. Even walking home tonight from work, thinking oh, oh I am behind writing this, how will I finish it, and then I just remember the peace of that room deep within the building.
But now, just finishing, I hear something creaking and moving in the kitchen. I am not sure what it could be. I listen intently. I feel slightly frightened that unexpectedly a mouse or rat or just something could somehow, not sure, have mangaged to get up here. Then there is a muffled flat bang. It is a balloon bursting within a paper mache mask we were making for halloween and didn't finish, it is such a peculiar sound, such a strange tectonic movement in our flat, that I laugh.
Amen
This day though, I go to Notting Hill on the bus thinking I have been really clever and aren't I lucky because it isn't too packed for a tube strike day. I have an appointment with a counsellor I have started seeing and I didn't want to miss it. For some reason I don't really want to write this. Though perhaps it is just another truth barrier to go through. Angry children. Counselling through a domestic abuse charity.
The day I rang the domestic abuse charity it was well after the worst - after separating, after the drinking stopped. I had been given the leaflet initially by the woman who came after I phoned for help after exdh disappeared drunk driving the children around and held onto it, though I can remember well before that looking at the poster on the wall at a toddler group thinking that is what it feels like. But there was never any physical violence so I was unconfident that it described what it was. But exexdh had shouted and sworn and ranted at me one more time and after soothing the children back to bed, back to sleep I lay on the floor and sobbed and thought I cannot allow this to carry on anymore. This is my home. The next morning shaky and weary I took the children to school and then came back, took the phone into bed, lay under the covers and phoned the number. I told my tale to a kind, warm voiced woman.
I have always felt that I was a powerful person so it is a surprise to be or have to tell this.
She said you need a solicitor. She said yes, you need to talk through what has happened to you for you have been so strong and you have had no support. Yes. You do not have to live in this way.
So on this tube strike day that isn't - I think - I know, I can walk back through the parks afterwards and then onto a church. I can go and have a look at the Anish Kapoor sculptures. What a treat, I think, and the day is beautiful, warm, crisp blue skies and the autumn trees are strutted peacocks, flame coloured in amazing display.
This is beautiful. I am glad of everything that has put me there at exactly that moment. Not knowing it isn't really a tube strike yet.
In a bit of Hyde Park I don't know very well I find the first sculpture. A Rothko dark pink curved disc in a grey pond. Reflected clouds moving across the sheen of metal and swans and geese scudding beneath, like their home just got a satellite disc. Quite nice I think and move to a huge curved rectangular mirror. But the concrete base it is on causes a funny angled reflection and the scrub of mud and worn grass where people have walked round is ugly. Ho, ho, ho I think at the fairground fattening and upside down of behind but mainly I'm just not sure, not convinced as I tack back across the park to the robocop liquid metal of a spire reaching up. OK. It is OK, for I like the heaven reference, the church reference and I am reading John Betjeman 'On Churches.' But I am surprised by my friend's recommendation. Then, walking down to the lake I see the huge disc like a landed moon, clouds made monumental by their framing, energetic, like thick painted brushstrokes. Oh, I think oh. It is beautiful, And then I turn behind to see the red disc now glowing like a red orb. I feel in a constellation between the two. Earth and the sky combined unexpectedly into wonder.
How much art can you take? Passing the Serpentine Gallery I dither about going in, worried I have got to get everything done and I am working 4 days this week not 3 and time is tight and I still have to get into a church. But, I reason as I am here I might as well just whizz in. An exhibition by Klara Liden.
In a dark room a grainy projected film shows a man ( I think ) but it turns out to be a woman, the artist, slipping slowly backwards, feet sliding a moonwalk through night time streets. It is haunting and repetitive, her journey ending back where she started. A loop. A circumference.
In another room, the same fleshy youth, the artist, beats a bicycle with a stick. It starts out just a knocking, like finding a note, almost a sensual tracing of the form, then increases, but not so much, for the violence is sidelong, casual, a little bit sly, loses momentum and then gathers again. There is no real frenzy to it. Though the bike does topple over, does break into pieces but it never seems inevitable.
These are just observations. I am not sure what I want from them.
I buy some postcards and set off across the park again. It is a long walk and eventually I take a Boris bike from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. I feel I am playing hookey on my own life to fit so much beauty into one morning.
I know St Martin's in The Field's has a cafe and has a lot of concerts but I don't know if I will be able to get in, I don't know if the actual church will be open.
But, walking up the steps, admiring the sky and view of Trafalgar Square which is so beautiful, letting light and space come into the heart of London, the doors are open. Though I still peer suspiciously in from the vestibule doors into the church. There are people sat at pews. I see people inside welcoming others. And walk in.
'There is a free concert.' The kind faces say. It starts at one o'clock. I am tempted to stay but think I will decide as I look around.
The church is beautiful. A huge space. Like an American church. I think, and then find out later that it's 1721 design was copied across North America Simple wood pews, a balcony above with more wooden pews, ornate chandeliers, and baroque white plaster ceilings with gold decorations and an amazing modern window at the end that later I find out to be by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. It has clear leaded glass that shapes into a patched cross in a hazy, optical illusion. As if there is a shimmer, a movement to it, like a vibration.
The first official reference to a church on the site was in 1222, when The Archbishop of Canterbury decided that William, the Abbot of Westminster had authority of the church over Eustace the Bishop of London. That church was surrounded by fields in an isolated position between the cities of London and Westminster. Imagine! Trafalgar Square! Though excavations in 2006 led to the discovery of a Roman aged grave from about 410. This body, so far outside the limits of Roman London burial has led to ideas that it was an early Christian centre. (possibly reusing the site or building of a pagan temple).
Much later Henry V111 around 1542 built a new church and extended the parish boundaries to keep plague victims being carried through his palace and this was enlarged in 1607 and then pulled down in 1721 to be replaced by the current building. designed by James Gibb. The Vicar of St Martin's Dick Shepherd during the WW1 saw St Martin's as 'the church of the ever open door' following the example of the patron saint St Martin a roman soldier, who became a christian and is remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, Dick Shepherd allowed soldiers to rest in the church on the way to France in WW1. And his open door policy led to the work with homeless people, then later the chinese population that arrived in the 1960s and this busy feeling of committed welcome that is apparent this day.
I discover too, on the internet that there is a CD of recordings from WW2 - THE BLITZ Vol 1 (1939-41)
Audiobook 2xCD on CD41 label
ISBN: 978-1-906310-00-4
'An evocative double-disc set, The Blitz (Vol 1) features 145 minutes of rare material recorded 1939 and 1941. Most of the 44 tracks cover the period of night air raids in British cities between September 1940 and May 1941, including the heavy raids on London known as Black Saturday (7 September 1940) and the Second Fire of London (29 December 1940). All the featured recordings are first-hand accounts made at the time, and include civilians, evacuees, ARP and civil defence personnel, RAF pilots, AA gunners and politicians, as well as actuality recordings made during raids and inside shelters.'
With a report from 'CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square during an air raid alert on 24 August 1940. The crypt of this famous church was used as a public shelter. On this night German aircraft bound for Rochester and Thameshaven instead dropped bombs over Central London, causing the first damage from enemy bombs since 1918.'
I am fascinated that I might be able to just choose to play tracks of this. That I can buy it like a greatest hits. Though I will.
Reluctantly I think I really don't have time to stay for the concert but I follow an open door down some steps to explore what there is. In the basement, in this space where people sheltered night after night from bombs, the cafe is packed under vaulted bricks. It is lunchtime. I move on to a huge modern underground expanse of space where there is a shop and a brass rubbing centre, then a sprial staircase that goes back up to the street. I have seen a mention of the Dick Shepherd chapel available for private prayer at any time and follow the arrows to find it. At the back, down some stairs, very quiet, behind glass is a modern simple chapel, two candles either end of a table and some chairs. I look through the glass, to a space cutaway in the earth under the pavement of busy feet, a very very peaceful room. Even walking home tonight from work, thinking oh, oh I am behind writing this, how will I finish it, and then I just remember the peace of that room deep within the building.
But now, just finishing, I hear something creaking and moving in the kitchen. I am not sure what it could be. I listen intently. I feel slightly frightened that unexpectedly a mouse or rat or just something could somehow, not sure, have mangaged to get up here. Then there is a muffled flat bang. It is a balloon bursting within a paper mache mask we were making for halloween and didn't finish, it is such a peculiar sound, such a strange tectonic movement in our flat, that I laugh.
Amen
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