tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30868036281757646462024-03-13T16:04:37.417-07:00I sit in churches to thinkamenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-50496766304707986972014-08-18T14:22:00.001-07:002014-08-18T14:22:37.933-07:00St Nicholas Cole AbbeyThere is that scene near the end of ET where the FBI arrive - big burly men shouldering in, the house taped up, a kind of tunnelled life within what had been the comfort of the home - and this is what our life feels like at the moment except much, much smaller, with more dust and dirt and East European accents not American. Our kitchen and bathroom are being replaced ( which I keep reminding myself will be great ) but life is meant to carry on, everything dirty, everything boxed up, nothing where it should be, most things coated in plastic - still getting the boys off to school ironed and pack-lunched with homework done, me to work for a national newspaper smiling. All of this living out of one tiny room with dust and dirt everywhere. As if matter itself has been released - there is a pointlessness, a futility to the human endeavour of a dustpan and brush and something in me feels as if it is giving up, needs a flying bmx bike, to find a good and solid home. <br />
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The weekend before the work starts I am packing the kitchen into boxes I bought from Rymans with the boys away when it dawns on me - we are too stressed for this - how are we going to cope.<br />
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My eldest son did not get the secondary school choice he/we wanted (despite a slightly odd certainty he would.) I did not get a Jerwood/ Arvon writers mentoring scheme award - though I was of six to be interviewed for three places. I am waiting for the tax credit tribunal though bailiff letters still arrive. I have got used to them but it is still frightening as I fold them away under an increasingly dusty pile of papers . You are trying to bully me. I think.<br />
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On the first day of the works - when every part of the kitchen and bathroom was ripped out - it is as if our family wounds are re opened - anxiety is very high - the boys are angry that we live in a tiny flat - that the home that has been made has been trashed that something about our lives is broken. <br />
I put up the camping table with a brightly coloured table cloth in the crowd of boxes and stacked furniture of the main room - and think of the invention and courage of the make shift shelters of disaster zones, refugee camps and at the edge of war. Women making a kernel of home in the chaos. I know I am lucky, that this is temporary, that we are safe but can see the trauma that being without home brings.<br />
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The results of both the school application and the mentoring award came through on the same day. I had hoped for good news. ( after all the last post was so bleak a friend texted support as if I was on suicide watch ) I had thought we have been through enough - this is the day the tide turns: At about 4.30 I hear I haven't got the mentoring. ( I knew by then I hadn't - I just knew you would leave the bad luck calls to late ) An earnest and kind young woman keeps telling me all the positive things about why and how I haven't got it. I just want to get her off the phone with her lingering good luck messages sticky as a boiled sweet found in a pocket. Oh, oh. I don't care I think - bartering with who? - I need the school place most - I will settle for just that - though I am crazily confident he will get it.<br />
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That night I sit up keeping vigil to the secondary school application email. The cutoff is midnight but at midnight no e mail has come. I stay up - slightly manically but repeatedly hitting the refresh button - but nothing comes through. Oh I keep thinking. I need to know. hit refresh nothing hit refresh nothing.<br />
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Eventually at 3am I think to try the edu site - where there is a note saying yahoo sites are not working and I obtain access with an old stored password to find out my son has got his third place school. Out of the upset of the day and the confusion of the night it is like seeing the world through a tangle - not what I thought would happen at all.<br />
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I absolutely thought that this day our luck would change.<br />
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I have been reading a biography of the writer Penelope Fitzgerald. I borrowed it from work - exhilerated to find the story of a woman who had her first book published at 60. Clever, from a clever family, she married a man who became an alcoholic then brought her children up in baffled but stoic poverty. Though they lived on a boat and it sank. My life has felt like that boat but it isn't literally true. I start to read the novels and the writing is sly but perfect, I don't always love it but I am always impressed by it - she just hangs characters a little bit out of reach, doesn't explain too much. She also loved the writing of Samuel Beckett ( I used to struggle to get a character through a door then reading Beckett realised a reader will believe much much more than you think, that the narrative can be almost abstract, suspended in space - a mound of earth, one room with wind at the door.)<br />
I have promised the woman I borrowed it from that I read fast/will bring it back but I thought I had read that PF believed you can't work off your bad chance - there isn't a finite amount - you have to just accept the load you are given but I can't find the quote. I had marked the things I liked with tiny torn scraps of paper and copied them in my notebook but couldn't find this one. I keep dipping to find it, then start to read the book again, what I do find is:<br />
'The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one's own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At the same time it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life. Life will not confirm.'<br />
and 'Experiences aren't given to us to be 'got over', otherwise they would hardly be experiences.' is the nearerst I can find.<br />
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I had hoped that I would remain calm and pragmatic throughout secondary school applications - the finding what is best for my very bright, wild, creative, angry, enquiring son and obtaining it. Though most children just want to be with their friends - he was adamant he didn't want to go the local and assured place comp. So I started reasonably early with an application last year for a really exceptional public school - working with my son night after night on practise papers - though discovering on the internet that this preparation that I started a month before the exam - should have been worked on for years with a tutor. wa wa waaa I thought - though we did it together - enjoying the process - reaching a regular score of over 90% on the vr. It wasn't enough and i knew he cldnt alwys spell v well and the phone call to interview never came. Later I thought about the braying parents and slightly odd staff - the stooped and over-charming, the aneroxic and the florid and it made me think of the wounds of public schools, the damage done to boys and I didn't trust the process - though the facilities and ambition was incredible - I felt sheepish I had put my son through so much - after all we didn't just need a place but a 100% bursary too ( filling in forms of financial details that would have made the stooped and thin wince at the bravery and madness of my life. ) What I really wanted and liked best was the access to the Thames - the freedom for a boy to explore the river, to feel free alongside the moorhens and strong currents.<br />
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I spent hours and hours and hours researching schools on the internet - though the truth was there was very little choice - but at the last minute I found an across the border-borough-option with an art scholarship exam to take and my son went and took the exam. That morning after dropping him off for the test I bumped into the Momdel - a beautiful Russian mother that I used to talk about Tolstoy and Dostoevesky in the playground after school though my certaintity that she had been a model had been confirmed when she took her daughters out of our school when she got a job presening ' Next top model' in Georgia. She introduced me to her companion - a Russian artist that had been tutoring her daughter for the art exam. Oh I thought glumly I am so naive. Then I found £15 pounds in the gutter and met a friend for breakfast. I could see that this was the best option we ( it would mean my younger son could get in on sibling policy ) had by miles.<br />
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Afterwards when I met my son at the school gate in the hoards of tense parents ( I saw others I knew or had known - a girl I had waitressed with, a newspaper editor ) he was excited and confident - look he said as if bringing out a bag of brightly coloured sweets for a greedy toddler - I took a picture on my phone - OH - I say - I am certain you are not allowed to do that - yes, but no one saw he said and look - my hands clamouring he showed me a really beautiful drawing of his hand drawing on paper - the task he had been asked to do - the determination of the drawing, the confidence and variation of line - oh I thought - there is no way he won't get a place with that drawing. All the art teachers came and stood behind me to look at the drawing he said then described a girl the only other one he thought had done a good drawing - getting frustrated and scribbling over her work. Maybe they will be able to see how good it was underneath her scribble he said with concern.</div>
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I can't really explain my certainty - though I do have an MA in fine art - but I thought he was sure to get a place, though I understood and indeed accepted that the test was to cook the books of a truly 'comprehensive intake' and to design the school to be middle class. Somehow - our address? being a single mother? we didn't add up.<br />
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Ironically the head teacher at my son's primary school tells me that it has been 'an astonishing year of 100% bursaries for private schools from this Y6' - she thinks it is because the charitable status of public schools is under attack - and the disadvantage of the children from our school is exactly what they want to look philanthropic - but children that do not get the results of my son have obtained them. I still don't think that this would have been necessarily the right option for my son but I feel sick that I have failed to obtain a secondary education that will suit him.<br />
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PSM says she chanted OM every day for the 100% bursary place her son has received.<br />
wa waaa<br />
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On our street, the dark cut through once known as Duck Lane, a camp of homeless guys has set up. More organized than the normal sleeping-bag-solo-sleepers they have mattresses and layers of cardboard and somehow their structures remain even when they aren't there. When I close my bedroom curtains one night I see them all tucked into sleeping bags but clamouring around a box of beer like a Daumier sketch, faces lit by street light, though in the morning when I walk past the sleeping forms I see a pair of shoes like slippers laid neatly at the side of the bed, a water bottle and a book nearby like items placed on a bedside table.</div>
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I also read that Penelope Fitzgerald writes notes of herself as a Becketian old woman called Mrs Thing 'Nietzsche complained of the 'smell of failed souls' in modern civilisation.' And yet is is all the same - so terribly the same, every morning one must get one's body up, consult it, wash it, somehow.....'<br />
'When Mrs Thing was 47 years old a fairy appeared and said 'You need never do anything you hated doing again: you need never find on catching sight of yourself that your face is red and foolish, you need never not quite catch what is said, never try to keep up with things........'<br />
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I feel like Mrs Thing. An old woman working hard, failing to quite pull off the normal things of life, a fool. Now squandering the assets of my son not just myself.<br />
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On the day I go to find a city church I catch myself thinking unexpectedly if I get into church today I will pray. That morning I had run and caught up with a mum whose son already attended the school my son has a place for. Her son too is bright, confident, slightly warrior and I thought her reaction would be a good gauge. Her face distorts - it is a terrible school she said, terrible, there is trouble and bullying, and fighting, they give no homework and they have all had letters to say year 7 is failing. Oh I say not quite expecting this onslaught. Oh. </div>
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I cycle close to St Paul's Cathedral - there is a church close to the river I think - remembering yellow spots on the map I have by my computer marking the churches. I find the austere Welsh Church dipped down from the road by steep steps but it is closed. Back up to the dual carriageway I find a church further up on the side though it no longer seems to be a church but a cafe - The Wren. I have to go I think, it is a Christopher Wren church - but I feel a bit disappointed - just today I was prepared to pray. I think it would have been a quick fumble - an embarrassed crouch to the knees and some muttered words - but I was prepared to do it. I walk up the steps - into a beautiful airy white space with wood pannelling and stained glass windows - people milling around, tables and a wooden counter with coffee machine, and cakes on glass stands. The room is beautiful - but but but - It all looks so 'lifestyled' - the fetishism of those bloody artisans I think grumpily, just walking round the edges looking at the original carved garlands left on the walls. It isn't that I don't like nice things - I just want things to look insouciant - or more exactly - where they should be. I don't even sit for a coffee though later I read the cafe has won an award for the best new cafe, that the coffee is very good. But again - I like a casualness to excellence and there is something over done to the over-crafted modern intervention to the beautiful space.<br />
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Researching later I find out it<i> is</i> still a church - but it seems to be an experiment - a very good cafe that hosts talks about God at lunchtimes - like an instagram version of a church it looks good in pictures travels well by social media and via wedding pictures.<br />
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Though I also discover it has been a church that attempted ( and suceeded ) in obtaining huge congregations in the past by such radical moves. In 1881 the congregation was down to one man and one woman but when Henry Shuttleworth, a Christian Socialist was appointed in 1883 - installing a bar, a huge music programme and making the church a centre of debate the number attending grew to 450 on a Sunday evening.<br />
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The first recorded mention of the church was in a letter from Pope Lucius II in 1144-5. Named after St Nicholas of Myra the patron saint of children and fishermen, Cole Abbey was a derivation from Coldharbour - a traveller's shelter or shelter from the cold. Deeds in the time of Richard I report a new fish market close by and during the 16th century several fishmongers were buried here. John Stow reports during the reign of Elizabeth I that a lead and stone cistern, fed by the Thames was set up against the the north wall 'for the care and commodity of the Fishermongers in about Old Fish St'.<br />
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During the reformation protestant worship was decreed though when Mary I came to the throne returning Catholicism to England it was the first church to celebrate Mass. The incumbent Rector Thomas Sowdley had in the meantime taken a wife in the reign of Edward VI and lost his job only to be reinstated under Elizabeth I.<br />
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The church was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666 and rebuilt by Christopher Wren between 1672- 1678. Noted in the building accounts are 'Dinner for Dr Wren and other Company - £2 14s 0d and 'Half a pint of canary for Dr Wren's coachmen - 6d.'<br />
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Destroyed again on May 10th 1941 in the worst air raid of the war. The church remained a shell until restored by Arthur Bailey in 1962. Recently restored it opened as a coffee shop and lunchtime meeting place for office workers to hear the word of God through 'Nick's talks in 2014.<br />
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Weeks later - I don't even remember how we hear about it but we go - on the last day - to Selfridges temporary skate park. This is London I think! This is amazing! Watching one son skateboard and the other rollerblade down Oxford St then turn down Orchard Street at the side of the huge department store to find the entrance. I skateboarded as a kid. My childhood next door neighbours ( one dead, one a heroin addict, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh I miss them both so much though one was always absent ) and my younger brother skateboarded. We bought skateboards through classified ads, started on a small slope infront of the next door neighbours house then graduated to a really steep street nearby. We went to the empty multi story car park every Sunday. It was just us down the spiral curve. We skateboarded and skateboarded - though it was surburban hills and carparks and the only time we came to London to Skate City we didn't know the basic flip turn to be allowed on the bowl. All that money for the train and the skate park entrance and we just mooched round the periphery- hicks from the sticks. But here years later- just after 10 in the morning my sons and I go up some abandoned hotel stairs at the side of Selfridges and into a temporary but huge skate park on the first floor. No rollerblades allowed though so my younger son who is always sensibly defining himself as 'other' from my eldest can't skate. Though they have skateboards to hire but not until after 12 when the lessons finish. My eldest son skates and skates - he is very good - and it is a beautifully designed space and almost empty to begin with - though later it fills up. My youngest son and I mooch around - go to Selfridges foodhall and have an ice cream, then back again. At 12 we go back to the desk to rent a board for him. There isn't a queue but it feels like one because I am thinking - ask for one for yourself - go on, go on, go on, go on. I get the board and helmet for my younger son, then just as I am about to turn away - funny mrs thing - I turn back to the pretty blonde girl and say - could I get another board - could I get another board for me. <br />
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On the smooth concrete I start to skate. I can do a very old fashioned but I believe very elegant skateboarding - and when I start my heart is banging - I feel it is a performance ( because there are dads watching from behind barriers and young people surprised as I weave around corners ) oh oh I am worrying I am de masculating my sons oh oh I think I am embarrassing them/myself the funny Mrs Thing is now on a skateboard oh oh - but then the music starts and the dj has put on I guess for me - old woman - when I'm 64 'When I get older losing my hair many years from now..... I feel I am flying. The park is beautiful - the concrete so smooth that I can go fast, pick up speed lean into the corners. I say to my sons am I embarrassing and they say - you can skate a lot better than most of the kids here - then the eldest trys to teach me to drop-in and I fall - Mrs Thing without dignity and bashing my elbow.<br />
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It doesn't matter for a brief time I lose her - I feel really free - really happy.<br />
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Things are about to get better I think.<br />
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My son gets a place at a newly opening Free School - I dust off my principals and accept the place. I worry and worry that this post is boring that what I have to say is only the grouching of a failed pushy mum. Then I think I wanted to write about London and the madness of education is part of it. Something is wrong though I take part in it.<br />
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<br />amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-78957429089562807872014-02-22T14:19:00.000-08:002014-02-26T15:49:48.241-08:00St Martins within LudgateI am squeezed on the wrong side of some railings alongside a dual carriageway on London Wall. The pavement has just petered out and the cars are passing fast. I am walking the perimeter of the old walled City of London. I am approaching the Barbican/ Museum of London and I am certain there are some remains of the city wall here but I can't get to them. I have a new smart phone and I have just checked a vintage pair of patent Prada wedges that I want to bid for on ebay pleased to discover I have 6 more hours to bid and that the price is stationary at £7.50. I am increasingly anxious that I shouldn't be on this crazy mission, that I am going to run out of time to do all the back-to-school jobs I need to do while exh's mum is doing the last couple of days of school holiday childcare. Then out of nowhere I remember my brother's unkind girlfriend saying years ago, 'You should get a boyfriend before you get too mad.' I think - near to being run over - playing hookey on motherhood and domesticity - keen to bid money I don't have on second hand shoes and looking for traces of the City of London Wall on a solitary, slightly manic walk around the complete perimeter of where the wall once was - that I have gone way beyond the point she meant then - way beyond a point I imagined for myself.<br />
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I curl around the railings into a side street and then see a concrete staircase under the concrete walkway I have been trying to reach. As I climb the piss-smelling stairs to an abandoned and boarded mini shopping precinct that looks like a 70s cowboy town I think quite clearly - oh I am going to be murdered now - for this place just seems so abandoned, so desolate, so unsafe. In a cutaway from the walkway a flint arch rises through the curve of paving slabs and it is possible to look down over the ruins of a medieval church alongside brown-dog coloured dug earth, with building machinery littered around. There appears to be a plan for this area but it isn't apparent what it could be. Nor is the wall I think, though I am certain I am near.<br />
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I woke up this morning a bit hungover ( PSM came to dinner the night before / it's in the name first time readers / a joke when she became a SM too and we shared a bottle of wine, discussing our children and our woes and became The Pissed Single Mothers Club though occasionally we are disturbingly good to our name ) I sat and wrote a list - make chicken pie, wash and iron sheets, sort out cupboard under the sink, clean bathroom, buy boy's socks from John Lewis, type up changes to novel, walk perimeter of City of London wall. Then I made a cup of tea, found some paper and just wrote for 5 hours solidly. I kept thinking - I have to stop and do one of the other things on the list - watching helplessly as the day evolved into a completely different one than I had planned and the things I needed to do gathered behind as if crooked fingers wagging disapproval.<br />
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At 3.30 I cycled out. I had dithered about where to start my 'London Wall' walk - near to Newgate where I would approach it from Westminster - or from the Tower of London ( so I can find a chuch to enter near to the end of my walk? ) It is solved by Peter Ackroyd who describes exactly the walk I want to make - from Tower Hill to the river by Blackfriars. On the bike the journey to Tower Hill is ridiculously quick. Passing through the City I can see churches tucked everywhere though St Pauls is like a white cliff face, a whale, an enormous thing, and all I can think is how am I ever going to find time to write about that? I circle around at Tower Hill looking for a docking bay for the bike. Unexpectedly through the glass grand foyer of a hotel I see a section of the wall sandwiched into a back carpark - like a zoo animal too big for it's enclosure. I don't have a map and though I have brought the Peter Ackroyd book - the huge tome is in a backpack with some apples and some chocolate - I am trying just to work it out. I remember vaguely there is a section right near to the Tower of London itself - and follow tourists down a walkway starting to doubt myself. But there under the 1970s concrete bridge is the ruins of a gateway and on the wall alongside a plaque numbered one, with the history of the wall and a numbered map on how to complete the walk. Oh I think breezily with the confidence of the hangover I will just follow the plaques. My plan is to trace the boundaries of the city before visiting the churches within the City. I notice a bird with a really bright eye sitting on the railings as if talking to me and realise a slight mania to my thoughts - I am overwhelmed by this trail of history - overwhelmed by everything I am meant to be doing.<br />
http://www.london-footprints.co.uk/wklondonwallroute.htm<br />
The journey starts well - number two - a huge slab of wall by Tower Hill tube station - where the layers - roman, medieval are clear and the ditch the other side still exists. Then the section behind the hotel - a cut through alongside the valet parking. Here behind the facades of buildings I can see an untidy route, scraps of overgrown waste ground squeezed and then stunted by office blocks then set off to find the next part of wall. I lose my way. I find myself in a dead end thinking there is an alleyway only to find the backdoor to a pub. The route becomes hazy - I find a scrap of wall by Aldgate roundabout, then a part alongside a church with gravestones flush to the bricks of the wall.<br />
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The wall was initially built by the Romans circa AD 200 the second largest construction in Britain after Hadrian's wall, made from Kentish ragstone, brought by water from Maidstone. It has been calculated that some 1,300 barge journeys would have been made to transport the thousands of tons of stone necessary to build the wall that stretched for 2miles and incorporated an existing Roman fort at the NW corner. The wall had many 'gates' that opened to important Roman roads leading to other towns in the country. Initially: Aldgate, Bishopgate, Cripplegate, Newgate and Ludgate though Aldersgate was added later and Moorgate an even later medieval addition. In Saxon times some of the wall decayed but was built up again in medieval and tudor times though as London grew, its defensive role became no longer necessary and much of the wall was demolished or disappeared beneath shops and warehouses. By 1760 parliament chose to remove the city gates and much of the structure disappeared through the evolution and building of the City. Like a historic tide the wall has been built and disappeared: during WW2 when London was bombed and some remains were demolished in other places great chunks of the wall were unearthed under flattened buildings.<br />
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Alongside the abandoned concrete shops at the edge of the Barbican I haven't found a plaque since number 6 and I am tired and frightened. I can't explain exactly the feeling of real dread - though perhaps it is just 'cutting myself off' the feeling of walking further and further into an empty dead end. On another piss smelling staircase but going back down now I notice a strange growth on the floor of a landing - a small smooth mound in the shape of a small foot like a scrap of ice. A drip, a repetitive leak of water has formed the base of a stalagmite on the 1970s staircase. By the side of a children's protection service office I find a patch of park with a plaque and the wall. A church had been built here to venerate the murdered archbishop St Alphage. The word murdered confirms the fear I feel. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">I am forcing myself to explore the wall, to look round the park I can hear running water from the overgrown corner of the park, through a gateway, cutting myself off further and further as I go deeper into the small park. It is a fountain, an innocent babbling magical thing only spied through undergrowth but I am relieved to be able to leave the area, leave this place behind. I have friends who live in the Barbican and I make myself laugh by imagining them looking out of their window to see me rooting around the undergrowth of a scabby park on my own. I look up to the flats and see on a walkway a trendy group - a pretty girl flanked by two men and see that they are taking a picture of me. I am not sure what the picture they are taking means to them but I feel very alone though very observed. I feel I am too far out of reach. Perhaps she is who I would like to be, taking a picture of who she doesn't want to be I think and see them laughing.</span><br />
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<span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1380664434912_2317" style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Further into the Barbican ( along concrete walkways marked by bike tracks like sand erosion, and squeezing past Pizza Express where the walkway is nearly cut off ) there is a huge part of the wall. I am still completely alone in a garden walking the perimeter, still scared but overlooked by luxury flats and alongside another water feature - much more modern with sprinkling fountains. The wall has alcoves in the exterior like sentry posts, thickly covered in ivy. On the interior side it is richly planted and in a wooden box like a bird hut there is a leaflet about the bishop's garden with a sign saying 'please return after use'.</span></div>
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<span id="yui_3_7_2_1_1380664434912_2325" style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Above a muslim family are taking pictures of the wall with me in their picture for some reason they make me feel anchored, in their pictures, in history. Perhaps I think when I am writing this the whole journey is about being inside or outside of the wall. It is an odd historic concept - the included and the excluded - and the city wall is the line that denotes it - I feel I am moving between both. Much later I am surprised to find this on wikipedia:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The suffix words "Without" and "Within" denote whether an area of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="City of London">the City</a> – and usually applied to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wards_of_the_City_of_London" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Wards of the City of London">wards</a> – fell outside or within the London Wall, though only <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farringdon,_London" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Farringdon, London">Farringdon</a> and (formerly) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_(ward)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Bridge (ward)">Bridge</a> have been split into separate wards this way (Bridge Without falling beyond the gates on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="London Bridge">London Bridge</a>). Some wards – <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldersgate" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Aldersgate">Aldersgate</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishopsgate" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Bishopsgate">Bishopsgate</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripplegate" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Cripplegate">Cripplegate</a> – cover an area that was both within and outside the wall and, although not split into separate wards, often the part (or "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_(country_subdivision)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Division (country subdivision)">division</a>") within the Wall is denoted (on maps, in documents, etc.) as being "within" and the part outside the Wall as being "without". Archaically <i>"Infra"</i> (within) and <i>"Extra"</i> (without) were also used<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-12" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Wall#cite_note-12" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[12]</a></sup> and the terms "intramural" and "extramural"<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Wall#cite_note-13" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[13]</a></sup><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-14" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Wall#cite_note-14" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[14]</a></sup> are also used to describe being within or outside the walled part of the city.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">I had been thinking about the excluded that historically lived outside the wall - the lepers and cripples though I also find mention of 'The tenement of the Hermit of Crepelgate' and a suggestion there was a structure there for a hermit even before Roman times.</span></span><br />
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Still dithering around I find a long section of wall on Noble St - though I have got to plaque 20 unexpectedly - the last one I found was 13. I don't really understand either how I could have wandered in such a huge area around the Barbican and then find a long intact piece here but I have to accept what I can see. Later I realise this is where the Roman Fort was so the route does kind of bulge and then fall back into a line. Though I also discover that the wall walk - created in the 1980s hasn't been maintained, that the plaques do indeed peter out in places like the crumbling battlements of the wall itself - the tide of time has swept away some of the jaunty typeface plaques of the walk. Indeed an IRA bomb in 1993 took both the plaque 8 and the remains of the wall it described. I order a London Wall Walk 1985 vintage guide book on ebay and also Walking London Wall by Ed Harris - published in 2009, who introduces his book with dismay at the historic marginal interest the wall generates and the trouble of writing a guide when buildings change and disappear leaving co ordinates like sand. </span></div>
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I am feeling increasingly melancholy - I can't seem to fit the day, can't find what I thought I wanted. Though walking alongside the low wall of what seems to be a public park I can see graves. I once heard on the radio about a park in London with a memorial to citizens who lost their life helping others. I always imagined it in East London but for some unknown reason - I think - looking through the railings - oh it is here. At the gate there is a simple sign - fascinating enough - saying 'Postman's Park A Christian Open Air Meeting is held here Monday 1.15pm from May - Sept by kind permission of the church.' I walk in - there are a few people milling around but I keep walking. I am not sure how I knew - but there - under a wooden roofed structure - are the tiled memorials to 'Heroic Self Sacrifice'. Conceived of by George Frederic Watts in 1887 to celebrate ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, there are beautiful arts and crafts memorial tablets with messages, almost like haikus of heroic acts and consequent deaths. Each is a short story: 'Thomas Griffin Fitters Labourer April 12 1899 in a boiler explosion at a Battersea Sugar Refinery was fatally scalded in returning to search for his mate.' 'George Stephen Funnell Police Constable Dec 22 1899 In a fire at the Elephant and Castle Wick Road, Hackney Wick after rescuing two lives went back into the flames, saving a barmaid at the risk of his own life.' 'David Selves aged 12 Off Woolwich supported his drowning playfellow and sank with him clasped in his arms.' 'September 1886, Ernest Benning Compositor aged 22 Upset from a boat one dark night off Pimlico Pier Grasped an oar with one hand supporting a woman with the other but sank as she was rescued.' Inflammable dresses, unmanageable horses, the dangerous entanglement of river weed - the dangers of mortality are vivid and selfless. Later I discover that a mobile app has recently been launched with detailed accounts of the 54 dramatic incidents and intend to take my sons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />I fiddle around now passed the bombed remains of the tower of Christ Church Greyfriars, round the back of the Old Bailey, then out to St Sepulchre where a plaque claims there is a ghost of a black dog that stalks the churchyard. I am trying to find a church that is open now - there is barely any trace of the wall left - finish up and get home and on with those chores stacked up behind me still to do.</span></div>
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On Ludgate, I find the church of St Martin's at Ludgate and the door is open. I climb the stairs but a Chinese couple are locking up and won't let me in. I walk around the back searching for the last traces of the wall. At a locked gateway a black dog sat flat like a shadow bays dolefully and I do actually think for a second that I am through some doorway of sense or time everything just seems so heightened though the Chinese couple who wouldn't let me in the church calm the dog and myself to reality. Finally I find a scrap of wall packed between office blocks then straggle the last vanished outline of the wall to the Thames and I have finished.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At home I wash my hands and make the pastry - then sit with a cup of tea and write a list of this journey - I am still slightly manic - but I can't actually write the blog until the pie is made and the under sink cupboard cleaned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There I find the ice cream boxes kept for paint mixing, the out-of-control but wrong-sized tupperware, slightly dirty jam jars that I am scared to thow out in case I need to make jam (though I have never made jam), old school trousers torn to make dusters, paintbrushes, cleaning products in classified boxes, and redundant water bottles (it is the holy grail of motherhood - a water bottle that doesn't leak or get smelly.) I have had an-end-of-school-holidays epiphany that if I could sort out this crap I could have clean wiped kitchen surfaces and spend less time fighting the madness of disorganisation. I am trying to move the detergent box, the fabric conditioner and the chemistry set off the surface by the sink and into this cupboard.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Afterwards I make a roux sauce - and cook the bacon garlic and onions - roll the pastry. Briefly I feel really, really annoyed that the thing I want to do - just write this - is on hold for this pie that I have to make. But I can't waste the meat leftover from a roasted chicken and want to prepare this meal for my sons for the night before they go back to school.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Later, much much later when my life has swamped me I look back to this day like the shore I have departed from. Late that night - the cupboard clean, the pie cooked I sat and wrote most of the city wall journey. Then like a tidal wave as the new term starts - fighting the tax credit people, secondary school applications for my eldest son and just worrying takes over my time late at night. This is the slot, the tiny part for saved for me, saved for writing and I feel it vanish like the glitter of salt in water. As I watch it disappear, then recede to a memory I run out of the confidence in the blog, in my writing, in my own fun and optimism. Secondary school research takes all the diligent fiddly-fingered late night internet investigations that this blog takes. Fighting the tax credit people takes the sense that things can be fair, that one day everything will get better, that we will be alright. Though at a crazy point I send the tax credit people pages from this blog - for it details so exactly what has happened - that exh does not live here, has been housed in a hostel then moved to illegal commercial properties - all so hard to prove when it is true. I imagine them stuck up in an office in Preston as an example of the loony lengths benefit cheats will go to though a lawyer friend I tell looks horrified at my madness. A letter threatening me with the bailiffs arrives though I am still in appeal. It is a mistake they say coolly when I ring to remonstrate. Yes they say they are targeting single mums when I ask if they have targets to reach.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh. oh. I think I don't deserve this. No single mum deserves this. Every bit of surviving, of bringing up those two boys with little money and little support, of holding back the flood of chaos that all these things brought has been done with determination and fun and dedication. Now I am exhausted. I find myself unable to talk or even think about it without crying. Friend's turn their faces kind to my tears and tales of misfortune though I am embarrassed that it doesn't seem to end. Being a working single mum is tough - hard work and sometimes lonely - and yet the worst of it is that however hard you work or try you do a bad job of almost everything. That despite the relentless good cheer and dogged work - everything is only tidy for a second, the children only well-behaved briefly and one son is angry and the other one anxious. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sitting down now five months later to write about visiting St Martin's within Ludgate I realise I remember very little of the visit. Rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire, in the shade of St Paul's he designed it to sit against the city wall, designed it in juxtoposition to the Cathedral. I went in a lunchtime a few days after my perimeter walk, climbing the steps up and into the church from the flat-facade that sits tight to the pavement. There was a man just infront of me going up the steps, both of us in a hurry both gazing around the dark interior together though he then sits to pray. I sense we are both slightly annoyed that the other is ruining the peace of the place for the other. I remember a really lovely quietness and some old wooden racks that were used for bread to be left for the poor. Though I discover that St Martin of Tours was the patron saint of travellers and that churches dedicated to him always stand just within city gates. The earliest mention of a church on the site is from 1174 though the legend is that <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">"Cadwallo King of the Britons is said to have been buried here in 677". Cadwallo's image was allegedly placed on </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludgate" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; line-height: 19px; text-decoration: none;" title="Ludgate">Ludgate</a><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">, to frighten away the Saxons. I remember I still want to see the statue of Lud that </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">decorated a later Ludgate </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;">and now sits in a dark arch within the churchyard of St Dunstan's of the West and I think briefly I should go back to see St Martin's and then cycle out of the reach of these old city walls to see the statue now 'without /extra'. But I don't. I still have very little time though I am writing again which makes me feel happy.</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19px;"> </span></span><br />
<br />amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-40010116716703273582013-08-17T12:03:00.000-07:002013-08-18T03:33:12.164-07:00St Dunstan in the WestSitting at my opposite neighbour's table drinking good coffee and trying to get my bearings in a mirror version of our own flat I listen to a truly terrible tale of betrayal. I find out too, almost in passing that the other neighbour on our landing is David Bowie's stylist. I feel like a Stella Street fantasist writing these words for it seems so extraordinarily unlikely though it appears to be true. <br />
In this scruffy block I am sandwiched above and below by gentle single mother's of grown up daughters - who barely conceal their timid but thorough disapproval of me and my noisy boys. Opposite on our landing there used to be a very nice gay couple but one partner returned to Australia and though the other man was meant to join him he never went. After a while a trans - something ( not sure if transvestite or transgender pre or post op? ) woman/man moved in too though somehow I sensed he/she was a lodger rather than a partner. Squeezed between us is the tiny flat with the single, charming, confident and warm man who is never there. He lives mainly in New York only coming back very occasionally. Perhaps understandably Exh has always been annoyed that this man leaves the flat empty and seems to lead a glamorous life elsewhere but this was before this new SUPER piece of information and I just daren't fuel his irritation by telling him - though he would love the second hand proximity to a superstar.<br />
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I have always been slightly miffed that none of the gay guys want to be my friend as I could do with an occasional cup of tea/glass of wine friendly neighbour though I think my tired face and truculent boys don't make me look a good bet as a fun pal. But I had tipped off the man opposite when Peabody came to our door asking questions about who lived there so now I am here in the looking glass flat listening to his terrible tale. Having escaped Croatia from the war 'I saw people killed', he studied art in the UK and has lived in this flat ( a friend's) for 12 years. When his boyfriend returned to Australia he believed he would join him later but was dumped by Skype. Shortly after he found out he had cancer - and around about this time offered the spare room to the trannie he only refers to as her. When the tenancy-holding friend put up the rent a few months ago 'she' was furious - believing my neighbour to be double crossing her and making a profit himself. She took her things and left owing the rent and a really nasty letter. Worse she stole bank statements and took everything as proof to Peabody - proving that the flat was sublet and that he lived there illegally. Consequently he is losing his home of 12 years - being instructed to leave in only a couple of weeks.<br />
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I return to my own flat having discovered all this and start writing - it seems to be given to me on a plate - with the jaw dropping opening that David Bowie's stylist lives next door. But as I write I am not sure what I am allowed to say - could an ardent fan work out exactly where it was and stalk my neighbour - - though to be honest he really is never here so it seems unlikely. Am I somehow monstrous to sit sympathetically at my neighbour's table to return to write such a terrible tale so gleefully.<br />
It seems increasingly the same with the children - recently my eldest son said accusingly peering over my shoulder 'Why did you write about Sparky's death?' In principle it all seems fine - I write warmly and anonymously about them - but I wonder how advisable it really is - what the cut off point should be? I am their Mum not a reporter on family life and I don't want to turn into Julie Myerson.<br />
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It is nearly the summer holidays and I have a daily school uniform crisis - somehow one son has ended up with almost no wearable school trousers and the other with no shirts. I probably should just buy extra items but I am trying just to get through before the summer growing break - it means I am washing one pair of 10 year old trousers every night and mending rips on the 7 year old's shirts. Also for a few months I was in a sock regime where my eldest son wore socks with the name of the day on - oh my for a few months I was good - monday meant monday socks, tuesday tuesday etc and it gave me a feeling of well being and organisation to the daily rituals but a few socks got worn then a few lost - and now I am fobbing him off with crazy mix of tuesday and thursday socks ON A WEDNESDAY. Then finally the weather turns hot and they both wear shorts that for once I was organised enough to buy when they were still in stock but as the cold summer drifted on I had given up hope of being worn.<br />
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I go to St Dunstan's in a hot lunch break. The exterior is a lovely deep sand colour with fine carved details, a small courtyard with one of those coffee stalls and a few tables set out. There is a huge clock with giants that move to hit bells on the hour and the bells of the church are ringing out. I see all this as I cycle around and around searching for a bike docking bay. In the hot weather it is always much harder to find somewhere to park but this is the worst I have ever experienced. I am cycling around for over half an hour getting hotter and more frustrated - I had planned to sit and have a coffee in the shady old courtyard but it looks increasingly likely that I will have to just ride back to work without getting into a church at all. I try all the docking bays - near St Mary le Strand, up near St John Soames house, on Carey street - this area that I didn't know at all until recently but it is now becoming familiar. Though I turn one corner onto Fetter Lane and see a castle like building - that I have never ever seen before though like Lincoln's Inn Field it seems unlikely that such a huge building or area could remain tucked away out of my sight - later I find out it is King's college Maughan library.<br />
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Finally a man takes out a bike at the first bay I tried - the one I used for Temple church and St Bride's too - we smile and chat about the hopelessness of finding a space now the weather is good.<br />
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In the church I had almost hoped to catch some sort of service - what were the bells rung out for? But there are just two women church wardens who smile in welcome. The light in the church is pigeon grey an unexpected contrast after the warmth of the sandy stone outside. The church is octagonal, a little bit jumbled somehow uglier or more ordinary than I had imagined despite the odd shape . I patrol the edges. The two women are talking somehow competitively of tracing family history - I am at the end of their church warden welcome stint and hear them pack up and their elegant tales of the trails of dead relatives disappear with their footsteps.<br />
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In the clutter of plaques there are some beautiful things - including a male and female kneeling bronze with a kind of speech bubbles appearing from their mouths ( later I find out they are probably the earliest monuments left from a much earlier church ), a bouncer like bust of Cuthbert Fetherstone and a marble likeness of a very poetic young man, curls resting on his stone pillow, hand on his heart. Edward James Auriol 'was drowned in The Rhone at Geneva on the morning of the 19th of August, having just completed his 17th year.......Bright, loving and dutiful, in simplicity and Godly sincerity by the grace of God, he had his conversation in the world.'<br />
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Looking him up I find this very odd piece:<br />
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Conversing+with+spirits%3A+as+the+days+grow+shorter+and+autumn+prepares...-a0137361973<br />
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There is an ornate carved wooden altar screen sandwiched into an alcove next to the main altarpiece to the side. I discover the church has hosted the worship of the Romanian Orthodox Church of London since the sixties and that this iconostasis ( a perfect fit ) was brought from the Church of Antim Monastery in Bucharest in 1966. Strangely in the side chapels there are other altars too - Roman Catholic , Assyrian, Oriental (Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syrian, Syro-Indian) and Lutheran for the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Geoffrey Fisher in the 60s conceived of St Dunstan's as a centre of prayer for Christian Unity - a meeting place for Western and Eastern churches.<br />
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I look around the church quickly with no time for the coffee I had hoped for - though I clamber around the small tables packed into the courtyard to see a fine Queen Elizabeth statue above the arched doorway at the side of the church. Back on a bike over Blackfriars bridge I am disappointed somehow by the jumble of the church, disappointed not to sit in the warm shade.<br />
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Later I discover the church was rebuilt on the site of an early medieval church in 1831. The original church was built in honour of St Dunstan - who was elected Archbishop of Canterbury in 960AD though he had previously been a hermit at Glastonbury - he 'sought peace with the aggressive Danes and the promotion of monastic living which had calamitously declined. A bookish man, he also established the library at Canterbury Cathedral.' The church is believed to have been built between the death of St Dunstan and the consecration of Archbishop Lanfranc in 1070 though the earliest reference is from a document held in Westminster Abbey dated 1180. The church escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666 when the Dean of Westminster woke forty royal scholars ofWestminster School in the middle of the night and they brought water buckets and extinguished the flames which had come within three doors of the church. However the church was pulled down in 1829 and re built. The tower later badly damaged in the Blitz though rebuilt in 1950.<br />
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Pepys worshipped occasionally at St Dustan's though his report from 1667 seems to hold little devout prayer:<br />
'Being wearied turned into St Dunstan's Church where I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand and the body; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again - which seeing I did forbear and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand which she suffered a little and then withdrew. So the sermon ended and also the church broke up, and my armours ended also.'<br />
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Paradise Lost was first printed here - in the first edition its title page inscribed as printed 'under St Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street, 1667. Sweeney Todd the fictional murdering barber 'lived' next door to the church at 186 Fleet Street cutting the throats of his clients and then selling their flesh to Margery Lovett the owner of a pie shop on Bell Yard though there appears to be a nudging belief that the tales are true and that the bodies were disposed in the crypt of St Dunstan's the guide book quoting a book with the Attorney General saying - 'Into old coffins, the tenants of which had mouldered to dust, there had been thrust fresh bodies with scarecely any flesh remains on them.'<br />
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I also find out that the statue of Queen Elizabeth came from the nearby demolished Ludgate - the entrance through the city walls into the City of London and that I had missed seeing the statues of King Lud and his two sons from the same gateway that are tucked under the side doorway beneath her statue - crumbly mysterious figures in the photographs like worn teeth.<br />
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I really want to see them - to finish this blog before going on holiday - though time is running out and I am super stressed and feeling really down. The tax credit investigation has taken up my time - preparing documents to send - finding unobserved time at the end of the day to print out months of bank statements at work - though I am mortified to find an american heiress that I work with standing at the photocopier reading them - surely bemused by the lurching lunacy of my overdraft. There is also a sinking feeling that the truth cannot be seen that however true my claim is that I have no proof. With the documents sent I wait and wait. Eventually I phone - it takes over an hour hanging on the phone to speak to anyone - though a nice helpful woman tells me when I finally get through that more phone lines have been added - as more people are being investigated - though she has no news she can give me. Finally just before going on holiday a man rings to say just as I feared that they do not believe my claim - that I have no proof that exh does NOT live here - for foolishly I have let him keep his bank and work details going through this address - though when I think logically about it I suppose I have wanted to help keep him on the straight and narrow through the chaotic days, the hostel years and now at his illegal industrial address. I have kept him involved in the boy's lives - on their side at least - and the policy has really worked for all of us really - despite a really terrible anxiety dip in May he is doing really well - still not drinking- a much more centred man. When I take the final call telling me I am not believed, that I need to pay the money back I am making the beds in the boys room and I howl like a dog on the phone - I am doing the best I can I sob - I have worked so hard - to keep everyone going - what on earth am I going to do - the man on the phone softens slightly - you can pay the money back slowly he says - but I haven't done anything wrong I wail.<br />
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On a trip after work to Piccadilly Sport's Direct to buy cheap hand luggage wheelie bags for we are going by Ryanair to Sweden - to stay in a friend's house - I think cunningly that I could stop quickly and have a look - it seems really important - some sort of key to what I am writing that I see the statues. But when I cycle past the gate is locked and I can't see anything at all in the shadowy archway set back from the road.<br />
I find out however that:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', helvetica, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.8125em; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">"Ludgate is commonly accepted as having been named after the mythical King Lud, who according to legend founded London. King Lud who is said to have been buried at Ludgate appeared in texts such as Geoffrey of Monmouths (born circa 1100 – died circa 1155) Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain).</span></div>
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Lud, the eldest son of King Heli is supposed to date from around 66BC. Though he in turn is supposed to have had two sons, Androgeus and Tenvantius, they were not old enough to succeed him when he passed away and Lud’s younger brother Cassibelanus became King. According to medieval tradition the two princes assisted in the defence of Britain against the Roman legions of Julius Caesar, Androgeus as Duke of London (Trinovantum) and Tenvantius, Duke of Cornwall. The eldest of the two, Androgeus, followed Caesar back to Rome and following the death of Cassibelanus, Tenvantius finally gained his fathers throne.</div>
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Lud’s name has been linked, by some, either rightly or wrongly with the etymology of London itself in the form of Ludd-deen (Valley of Ludd) or Caer Ludd (Ludd’s Fortress). Ludd’s original settlement was said to be in the area of Ludgate Hill, where St Paul’s Cathedral now stands. This hill was one of the three ancient hills around which London was formed and Lud Gate was the principal of the ancient six gates into London. There are other explanations and arguments to the origins of the name Ludgate however: ‘According to old Geoffry of Monmouth's fabulous history of England, this entrance to London was first built by King Lud, a British monarch, sixty-six years before Christ. Our later antiquaries, ruthless as to legends, however romantic, consider its original name to have been the Flood or Fleet Gate, which is far more feasible. [Walter Thornbury in Old and New London: Volume 1 (1878)]</div>
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Cementing the link with Ludgate and Lud in 1260, King Henry III (born 1 October 1207 – died 16 November 1272) had the Lud Gate decorated with iconic images of the legendary king and his two sons Androgeus and Tenvantius. These statues were beheaded during reign of King Edward VI (born 12 October 1537 – died 6 July 1553) and repaired a short time later during the reign of his successor and catholic sister Queen Mary (born 18 February 1516 – died 17 November 1558). Then in 1586, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (born 7 September 1533 – died 24 March 1603), the aging Lud Gate was rebuilt afresh and new statues of King Lud and his sons were put on the eastern side.</div>
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Beside the gatehouse was the famous Ludgate prison. After being severely damaged during the Great Fire of London in 1666, the prison and gate were demolished in 1760. The statues of Lud, Androgeus and Tenvantius were then gifted to the City of London by Sir Francis Gosling. Unused the statues were eventually bought by the Marquis of Hertford and can now be found, along with a statue of Queen Elizabeth I (made at the same time as the Lud family statues in 1586 and could be found on the west side of the gate) in the courtyard of the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street.'<br />
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Back from holiday - Sweden and camping in Dorset - a really lovely time - the boys really happy and well - the eldest finding a really decent ammonite specimen in the cliffs of our campsite, the youngest producing like a rabbit from a hat - a skill for story telling. Though in the shock of going back to work and climbing back onto the saddle of my complicated and stressful life I think - ah it is the gateway opening into the city - I am nearly into the old history - though I also think - how am I going to find the time to balance all the elements - the druids, the romans, the whole history of the City.<br />
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Checking facts in Peter Ackroyd's London the biography I find out a woolly mammoth was discovered in 1690 beside what has become King's Cross - though Dryden had written earlier of this invisible landscape of London<br />
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'Yet monsters from thy large increase we find<br />
Engender'd on the Slyme thou leav'st behind'<br />
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marking other discoveries found in the clay of London - sharks in the East End, the skull of a wolf in Cheapside and crocodiles in Islington.<br />
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Like scale I find the enormity of time an obliterating twist of focus of a microscope. I thought I had put this up already but OL sent it to me again recently so maybe I hadn't:<br />
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http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html<br />
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Amen.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-19152784551231331172013-07-05T12:30:00.003-07:002013-07-06T06:19:29.257-07:00St Mary Le StrandOn the morning of Margaret Thatcher's funeral I cycle over Lambeth Bridge as three swans fly low overhead, their long necks following the river, heavy wings beating. Backing up along the Embankment the re-directed traffic coming over Lambeth Bridge is at a standstill. Policemen guard closed roads with traffic cone roadblocks like flimsy hurdle tracks. I can see flags flying half mast at the MI5 building and the Houses of Parliament though Lambeth Palace has opted strategically for no flag rather than lower one.<br />
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I had heard the news of her death on the radio on the Monday morning as I washed up and just made a little gasp. We had returned the day before from a bank-breaking ski ing holiday. If you have kept with me year in year out - my brother has a flat in France and I throw all the holiday money I have at teaching the boys to ski BUT this year exhausted by work I didn't check the passports until three days before and my eldest son's was only valid for the day we travelled out. It was the Easter weekend. Panic, extraordinary stress and then determination set in. A long story but I took my eldest son on a tightly-timed road trip - on a coach to Newport to get the passport, to Cardiff to get a flight to Paris and on the metro to the opposite side of Paris where we took a night train. I have always had a romance about night trains but with a ten year old boy in a carriage with four strange slightly hobo men below us it was hard to get him to see it/ perhaps even believe it. Though tucked in - ridiculously high - across the small gap we smiled - we had done it. We woke in our couchettes in the early morning as the train rumbled through the beauty of the mountains. Then drank surprisingly and ridiculously good coffee and hot chocolate from a machine on the train and exh and my youngest met us on the rural platform and we drove for 15 minutes to join our friends. We ski ed all day - so happy to be there. Tipping on the edge of tiredness and sanity and sense - glad to have our odd and separated family to make it work.<br />
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We have returned relaxed though it may be a thin veneer for the money I have spent was brave but foolhardy and I am trying to get all the washing done before going back to work the next day. Perhaps I am holding my breath making all the calculations as the news comes in. In our flat all sounds can be heard but are not always noticed. I don't think the boys registered the sharp intake of breath. And I am not sure how to describe to them my historic and instinctive dislike of Margaret Thatcher. She must look as if from an old world to them/ ding dong pussy bow down the well. I grew up with her, didn't trust her and don't think I like the England she made though I notice these days I turn instantly and vehemently right wing in any post office establishment where the hopelessness and surliness of the strongly unionised staff and the 'do not attack the staff' signs seem the last and lousy bastion of the 70s so I wonder as others gather to say that they did - if I support what she did more than I think. I also admire the clean, well painted England with cared for homes though increasingly I think there is a fetishism to the Fired Earth and Farrow and Ball middle class lifestyle fantasies and wonder how high the fence keeping out the have nots has become. After all I peer over the wall on an extreme ladder between both worlds - I go on ski ing holidays and work for a national newspaper and then go home to find shit smeared down the stairs of our block and a homeless man stood motionless and vulnerable in the corner of the bin shed as if a naughty school boy had been told to turn to the wall.<br />
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On the day of Margaret Thatcher's election as conservative leader I was just a little girl but I can remember saying to my Mum while I was having a bath - isn't it good to have a woman leader? My Mum was unexpectedly and unusually vehement and angry 'She has done nothing for women and will do nothing for women.' though her fierce off guard reaction was more surprising than anything - something honest in the repressively dutiful face of motherhood.<br />
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Looking at pictures of MT published in newspapers - there is a certain charm to the textures of the age - the soft silks, hairspray halo, nubbed knits and masculine have-a-go photo opportunities of her certainty. I read too that she made a Windsor Castle birthday cake for her children long before she became leader of anything and wonder if at her core was a strange narcissistic childhood mirror of the Queen. I then spend quite a bit of time reading about their strained relationship - the queen hissing at a BBQ at Balmoral that MT should sit down - though also described is a strangely touching scene when the Queen realises Mrs T's dementia and breaks with royal protocol to take her arm and gently walk and chat with her. Though I wonder if this comes from the kindness of being the winner of a previously strong and despised adversary. Also later when I am having a bath I think my Mum is from the same generation as both of them - just a few years younger - and there is some mirror to her sense of duty and hard work and perhaps there was an envy of these women's power.<br />
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Carol Thatcher recalls 'My mother was prone to calling me by her secretaries names and working through each of them until she got to Carol.' though she also said that Margaret Thatcher had told her 'I think my place in history is assured.' I imagine the emphasis on 'my'. Perhaps that is why I resent the stacked up traffic and dipped flags that this vain boast is being honoured. I do not feel represented at all by this state fanfare though when I get to work and voice my badly thought out resentment I am surprised and horrified that a girl I work with has gone to stand and watch the coffin go by. Though I shouldn't be surprised - not by where I work - not by the nice, bright, young woman in sloaney gear - for I imagine she must find the semblance of certainty comforting.<br />
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When I visit St Mary le Strand it must only be a day later and the metal fences still line the route. I park the bike on Kingsway I have tried so many times to get here but still I go all the way around Aldwych, - I don't even cut through by India House just doggedly walking round the whole half moon traffic island though it is the first hot lunchtime and I am dressed warmly in tights and jumpers and layers as for so long it has been cold. I am convinced the church sits at the mouth of the Strand and Waterloo Bridge but it doesn't, it forms it's own thin traffic island in heavy traffic further back like a rock in a stream, the cars moving around. The thin pavement is hooped by railings with a tumble of pretty garden and a magnolia like a fecund wedding bouquet in a high spray over the entry to the church. Blooming and dropping there is a snow globe of blossom skiddy on the thin steep steps. I enter the church to find a much much smaller space than I imagined. This is a church that I thought ( possibly because it has taken me so long to get into ) that I think will be really important- a link between Westminster and the City - but in it - I think - oh it doesn't seem that important just an incidental place - a waiting room - like an ornate bedsit room for God.<br />
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Inside, gazing at the ceiling is a couple with a very chatty guide at their side. I am trying to hear what he has to say but not get embroiled. Walking around the church I notice a strangely cluttered corner near the altar - glasses case and books all just tumbled on a chair - then a mirror by the hymn books. I imagine the guide to be strangely vain before meeting his captive audience then realize it is to view the intricately painted and modelled ceiling carved with white and gold flowers.<br />
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This church was one of the 50 New Churches of 1711 known as the Queen Anne Churches built mainly for the fast expanding suburbs of London that included the Hawksmoor chuches in East London and the spread of the disciple named churches to the South. St Mary Le Strand ( to replace a church pulled down much earlier - more later ) was designed by the secretly Catholic architect James Gibb who was trained under the Papal architect Carlos Fontana in Italy. His building is seen to reflect the Italian and Catholic Baroque influences apparently combining elements from the Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila designed by Raphael, Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence the church of SS Luca e Martina in Rome and the Cortona's St Maria della Place in Rome. Though complaints of traffic noise from the Strand even in the eighteenth century meant Gibbs designed the walls of the main church with no low windows.<br />
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It is a place where high handed decisions knocked things down and took them away - the early church ( first mentioned in 1222 called St Mary and the Innocents ) was pulled down by the unpopular Edward Seymour 1st Duke of Somerset in 1549 so that he could use the stone to build Somerset House. Later a maypole that existed on this site for hundreds of years was taken down by the Puritans in 1644 when all Maypoles were banned though erected again in 1661 after the restoration.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;">'The Maypole, to which we have already referred as formerly standing on the site of the church of St. Mary-le-Strand, was called by the Puritans one of the "last remnants of vile heathenism, round which people in holiday times used to dance, quite ignorant of its original intent and meaning." Each May morning, as our readers are doubtless aware, it was customary to deck these poles with wreaths of flowers, round which the people danced pretty nearly the whole day. A severe blow was given to these merry-makings by the Puritans, and in 1644 a Parliamentary ordinance swept them all away, including this very famous one, which, according to old Stow, stood 100 feet high. On the Restoration, however, a new and loftier one was set up amid much ceremony and rejoicing. From a tract printed at the time, entitled "The Citie's Loyaltie Displayed," we learn that this Maypole was 134 feet high, and was erected upon the cost of the parishioners there adjacent, and the gracious consent of his sacred Majesty, with the illustrious Prince the Duke of York. "This tree was a most choice and remarkable piece; 'twas made below bridge and brought in two parts up to Scotland Yard, near the king's palace, and from thence it was conveyed, April 14, 1661, to the Strand, to be erected. It was brought with a streamer flourishing before it, drums beating all the way, and other sorts of musick. It was supposed to be so long that landsmen could not possibly raise it. Prince James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral of England, commanded twelve seamen off aboard ship to come and officiate the business; whereupon they came, and brought their cables, pullies, and other tackling, and six great anchors. After these were brought three crowns, borne by three men bareheaded, and a streamer displaying all the way before them, drums beating and other musick playing, numerous multitudes of people thronging the streets, with great shouts and acclamations, all day long. The Maypole then being joined together and looped about with bands of iron, the crown and cane, with the king's arms richly gilded, was placed on the head of it; a large hoop, like a balcony, was about the middle of it. Then, amid sounds of trumpets and drums, and loud cheerings, and the shouts of the people, the Maypole, 'far more glorious, bigger, and higher than ever any one that stood before it,' was raised upright, which highly did please the Merrie Monarch and the illustrious Prince, Duke of York; and the little children did much rejoice, and ancient people did clap their hands, saying golden days began to appear." A party of morris-dancers now came forward, "finely decked with purple scarfs, in their half-shirts, with a tabor and a pipe, the ancient music, and danced round about the Maypole." </span><br />
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45135<br />
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By 1713 it had rotted so much it was removed to make way for the new church and another set up opposite what is now Somerset House. This one didn't last long - being bought by Sir Isaac Newton and sent to Wanstead Park where it supported Huygens 37 metre long telescope.<br />
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In 1802 three people were killed when a man standing on the roof of the church during a procession of royalty to St Paul's on the proclamation of peace with France lent on part of the parapet and it crashed down on the crowd below. In 1809 Charles Dicken's parents were married here.<br />
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And here in beautiful copperplate writing are the details of an enquiry into the conduct of the St Mary Le Strand temporary watchman to a robbery in 1822<br />
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/history-from-police-archives/Met6Kt/MetHistory/mhDocsPpStMary.html<br />
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History seems like so many things a matter of scale - nearly 200 years ago can be concertinaed by some small human detail - 'and the window of his Kitchen having no fastening' I feel my ears whistling with the speed of the journey just as when my eldest son says as I kiss him goodnight 'Mum do you know there is a hurricane on the planet Jupiter that is big enough to contain three planet earths?' 'IT IS JUST TOO BIG TO COMPREHEND.' I want to shout though of course I don't, my lips just press the warmth of boy skin and I say 'Get to sleep now. I love you.'<br />
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This post seems to finish on a coach trip back from Wales through the pouring rain - when it started after a completely different coach trip to Wales to get the passsport. A whole half term has elapsed - and I am now on my own on the way back from a camping trip leaving the boys with exh and friends still camping in a forest. I have had to come back early to get back to work though a little sneaky part of me feels lucky to be warm and guilty to have left them in the cold and wet. My spirits are truly low for I am going back to many difficult things - a bitter battle with work about how much I should be paid for the job they want to give me. What should have been a celebration has turned unpleasant and savagely unfair - they say I am lucky to get a job but want to pay me much less than anyone else is getting. I also received a letter the night before going camping saying I am under investigation by the tax credit office because they think exh lives here - I don't even get very much money from them - but for some reason this has floored me - I have worked so hard to keep everyone going and reasonably stable and they have suspended my payments and my mobile phone bill and the water rates have bounced. <br />
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I didn't think I would find room to describe the shock of Newport city centre on a Sunday night when I arrived with my young son in April - the boarded up, closed down town where a shop we went into for a sandwich just had a few chocolate bars spread out on the shelves. But coming back this time on the dawdle of a National Express coach, through exhausted and deprived Welsh towns, the houses somehow familiar from tv murder investigations and last seen missing children I feel I need to report it. It makes the have not where I live look really comfortable but perhaps it is just the cheek by jowl of opportunity - by living in a vibrant city anything seems possible.<br />
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Then in a tesco supermarket in Swansea I watch a large white seagull with the raw and bloody headless carcass of a pigeon. Sharp beaked and impassively bright-eyed it repeatedly bangs the squirm of pigeon guts from the grey splayed feathered body against the wet tarmac. <br />
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I see too in a place called Cross Hands a man stood still at the thin edge of a demolished church - his boots at the tip of a black hole left at the side of the building It is such a strange sight - like a french realist painting - a Millet or Courbet - and I am not even certain I have described it well enough for anyone to understand.I text exh and another friend to say that I am going through a dark journey of the soul.<br />
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Finally moving the computer screen to dust the little alcove where I sit and write I notice the dense cloud of purple spots that mark the churches I have visited on the map behind - how many of them there are for the shape of my chiefly Westminster endeavours are tucked behind the screen - wow I think - briefly impressed by my own commitment to the project - and then I see that St Mary Le Strand is the belt of the figure of eight between Westminster and The City - just one more and I am through to the City churches.<br />
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Amen.<br />
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<br />amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-5304202043540070262013-04-19T15:10:00.000-07:002013-04-20T17:08:59.852-07:00St Bride's Church<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sparky our hamster is dying. Life just slowly ebbing away from the poor little thing. Each night I check to see if he is alive, thinking he will be dead by the morning but when I check again first thing I am surprised to find him still breathing. He drinks water from a bottle I give him by hand. Before I tell the children he is dying (manipulatively calculating grief and homework to be done ) I check quickly and can't see him breathing - RIP Sparky - I text exh - then see the fur whispered by breath. I have made a mistake I text again. Don't bury him! he answers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is something to do with the attendance to life departing - the spirit still contained within the little body but tipping on a precipice - plus subtefuge to the children that causes me such distress. Also I am not completely sure my instincts are good - friends text to say I should have him put down at the vet or even hurry nature myself though he doesn't look to be in actual pain, just weakening and weakening - but for so long now that it has become completely normal and completely horrible at the same time. I can't stand the cliff top to grief - though I have a malteser box ready to bury him in - but for some reason - work, money, just balancing everything I feel I just can't cope with anymore, just can't face the extremity to the children feelings and I feel slightly manic. Then I discover a mum I like very much from school has had a breakdown and her children come to stay for a few nights and another sadness and stress and subterfuge takes over/alongside. The hamster lying almost still in a cage cloaked in a blanket in the corner of the flat as the four children play.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The mum and dad are splitting up and the mum is in hospital - but the children have only been told she is exhausted. I can only ask the children what they normally do at home - if they are ok - if there is anything we can do to make them feel more comfortable. They are beautifully behaved - the boy in my eldest son's year and a little girl of 5. I am unused to the absolute willingness of a little girl as she offers to clean the chairs and dry up ( it is true though i am reluctant to collude ) but also children that go to sleep like light bulbs. The little girl takes to bed the valentine bag she has made her mother though it spreads a new form of glitter - thinner like worms across every part of our flat as if love tries to escape in the night leaving the squirm of shiny trails.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I laugh with exh that we are the patron saints of separated families - suddenly helping other people in the place we have come from though and this is difficult to say - I feel two things - absolute pride that we came through but also looking back at the tightrope - I can't see how I came out still walking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sparky dies finally but peacefully. and the children's grief is raw. We sit and read the Michael Rosen Sad Book and draw and cry. This seemingly small grief feels like a preparation for all grief, taps into the grief that they already feel and it is horrible to watch. I think I deal with the emotions well though I am unable, completely unable to pick up the little corpse. Exh says - you manage so many difficult things it is surprising you can't handle this. I just can't I wail then watch my youngest choke sobs with the upturned, stiff, little body in his hands, it's claws clenched.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I wake on a Sunday morning when the boys are with exh's mum and think unexpectedly I will go to an Evensong. As a child it was my favourite service, I liked the light at that time of day - either electric lit or light evening and also the lilt of the service. I wonder if it was because it was just shorter though I think somehow children know what is authentic and the old words seemed more true than the fuss of family services with the vicar meaning well but seeming insincere. Once I have come up with the plan I am determined though somehow nervous to stick to it. Still trying to get into St Mary Le Strand I google for service times but there is no evensong. St Brides does. Though the website's strap-line is 'spiritual home of the media' and I have some fear that I will walk into a work situation, like an office leaving do where I don't know anyone. Though when I park the bike I think excitedly I have reached the shadow's of St Paul's.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 'He just didn't find me'. I hear the very, very intelligent woman that sits behind me at work say about God. ' Though I wish he had. I went to church every Sunday. Sometimes twice when I was singing in the choir. Though I never understood 'The meek shall inherit the earth. It just isn't true.'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am surprised and fascinated by this open and casual discussion of religion in a newspaper office. Even thinking about it seems a dirty secret sometimes for there seems always to be an assumption that religion is not just not cool but ' non intelligent ' though she is older and grand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is nearly dark as I wind around almost empty narrow back streets and alleys to get to the church. I wonder why I have made this rather odd cut through from the side street BB bay but the church bells are ringing out and I am nearly late and as I turn into a passageway that runs alongside a tall wall by the churchyard the bells stop. For just a breath in the gloaming I think oh this is the oldest view I have seen but part of it is to do with what seems the ancient hurry of the bell. I scurry down the old steps dipping down from the level of the graveyard to a high shored up wall that keels over a narrow curved street. In this dusky light it feels like I have gone back in time. I can't quite work out how to get into the church but a man infront of me turns off from the narrow curved street and I follow him up some more steps alongside railings and then left into the church. Out of the dark the church is bright lit with shiny chequered floors and I have to move between screens with huge woodcarvings balanced on top into the main area of the church like venturing into a warm kernel. There are little lampshades at the side pews, an eagle lectern and an altar like a big ornate wardrobe. It is almost full, people sat in the pews and on extra chairs and vergers moving forward, the choir processing to their stalls whilst everyone sings. I rustle into a pew and find the hymn book and sing too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next to me are a handsome languid couple nestled to each other like a cashmere catalogue photograph. Behind them a resolute blonde girl hand in hand with a proud looking young man. Media couples showing up as their preparation to marry here I think. The rest, mainly people on their own in the pews or seats look intelligent, intense and reasonably good looking. A good place to find a boyfriend I think briefly. Then realise there is a real peace here. The singing is beautiful, and just as I remembered there is something special to this time of day - the night drawing in and a feeling of safety and celebration in a beautiful place as if all dark is kept outside by belonging here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Later I laugh that I wrote that everyone is 'intelligent, intense and rgl' as if describing how I would like to be/'my own kind/ a tribe'. Though I have rarely felt myself to belong to a 'set'. But then I think about other professional 'packs'. I hardly know any lawyers but once I went to a friend's child's christening ( she is married to a barrister ) and I was bundled into the back of a tiny car to get a lift back to the house/lunch after the service with two in the front. A man and a woman but not a couple - old friends - though possibly some sexual arrangement/historic flirtation between them - she appeared to be a middle aged anorexic and he had to stop to buy coca cola he was so hung over. Once the car doors were slammed shut they laughed so cruelly at the hostess, my beautiful art school friend for being so eccentric - and yet they seemed a crazy couple - something from a guinness world record challenge - how to fit so many awkward arms and legs in a tiny space. Eccentric too that they didn't know how to be polite. Later I thought they were just a tribe, a gang and that my friend just didn't belong in their world and neither did I - sat in the back of the car I just didn't register, was almost invisible just not 'one of them'.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Verger taking the service ( the Vicar is ill ) starts by apologising for not having lit the altar candles and then says when he was trained he was told if mistakes happen to ignore them in a grand way and not to lose the authority of the service but that the world had changed - it is a disarming start and he carries on to quote Nigel Benn the boxer and a feud with Chris Eubanks.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unexpectedly I had chanced on the radio someone talking about Mystery Worshipper and it felt like another guilty secret / area of expertise being aired in public. I peruse the MW website regularly to check reports on the church services of the churches I visit - like 'entertaining angels unaware' the radio guest said for if God appeared in any guise he should be made welcome - though secret shoppers might be a better analogy. I had been thinking anyhow about the home / guest aspect of churches after visiting Bloomsbury Baptist Church - when the minister replied to my unkind and snipey post - kindly asking if I had received a warm welcome. I was embarrassed to be caught out as a rude guest - reporting on the icy atmosphere of a guest bedroom or the nylon sheets on the bed when the welcome had been friendly and sincere. Though rushing to get the post written I had failed also to mention the really good works the Bloomsbury church carried out for the homeless.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Though the mystery worshipper seemed to have the same gripes about the atmosphere that I did:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">'Recalling other interiors of a similar style (churches, lecture rooms, school assembly halls and meeting halls), and wondering whether they are intrinsically stultifying to the imagination, since I found myself unable to imagine anything else while in that setting.'</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And on St Brides:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">'Walking down the passage that led from Fleet Street to St Bride's and hearing the choir rehearsing as I approached the church. I instinctively felt that I'd discovered somewhere that reflected spirituality and warmth.'</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">Only when I got home and started looking up the history of the church did I find out that whatever I and Mystery Worshipper felt was ancient. There has been a place of worship on this site since Roman times, certainly from the 5th century when St Bridget or her followers founded the church. Also that I had missed the crypt that housed the medieval chapel and roman remains that had been discovered when the church was rebuilt after being bombed in the war.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">On a Wednesday lunch time I go b</span>ack along the narrow passageways and streets - Magpie Alley, Primrose Lane - the names of covered over and disappeared things - dropped feathers and pale yellow faces paved below.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">Back in the church ( still shiny and chequered ) I find the crypt down narrow stairs though I seem to be in a haze because I don't really understand the stone remains uncovered from the earth. A 'bridge' crosses over the curve of stone foundations, then tucked in a corner is the display information for an iron coffin with patented clasp found in the graveyard though the space is empty. Invented to keep out body snatchers in the 19th Century it was a faddy invention too expensive for most to use and slow to rot - at present on display at the Museum of London's exhibition Doctors, Dissectors and Resurrection Men exhibition. At the end there is a medieval chapel - a beautiful and peaceful small, vaulted cave but cluttered with modern blue glass altar candles and modern wall hangings that I really don't like. I do sit there for a minute but another man is coming in and there doesn't seem enough space for two strangers to sit together. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">In the other room ( the layout is quite odd - there are more remains but with mirrors fitted so it is possible to see areas out of view. I don't really understand the mirrors ( perhaps not tall enough to view what they are arranging to show? ) though I am really vague about the whole exhibition - I don't understand the diagram with coloured outlines showing the church from roman, twelfth century, thirteenth and fourteenth century and Wren's seventeenth century building - perhaps because I am rushing, perhaps because my concentration is exhausted by work and children. I had expected to be really moved by what was here underground, discovered after the devastation after the war but I am slightly baffled. I see the fragments of roman life, the remains of fortification walls, but I can't understand the structure or the history. I am disappointed because I had thought I would see the well that the church was built alongside but this isn't accessible to the public. Also when the crypts were opened there were skulls laid in rows and a chequerboard made of bones but there is no trace of this.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">I discover however that King John held his parliament here in 1210, Thomas Wolsey was St Bride's parson, Samuel Pepys was christened here and emperor Charles V lodged in Bridewell Palace alongside the church when he visited Henry V111 in 1522 and that the church has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. From the Roman traces and original 6th century church it was replaced 5 times before the 15th century church that became known as the 'printer's church' was built. In the 1500s </span>Wynkyn de Worde brought the printing business he inherited from Caxton to St Bride's bringing his business to the clergy who had big houses nearby. As the trade burgeoned the church became known as the printer's church and later as Fleet Street developed as the home of newspapers the journalist's church.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">The guide book claims a crossover in language between trade and theology.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">'The printer 'justifies' a line of type, meaning that he makes it fill a space neatly. Theologically, justification is to have all spaces filled with Christ's righteousness and thereby be freed from the penalties of sin.'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left;">In 1666 the plague hit:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left;">'...the parish had been sorely tried by the Great Plague which reached it in mid-June. The normal mortality had been about nine deaths per week, but these increased to four times that number at the end of July, to over 150 at the end of August and 238 in the week in mid-September when the pestilence was at its height. From that time the figures fell quickly and the danger had passed by November, but it left the parish desolate and many houses tenantless. The vicar, Richard Peirson, stayed at his post, although both his Churchwardens died, and carried through the heartbreaking task of giving what relief was possible and burying the dead.'</span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;">http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=117959</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="text-align: left;">And then fire:</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left;">'For two days and nights after the hour before dawn on Sunday, 2 September 1666, the inhabitants watched the fire approach with growing alarm. By Tuesday morning, the third day, it had reached Blackfriars, and on that day the parish of St Bride was overwhelmed. 'Ye parishe was burnt downe', wrote the clerk in the Burial Register, 'but sixteene houses in ye brode place by Newe Street.' The plague had wrought havoc among the parishioners, now the parish itself except for sixteen houses had been destroyed. The Church had become a blackened skeleton, its belfry empty and its stones shattered.'</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="text-align: left;">Only melted metal from a medieval curfew bell and the eagle lectern which was rescued from the church survived. Afterwards t</span></span></span><span style="text-align: left;">he churchwardens wisely took Dr Wren out for dinner at the Globe Tavern at a cost of £12.17 od and the church became one of the first post-fire churches ready for worship. Only after the church was again destroyed on 29th December 1940 was it discovered that Christopher Wren had just built over the remains of the six previous churches forming extensive crypts had been used for burials and layered the history of the church.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cycling home from work one night I notice suddenly that the disputed line of pavement and grass in Parliament Square is bald, shaved of tents. At home I look it up - the last tents - left unmanned were cleared away on the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It seems a spiteful date.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think of Brian Haw's symbolic vigilance for peace cleaned away, his 9 cold pavement years leaving no trace. I discover his Dad worked in a betting shop and committed suicide by gassing himself when Brian was 13. He had been one of the first soldiers to enter the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at the end of WW2.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Brian Haw's 'rectitude was a mirror that the people in the building opposite couldn't bear.' said Mark Wallinger.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89OvMy2z_Mo - dead bodies dragged to a pit like a bucket slowly filled, the healthy and practical stoicism of the living like ants - I think we should all hold the mirror up. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I tell the boys I am going to make tiny temporary peace sculptures and place them surreptitiously on the the posts that rope off the pavement from the grass in Parliament Square opposite the House of Commons. Guerrilla art I say and they are keen to help. But I haven't done it. Yet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Amen</span><br />
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amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-40813597432254001452013-02-09T07:22:00.002-08:002014-08-20T15:35:54.202-07:00Bloomsbury Central Baptist ChurchOh, oh there doesn't seem to have been time for an xmas special this year ( though I sandwiched the trip to the Bloomsbury Baptist church in a present buying dash to Forbidden Planet before work believing that there would be. )<br />
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Unexpectedly seeing the church - a faux Notre Dame frontage, big but almost invisible in that funny back corner of Covent Garden / New Oxford St /Holborn where the rates must still be low enough for specialised shops to exist and the chiefly male enclaves of Models Zone and Forbidden Planet mean that my sons will cheerfully visit the British Museum if they can go at least window shopping afterwards - I thought as if in a trance - I CAN DO IT - I can get into a church AND write an xmas special - though there were only 4 more days until christmas and nothing was wrapped or cooked and I had a full day of work infront of me. That morning I was making a dash for a gift for PSM's sons's birthday present for a party that afternoon. Despite an almost official rumour early in December that payday would be brought forward my calculations for Christmas had come to a grinding standstill when it wasn't. Though just in the nick of time the wages had cleared the night before and I had chanced final stocking filler purchases online despite Amazon no longer guaranteeing their delivery. Later when I got to work I rang numbers I found on google to chivy the gifts in time for christmas. A kind but weary sounding man on a Scottish Industrial estate said 'We are working flat out to get everything out' about a life-sized gorilla puppet I had bought for my younger son. Then there is a long pause as he goes to check. 'Yes', he says - 'it is packaged ready to go - with luck on your side it will be there.' then a pause, 'It's big' he drawls. I feel I have a direct number to Polar Express HQ.<br />
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I have only visited a Baptist church once before<br />
http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/baptist-church-horseferry-road.html<br />
and I still walk past that odd and shuttered building, It was in the early days of the blog when I managed to write a post almost once a week though I found my own project daunting. Just finding the confidence to get into a church at all was hard - I remember being terrified this one would smell ( though it did ) and terrified I would walk in on a full submerged baptism ( I didn't).<br />
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A sandwich board says the church is open and I push open the glass door - to find three awkward but smiley youngish people at an over manned welcoming desk, I realise I haven't even had time to worry about the submersion. Though it is just past 10 am in the morning so it seems unlikely. Can I quickly have a look at your church I ask, yes, they wave me in - smiling and nodding encouragingly. It is a large, light auditorium, with a curved balcony above and a flower-shaped window high up behind. But and I have found this before in the non conformist churches - there seems something completely missing - it is almost like a lecture theatre, there is no sound, no shade or dark, no secret corners - it is just a big, clean, well-vacuumed space. I try to write about what it is that is missing. I think of the carpet and how it almost hushes the presence of my own step from the church, the sound of myself in a holy space. I have a book about shadows in art and it is a very favourite photograph - a black and white photograph taken by Monet at Giverny with his own shadow falling across the foreground of the lake for recorded is his own presence with the thing that fascinates and absorbs him.<br />
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I think of my own home and despite my despair sometimes at our tiny space, the small rooms and the seemingly endless shift of small pieces of plastic, papers, books and folded clothes from one room to another there is sometimes a pause when everything is tidied and clean when I see the beauty of the home we live in, the home I have made. I think of our lives and the fun and activity and thoughts and shouting and the carefully picked beauty of our things, cups and pictures, the drawings and postcards, colours and lampshades and our lives together. I think you would feel it when you walked in, the richness of our lives despite the cramp of the space.<br />
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I do not sit, though I think I should, I am worried about being late for work. It is the last day today before christmas and there is still so much to do - we are attempting to complete three newspapers in a week - two are finished but the third needs to be or we will have to go into work over the holiday. 'Happy Christmas' I say to the slightly nerdy and startled trio at the desk. There is a small nativity behind them and some tension as if perhaps the girl used to go out with one of the men and now goes out with the other. Though they are of a wholesome, indeterminate knitting pattern age and time. 'Happy Christmas' they say.<br />
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Afterwards cycling to work I think I have squandered the Christmas Special for there was so little Christmas or anything at all much in the church. Perhaps I can pretend I never went I think - perhaps I can get into another Church, a more beautiful one and say that it is the Xmas one.<br />
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Though of course I don't. Christmas takes over like a cocoa cola truck driven at top speed by a smiling yet manic faced santa who cooks and vacuums and wraps. On Christmas day we dance Gangnam Style to a new Wii game and play Scrabble.<br />
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Before Christmas I had seen on the step of an office on the mini roundabout corner of Artillery Row and Great Peter St that I have described before for the sunlight hits and warms the space and the homeless know to sun themselves there like cats on a favourite wall. In the littered debris of bottles and cans was an order early for Christmas supermarket brochure splayed like porn. Images of plentiful Christmas food and treats spread wide on bright lit pages. I thought it is a dream we are all chasing - all salivating for and there is something repugnant to the greed of it and yet I wouldn't know how to stop. When the boys shout on Christmas morning 'Everything is Brilliant.' I am happy.<br />
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The church opened in December 1848 as a showcase for the Baptist faith in London and was funded and built by Sir Samuel Morton Peto MP. He had made his money as a building contractor involved in the building of many London landmarks including Nelson's Column, the Houses of Parliament and the infrastructure of London's brick sewers but then moved his interests to the railways. He built railways here and abroad - including Canada, Norway and Algeria ( accompanying Napoleon III in the late 1850s to open this line.) Until then religious intolerance and financial restraints had meant meeting houses were lowly, hidden places - rooms above shops and tucked down alleyways. When the Baptist Church was proposed on this site there was reluctance to lease the land to nonconformists with their dull spire-less architecture. Peto is said to have exclaimed ' A spire my Lord? We shall have two!' And the twin spires graced the towers until 1951 when they were deemed unsafe and brought down.<br />
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The first preacher Revd William Brock claimed 'the Bible and The Times newspaper are the best materials for the preacher', for the God of the Bible was also the God of everyday life.<br />
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Cycling over Westminster Bridge I see a man dressed in tight jeans with pink frilly knickers over them navigating the pedestrians and traffic on a skateboard. Wow I think he has sorted out what he needs from life and gone for it.<br />
I have printed a calendar of the washing up pictures I have taken. I love the compositions of colour and the celebration of everyday.<br />
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And then Christmas over I just run out of steam. My friend said I didn't get to the heart of the knights templar - and I knew she was right - I could just about hear horses hooves on cobbles in the alleys around the church but I never got to the beard and hair and spit of big fighting men praying. And now I spend evening after evening infront of the computer a bit knackered and a bit glum in January edging into February like a teenager revising, clicking yahoo news, desultorily reading about weather and murders and debt thinking I don't really want to write about this church - then inching another tiny piece of history<br />
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I find a submerged baptism from the Bloomsbury Central Church on youtube! Fascinatingly the CARPET ROLLS BACK at the altar and sections come away to reveal a pool - men in baggy gym wear stand lowering a woman backwards into the water which she comes out of shuddering with joy. At Blackpool Circus when I was a little girl the grand finale of the show was the ring filling with water and a silvery swan with dancers floating in it. Two years ago I went back with the boys and their cousins to find the vast room with trapezes strung to the heavens reduced to a beautiful, gilded trinket-sized theatre. As the musicians started their helter skelter tunes I held my breath that the range of ages 6 - 16 could be entertained, then watched them roar with laughter, doubled up with mirth as the slapstick clown trapped light then flung it from a bucket as the lights came up. The finale creaked into action as the floor lowered and a swan was raised, the water filled the floor - oooh I cooed. <br />
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Another friend emails kindly to say - just write - you are funny - don't worry about the research and the churches. But I love the churches I want to say - I think there should be more churches and less me. Though also I realise that when I first started writing this blog I wanted to show I could be funny and real and now I have become only earnest. My over worked, slightly put on, brave heroine voice has become mannered - I use words and expressions over and over - 'slightly', 'weary', 'held my breath'. It seems to be the narrative I tell. I wonder if it has become embarrassing. I feel have lost confidence in the project and my own writing, though I don't want to give up. Perhaps it will get easier I think when spring comes, when I get to the City churches, relieved to have finally finished this one.<br />
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Amen.<br />
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<br />amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-3450891048491380972012-12-18T16:34:00.000-08:002014-08-20T15:31:54.127-07:00The Temple ChurchI completely and utterly lose it with ( the very very good looking/ see previous post ) exh. I am shouting and swearing into a mobile that barely works in a dark damp street near London Bridge. Some logical part of myself knows this isn't a good idea, that falling into this black place of rage can do no good but another tiny part feels that it is about time, that finally something is being freed. It is powerful to feel the words gather speed on their spindly legs to the beat and power of wide wings though I wonder briefly if this is an actual madness, a late Van Gogh landscape, if I have slipped now into this tumult unable to recover<br />
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Later I find out that I misunderstood the text that triggered the outburst - that I am almost completely in the wrong.<br />
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On a grey day ( and there is going to be a theme here for it is a friday lunchtime - the only day I seem able to take a break ) I cycle out from work to get into a church. I know St Mary Le Strand is closed on Mondays and Fridays so I am aiming for the church at Temple. I have caught whispers of it's beauty and also Da Vinci code conspiracy theories in other research so I think it is going to be a good one.<br />
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Parking the bike just off Fleet St I am again in a part of London I have never been. I think as I walk down a thin cobbled street that it is like being a secret agent with my own self-generated, slightly nerdy special mission to complete. I am hidden in this snatched fraction of the day for no one knows where I am and I can't imagine telling anyone I work with where I have been. On the east side at the gatehouse of the walled court I ask a security man if it is possible to visit the church - yes he waves me in. Like Lincoln's Inn there is a courtyard - but less of a quadrangle - more a carpark with an irregular arrangement of very old and modern buildings that run into lawns. I don't know where I am going and I follow the crunch of wet gravel in a straight line looking down to a view of the Embankment and the Thames. Walk like a lawyer I think imagining the scurry of the white rabbit with a pocket watch - though there is no restriction to being here - I just don't want to look like a Dan Brown conspiracy tourist. I climb some greasy steps to see if a hall with stained glass is a church - it isn't - then sidle between two buildings on a path into a courtyard alongside offices<br />
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I have often thought I would like to take photographs through the windows walking past empty offices. I love the still empty air of the partitioned spaces and the seemingly neutral and 'timeless' aesthetic of computer, keyboard, desk and chair made jaunty by bright coloured talismans of family life or souvenirs of individuality. Here at lunchtime at Temple these arrangements of greige are crammed into small Dickensian rooms with bound papers spilling onto desks.<br />
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Under the shelter of a stone arch I find a map on the wall then have to back track up skiddy stone steps, through the same courtyard but on the other side alongside more office windows. The central garden is planted beautifully with plumbago and dark dahlias all of it sodden by the rain. Through the windows I see: a corporate lunchtime group perched at a round table with catered sandwiches, papers built in pillars curving against the window like a hoarders work in progress then in a tiny basement room two men struggling with a photo copier as if in a lover's clinch or knights in a cave against a dragon. I turn the corner to find the round church - labrador yellow set back from a courtyard, a column topped by a statue of two knights on a horse in the centre of the square. It marks the reach of the fire of London I find out later. The flames somehow stopping an arm's length from the church. Writing this I think can that really be true then check my map book because I know there is a map of the burnt out areas of the city. Yes, the beautifully drawn map by Wencelaus Holler in 1666 shows the white space of land destroyed by fire lapping the ink drawing of the circular church /tower and a few fine pen-nibbed trees surviving nearby.<br />
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At the door of the church however a poster announces tours and admission fees. I need £4 to enter. I have to troop back out through an alleyway onto Fleet St to get the cash and then back again with the money. As I enter the church there are two women on the door both very helpful but proprietorial and a bit bossy of their ancient space. There is scaffolding like a curtain across the view of the altar straight ahead but as I turn my head to see into the round of the church I can see effigies slightly submerged in the stone floor and it seems the altar is almost a side show to this old, circular shaped place. In the high, light, buttressed circle there are 9 stone knights lying as if on very thin mats on a bare floor. They are beautiful, the textures of their chain mail and socks like knitted stone just sleeping<br />
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I discover these are Knights Templar from the ancient order founded in 1119 by Hugh de Payens from Champagne and Godfrey de Saint Omer from Picardy to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. and that this church is a Templar church founded in 1185. When Jerusalem came under Muslim control in 638 bandits and fanatics preyed on the travelling christians and this new order formed to defend them. They became the most feared knights as their devotion to scripture gave them the willingness to die<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">. </span>The statue I had seen outside the church is the emblem of the order - the two knights together on a horse; a symbol of slightly disputed meaning - either their humble beginnings when horses had to be shared or the charity shown when a knight takes up a wounded Christian. Initially a round church modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was established in Holborn in 1128 on the site of an old Roman Temple. When this site became too small for the increasing numbers they moved to the present site building a larger round church set amongst grand halls, cloisters and walks. The church was consecrated February 10th 1185 in a ceremony by Heraclius Patriarch of Jerusalem and it is believed likely that Henry 11 was also present at the consecration.<br />
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In an address given in 1885 to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of the consecration of the church I find contemporary concerns:<br />
'The Templars have bequeathed us, as legacy, this lesson which we must not forget in the hour when we would fain recall the days of their grandeur and fresh enthusiasm: there is no promise of continuance for any institute, any party, any church, any creed.' the sermon by Alfred Ainger 10 Feb 1885.<br />
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For only two years after the consecration of this chuch in 1185 the Holy City of Jerusalem was captured by the Saladin the great sultan of Islam and when the pure Gothic chancel extension to the nave was consecrated in 1240 in the presence of Henry III there were less than eighty remaining years before the Knights of the Temple were no more. <br />
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It seems The Knights Templar evolved an early banking system - not unlike using travellers cheques - so pilgrims could redeem money against valuables deposited with the Templars rather than carrying wealth on their dangerous pilgrimages. The order became very rich and powerful, taking valuables from their conquests, gifts from the wealthy initiated into the order and offering loans to monarchs. However, with wealth and power came envy and hostility and the Order was disbanded when King Philip 1V of France put thousands to death in the 14th century in order to plunder their wealth for his war against England.<br />
With this sudden demise I find conspiracy theories: the knights become a part of Switzerland, taking their banking expertise to the Swiss, the knights sailed to America, went to Scotland, became involved with the Freemasons. Dan Brown's plots seem to use ideas that they held dangerous secret knowledge against the Church which the Church wanted buried. I even ( and quite unexpectedly) find a complicated tale that the Knights Templar were imprisoned in the castle local to my home town and built tunnels under the streets - that a stone Owl perched on a building in the high street holds a Freemasons secret message. Though I am interested in the reference to the symbol of the stone owl - when I drive out of London with the boys to see my mum and dad we always look for and laugh at a stone owl balanced on the corner of a Barclays bank in St John's Wood - I have always told them it is real, to check if it has flown away but they are now old enough to tell me stories about it too.<br />
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Looking up from the knights on the floor I see a ring of 'gargoyles' around the walls of the circular church. Beautifully modelled they are disturbing and funny. A man stretches his mouth wide to poke his tongue out, another man is cross eyed. The mad, blind. toothless and terrified are all gathered. A devilish goat, a simple king, faces with lolling expressions even a man having his ear bitten by a dog. I feel I have found a secret, something really special.<br />
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'I love the gargoyles' I say to the women on the desk as I buy a postcard. 'Grotesques', she corrects me correctly but primly. 'They are replacements put there in 1862'. I am surprised for they seem so very authentic.<br />
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I find the Templar Knight described by Bernard of Clairvaux, a nephew of one of the founding knights as:<br />
' Truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armour of faith just as his body is protected by the armour of steel. He is thus doubly-armed, and need fear neither demons nor men.'<br />
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I wonder if the grotesques represent this. When Philip 11 suddenly and harshly disbanded the Templars '<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">The charges of heresy included </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">spitting, trampling, or urinating on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_cross" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Christian cross">cross</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">; while naked, being </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">kissed obscenely by the receptor on the lips, navel, and base of the spine</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">; </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">heresy and worship of idols</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">; </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">institutionalized sodomy</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">; and also accusations of </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">contempt of the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Mass" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Holy Mass">Holy Mass</a> and denial of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrament" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Sacrament">sacraments</a></i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">. Barbara Frale has suggested that these acts were intended to simulate the kind of humiliation and torture that a Crusader might be subjected to if captured by the Saracens. According to this line of reasoning, they were taught how to commit </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy" style="background-color: white; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; text-decoration: none;" title="Apostasy">apostasy</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;"> </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">with the mind only and not with the heart</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px;">' </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">Barbara Frale, 'The Chinon Chart: Papal Absolution to the last Templar, Master Jacques de Molay', </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">Journal of Medieval History</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">, 30 (2004), 127.</span><br />
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Though I also find Bernard ( 1090 -1153) moaning about the grotesques.'What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters under the very eyes of the brothers as they read? What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, strange savage lions and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man?' I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body. Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, then again an animal half horse, half goat....Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities we should at least regret what we have spent on them.'<br />
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Much of the church has been destroyed or restored or replaced. After the departure of the Templars the land and buildings were rented to lawyers and their tenure made official in 1608 by James 1. Christopher Wren tinkered the original structure after the Fire of London though the fire had not damaged the building at all and on 10th May 1941 incendiary bombs set light to the roof, setting fire to much of the church and cracking the dark Purbeck marble columns by the intense heat. The columns and the church have been restored though it seems the original columns had a 'light outward lean, an architectural quirk,' which was reproduced in the replaced columns.<br />
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This takes me so long to write. I am not sure why. I thought I would love the mystery and tales of these knights but every night I sit to write and I just feel weary - I fiddle and fiddle with a few words but without the passion I normally feel for this project . Every day on the way to work I cycle past St Margaret's in Parliament Square. I didn't care for it much when I wrote about it and now I love it's almost organic form, the intricate tracery like the delicate structure of a mushroom in the shade of the Abbey. I have learnt so much from the churches I think but worry I have written myself into a cul de sac.<br />
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I am reading ''A jury of Her Peers' American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx' by Elaine Showalter for I am thinking how to write or what to write. I have barely any time to read or write anything at all and I only seem to be able to write this blog slowly. I am worried it won't add up to anything much. Though I send it to an agent who always says nice things about my writing, and he does but as always he says it is ( sadly ) unpublishable. I guess I want to write something that is publishable that I want now to be published.<br />
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Reading 'A Jury of Her Peers' I find comrades alongside my slightly solitary life for described are the early challenges of being a woman and a writer.<br />
I find 'Anne Bradshaw vouched for by her brother in law that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making 'these Poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments'<br />
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Lydia Maria Child a writer and American abolitionist in 1864 listed she had:<br />
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Cooked 360 dinners<br />
Cooked 362 breakfasts<br />
Swept and dusted sitting room and kitchen 350 times<br />
Flilled lamps 362 times<br />
Swept and dusted chamber and stairs 40 times.<br />
Beside innumerable jobs too small to mention.'<br />
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Though what I identify with is the beady eye alongside families, the difficulty of getting everything to square.<br />
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I hear a well heeled writer at work say he has never dusted anything in his life. Oh I think with a quick flash of spite but somebody will have done. Some people will have done that for you - for it seems to me that dust is matter that should be considered by all.<br />
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In the time I take to write this I see the first sprouts of scaffolding appear above the fence of the boarded up site on the corner of Horseferry Road where the court was, then a bright yellow digger and a crane installed. The crane looms high above the west tower of the Houses of Parliament catching the light bright against the blue sky, the gold tips of the tower behind glinting in the same sunlight. The space is still there but it is being filled in above dark green hoardings and portacabins built on stilts.<br />
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Unexpectedly the day before I finish writing this I have to research photographs of Jerusalem for a Christmas themed travel piece on the Holy Land. Oh I think seeing pictures of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem and The Temple Mount, I never thought about this. It is described as a tacky place, too full of tourists and too full of the warring concerns of different faiths but in the pictures I find it beautiful. Someone in the office says over my shoulder that they went with their family on a coach trip out of a water park in Egypt and it was like stepping into another time, but sacred. In these dark, disputed candle lit places I think that despite the dusting of the faithful there must be old traces, old matter, dead skin mingled and collected like sand.<br />
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Amen<br />
<br />amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-14842239049234984502012-10-09T15:46:00.002-07:002014-08-20T15:20:34.064-07:00St Lincoln's Inn chapel<div size="3">
The man says - here - look at this, opening a hinged wall of paintings to reveal in the bottom left hand corner a painting of the ruins of the bank of England.</div>
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It is 10 o'clock in the morning in the Sir John Soanes museum and the boys are wary but intrigued. I am trying ( and failing ) to drop them off early to a holiday workshop in the basement next door. I feel like a pushy mum with my attempt to saturate them in a beautiful cultured place but also in my attempt to do this and get to work on time. The workshop starts at 10.30 and my work starts at 10 but with the ludicrous and often unfounded optimism with which I often lead my life I thought if I was half an hour early for one and half an hour late for the other somehow it would work out - but it isn't doing. There seems to be a rather strict 10.30 drop off policy. However, rather than just hang about outside we look around the house - 'don't touch' I have to hiss, 'don't run' I whistle through the spit of my teeth - though I can see that out of the fresh air and stretch of a campsite in Dorset this is a darkly lit, odd place stuffed with odd old stuff and yet I want them to love it. </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">'Sir John Soanes was fascinated by the buildings he designed being abandoned and another culture taking over' our narrator explains. I think of Roman Temples left to ruin in a green damp landscape alongside </span>the huge arc of the Thames as the Romans departed in 410AD. Then I imagine our own landscape in ruins - the Bank of England ( mostly changed since Sir John Soane's original building) with the pillars tipped, grass growing and nearby the tumble of Next, Accessorize and Eat. I wonder at the archaeology of our chilly sandwiches and co ordinating consumer concerns. As a child I thought that in the future orange groves would grow where junior football teams spat pips from juicy segments at half time, though I also wanted to rewrite Cinderella from the view point of the ugly sisters. <br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">Watching Newsnight I laugh dryly hearing an American Economist say that George Osbourne would have failed economic policy if it was an exam.</span><br />
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The painting is squashed in a room stacked with Hogarths and Canelettos and shows the Bank of England cut away, tall scruffy trees growing alongside, a misty fog coating the air, masonry tumbled against a dark stormy sky. It was painted by Joseph Gandy the romantic but tragic architect and draftsman who worked for 40 years alongside the significantly more successful Sir John Soane. Both were obsessed with posterity and Roman ruins and spent hours discussing and working on their melancholic dreams of excavated remains and the future. Though it was Sir John that could rouse himself from these reveries to talk of bricks and plumbing to his many clients while Gandy only ever built a couple of buildings and ended mad <span style="font-size: 100%;">and penniless in a windowless cell in an asylum in Devon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;">http://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/remembering-exposition-at-sir-john.html </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;">Sir John Soane also wrote 'Crude Hints towards the History of My House' in 1810 imagining returning to his home in the 1830s to find a dilapidated ruin. Though this somber mood is believed to be provoked by his disappointment in his sons, his friendship with Turner breaking down and rows with the Royal Academy of Architects.</span><br />
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In front of the painting the stooped but impassioned guide also says to the boys - holding their attention with a severe eye - 'look within the ruin - who does Sir John think will survive', 'Are they workmen? one falters. 'Yes. People building again. People who can use their hands.'</div>
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Leaving them, their heads dipped in concentration in a beautifully proportioned Georgian basement cutting, sticking and drawing I leg it. From the Boris Bike corner of the elegant square I can see a towered gateway opposite - I have no idea what it is but it looks like an entrance to a castle. I don't know this area of London at all but every corner is almost a pantomime extreme 'untouched London view'.<br />
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I am trying to get into St Mary Le Strand church at Aldwych - we pass it every morning on the bus as we go to these workshops so I think it must be possible but the timing is always just too tight. One day exh who is skimming his own work by half an hour to pick them up at lunchtime rings to say he is going to be late. I set off hurriedly from work cycling over the river to pick the boys up and hold onto them before exh gets there ( though I get lost in the back streets and find myself pushing the BB over the crunch of gravel amazed in the grounds of St Lincoln's Inn thinking about Volpone and discovering the gatehouse that I had seen from the square is the gatehouse of St Lincoln's Inn. ) I attempt to bribe the boys with a bag of sweets to come to SMLS with me while we wait. They are up for it but exh phones to say he has arrived and I pass them like a baton into the back of the car and pedal back to work without getting into the church.<br />
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This is the end of the summer - the summer holidays petering out into trips to Clarks, Sports Direct and name tags sewn in the neck of soft collars. Optimistic sticker charts ( times tables and music practice ) are stuck to the kitchen wall, ironed clothes laid out and the alarm clock set.<br />
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Back into the routine of school and work I think I will be able to get to SMLS in a lunch break but I don't seem to have them. I love the work - the mixture of organising photo shoots across the world and looking at beautiful pictures but the desk is understaffed by stress and illness and the amount of work is unrelenting. Losing a job at the beginning of the year has knocked my sense of safety and I worry and worry that I am not quite fast enough, organised enough. I work 5 days a week, often until 8pm then at home I often do more.<br />
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Finally I cycle out on a Friday lunchtime determined to get to the church. I want to be quick but can't find a docking bay free for the bike. This is the Westminster border and I am at the edge of an area I know so enjoy circling old streets looking for a place to park. Though time is ticking for I meant to just slip out for a quick break and will get behind at work by this jaunt. I thought SMLS to be open at lunchtimes but the gates are shut and padlocked.<br />
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Oh, I think, then walk up the end bit of The Strand, just before it becomes Fleet Street wondering if there might be a church in the Royal Courts of Justice though with a bit of nosing about there doesn't seem to be anything. I have been helping my friend edit her poem about the Resurrection Men - Bishop, Williams and May who killed to sell bodies for anatomical research - and much of it is based in this area for they were caught trying to sell a 'fresh' body at King's College. I think I tormented her by knowing nothing of the subject and clean of knowledge depended entirely on her words to imagine these places - so it feels funny but fascinating to be in her landscape. I will try Lincoln's Inn I think - I feel completely out of my own time now as if there isn't really an office to go back to and a lot of work waiting to do. I turn down an alley - an old bell hung from an old building, shop windows bowed onto the street - lawyers rooms crammed together. At the end of the yard is a street that swerves off at the end with low village like buildings, like a Dickensian scene<br />
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Writing this I discover it is Carey Street previously the home of bankruptcy courts a possible etymology of the term queer street.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;">I duck under a low alley lined with lawyers bookshops and into a huge green square. It is so bright and perfect looking - a little bit New England with white fences. There are beautiful old roses tumbling over a wall, tourists milling around and the scurry of lawyers passing. I know there is a church here but I am not sure which building is the church - all of it is historic, turreted and ornate most of it could be ecclesiastical - just as I think I will have to go to the gatehouse to ask I see a sign saying that there are guided tours that start in the chapel and instructions on how to find it.</span></div>
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On the east side of the square I find myself under a low arched open crypt with stunted buttresses like squat thick tree trunks - still unsure where to go. Hesitantly I walk up the stairs at the back of this area and then at the top open the doors into the chapel. There is a man speaking to a tour gathered though the pews are so high they are like wooden booths. The windows are tall with jewel stained glass in a dense patchwork of coats of arms. It is as if I have lost all sense of time for I sit for a while just looking at the glass and listening to the talk.</div>
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He talks of John Donne who laid the foundation stone of the chapel in 1620. Donne had been the preacher at Lincoln's Inn between 1620 and 1622 and preached the first sermon in 1623 packing the congregation so full that people passed out and were taken for dead. The chapel bell that rang out at midday to mark the passing away of a 'bencher' ( a member of the inn's governing body ) is to have inspired John Donne's line 'Never send to know for whom the bells toll; it tolls for thee'. The tour guide in the pulpit also talks of the aristocracy sending their second or third son's to Lincoln's Inn to learn law so that disputes of land could be resolved.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 100%;">Later I find out that originally during the 12th and 13th century the law was taught in the City of London by the clergy. However Henry III decreed that no institutes of legal education could exist in the City of London and a papal bull declared that the clergy could no longer teach common law only canon law and so the institutes of legal education fell apart. Common lawyers collected at the hamlet of Holborn - the nearest place to the law courts of Westminster Hall that was outside the City - and at sometime ( it is unknown exactly when ) Lincoln's Inn was </span>formed. Ben Jonson is reputed to have helped as a brick layer in the construction of the Inn, and Oliver Cromwell lived over the gateway nearest to Chancery Lane. Dickens wrote in Bleak House:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; text-align: justify;">‘This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and blighted lands in every shire; which has its warn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give - the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!”</span></div>
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On a trip to the Natural History Museum with the boys we find a room on Earth's Restless Surface just after the earthquake simulator. Briefly I find the statement that change is all that is certain comforting and then as I move around the exhibition I panic. I think it is the sense of scale and time that disturbs me - tiny drops of water building or carving rock, gravity itself eroding matter, everything shifting, everything tumbling. When my eldest son was little he would talk and talk about outer space from the strapped child seat at the back seat of the car as I drove. I wonder now if it was before the youngest was born or more likely just after. Each question would make our own position in the car more tiny, more ridiculous, it was like a zoom lens rendering us invisible. I attempted to answer each question though sometimes I didn't know the answers and often the answer was just yes. Though infinity seems like a guess sometimes, a dinner plate to fall off.<br />
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I discover too that Sir John Soane's disappointment with his two sons was more than ( or perhaps because of ) a pushy parent's inability to cope with a lack of achievement - though he pushed and pushed them both to become architect's. The elder son John died young while the youngest George exhorted money from his family with threats of becoming an actor, was imprisoned for debt and fraud and then published anonymously an article '<i style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">The Present Low State of the Arts in England and more particularly of Architecture' </i> in which Soane was singled out for personal attack. Later George lived in a menage a trois with his wife and her sister subjecting the family to domestic abuse and though Soane's paid for the grandson's education - again attempting to keep the lineage of architecture in his name by placing him under the guidance of another architect the grandson was dismissed for staying out late with a known homosexual. At night just before sleep I think about the rage and secrets hidden in this story.<br />
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I hear a woman on radio 4 talking about writing her own life as a book and she said between describing the drug habit she picked up once it was published that the trick was just to call everyone really good looking - they don't mind what you write as long if you say that - it made me laugh out loud as I washed up.<br />
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Finally I have a vivid dream that my hand is held by a ghost. That I am just standing in a lobby somewhere and my hand is held warm and tight by nothing. It is a real shock even in a dream and I wake frightened.<br />
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Amen</div>
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amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-52559931395709626062012-07-13T14:55:00.051-07:002014-08-20T15:15:18.567-07:00St John of the White Tower<span style="font-family: georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"></span>The Court on Horseferry Rd that closed in December has been demolished. A vast space on the corner of Marsham St opened up revealing a rather blank blocks of flats and unexpectedly a view of the gothic, golden-tipped tower of the Houses of Parliament with the Union Jack flying. I find the view fascinating as we walk to and from school, the change it makes to other buildings, the layers of London peeled back, the shift/mark of change like a lost tooth. Though the speed that it has been taken down and the hoarding advertising luxury apartments suggests it won't be there long.<br />
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It is nearly the end of term. We are all tired and grumpy. Waking everyday to this grey sci-fi summer we talk of rain at breakfast. The boys usually recalcitrant to waterproofs understand their necessity like soldiers stowing kit. I am finding the high pressure full time job and my own life hard to sandwich. As if I am a voyeur on comfortable and cultured lives, my face feels pressed to the glass of ease and ambition. Though I like the work, feel completely at home looking carefully at beautiful pictures, trying to find the detail of narrative that makes sense of a story and my sons have a better standard of drawing paper. No longer felt-penning superheroes on the other side of TOWIE girls in bikinis, they sketch on the reverse of Titians, theatre productions and news pictures of the anniversary of the London riots. When it goes well it is work I love - there is just a lot of it and I have to squeeze in parent teacher meetings, cooking cakes to thank teachers and baking Munch scream cookies for the Bazaar with finding and paying for childcare. The boys exhausted melt down being dragged home, the last children left at after school play centre. Oh I think then this is tough.<br />
Between school and work I ride the Boris Bikes over Westminster Bridge past PSM's house near to the turrets of Southwark Cathedral. The brief space between home and work feels like freedom. The view of Big Ben, the river, crowds increasing as the Olympics near.<br />
I have been collecting 'old views'. Cycling or walking past I suddenly catch one - a back street in Waterloo, without the gloss of front doors but an overgrown row of back yards, a corner in St James's, roof tops and elegant pillars, a street a stillness to time, a fold, something eyes from another time saw. A handkerchief of land in Russell Square, an old bomb site just left. A turn near Borough market that bears almost no trace of now. I like the authenticity of the past almost undisturbed. It is like a rhyme or a wink, how Paul Auster describes the vibration of coincidences. Once, cycling home on a bike I see a woman in a Crinoline and two men in frock coats on Pall Mall, just standing on the corner trying to hail a cab, hair tucked into wigs, a little bit drunk.</div>
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My 16 year old niece comes to stay for a week while she does a fashion course and my sister in law and two nephews come for the weekend ( It is a long story but employment worries mean my elder brother now works in Dubai on his own and his family live in their home in the North of England though he comes home for snatched weekends and holidays. My sister in law and I became close through our children but perhaps closer since this arrangement took hold - she isn't exactly a single mum but she does the work of one at the moment - and it is nice to spend time working together in a team, kind to each other, able to make each other laugh, part of each other's families. I squash everyone into the flat squeezing buckled air beds into the boys' room and sleep on the sofa. The youngest nephew once said to the boys 'Aren't you embarrassed to live here?' not understanding that most of their school friends live cooped lives with dirty yards too.</div>
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We take a boat to the Tower of London. It rains a bit and we can't really hear the commentary. She must have been cold my sister in law and I say about the Queen - for it is a much warmer day and yet the wind on the river is old lady chilly. Just as we disembark I see the Spirit of Chartwell motor past. I think after all they did a good job for it is an ugly boat brown boat, like an obese cinderella skiving up the river. As our boat turns to dock at the Tower of London I feel excited, just as I did as a child by Traitor's Gate. It seems so easy to imagine the dead end fear of being rowed in, fear stage managed in the crick of the neck height of the castle and the low down boat gliding in. With absolutely no queue we see the Crown Jewels. Unexpectedly there is barely any grumbling from the children. Such riches seem to quiet them. Narnian scabbards, diamonds and rubies and sapphires bigger than birds eggs, a huge ornate gold punch bowl, detailed by fish and lobsters - holding 115 bottles of wine my eldest son winks at me. The last glass case of the exhibition shows the cases the jewels travel in - sculptural, empty spaces describing a puzzle of baffling forms. Afterwards I notice a church tucked into the corner of the courtyard. I want to go there I say as my sister in law and I hand out sandwiches to the range of ages ( 6 - 16 ) sat on a damp bench, hoods up, waterproofed against the drizzle. But we see the ravens, the torture chamber, the Bloody Tower, then the White tower. Walking into the White Tower we pass an open door that reveals the narrow staircase where the bones of two young boys were found buried, then troop past suits of armour through bare halls. I catch the cousins ( brothers/boys ) fighting - cuffing and kicking opposite boy armour. My sister in law is round the corner - so i intervene - quietly shouting at them to stop it, what a bad example, how old are there, all the things you say. Behind me a guard of the tower, a cell block H looking woman takes over from my remonstrations and says she will throw them out. Chastised we move on through. There is a room of majestic life sized models of horses, almost as if stabled and beautifully carved called the 'Line of Kings'. Restored onto the throne in 1660 Charles II presented this Line of Kings- each king since Wiliam the Conquerer represented by their armour and the powerful model of horses. Possibly one of the first tourist attractions it was an advert to the strength of royal lineage and he opened the tower to the public putting both weapons and the crown jewels on display. A Stuart spin doctor he also laid on the Royal Thames pageant. At work I get a book catalogue that lists a book called Rebranding Rule' the restoration and revolution monarchy 1660 -1741 by Kevin Sharpe that seems to be about the public representation of monarchy after the aftermath of Cromwell. Oh I think rather chuffed I am on to something. Though I also read in the Metro that there has been the biggest amount of reported visitors to Buckingham Palace this year, many coming to see Kate Middleton's wedding dress despite the queen called the headless dummy horrible, horrid and 'made to look very creepy.' I think how the anxieties of royalty must be imbedded - perhaps the riots triggered old fears of execution. Though they have had a good year this year - putting a lot of verve to their popularity - the pageant, jumping out of helicopters, a summer of flag flying and pride.</div>
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I discover too that until 1830 a menagerie was housed at the Tower of London, another potent symbol of power and strength. Believed to have started with one lion in the time of King John the collection grew - a gift of three leopards from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1235, a white bear believed to be a polar bear donated by the King of Norway in 1251, and an African Elephant ( the first in England since the Roman invasion of 43AD ) given by Louis IX in 1255.<br />
By 1741 the first true guide book to the Tower listed the animals on display and recorded their often mundane names:'The collection included Marco and Phillis the lions and their son Nero, another two lionesses called Jenny and Nanny, a leopard called Will, a panther called Jenny, two tigers confusingly also called Will and Phillis with their son Dick, as well as a racoon, two vultures, two eagles, an ape and a porcupine whose names were unrecorded.'<br />
The Menagerie was not without incident - 1686 a keeper's daughter was mauled by a lion, a boys leg torn by monkeys in the 17th century and an escaped Leopard shot in the 18th century.By 1830 the animals were trundled away to form London Zoo or sold and shipped to an American showman.</div>
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I lose all the children for a while - I can't exactly remember if I go back to check on one group or forward to check on another but somehow I am without any of them for a while. I coast briefly, unattached to anything, not really taking in the details any more, just resting, aware of the historic space but also an ugliness to the display. I notice a huge fireplace in one room and think what a beautiful space and then climb some wooden steps into a simple stone room and suddenly there is some rush and an attractive smiley woman is saying 'IF YOU WANT TO HEAR THE TALK YOU NEED TO SIT NOW!' Oh I think looking up to the simple arches and windows above a table altarpiece, I didn't know this was here. But with a lovely feeling of recognition of a space as if I knew already about this simple but completely beautiful chapel. I think oh it is on the cover of a book my dad gave me about the city churches, that I haven't let myself look at yet. A pause here - I have mumbled an interest in London churches to my Mum and Dad who used to nag me how the novel was doing - but not revealed the extent of this project. I wonder if it is accepted within the family I have become a Sunday writer, lost my ambition, that I am too old for publication. I wonder with fear if it is true. Though I am so involved in the obsession of this work I don't think there is anything else I can do now. I lean on a pillar for the talk. I think the children or my sister in law will either come up the stairs and find me or come back to find out where I have got to but no one does.<br />
The young woman gives an enthusiastic and smiley sing song talk to the seated audience. She over emphases the first word of each sentence - HERE, she says, the White Tower was built with work commencing in 1078, the thick walls a symbol of Norman strength but also a royal home, a safe place. IT capitalised on the wooden fortification built in 1066 as William the Conqueror's stronghold, becoming one of the biggest forts in Christendom. THE small chapel is the oldest intact church in London she says and was the king's private chapel situated next to the royal bedroom. HENRY VII's wife Elizabeth of York lay in state having died in childbirth here, MARY I was married by proxy here to Philip II of Spain and Lady Jane Grey would have worshipped here. MUCH earlier during the peasant's revolt of 1381 the castle was stormed as the young King Richard II went to hear the demands of the peasants at Mile End. THE Lord Chancellor, Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury who was particularly associated with the disputed poll tax and Lord Treasurer ( Robert de Hales, the Grand Prior of the Knights Hospitallers of England ) were both dragged from the chapel, then taken and beheaded on Tower Green. The guide passes a laminate picture between the different nationalities seated on wooden chairs showing Simon of Sudbury's part mummified skull that is preserved in his home town clearly showing the axe mark. A South African girl passes it back to me as I loll on the pillar looking at the dense stone of the structure, the simple space that was probably once ornately coloured holding my breath. It seems such a tight space for these tales, I wasn't expecting to come across it. The small Norman arched window above the altar table faces directly east along with the gallery windows curved around the apse and I imagine the sun light spilling into the chapel as it rises each day. Though writing this I realise this is why churches are often to be built east to west, that out of the darkness the sun rising each day could be a celebration.<br />
I catch up with the others, though no one seems to have missed me, everyone just milling around now, the children bored, anticipating the gift shop. Just before departing I find a list of executions within the tower listed by centuries and I am surprised to read that in the 20th century 12 people were executed. 11 during World War I and one during World War II - all shot by firing squad. We are running out of time because my sister in law and her sons need to catch a train. Though I still try to get in the other church in the corner of the walls of the castle. 'Only if you are part of a tour' the beefeater says, so I will have to go back.<br />
Later I read:'...the Tower appears almost as a character symbolising both protection and fearful danger.' about Shakespeare's Richard III. For the young sons of Edward IV confined in secure cells on upper floors in the White Tower in May 1483 it seems to have been danger. The Princes in the Tower disappeared in July 1483 presumably murdered. In 1674 workmen digging out foundations of a staircase leading up to the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, high in the White Tower, found a chest containing the skeletons of two boys and Charles II had the remains buried at Westminster Abbey. Tests carried out by medical experts in 1933 confirmed that these bones were those of two children of the ages of the Princes in the Tower in September 1483. Though there is now controversy that this can be true. I wonder too how handy for Charles II to have loopholes in his lineage cleared up.</div>
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I book a standing ticket at the Globe for the Richard III for £5. I have never seen the play before or been to the Globe. But I love the aeroplanes passing overhead in the blue sky of the open roof, the gaudy painted colours of the stage, the pack and cheer of the crowd, the standing audience swaying as legs grow tired. Mark Rylance is Richard III with an all male cast. He is brilliant, deviously charming on spindly legs and nursing a drooping claw, a damaged man damaging others with his ruthless ambition. The ghosts of all he kills lining around him in the final scenes:</div>
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Sweating and terrified, Richard asks desperately, “What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. / Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I. / Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am” (V.v.136–138)</div>
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“I shall despair. There is no creature loves me, / And if I die no soul will pity me. / Nay, wherefore should they?—Since that I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself?” (V.v.154–157). Shakespeare too helped tell our stories - the stories of our king's lineage, stories that made the monarchy real to the people in the pit.</div>
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I must have told my sister in law about the blog over a glass of wine though I don't remember doing so. Out of the blue she emails weeks after their visit to say she has read the blog and found it intensely moving. I wonder and worry whether she might just feel sorry for me. Is it any good I want to reply. Can I write? I want to reply, can I? Or am I just a Sunday writer? Is it ok to write about my children? My family? You?</div>
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There is always a moment of optimism when I first start writing about a church when I think oh this one is going to be easy, I will have this done in a couple of days. I will be back to doing a church a week I think excitedly eyeing the City churches as I pass them. But then the summer holidays hit, the sun comes out, the boys camp in Norfolk with their Dad and friends and I join them for a weekend. The following week I even sit and watch some of the Olympics, 'Mum's watching telly' the boys say in glee as I shout at athletes winning gold medals. Then we are off for the annual camping holiday in Dorset where we catch Olympic sailing from the cliff tops. I finally finish War and Peace ( it has taken me exactly a year ), those last pages so dense with ideas of power and scale, freedom and humanity that I have wondered occasionally if I might not make it, might not get to the end. Briefly wonder if that happened - would I lie - say I had read it. But I do. The last thirty pages taking three months. Oh but it is worth it. I don't believe it is a plot spoiler to copy the last paragraph. Tolstoy finished by talking of the historic acceptance of earth's motion in space and it's imperceptibility:<br />
'In the first case, we had to get away from a false sensation of immobility in space and accept movement that we could not feel. In the present case it is no less essential to get away from a false sensation of freedom and accept a dependence that we cannot feel.'<br />
Amen.<br />
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amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-68172294870996405052012-06-03T16:09:00.055-07:002014-08-20T15:09:10.233-07:00The Queen's Chapel of Savoy<div>
We get up at 5.45 to see the river pageant. The boys waking as if going on holiday, scrambling into their clothes while I make sandwiches. Outside the light has the grey speckle of underarm, warm and damp but not quite raining. I carry bags of activities and food, my sons carry the folding camping stools. We thought we would pitch up at the end of our street in the garden by the Houses of Parliament - we had done a recce the night before and there were toilets and a coffee kiosk setting up - with lots of room to run about until it got crowded. This morning in the gloom we can see the silhouettes of a few umbrellas already at the river side but vistas of free space under the trees. For a moment the plan seems to have gone ridiculously smoothly and my eldest insists we high five. At the gate however there are security men. 'We have to sweep the garden for bombs', they say, we can't let anyone in until 11am. But, there are people already here I say pointing at the draggle of umbrellas already on the front. 'They were here before we arrived' says the man. We can't do anything about them now. You should have got here 5 minutes ago - we weren't here. We plead for a while but they won't let us in. Let's keep walking, I say, we'll find a place. On Westminster Bridge there is a group of older women already set up with camping chairs and union jacks at the edge of the bridge under Big Ben and a gentle elderly lady with bulging feet in old lady sandals, a mac and a cheap umbrella. It has started to pour and the wind has picked up. Security guards give conflicting advice as to where we can be, allowing us onto the bridge and then herding us back. It is all women here someone observes, then notices my sons. For about 10 minutes we debate whether it would be better to be here with the best view or nearer to PSM's house on the South Bank with the obvious advantages of friends, toilets and cups of tea. My youngest needs a wee and the decision is made.</div>
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On the east side of Waterloo Bridge we choose our place on the railings, in view of St Paul's, almost as if standing where Canaletto painted the historic view of the Thames. It is pouring now and really cold. My youngest has retreated to PSM's to watch cartoons though my eldest is still at my side - I am going to sit with you all day he says. By 9am we have sat for 2 hours played a lot of games of travel Connect 4 and he has tooted a rather beautiful looking but tuneless brass horn that I bought for him on the internet loudly and repeatedly to tug boats and steam boats moving up river. We have spent the only money I have on hot drinks and a minescule bag of warm doughnuts and when he says 'how much longer' I have to say probably 7 hours. Understandably he decamps to PSMs for a break. I do wonder what giving up might feel like, the dirty damp bags a tide at my feet.</div>
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On one side there are now two old ladies from the North and on the other an East End family, of different generations - a nice young man and his girlfriend with smart cityessex (citisex?) accents, his cockney mum and grumpy cockney granny in high heeled flip flops with socks who says every now and then. 'I don't think I should have come.' coughs a bit, then sniffs the air and says longingly 'I can smell bacon.' Though the family try and jolly her on. The rest of us are smiley and stoic in waterproofs. At 9.30 it starts filling up and a posh older man with a booming voice, spots a gap between me and the east end granny and stakes a claim on the railings, phoning his family on the mobile, I have found a simply perfect spot he says. It is absolutely marvellous. For a while the original settlers bristle to the boom of him but then we all relax and get on. He is really nice to the grandchildren that he slots in around us, and the WAGs and sons or husbands of his family become the crowd behind us but retreat/duck under his well meaning Empire-running tone. </div>
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I am in the elderly women gang on the unsuitable footwear. I dithered in the hallway about wellies. Then plumped for ballet pumps and no socks and oh my goodness I am cold. </div>
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At 11am the children return with PSM's sons and PSM and her boyfriend. She takes one look at me and goes home bringing socks, wellies, a hot water bottle and a flask of hot sweet tea. She is a midwife and I feel I have been midwifed though it is lovely to feel so cared for.</div>
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The children settle down to a couple of hours Where's Wally and Tintin books while I stitch union jacks out of felt. When I thought I would be entertaining the boys for hours and hours on my own I packed craft material and bamboo sticks to make flags. I think I look a bit mad and a lot more patriotic than I actually am, doling out sandwiches and union jacks to four boys. Somehow though I don't know how exactly, it is assumed I am a single mum by the boomy grandad who is unable to hide his surprise I know who Canaletto is. PSM always more sensible than me has retreated to the warmth of her house, to drink cava and wait for some friends. Though it is no longer actually raining now just damp. There are dark inflatable speed boats patrolling the sides of the river, low in the water but skimming fast, men with guns shadowy in black. The boys watch them through binoculars, sing songs and talk nonsense - with intermittant bursts on the golden horn. When they turn to me and ask how much longer they look disbelieving when I say probably 4 hours.</div>
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About 1 o'clock the crowds are 9 or 10 deep but a procession of small children in bone dry cashmere breton jumpers process in a line like a scene from a stylish french children's book to our vantage point at the railings propelled by a professionally blow dried mother hissing in their ear - 'well done' and 'keep going'. At the railings she is showy and loud pointing out London landmarks, herding the children and staking a claim with her body language, hogging the view of the older women next to us. I feel tired and angry. 'I am really sorry we have all been here a very long time, it isn't fair if you take our space. 'MY MOTHER HAS BEEN HERE SINCE 10! she says shrilly, waving to a woman 5 back in the crowd. But she isn't at the front I say. I hate being rude or mean but I don't want to let her take our place, can't stand the air of entitlement. We have been here since 7 I say dourly, like a toad on a camping stool, guarding something momentarily precious. 'These nice people have been here since 7 she says in a shiny voice to the children, not catching my unblinking hooded eye under the green waterproof - though there is a tinge of incredulity, as if only fools would make the effort. And that's why we are at the front. I say. She stays. I glower. She stays. I glower. In pique I use my son's camera to take a picture of her. In a town on the border of Mexico and America I once saw grids of poloroid pictures of shoplifters pinned to the pound shops door. In the small hazy focus of the bare backroom they had been taken to, powerful portraits of fear, defiance and sulky resentment. Though I am still surprised by how much authority a camera has - as if there is a central 'badly behaved' shop door pictures could be sent to for the mother turns back her party from the railings. Oh I just wanted my children to see the pageant she says in a little girl voice as they depart. The children cry on the retreat, like little pink mice, their tails tucked behind them. I feel like someone wicked in a nursery rhyme though a woman on the other side of the northern women say she had asked them to move too.</div>
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At 2pm PSM texts me to say she will never get through the crowd to the front but can I have two of her friends children please. Small boys are despatched to collect them, squeezing back between the crowds legs as if amoebas splitting and doubling. PSM's eldest son carries a clingfilmed glass of cava for me. With six children I feel we are a rowdy pack, but the Grandad says - leave them - they are enjoying themselves, they have done very well, but in a benevolent 'isn't it jolly what things under microscopes do when you watch them' tone. My eldest and PSM's youngest, sing the National Anthem at the top of their voices, which should be charming but isn't. The cashmere breton jumpered children have been packed at the feet of the Grandad's family. Only writing this do I realise this wasn't just kindness - they were a part of it.</div>
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By 3pm excitement is high - across the river we can see the flicker of screens between trees and know the Queen has embarked, that the boats are on their way. Every 10 minutes the boys ( and one girl ) say - how much longer - and I guess 10 minutes. Then they ask again. 10 minutes I guess again. But suddenly it is nearly happening and I feel tired and cold and need a wee.</div>
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The Bell boat is first, careering rather madly, through the choppy water, the bells ringing out, tipping back and forth on wheels like something put together from the making box. Then the Venetian style Gloriana, very beautiful, men in time powering the boat cleanly through the currents. Behind with the the flurry of oars and paddles, and punts the little boats pour under Waterloo Bridge - comical and beautiful in their pell mell dash and endeavour. Red, blue, yellow, gold, orange, - flashes of colour and rich details - canoes and skiffs, gondalas, row boats, kayaks, fishing boats, the rhythm of oars in and out and in and out, shoulders moving together. I hear myself just saying, oh, it is lovely, repeatedly. Like a Richard Scary children's book page full of crazy animals in crazy vehicles spread out infront of us the boys and I point out to each other different boats and flags The gondala' we say, to the elegant arc of a white and golden boat. The little long boat! for there is a mini Viking boat with shields and a dragon masthead. The willow pattern plate boat - a low slung boat with a braided canopy But the scene does look like the Canaletto - it is absolutely beautiful. And we wave and wave and wave. </div>
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Infront of us though the boats have to funnel through a channel between moored boats packed with flag waving wellwishers and the currents of the Thames seem to pick up on this corner and we see the oarsmen, the canoeists, backing up, jamming into pockets, a little bit of panic then paddling through.</div>
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The Commonwealth boats glide in, jaunty, more controlled with their little motors powering their triangular formation. Flags fluttering, turquoise clad crew, padded and proud. The Grandad behind is listing the countries of each flag, to no one in particular. He wants his binoculars back from his grandchildren but everytime he nearly gets them another striped child lisps it is their turn. He is kind enough not to demand them but I feel he would like to. I am on his side. Oh it is beautiful I say again. A big pleasure boat with an orchestra playing Handel's water music in a plastic flapping gazebo on the top deck sails past, music in gusts, everyone cheering.</div>
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Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? my youngest says.</div>
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A boat with some trumpeters dressed a bit like cards in Alice in Wonderland playing a fanfare comes under the bridge. Da da they say. Da da da da da da da da dahhhh! Then the royal barge - a big maroon thing ploughing through the water flanked by the drop shadow of the dark inflatable security boats, and backed up behind with matt grey warships, soldiers at attention, alert to attack. But after all that waiting I find it hard to remember anything and I confuse the snippets I have seen on tv with the not much I remember. I think it may have started really pouring at this time though that might happen shortly after. I remember people saying they couldn't see the thousands of flowers on the barge and I say - the flowers are in the swags - in the garlands. The Grandad snaps once or twice at my sons/charges to keep their heads down, but he still hasn't got his binoculars back and is feeling frustrated. I continually tap at the 6 children with my felt flag not to stand on the concrete of the railings so that other people can see. I feel briefly like I have turned into the grumpy east end granny though no one attends to my grumbling. A few people sing God Save the Queen but just like my son and his friend it sounds slightly ironic, a little bit tongue in cheek, a little bit don't care and the woman leading it at the back just sounds drunk.</div>
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I think then it is odd - I have waited in the cold and rain for 9 hours for something I don't believe in - don't really give a shit about. Infront of us the big boat moored up and packed with well wishers tips precariously as everyone leans to wave. Our crowd keep laughing as the boat tips alarmingly further and further out of the water, the bottom of the boat, a muddy white, revealed.</div>
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No one says - god bless you ma am , no one says anything very much about the Queen at all apart from she works hard. I hear people say this will never happen again in out life time. Not even in your life time a woman points out to my sons, calculating the possible reign of Charles or William to not amount to much and I think most are just there for the sense of history. Though I wonder if a boat pageant might become the new royal pop concert - there is something so popular and spectacular to it.</div>
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But seeing the Queen as a vulnerable grainy fleck of white in the grey damp air waving on a boat floating on the Thames I think of my Mum. They have the same dogged duty, the same unfailing and unstinting duty to duty. Though what they are dutiful to is almost forgotten, a dry husk of whatever it is they were told was important to be as good little girls. The guarding has become the important thing, their determination and obedience almost the value itself. When I watch the tv I think the Queen has a few seconds when she looks up to the drip of her gazebo, the grey rain coming down and wonders just briefly why she is here, what on earth she is doing adrift on a tarty barge. But I also think Kate Middleton looks lonely. Stood a fraction behind William as he laughs with his brother she laughs too, but anxiously, looking to check if she laughed correctly. A family I supose. Just a flawed family.</div>
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Later I find out researching and watching endless youtube clips of the pageant to try and remember what happened that someone I went to college with, a friend's ex boyfriend was in charge of the look and dressing of the Royal barge which seems funny. He was then an energetic, beautiful but appropriately for art school, snarling young man. Though I like the idea of the banner at the stern decorated with more than half a million gold buttons in the shape of the royal coat of arms - though I am not sure anyone noticed it.</div>
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If it hadn't already started raining when the Queen passed by - it does now - a deluge as the cheery Dunkirk boats come through. The boats of different shapes and sizes are painted and polished with the spit and rub of pride and it is almost possible to smell the fresh paint and duraglit across the width of the Thames. The crowds cheer and cheer in the rain proud of the pluck, the spirit and bravery of boats that evacuated 338,226 troops from the shores of France. When those troops were cut off by the German Army on the shores of France in the early summer of 1940 the extent of the possible disastrous defeat was kept from the British public. However King George V1 ( the Queen's father) called for an unprecedented week of prayer - the Archbishop of Canterbury led prayers 'for our soldiers in dire peril in France' and the public knew something grave was up. These little boats - the fishing boats and pleasure craft alongside royal national lifeboats and British destroyers ferried the troops to safety 'a miracle of deliverance' as hailed Winston Churchill.</div>
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A military band packed onto a pleasure boat sails through, drummers drumming scottish songs, the grandad humming, a few of us snatching the words we know, good to jig a little in the sheeting rain. Then the toot of the historic boats, steam funnels puffing smoke. The boys take it in turn to play the golden horn in conversation to the boat whistles. The working boats following, life boats and fire boats spraying water.</div>
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The music is muddled in my mind and it seems not very well reported on tv or even youtube - though it was beautiful and there was a boat with an amazing eastern sounding choir, which I imagine must be the Shree Muktajeevan Pipe Banc and Dhol Ensemble. </div>
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Toot toot toot, the golden horn played right in my ear. I have had enough.</div>
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This is the end, the War and Peace moment, the moment when the French army retreat - when the crowds who have stood so long, came together into a collective of cheers and reasonably goodwill decide - everyone, all at the same time, without saying goodbye or even making a plan just ups and leaves. I think one of the boys says - I have had enough and rather than do the normal - just 10 minutes more - I just say yes. Let's go. Only then noticing the departing backs of the Grandad's family, the empty stretch of railings, just the movement of retreat. The recreation boats are coming through, endless white fibre glass boats that our gaze slide away from. And we run back through the rain and abandoned union jacks curled in puddles to PSM's house. And PSM and her friends cheer me when I come in as if the Queen herself has arrived - I am my mother's daughter with my ridiculous stoic duty to the task. Our children will remember this for ever they say, giving me soup and tea. Secretly I think I don't think the children really cared. Perhaps even I didn't really, though I had wanted to see the Thames swamped with colourful boats.</div>
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I am just saying I wish I had seen The London Philarmonic Orchestra when we hear it. PSM's house is just set back from the South bank ( though behind solid office blocks ) and we hear them loud and clearly. She runs out with her boyfriend into the rain to see, the rest of us stand in a the sea of a lego of a boys bedroom to hear them.</div>
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I will never get these tired damp boys home without a fuss I think looking out at the pouring rain, knowing I haven't got enough money for a taxi or even a bus as a back up plan and too proud to ask PSM to borrow some. But we walk back through the lash of wind and rain happily carrying our damp stools and bags. My youngest dancing on tip toes through the lakes of puddles, his face completely absorbed to the dance he makes.</div>
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I wonder what church could sit with the pageant but think I will just have to make it work - there aren't any specifically royal churches left that I know.</div>
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When I walk down Savoy Hill to the Savoy Chapel there are still metal barricades stacked up, left over from the pageant though I think by the time I get to the church it is a week later. The chapel is set back in a garden but there is building work going on and it looks closed up and a bit of a mess, though there are old gravestones skewed into the railings, as if the earth has just been turned over.</div>
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I have tried a few times to get into the church and it has always been shut ( even when it should have been open ) so I am pleased to see the door wide open. Inside a very plain and small village hall style porch there are flowers on a table and closed doors. Then a door opens revealing a glimpse of the chapel, a mother propelling a child as if to the toilet. I squeeze past their hurried exit into the small chapel where it looks like the congregation are just leaving. I think I'll just sit briefly, before realising the seemingly departing congregation are mainly a family gathered around the font with a baby. It is a christening and the baptism is about to take place. I lose my nerve and get only a quick look at the high narrow chapel with painted ceiling and anonymous plush decor and recognise the slightly anonymous royal chapel style. It doesn't seem anything to do with the hotel at all but The Queen's Chapel of Savoy. Completely unexpectedly it is a royal chapel. 'The chapel belongs to Her Majesy The Queen in her right as Duke of Lancaster'. In a glass case there is a signed book of the monarchs that have visited.</div>
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A church was originally built here in the Middle Ages as part of the Savoy Palace, the walled riverside mansion built by Count Peter of Savoy in 1246. He was given the riverside land between Westminster and the City of London when his niece married Henry 111. Later it became the home of John of Gaunt who inherited the title of Duke of Lancaster in 1351. With it came the rights of palatine giving his land the right to be ruled autonomously from the rest of the kingdom, indeed this area known as 'Savoy' kept many of these special judicial privileges until 1873. Under these laws someone being pursued for a debt in London could reside in the Savoy without fear of arrest by people acting under the King's authority. The vast palace where Chaucer ( a clerk of the palace ) began the Canterbury Tales was burnt down in the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 fueled by the unpopularity of John O Gaunt's poll tax which taxed rich and poor alike. Later restored and rebuilt by Henry V11 it became a hospital for the homeless, a vast nave filled with a hundred beds, and the first to benefit from permanent medical staff. It closed in 1702, falling into disrepair. Though there is a Turner sketch of the ruins and I love the idea of this gothic crumbling pile in the heart of London.</div>
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The Chapel known as both St Mary in the Hospital and St John the Baptist in the Savoy was the only thing to survive a fire of 1860 and was later restored. In the 18th century it was a place where marriages without banns could legally occur and was referred to in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited as the place where divorced couples got married - 'a poky little place'</div>
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The impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte bought the ruins of the Savoy Palace in 1880 initially to build the Savoy Theatre for the production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It was the first public building to be lit entirely by electricity and so successful was the venture that it financed the building of the Savoy, most of the revenue coming from the Mikado.</div>
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Writing and researching this I was for a while worried that there was going to be no connection to the Savoy hotel. I had bought the brilliant The West End Front - The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels (if you know me and it is your birthday soon expect it as a present) after hearing extracts on R4 - and wanted to use the fascinating stories some of which show so clearly the divide between rich and poor during the war.</div>
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As the communist newspaper The Daily Worker asserted in September 194o campaigning against the lack of reasonable or indeed any shelter from the Blitz in Stepney,</div>
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'If you live in the Savoy Hotel you are called by telephone when the sirens sound and then tucked into bed by servants in a luxury bomb-proof shelter. But if you live in Paradise Court you may find yourself without a refuge of any kind.' Then in big bold print 'THE PEOPLE MUST ACT'.</div>
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On 14th September, the 8th night of the Blitz they did. Meeting in Embankment Gardens they waited for the air raid siren to begin, unfurled their banners and marched onto the Savoy. Why the Savoy? 'It was the nearest' was the straightforward reply. Mainly east end communists - dockers, clothing workers, bootmakers though a few recruits had been picked up on the night from the poor public east end air-raid facilities. Somewhere between 40 and 80 it is claimed, though memories seem uncertain. The group marched through the doors of the Savoy, making a speech for equality. Despite the panic button being pressed and the police being called unexpectedly and cleverly the assistant general manager Willy Hofflin answered simply, 'There is no reason why these people should not have the same shelter as the Savoy's guests.' Infact, with bombs coming down outside it was the law not to turn people away into danger.</div>
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In a padded, cavernous space with a dance floor on one side and a dormitory on the other, separate quarters for single men and women and camp beds with matching sheets and pillows in green and pink and blue, a snore warden and uniformed nurses - the invaders were heard to remark - 'Shelters....why we'd love to live in such places'. </div>
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They ordered tea, demanding to pay only what they would pay in a Lyons Corner House. The waiters huddled to debate the request seemingly sympathetic to the invaders for in minutes trolleys appeared with tea and bread and butter.</div>
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After that there are two versions of the night - that the all clear sounded just as tea was served or that they stayed a victorious night.</div>
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Barely reported in the British press the Savoy invasion gained more coverage in the Nazi 'Volkischer Beobachter' 'For ten days now eight million people have flown into the air raid shelters and the subway' 'Londoners have become cave dwellers. Life has stopped. The working population is fleeing from the east and south of the city to the West End. Desperate men and women have stormed the luxurious Savoy hotel. Only police have been able to evacuate them. The question comes into one's mind.....whether at all and for how long the English population will follow Churchill on this path....'</div>
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Only fuelling the suspicion that the Communists were working on behalf of the Nazis. When the Savoy invasion was discussed in parliament the matter was taken very seriously and Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary,</div>
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'agreed with the Prime Minister that it would be necessary to take strong action to prevent demonstrations of this kind, which if allowed to grow, might easily lead to serious difficulties.'</div>
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The communists kept going with their attempts to find safe places for people to shelter repeatedly targeted the tube stations - exhorting London Transport to keep the gates unlocked or getting a crowbar to the barriers when shut. Only a week after the Savoy invasion on 21st September London Transport switched off the electricity at Aldwych, chemical toilets were installed and 2,500 were finally allowed to shelter on the Piccadilly line track along with the Elgin Marbles which had already been stored there three weeks previously.</div>
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'We went to the Savoy to show the class position; to show how the rich lived with a great mass of stuff while the ordinary working man and woman had to live on the coupon books. And because of what we did, the Underground was opened, and people had somewhere to shelter from the bombs. I'm very proud of the part I played.' says Max Levitas who was part of the Savoy invasion to Matthew Sweet the author of 'The West End Front'.</div>
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Finally I look again at the Canaletto: </div>
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http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/canaletto/the-river-thames-with-st-paul-s-cathedral-on-lord-mayor-s-day- </div>
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finding diarists Pepys and John Evelyn's description of the 1660 pageant when King Charles 11 took part in the pageant a year after the restoration of the monarchy. Pepys described the scene as the king and queen journeyed downriver from Hampton court to Whitehall 'under a canopy with 10,000 barges and boats, I think, for we could see no water for them.'</div>
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For Evelyn, the event 'was the most magnificent triumph that ever floated on the Thames.' He wrote admiringly of 'the innumerable boats and vessels dress'd and adorn'd with all imaginable pomp...the thrones, arches....stately barges...musiq and peals of ordnance both from ye vessels and the shore'</div>
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In the painting St Paul's dominates the skyline but surrounding it - under an egg blue sky are the many church spires of the city. The only secular interruption to the sky is the Monument. On the long wait at the side of the Thames when arguments broke out and distraction was needed I had said - let's count how many churches we can see but it wasn't a game that captured the imagination of the pack of occasionally unruly children and I don't remember the answer. The spires peered from behind office blocks, nudged the view from the layer of buildings. St Paul's still central but the Monument hidden from view. I thought I have become a church watcher - like a bird watcher - the sightings on a skyline or glimpsed down a side street, the observation of history, the peck of another time, the i spy thrill of spotting one I haven't seen before.</div>
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Amen.</div>
amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-10688398154203149852012-05-14T06:29:00.083-07:002012-06-09T17:49:03.651-07:00Notre Dame of France, Leicester Square<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I think about Co Dependency and Christianity as I cycle to work across the parks, mainly in the rain. After a really horrible row with exh and an evening of tears and wine and good advice from a mum who spent a year in a refuge I grumpily get the co dependency books back out. It seems I need to accept my part in my problems. Though I believe I do mainly, I just need to guard the boundaries. The ride is beautiful: nosing the bike infront of Buckingham Palace, along the bottom of the damp dark green of Green Park, under Wellington Arch, up the steady incline of Hyde Park, past the barracks, alongside the lake, over the road, past the gallery and beneath the canopy of old trees. Dogs like cartoon characters in dog walker packs, all ears and eyebrows stretched taut on leads, then wet deck chairs blown inside out, billowed pregnant in the wind. At the brim of the hill The Round Pond is almost part of the sky, a grey disc of reflected cloud with swans and geese flapping their wings in a slow feathered cancan under the unseasonable gloom. Tourists at the gates of Kensington Palace, where the tide of cellophane flowers lapped when Diana died talk in hushed voices of where they were when she died ( in a teepee in New Mexico with shagging lesbians if you want to know.) Princess Diana is almost the patron saint of CD I think, all those unsuitable men, the middle of the night bedside hospital visits, the unhappy childhood, the open wound of that savagely caring heart dragged like heavy luggage. I imagine a catholic coloured statue of her, a Jeff Koons perhaps, a single tear in the corner of those dipped blue eyes dropping with the weight of the sorrow of the world. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This is the Christianity I learnt at home, at sunday school, at school:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Think of others before yourself.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Give without counting the cost.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Do a good turn every day.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">As a family we said prayers every night until I was a teenager when I finally rebelled against the tradition, the words themselves exhausted by the speed with which we rattled them off. We didn't have a TV and I think my childhood was more old fashioned than my age. Exh still laughs at my 'Oranges are not the Only Fruit' story of collecting for Oxfam when the men landed on the moon. ( though not actually the first landing I suspect ). My younger brother and I peering round the dimpled glass front door of a house to see the grainy black and white picture of men in bulky suits as if made on Blue Peter. My Mum above us rattling the collecting tin circled by the pictures of starving children to a Dad who was surprised the door bell had rung.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Co d is what you learn when you detach from an alcoholic. What you have become or have always been. It is the unhealthy attachment to another, the willingness to take care of someone else's problems, a compulsive wish to control others by your care.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">This is what Nietzsche said on christianity:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.'</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px; "><p style="margin-top: 0.4em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.5em; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">He 'called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> a "calamitous error",</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">and wished to initiate a re-evaluation</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> of the values</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> of the Judeo-Christian world.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 0.4em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.5em; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Nietzsche sees slave-morality born out of the resentment</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> of slaves. It works to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness." '</span></span></p></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It seems a lot of the churches I want to get into now are only open on Sundays or odd times in the week and it is increasingly difficult just to slip into a church as I am working all but full time. Also I have discovered on my map behind the computer that charts churches I have been to and those still to visit, a purple sticker over a yellow one on a church in Soho - though I am not sure if this is a mistake or if the boys are playing a trick on me. I had a boyfriend once a long time ago, a college boyfriend, who kept adding extra birds to a large copy of Constable's Haywain that hung in his parents front room. They never noticed he said and the intricacy of the sly sabotage made me laugh.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It is pouring as I turn off Leicester Square into the narrow street of Notre Dame of France. Infront of the Odeon there is a woman with a clip board directing passersby away from the workmen creating a gothic landscape for the premiere of Snow White and the Hunstmen. A drunk man cackles to security guards behind the newly errected barriers 'It is pissing down, no one will be coming here.' 'They will come.' they say calmly - behind them green astro turf being rolled out and men placing fake crows in fake trees.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">In a flat faced large 50s building I walk up the steps and into a huge rotunda room with grey light from a cupola skylight in the shallow domed roof. It is a bit murky, a bit municipal, a bit unkempt. I sit at a pew. Just sit. There are about five others sat in the pews with their heads bowed. Perhaps just sheltering I wonder - the heels of scruffy shoes and stowed bags visible, though they seem devout in their prayer. As I sit in the grey stillness it feels like an arbitary act that I am just sitting still on a Tuesday lunchtime here in this place. I begin to hear high holy music, as if almost at a frequency beyond human ear, I can't work out where it is coming from, and imagine a cd piped in for atmosphere. Later when I am researching the church I find a mention on flickr that there was an organ playing when the photographer took the pictures and I wonder now writing this whether someone was actually quietly playing.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Above the altar piece is an large ornate and richly detailed tapestry of Mary. Like a Disney princess she is surrounded by animals and birds - a cockerel, a peacock, a squirrel, a deer. I am mesmerized by the fine detail though I find it a bit sickly, a bit ugly.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Eventually I stand and walk to the back of the church, finding blue and white delft tiles depicting the Stations of the Cross and a notice board on the curved wall labelled 'Spiritual Life' listing retreats, and prayer groups, some of it in French. I find too a mention of Jean Cocteau's mural. Aha I think, they are here. A friend had mentioned that there were some of Cocteau murals in a french church in Soho but for some reason I had assumed they were in the French Protestant church in Soho Square which I still haven't got into. I have to wander around the church, up to the altar and then to the side curved wall where there are glass booths sectioned off from the church. It isn't clear if they are chapels or offices but pressing my face to the dark glass and through the reflection I see the slab of an altar and vibrant life-sized drawings of the Cruxifiction on the wall behind. Passionate but stylised line drawings in bright pencil crayon colours they show only the legs and bleeding feet of Jesus, the blood dripping from his feet to a rose. Homoerotic soldiers, bereft women, a gold ringed black sun, there is an odd but modern narrative within the picture, a crucifixion of difficult human emotions.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The mural was painted over eight days in Novemeber 1959 when Jean Cocteau was promoting his film Le Testament d'Orphee in London. The church had been badly bombed in 1940 and then restored. The french cultural attache Renee Varin was commissioned to encourage eminent french artists to help create a sacred space. Though Cocteau's poetry, opium and homosexuality were seen to sit uneasily with his Catholicism he was invited to decorate a chapel and screens had to be errected to keep away the crowds while he worked.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'He arrived each morning about 10am and began by lighting a candle. He was heard talking to the Virgin Mary while working on the drawing. 'O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God's creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too....I am drawing you with light strokes....You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.'</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And when he left,</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'I am sorry to go, as if the wall of the chapel had drawn me into another world.' 'I shall never forget that wide open heart of Notre Dame de France and the place you allowed me to take within it'</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Though as I begin researching the murals I am tipped through a door of conspiracy and complicated plots attached to Cocteau. A lot seems to be based on the discredited Priory of Sion - a lineage invented by the frenchman Pierre Plantard in 1956 to prove he was descended from the true King of France. The plot included fake documents being planted by Plantard and accomplices in the Biblioteque Nationale and across France to establish his claim. (Oh I love the idea of false history embedded in the real. ) Despite Plantard admitting his hoax the story seems to have gathered momentum, being used to prove the lineage of Jesus and Mary Magdalegne and becoming the basis of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. The son of a suicide Cocteau was listed by Plantard as a Grand Master of Sion along with Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. The murals at Notre Dame fuel the debate:</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">'The Priory of Sion has, in the past, purposely used the letters "MM", or sometimes jus "M" to symbolize Magdalene and Cocteau used them as well. In the Church of Notre Dame de France ("Our Lady of France") in London, which Cocteau decorated with fantastic murals, this letter "M" is mysteriously placed on the altar, directly beneath the scene of the crucifixion. To the left are depicted the dice thrown by the Roman soldiers who according to the Gospels, cast lots to determine who should get Christ's clothing after he died. The number of dots that are shown on the dice is fifty-eight, a significant number. The skull of Baphomet, which the Templars and later the Priory of Sion are said to have possessed, was referred to cryptically as "Caput 58M" 5 +8= 13, and "M" is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Therefore "58M" could be a code for "Mary Magdalene" who is traditionally shown praying before a skull.'</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">'The same statement is being made in Cocteau's mural at Notre Dame. This statement is further reinforced by the fact that the 'M' on the altar is directly below a rose that Cocteau has placed on the cross, precisely beneath Christ's feet. Not only does that make it a 'rose cross' but the rose is above the initial for 'Mary'. The term 'Rosemary' is used in occult parlance to refer to the female consort of a god or demon. (Thus the title for the film Rosemary's Baby.) This is exactly what Magdalene's symbolism entailed. The fact that the rose as well as the blood drops beneath it, are coloured both red and blue may indicate the 'blue blood' of Christ's royal line. Given all of this, the Church's title 'Notre Dame de France' is interesting. Most would assume this to be a reference to the Virgin Mary, who is called by Catholics 'Our Lady'. But the true 'Lady of France' is the goddess Marianne, their national symbol. Perhaps 'Marianne' and Magdalene' are representations of the same archetype.'</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">http://quintessentialpublications.com/tymman/?page_id=26</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Phew, I find this stuff exhausting. Though ( and I think this is my favourite bit) I also read fascinating accounts of two female academics of impeccable reputation being transported through time in the gardens of Versailles in 1901. Cocteau calling it 'the most important experiences of our time'</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:georgia;">http://www.kathleenmcgowan.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52:the-mystery-of-the-versailles-time-slip&catid=38:articles&Itemid=62</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" color: rgb(17, 17, 17); line-height: 20px; "><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline- vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background- text-align: justify; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-size:13px;color:transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline- vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background- text-align: justify; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-size:13px;color:transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Notre Dame of France itself was established by the Marist Fathers for the French community in London in the 1860s in a building that had previously been 'Burford's Panaroma' accounting for its circular shape. Consecrated in 1868 the church's mission included a hospital, an orphanage and two schools which were run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. The Marist fathers wished to put the sacrifice of Mary at the centre of their faith - Mary's close and gentle but human relationship to Jesus to mirror their own. They call themselves rather intriguingly </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'hidden and unknown' - I think they mean that their work is 'unsung' 'unobserved' - again like Mary - with the sacrifice of her holy motherhood.</span></span></span></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline- vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background- text-align: justify; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-size:13px;color:transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></span></span></p></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The original panoramic building was built in 1793 by Richard Barker. He had invented a circular drawing on a cylindrical surface t</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">o convey complete 360 degree scenes </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">in 1792 and obtained a royal lincence in 1787 for the exclusive use of his invention for fourteen years. Initially setting up with his son he showed huge panoraomic drawings in a make shift shed in his back garden near Leicester Square before purchasing this site and commissioning the purpose designed rotunda building. 'Panorama painting seems to be all the rage' wrote Constable in a letter of 1803 and Ruskin later described a visit to Milan:</span></span></div><div><span style="color:#000000;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'I had been partly prepared for this view [of the city from the cathedral roof] by the admirable presentation of it in London a year or two before, in a great exhibition of which the vanishing has been in later life a greatly felt loss to me,--Burford's panorama in Leicester Square, which was an educational institution of the highest and purest value, and ought to have been supported by the government as one of the most beneficial school instruments in London. There I had seen, exquisitely painted, the view from the roof of Milan Cathedral, when I had no hope of ever seeing the reality, but with a joy and wonder of the deepest;--and now to be there indeed, made a deep wonder become fathomless. (from Praeterita: TheAutobiography of John Ruskin [Oxford 1978] </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/2003/panorama/new_001.htm for a picture.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br />It was not the only spectacular attraction of Leicester Square - in 1851 the area was occupied by a large, circular, domed building, in which was exhibited Wyld's "Great Globe."</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">http://www.ssplprints.com/image/105139/unattributed-wylds-globe-leicester-square-london-12-july-1851 Do look! It is a fascinating illustration! </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">The representation of the world was sixty-five feet in diameter, and comprised a surface of some ten thousand square feet. Galleries encircled the interior of the building at different heights from the ground, by which means visitors were enabled to walk round and inspect every portion of the globe, an attendant, staff in hand, pointing out its principal features; lectures were likewise delivered at intervals during the day.<br /><br />Though anybody who complains about Leicester Square these days will like the later description of the central patch of land once the Globe had closed down: 'Overgrown with rank and fetid vegetation, it was a public nuisance, both in an æsthetic and in a sanitary point of view; covered with the débris of tin pots and kettles, cast-off shoes, old clothes, and dead cats and dogs, it was an eye-sore to every one forced to pass by it. '<br /><br />The Notre Dame Hall beneath the church later hosted many punk gigs. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:georgia;">Here, a description from John Springate from the Glitter Band:</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'Gerry Shephard and I went to see The Sex Pistols at Notre Dame Hall in Leicester Square, which I think was late-76. Gerry and I were dressed in our snazziest gear with flared trousers and all that, and there's all these punks there with drainpipe jeans, short hair, really sort of 'now'. The Sex Pistols came on and did four numbers and I said to Gerry - cos we'd had had enough by then, we'd seen enough and we came out - I said, 'Well that's it then.' I just knew.'</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">http://www.alwynwturner.com/glitter/punk.html ( a music site charting glam rock in its proponents own words including its demise as punk arrived. Here too is this great description from Tina Charles ( 'I love to love ( But my Baby Loves to Dance') ):</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">'I did a TV show in Germany with The Clash and Dana and Showaddywaddy, which was a very strange group of people. And we were all on the 'plane going over and I always remember The Clash were so badly behaved, taking all the mini-bar from the hotel and everything - they were just shocking. And there was Dana and I behaving ourselves totally.'</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> And in the late 80s when I helped my neighbours in the opposite bedsit in Baron's Court run a party business we hosted a Burns Night party there - attaching stag's heads to sandy concrete and borrowed tartan draped round pillars and folding endless purple and green napkins. Thatcher's children indeed. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I struggle writing the Cocteau conspiracy theories for days then wipe out the whole post by accident. In tears I text friends to see if they can help me retrieve what I have written. I take it on myself to delve deep into the bowels of the computer getting as far as 'meta data and hidden cache' but not knowing the software to open them with.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br />Still cycling back and forth across the parks - preparations for the Queen's celebrations are underway. One morning with traffic at a standstill I have to push the bike infront of the palace because the roads are shut. Soldiers in Nutcracker suite outfits dotted across Green Park move in a slow pace sweeping for bombs. Another day, I turn the bike onto Birdcage Walk to find myself at the head of a busby-clad brass band regiment like a middle aged masthead on a hired bike. I treat myself to an out of character self-waved circular cheer - a booyah! to the world, though no one is watching .</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I rewrite the blog - remembering almost word for word some of the early stuff then getting bogged down in religious conspiracies again. It feels like it takes me ages - an extra week at least to rewrite and I don't even have the satisfaction of a purple sticker to place.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">OL sends me an image of a church sign he has seen in Cambridgeshire visiting his parents. 'The Hokey Cokey is NOT what its all about' it says. He says it is the sister image to a nearby off licence which says 'What if the Hokey Cokey IS all it's about?'</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Amen.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div>amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-29499868506097029162012-04-15T13:45:00.060-07:002012-05-06T13:37:20.326-07:00St Clement DanesIt is Sunday afternoon and I am cycling down the Strand really really fast, wearing a cape, with a man in a white van gesticulating at me and I am absolutely hopping mad. I have discovered this morning that there has been an incident at Exh's new place yesterday that includes our children, a knife, a screwdriver, PSM's sons, and an altercation with some big boys. The children had been allowed to roam Bermondsey unattended. I am furious and frightened. I feel sick. Everyone is safe and all is well and in many ways the incident is better than it sounds but in many others it is worse. I have the sense that my optimism that everything will be ok is not true. That my foggy cheer that by the teenage years we will have worked out so much I will not be shocked by what is to come is only an essential lie that I tell myself. Once a woman cornered me to say how much I would suffer when they were teenagers. Her beautiful and seemingly biddable son had turned unexpectedly drunken and nasty. I thought grumpily that she should keep quiet, as if transgressing the sanctity of motherhood truths like talking about childbirth to a first time pregnant mum. After all my oldest friend's son is 21 this year and I have witnessed some of the pain of a son growing up. Though he is a fantastic. However my eldest child has a warrior heart - brave and fearless and while you would want him on your side in any battle he is a difficult child to fit into the mild mannered expectations of our time. I believe he would stoop to pick up the wounded in a battle if they were on his side but I believe too he would be a ferocious enemy. Also and this is understandable as a 9 year old boy he has no comprehension that he is mortal. I believe too he needs more freedom - I have seen his engrossed and happy face as he made camps in muddy fields on his own for hours, and yet I trap him in a second floor flat with a making box, a wii, a load of lego and a lot of paper and pens. Of course I get them out to the park, to the countryside, to Richmond Park as much as possible, but he needs freedom to make mistakes on his own.<br /><br /><br />'Oh' I feel like roaring. Sometimes I don't know what to do. I think of everything tender in him, the care and thought with which he picks presents, the dedicated attention and gentle patience he lavishes on his young cousins, the enthusiasm and beauty with which he makes a japanese garden on a beach and the question he asked me the day before - did you realise when you were a little girl that the people around you had witnessed the war? - but I have realised this morning for the first time he is a danger to himself. He will swagger down the street, he will challenge others, he will get into fights. I have to teach him to be safe but I worry it is inherent in him.<br /><br /><br />I am aiming for the Savoy Chapel but I sort of know I am late. The incident has taken hours of discussion and detective work to sort out what is being said and what is nearest the truth. Then just before getting on the bike I spoke to PSM and she has added extra details which seem to change everything and mean that someone/everyone is lying. Though I suspect infact everyone believes the truth they are telling. It just doesn't all add up.<br /><br />The Chapel, just off the Strand is shut. It is only open for a service at 11am on Sundays, there seems to be some restoration work going on which means it is shut in the week. Oh, I think, what shall I do now. I still have the anger and tears choked in my throat, stuck like a swallowed spoon. I am in a haze. Shall I get another bike and go up to try Soho? Or South London? I have got to get into a church today for I am starting full time work the next day - I have just over a month booked at one newspaper and then a contract at the quality broadsheet for six months potentially being extended for a year. I got the job! Though the combination of pending full time work and being less available to my sons is an additional worry.<br />Then I look up and laugh. It is a game that is easy to play in London - how many churches can you see at one time - and here in easy view are two churches as if under my nose. The first, at the bottom of Aldwych, St Mary Le Strand is shut. But, a little bit further down the Strand, on a kind of traffic island in the wide thoroughfare St Clement Danes is open. Oh I think a rush of excitement - this is nearly the City - this is the Oranges and Lemons church.<br /><br />At the gate I see that the church is affiliated with the Royal airforce and as I walk in I can see display cases of airforce memorabilia and postcards for sale. A man in the office at the side nods to me as I enter. The church is light and bright and beautiful - dark wood at the lower floor and white columns reaching up from the gallery, ornate plaster work of swags and rich gilding in the vaulted roof, I sit in a pew. I want just to think. <br /><br />Across from me an old woman with a peaceful face also sits at a pew. She is folding things into plastic bags. Large with bare arms she is like a painting, somehow monumental, completely at ease with herself, engrossed in her task, oblivious of my sidelong eyes observing her.<br /><br />Infront, hung on the back of each pew there are beautiful cross stitched kneelers. I love the time and care of their work. Nimble fingers counting out in stitches airforce ensignia. I bought recently on ebay a half finished patchwork cushion cover for £15 - it is one of the most beautiful things I possess - possibly from the 30s, the rich colour and textures of the velvets and silks stiched together with highly visible herringbone stitch are in irregular triangular shapes. Like the structure of a leaf the construction is visible, a show of the craft and care and time of a woman's work. I would like to have it framed, would like it one day to hang above my desk while I write. If I was stuck for words or stories I would look at the combinations of colours and patterns, the unexpected arrangements that work so beautifully. When I try to identify the herringbone pattern of the stitch I find:<br /><br />'Patchwork represents religious poverty in several cultures. A prominent example is the kesa or kasay which origninated in India in the fourth century BC. It arrived in Japan with Buddhism in the sixth century c.e and became a Western Asian tradition. The patched shawl is a symbol of Buddha, who was often depicted with a patched robe draped over his left shoulder. Worn for worship and ritual, the kesa represented a vow of poverty and served as a symbol of humility. The rectangular kesa is about one yard wide and two and a half times the length of the human body.<br /> As a devotional act, monks cleaned and stitched together discarded fabric in a traditional manner, based on seven vertical columns. The pieces of fabric are sewn from the centre, slightly overlapping one another. Patterns are based on rank and position, including the quality and colour of the cloth. In some cases, a brocade fabric was cut up, rearranged and put back together in an artistic manner. Prayers were repeated while the kesa was being sewn, put on, and taken off. the kesa was only cleaned with purified water and incense. In most cases it was the only personal possession owned by a Buddhist monk. Needlework through history: An enclylopedia Catherine Amoroso Leslie<br /><br />On a whim I have started taking pictures of my washing up on the draining board. I spend so much time doing it day in day out - breakfast bowls, coffee cups, wine glasses, cooking pots, bread tins, stacking clean colourful cups and plates in a higher and higher perfectly balanced arrangements that I thought it would be funny take a record of my work. Also, sometimes, the early morning sunlight hitting a colour combination - a green patterned tea cup with a pink, yellow and orange plastic beaker is just beautiful.<br /><br />'I believe life is sacred' a man says simply in a discussion about euthanasia on the radio. Ah, I think with a comic book light bulb above my head - get that sound effect machine back out - Ding! That is the key. That is what is celebrated in all these churches, what is found when I come through the doors. It seems very simple and yet completely overlooked most of the time. Life is sacred. Here in the space of these churches is the acceptance of mystery at the heart of life and the celebration of it too. Just sitting still here I understand this for the first time. I don't have to believe I think looking at the cruxifix and the flicker of an altar candle - just accept the statement of sacred. Perhaps it is what my children are missing. I remember travelling in Greece and admiring the inventiveness of the roadside shrines. Votive candles flickering in spindly glass boxes, pictures, a small glass of something, some herbs, once I saw a bottle of coca cola. I thought they were like 'welcome' boxes to god, like a hostess offering some small nibbles to a guest on arrival. This was years ago when I was an art student and I wanted then to make my own, to give thanks by what I kept precious in that box. Though I never did it. Now I would keep an orange, an apple, an egg, a large glass of wine, a candle, maybe a slice of home made bread and something that smells nice, maybe some basil or sage and a bowl of Walker's Chilli Sensations crisps. Simple things that could be shared. I write all this and then google these boxes and discover infact all my ideas are wrong - shockingly they mark road accidents - in memorial for those who died or in thanks for survival. Oh.<br /><br />Sport I think. That is what we need. More sport for the boys. I will just have to organise them.<br /><br />I notice the beatiful wooden pulpit, like an intricately carved look out post. I find out it was carved by Grinling Gibbons who's work I have admired before in a Wren church.<br /><br />In the St Clement Danes guide book I read:<br />'The Romans, having founded Londinium and occupied it for 400 years, abandoned it in the early 5th century. They left behind them the walled City of London and an embryonic Christian worship.'<br />Ding! Again that light bulb. Oh I suddenly realise, understanding my stupidity - it is because of the Romans there is Christianity in Britain. I can't tell you what a complete revelation this is to me - and with it the realisation of why it is called the Roman Catholic Church. I think it is almost too embarrassing to mention this it seems so completely obvious but somehow it makes many things very clear to me. The baton on and on of worship. Not only was London created by the Romans but the churches are their legacy. I had only thought of the roman gods as their religion, forgetting St Paul and his travels. On a recent quick dip into the British Museum I was also fascinated by the crossover sarcophogases - egyptian to roman. Again I hadn't understood this movement of change from one to another. It is something that interests me the shifts of power blending and merging, we were taught in 'periods' at school not the gaps between, the downhill run to a new order. I start reading about the Romans in quiet moments on a very rare not busy day at work, I catch Mary Beard on TV talking about the Romans and showing us their remains littered under the streets of Rome - a block of flats still standing, basement burial chambers under modern apartment blocks. We live on the patterns of their lives I think, the Strand itself the straight line of a Roman road.<br /><br />As the Romans departed the City of London the walled city seems chiefly to have been abandoned though there is some mystery surrounding this - I think of it though - a desolate place, temples left to decay, the rain beating down on elegant columns, the ruins of Roman life fading away. Lundenwic, a port area near the present St Clement Danes was established but when the warriors of Denmark came up the Thames spreading slaughter at the beginning of the 9th century the Saxon population retreated back within the city walls. Eventually Alfred the Great overcame the Danes in 878AD and Guthrum their leader accepted baptism and peace. It is thought that Alfred allowed Danes with English wives to settle in the old 'wic' or port ( hence Aldwych) and that these people took over a small wooden church already in existence. Later, under the Danish king Canute (1017-35) a small stone church was built, dedicated to St Clement. Over the years it was enlarged and restored many times, acquiring a tower in about 1100. This is the church that became known as St Clement of the Danes.<br /><br />According to the confession of Thomas Winter, it was here that the Gunpowder Plot in was concocted in 1605. He says, "So we met behind St. Clement's, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, Mr. Wright, Mr. Guy Fawkes, and myself, and having, upon a primer, given each other the oath of secrecy, in a chamber where no other body was, we went after into the next room and heard Mass, and received the blessed Sacrament upon the same.'<br /><br />John Donne lived (1573 - 1631) in the parish and his wife was buried here - though the gravestone no longer exists Donne's epitaph to her remains, now engraved on a tablet within the church. 'Her husband John Donne made speechless by grief, sets up this stone to speak, brings his ashes to hers in a new marriage under God'. She died giving birth to their twelth child.<br /><br />Despite escaping the Great Fire of London in 1666 the church had become run down or even derelict and became one of the few 51 London churches Christopher Wren designed and supervised in the late 17th century outside the City of London after the fire.<br /><br />I look up the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' but it seems little is known, though the first written record of it is from 1744. There appears to be another version too:<br /><br />Gay go up and gay go down,<br />To ring the bells of London town.<br /><br />Oranges and lemons,<br />Say the bells of St. Clements.<br /><br />Bull's eyes and targets,<br />Say the bells of St. Marg'ret's.<br /><br />Brickbats and tiles,<br />Say the bells of St. Giles'.<br /><br />Halfpence and farthings,<br />Say the bells of St. Martin's.<br /><br />Pancakes and fritters,<br />Say the bells of St. Peter's.<br /><br />Two sticks and an apple,<br />Say the bells of Whitechapel.<br /><br />Pokers and tongs,<br />Say the bells of St. John's.<br /><br />Kettles and pans,<br />Say the bells of St. Ann's.<br /><br />Old Father Baldpate,<br />Say the slow bells of Aldgate.<br /><br />You owe me ten shillings,<br />Say the bells of St. Helen's.<br /><br />When will you pay me?<br />Say the bells of Old Bailey.<br /><br />When I grow rich,<br />Say the bells of Shoreditch.<br /><br />Pray when will that be?<br />Say the bells of Stepney.<br /><br />I do not know,<br />Says the great bell of Bow.<br /><br />Here comes a candle to light you to bed,<br />Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.<br /><br />Chop chop chop chop<br />The last man's dead!<br /><br />Theories suggest that these are all the bells of the churches that could be heard from Newgate prison where executions took place and that the meter of the couplets match the sound of the peal of the bells. Another that St Clement Danes' churchyard once stretched to the bank of the Thames and the local children helped to unload cargoes of ships attempting to evade customs duty, receiving foreign fruit as a reward. Then I find the suggestion: 'The round singing of the ancients, of which this game is a fitting illustration, is probably a relic of Celtic festivity. The burden of a song, chorused by the entire company, followed the stanza sung by the vocalist, and this soloist, having finished, had license to appoint the next singer, 'canere ad myrtum,' by handing him the myrtle branch. At all events round singing was anciently so performed by the Druids, the Bardic custom of the men of the wand."<br />In 1920 a service was introduced at the church for the children of the local school to be given an orange and a lemon which still exists today.<br /><br />On the 10th May 1941 St Clement Danes received a direct hit from an enemy bomber. Fire roared through the building, Wren's woodwork catching easily, flames as high as the steeple. In the guide book there is a picture of the tower lit like a light house in the dark night, fire spewing from the windows and arches. That night a heavy night of bombing in the capital 1,480 people were killed<br /><br />Geoff Sanfield recalls his family house in Barnet north London being hit for it was the suburbs just as much as the centre of London that lay at risk. This was just one incident from the thousands that night:<br /><br />'The bombing had eased somewhat by April 1941, so we came home. The grass in the garden was waist high and the five sycamore trees were even higher and made for great climbing.<br /><br />On Saturday, May 10th, 1941, the biggest raid on London took place when Hitler sent over everything. For some reason, we had not gone to the Anderson shelter that night, probably fed up with all the various privations, and also things had been beginning to ease a little. We were bombed at around 11 pm. Four bombs in all; one three houses along from us, one on the allotment at the bottom of the garden and two further away.<br /><br />The various blasts blew the curtains in and most of the windows out, some ceilings out and plaster came in. My sister and I, who were sleeping in a double bed in a downstairs rear room, were still asleep beneath curtains, dust and plaster etc. Dad had been in the kitchen making cocoa, and finished up amidst all the pots and pans. Mum had been standing in the doorway to our room and was narrowly missed by the front door, which was blown in. I can still smell the cordite, explosions, plaster, dust and fractured sewers etc.<br /><br />We were dragged out of the house and up the front garden path, and I can remember stooping to pick up a large bomb splinter that had become embedded in the garden gate, now hanging by one hinge: I was promptly pulled away as it was still very hot, but what a souvenir to have had!<br /><br />We were taken to neighbours for the night and Dad returned to what was left of the house, but it had already been looted, mostly food, but also some cutlery and cut glass. One particular piece was a wedding present to my parents from an uncle who had recently been killed. Dad pulled back the debris-covered bedclothes and went to bed, remarking that Mr Hitler was not going to deprive him of his bed.'<br /><br />http://ww2today.com/10th-may-1941-huge-raid-on-london<br /><br />I think of my son's astute question about my childhood and think - no - I had no idea that my parents generation witnessed such destruction. (I am an old mother and my mother was an old mother within her generation.) I just longed for hotpants and thought the Osmonds sounded dangerous belted from a dark shop doorway in a Welwyn Garden City precinct. When my Grandad and my grandparents next door neighbour died a day apart the funerals were held back to back in the small village in the Lake District where my mum had been brought up. I witnessed and kept like a stone in a secret pocket, my fingers occasionally fiddling the shape in a thin silky lining, the scene in my grandma's house when my aunt still with her coat on broke down crying after the neighbour's funeral. It wasn't the grief that was hard to understand from the hidden curl of a large chair but the hushed but palpable scorn of my mother and assembled relatives that she had done so.<br /><br /><br />The Rector of St Clement Danes was said to die from shock within five weeks of the bombing of the church and his funeral was held in the ruins. By 1953 the parish was combined with that of St Mary le Strand and it must have seemed that the church would be forgotten for wildflowers and grasses grew in the remains. However it was given into the keep of the Air Council and rebuilt faithful to Wren's designs, restored as a perpetual shrine of rememebrance to those killed in RAF service. The chancel arch is surmounted by the restored Stuart coat of arms and carries a latin inscription which translated reads, 'Built by Christopher Wren 1681. Destroyed by the thunderbolts of air warfare 1941. Restored by the Royal Air Force 1958.'<br /><br />Walking up to Victoria Street on St George's day I hear the tinny sound of amplified brass bands and car horns blaring. What's happening I think, catching the streak of red and white flags and the bounce of red and white balloons dragged fast by a parade of scruffy vehicles at the end of the street. People stand bemused by the rattle of vans and scaffolding lorries careering past decked out with a few St George's flags and a couple of random inflatable figures attached to the back of a truck. It goes quickly passed and it seems as if everyone breathes again, frightened by the brief rough display of patriotism. <br /><br />Finally, the work I am doing at the moment is at High Street Kensington and I can cycle every day through the parks to work. It is lovely - if often damp. Though I wonder if this has caused this blog to take so long - I sit to work in the evenings as usual but I am exhausted, tired physically. In some ways it is good for me because I tuck myself into bed by 11pm when normally I am up until at least 12pm and then read a few pages of War and Peace before sleeping well. ( Losing my job stopped me reading, then I lost a page and finally when I had worked out a plan to borrow someone's kindle to read just that page before recommencing the book, the missing page turned up folded in the ruin of the paperback.) Thinking about War and Peace as I pedal the slight incline up from Hyde Park Corner through the fine sheen of oily rain coating the park, I worry I have fallen out of love with fiction. I still think W and P is the most fantastic thing I have read but as I near the end, the shocking violence and tidying of plot that is accumulating to the finish doesn't interest me as much as the vast vistas of the main book. I like the mundane immensity and non symmetrical nature of life as it plods on, too awkward and sad and sometimes pointless to be tied into a plot, though occasionally finding the rhyme of coincidence and joy. At that moment I see a battalion of plumed golden helmeted soldiers on magnificent black horses on the brow of the hill in the mist of steady drizzle. I can hear the creak of their breast plates and saddles and the jangle of their reins - I imagine a Russian landscape with similar officers step step stepping huge black horses into a village. I see the power and awe they would instill from the discipline of horses moving in time, the straight backs and anonymity of fighting men. These are the Life Guards of the British Household Cavalary exercising near their barracks.<br /><br />I get used to seeing the soldiers on horseback each morning as I cycle to the brow of the gentle hill, always in a slightly different place, always involved in slight different exercises - marching in line, turning as a unit, galloping, soldiers tilting in their saddles to joust hoops from the ground. Another morning under wet trees I see only soldiers training. Dressed in black they are doing a fast continous circuit - lying on their backs stomach crunching, then sprinting, then jogging back to stomach crunches, their steady fast, obedient and repeated actions reducing them to ants, limbs busy, following orders.<br /><br /><br /><br />As I pass Kensington Palace on the bike one morning into the pleasure of the downhill, feet off the pedals swoop, I hear distant screams, girls voices high and far away like on a fairground ride. As I cycle down alongside the parkside hotel the screams get louder. Girls in school uniforms cluster in hoodies, screaming and waving handmade posters - 'Justin Bieber' they scream. 'Justin Bieber.'<br /><br />Amenamenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-54740146128370851922012-03-08T13:50:00.053-08:002012-05-04T01:55:53.795-07:00St Giles in the FieldI am sick of my own whiny voice. Early on writing this blog Exh emailed a cartoon to me. Two dogs sat together, 'I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.' <br />http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/60/6068/MIID100Z/posters/alex-gregory-i-had-my-own-blog-for-a-while-but-i-decided-to-go-back-to-just-pointless-new-yorker-cartoon.jpg<br />I thought it was his way of drily condoning what I was writing about though I think at that point he just hadn't read it. It seemed hilarious for it coincided exactly with how I saw the on and on yap of the compulsive and painful truth telling. I stuck the cartoon up, can see it now on the right hand side of the computer, the London map dense with the yellow and purple spots of churches visited and still to visit stretched out on the wall behind.<br /> <br />It seems a big debate at the moment - how the family is written about. I caught something on the radio whilst hurrying out to work, and read in the Guardian about the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard who has written a six-volume literary epic based on his famiy in particular his alcoholic father. Half of his family no longer speak to him though it is hailed as a masterpiece. In the article he says,<br />'As a person, I'm polite - I want to please. One of the reasons for that is my father; he had that grip on me. For 40 years I'd lived that tension between my inner and outer selves. Suddenly now the point was not to please, it was to speak the truth. To write reality."<br />Though he also realised it was:<br />''Just me and the computer in a room by myself. It never occured to me that it might cause problems - I was just telling the truth, wasn't I? But I was also being very naive. I sent a copy to everyone involved before the first volume was published, and then I discovered how difficult this was going to be. It was like hell."<br /><br />On the radio ( Start the Week R4): I thought it suggested if it was good writing it was ok and if it wasn't it wasn't. But then I go back and find the podcast ( I have never done this before - and there is an excitement and a slight panic that I will spend my time just listening to back catalogues of R4) and hear Will Eaves express my own anxiety to these rules that there is no way of knowing while you do it that you are able to achieve this. He believes too that writing creates a 'Freestanding structure, whatever the origins maybe.' While AS Byatt countered 'Writing about people you know is always an exercise in power.' and that it is a dangerous thing to have a writer close'. 'an appalling thing' she says. I don't know. I wanted to describe good and bad things that have happened fairly. Though I may have failed. In the last blog I meant only to describe one more time exh's alcoholism to describe my own continuing reaction to it. The attachment I made to his behaviour. The trigger of hyper alertness it seemed to switch on. Though I do think - what else would or could you do? With children? A woman - a friend of exh said at a party, her arms heaved righteously under her bosom, but of course - you are the co dependent. A wagging slightly mean finger to her tongue. Oh yes, I said but I still don't think there is another way to behave once the shock of alcoholism takes hold. Though perhaps it is co dependent to take them on? Take a risk on dangerous things? Ignore the warning signals? I don't know, I do feel rebellious of the label given but understand I took part in a pattern, even hide my own drinking issues in the pockets of ex's own problems.<br /><br />A voice coach that I had never heard of talks on desert island discs about the horror and pain of living with an alcoholic husband and how coming out of it she felt she fought every day for survival. How pleased she was not to have had children within that relationship and how damaging it was. Oh I thought, a catch of pain, as I heard her talk, that is what it was like, I didn't make it up. It really was that tough. She picked really beautiful music too, classical music that I jotted down.<br />The dusty smugness of DIDiscs seems to have been replaced by people talking quite honestly about the route and pain of their lives. But perhaps again that is how we speak now? I have heard John Prescott, James Corden and some rugby player discuss eloquently the difficulty at times of being themselves.<br />James Corden was very honest and charming ( is that compatible?) about his Salvation Army family, the love they gave him, his own ambition, and the loneliness and lost feelings induced by a party life style. His family arriving at his London flat to rescue him, only a lindt chocolate rabbit and some vitamin water in the fridge - no milk to make a cup of tea - but his Dad hugging and praying with him.<br /><br />I hear too on the radio that before her death Angela Carter was asked to be on Desert Island discs then they put her recording slot back ( possibly for John Major ) and by the time the BBC could do the interview she was too ill. She organised her own funeral to be a Desert Island discs show and a final revelation was that she had chosen a zebra as her luxury. I laugh out loud at the beauty of a desert island with a zebra alongside. I love zebras for I always think that they make unicorns look possible, indeed almost anything possible. <br /><br />I have been ill for bloody weeks. Just as I started the broadsheet work I was so excited about I got a cold. Then it knocked me sideways as it mutated from the normal sniff and splutter of a few days and I shivered and sweated and ached and it carried on and on and on, briefly ceasing, then returning with renewed vigour, evolving new symptoms. I sneezed and blew my nose raw in the hush of the civilised office where decorous journalists with principles, debated art and books. I couldn't not go, I needed to prove my reliability but I was soggy and sweating, barely able to cope and slightly wild-eyed to stress, though always trying to smile. It was a manic combination. I wanted to be asked back but in the circumstances it was hard to make a great impression. Luckily I get other work with other newspapers but I wait to know if they are going to book me for a long stint that was mooted. <br /><br />Though UL now back to the acroynym of OL loses his Turkmenistan job because a client pulls out and then gets it back a week later because there are new clients.<br /><br />I cycle up to the corner of Oxford St/Tottenham Court Rd/Covent Garden on a strangely warm saturday early evening, looking for a church to visit. I realise in the throng of Soho that there is no way that a church will be open now at this time. But still I steer the bike round the options. I feel slightly weary of my task, I want to get to the City churches not be weaving around the dust and I heart london tat of this end of Oxford St. Not really surprisingly The French Protestant church on Soho Square, The Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, St Giles in The Field and the Swiss Church are all closed but partly because I am against the tide of people in couples and groups out to bars and restaurants and theatres with what feels like a forlorn task set and I don't have anything else to do on a Saturday evening I keep moving round. I'll find something I think but the nearest I get to a church is two men coming out of a side door of a monumental grand building at the end of Covent Garden which I see is the Freemasons Hall, the headquaters of the United Grand Lodge of England. I am resentful sometimes of my obedience to the task - the spiral around of the purple dots - but if I didn't stick to my plan I would miss out the ones I didn't like the look of and would already have missed some of the best stories. Though increasingly I think that I will continue this arc of the spiral that I am on, which is going to take me round the cusp of south london shortly but use Oxford Street as a rough boundary for a while, then make a bit of a dash east. When I say 'dash' I am probably talking about a year away really. Blimey! I seem resigned to the long haul. I don't seem to get more than one a month done these days. Anyhow, I am not sure what I am saying makes sense! Unless you are such an isictt fan that you have your own map and sticker system at home! Oh go on! Tell me you are! <br /><br />For some reason though I think St Giles in the Field is a Hawksmoor church and I feel excited as I cycle up again on a Tuesday lunchtime. I am going into Peter Ackroyd territory I think, though I have never read Hawksmoor only tried. I think oh good - I will have to try harder, try again. I read his TS Eliot biography which I loved and I used to waitress in a small restaurant where he had a regular table. He seemed a good man. The church flanks the north end of Covent Garden, the east of Charing Cross Rd, a scruffy, confusing patch of one way streets made dusty by the Crossrail building work consuming the area, a huge crater behind hoardings. The church is a large slab of a building, elegant but huge, set back from the road, resting in gardens surrounded by railings. There is a coffee stall to one side of the entrance and a cluster of dirty comrades in overcoats sat on benches, cans of beer tucked at their legs, Inside the church it is completely empty and quiet. Later I find a leaflet that describes the church as a representation of the journey of Christianity, the font near the doorway signifying baptism as the start of a Christian life, the clear sweep of the nave from the back of the church to the east end past the word of God of the pulpit and lectern through to the sanctuary of the altar where the sacraments were given all the way to the image of Jesus. I only really saw a plain space, galleries either side, plain glass windows apart from behind the altar where there is stained glass. To the left is a large architectural model of the church as it is. I peer in through the windows. I want to see a representation of my own solitary figure in a cape stooping to look at a tiny model of the same church within the wooden interior but of course it is empty. Known as the Poet's church, Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning married here, John Milton's daughter was baptized here and Andrew Marvell buried in 1678. <br /> <br />It appears there has been a place of worship on this site since Saxon times. I write this and then start looking up about Saxon beliefs and feel swamped. Though there is very little solid information just lots of gods and ritual sacrifice ( animals).<br />Though I find Pope Gregory the Great instructing Abbot Mellitus that:<br />'I have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols in England should not on any account be destroyed. Augustine must smash the idols, but the temples themselves should be sprinkled with holy water, and altars set up in them in which relics are to be enclosed. For we ought to take advantage of well-built temples by purifying them from devil-worship and dedicating them to the service of the true God.' <br />In 1120 Henry 1's wife Matilda founded a christian leper hospital called St Giles here in the countryside, out of the city and away from Westminster, in a place of marshy land that would seperate the diseased from the able bodied. St. Giles was the patron saint of woodland, of lepers, beggars, cripples, and of those struck by sudden misery, and driven into solitude. Years ago when post modernism seemed a complicated thing that needed studying, not just the scrapbook of our lives I tried to read french philosophy though most of it was just too dense for me to understand. I recorded myself reading Blanchot believing that I would be able to decode the layered text if I did. OL then just my boyfriend, was caught on the tape in the background just coming round, the door opening, the shuffle of his step in the hall before the cassette is switched off. When he went to Russia and disappeared I used to play the scrap of recorded time and listen to the mundane moment of our life together, the assumption of the here and now fluttering and observed like something trapped in a jar. Anyhow, in Foucault's 'Madness and Civilisation' ( frankly a page turner in comparison to Blanchot) I can remember with fascination the suggestion that lepers existed in the place later consigned to the mad - literally outside of the city walls. Though I discover now some medieval sources suggest that those suffering from leprosy were considered to be going through Purgatory on Earth, and for this reason their suffering was considered holier than the ordinary person's. More frequently, lepers were seen to exist in a place between life and death. Though leprosy mainly disappeared in the mid sixteenth century and the 'outsider' position - the 'not us' - was taken by poverty, poor vagabonds, criminals and ‘dangerous minds.' Indeed after the reformation a post catholic church was built at St Giles in the Field in 1632 and the poor flocked to the area - vagrants expelled from the City, irish, french refugees and the 'st giles blackbirds' - the poor and black who had escaped from slavery or the army. At the crossroads of Oxford St, Charing Cross Rd and Tottenham Court Rd there was a gallows and a 'cage' for miscreants and even after the 15th century when the gallows was moved further to the edge of the developing city, the condemned would stop on their journey at the Resurrection gate of St Giles in the Fields and be given a bowl of ale. <br />In this 'damp and unwholesome' parish of St Giles the great plague of 1664 started and the first victim was buried in the churchyard. By the end 3,216 plague deaths were recorded in this parish of 2,000 households. Indeed so many were buried that the ground of the churchyard rose, the land got soggier and the application for a new, the present church was passed in 1730.<br /><br /><br />I stand in Foyles bookshop on the Southbank reading Peter Ackroyd's London biography. I am struggling a bit with Ackroyd envy, his work is so good and I am worried that it means mine is pointless, these tales have been told already. I have discovered already the design of the present church is not a Hawksmoor though he did submit designs for the Church under the commission of 50 churches but it was turned down in favour of the Palladian scheme by Flitcroft but also that Peter Ackroyd has written a whole chapter on the St Giles area. A crossroads of time and eternity, he calls it. He seems to believe like I do that a place holds an imprint of history, that the homeless and drunken and derranged gather like migrating souls, to an old nest. Though perhaps it is just that aid is given in these historical areas of poverty. I live on the corner of what was once the slum known as Devil's Acre and there are at least two hostels nearby. The homeless fold themselves into boxes and bins in our courtyard and sleep in snagged nylon sleeping bags outside office blocks. Recently I saw a man in a hospital gown and bare feet, his toes clenched like pigeon claws to the pavement and when it was really cold earlier in the year I saw a figure crouched over an army stove, sheltering down our thin dark street as if it were an ancient ditch.<br /><br />Hogarth the master of detail of such depraved squalor used the St Giles parish as the backdrop for 'Gin Lane' 1751. <br />'Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish are those which serve the gin industry: gin sellers; distillers (the aptly named Kilman); the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr. Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone. Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit —as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs— lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.[a] This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old child from the workhouse where it had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled it and left the infant's body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin.[10] In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor.'<br /><br />Round here the worst casualties are the crack addicts, the yellow-faced lost souls with their tatoos pale on the nicotine stain of liver damaged skin. I saw near Victoria station a man, barely human, stopping a bus. He was in the middle of the road with two fingers up. his clothes barely covering his body, just a blur of hair and flesh, his back arched like a snarling kicked dog, more a hound than a man. Another howled down our street, his arms gibbering his own body in comfort.<br /> <br />I discover too that attempts in the nineteenth century to clear the slums of St Giles to make way for sanitation and transport systems meant that the evicted just moved into near by slums, such as 'Devil's Acre and Church Lane making them more overcrowded still'. So this corner I live on holds the trace of St Giles's history.<br /> <br />It is Spring now and I see a heavily bearded man sat in a doorway, in a corner with the most sun, he has taken his shoes and socks off, undone the layers of his coats, and sits stretched out and smiling into the warmth, his large gnarled feet bare. If I ever have time or money I would pay for or push a foot health trolley round for the homeless. It seems the thing most needed. Socks on demand, new boots if needed, antiseptic cream, a foot massage and toe nail clippers. <br /><br />Amenamenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-61693544820642665422012-02-06T15:00:00.025-08:002013-10-28T11:50:46.326-07:00Church of Our Lady of The Assumption and St Gregory ( formerly The Royal Bavarian Chapel )I find it very hard to switch off. Not to be on 'guard'. Even to sit still. I think since the first time I stood on the toilet lid to reach the toilet rolls on a Sunday morning and found a regiment of empty and full cans of stella, tucked behind the pack at the back of the shelf and in mid-tiptoe-stretch realised in a wash, a wave, a flood of stark understanding exactly what was happening within our family I have found it difficult not to concentrate on life with an almost magnified watchfulness. I was busy already with two young children, a long commute and a nearly full time job - but in that chilly downstairs toilet I stood aghast but alert, hyper-aware listening to the children playing with their seemingly exuberant but erratic dad.<br />
That home was in a coastal town on the mouth of an estuary, a cowboy town with one road in and a lot of people who never left, never moved from it. I would hear the clunk of pile-driving on and on as the foundations of a big seafront development were attempted but they just couldn't reach solid ground on the estuary mud. It took months to get the foundations in and the austere, ugly flats with the beautiful view missed the certaintity of that seemingly never ending property boom just as I did.<br />
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Though I imagine that having lost my job and with weeks to spare I would be able to sit and write a blog a week, wrestle the first novel into a publishable package ( I even have an idea - ding! - how to do it!) then make sense of my ideas for the second. But I don't. I go ( slightly unsuccesfully ) homemaker crazy. I fill every second with manic effort - cleaning all the cupboards, driving to ikea twice ( boys beds, a wardrobe for me, underbed drawers ( more later) ), pasting a forest photo mural on a wall in the boys room, buying storage on ebay and nice sheets for all. I have a plan that if I can hold back the tide of dressing up box, airfix, lego. that we will all feel well, and that with a mere flick of my wrist I will scoot the vacuum cleaner/ duster around and then sit to read a book/ write. And yet all this unceasing effort creates a tidal scurf - there is a dismantled platform bed in the hall, child stained mattresses, jigsaws for charity shops, even a playmobil ark ( though I am too fond of the animals to give them away, so it is a shell of a toy, almost useless) and all this tidying feels like it has created only more havoc. I need Exh to move the stuff, need him to help me. But ( and this is indeed a celebration ) Exh has a new home too. He is moving from the hostel on our street to a live/work unit in nearby south london with some friends. The boys are so excited. Though exh has always struggled with change ( as perhaps I do ) so he dips badly before getting back into his stride but a little bit edgy and anxious.<br />
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I think when I am lost on one of these lone, obsessive trips to Ikea, this time to the Edmonton one which I have never been to before, because it is the only branch that says underbed storage is 'instock', though because I have left the directions on the kitchen table and then confused right and left from the snatched instructions my kind brother relays over the mobile phone in a layby, I am parked up off a dimly lit roundabout - this is a fantasy - I am chasing something impossible to obtain from flat pack furniture. Can enough Billy bookshelves, a Pax wardrobe and some brightly coloured children's bedroom accessories give peace? And yet the boys new room coincides with many things to achieve it. Though the anger has already mainly blown out of my eldest son - and if this is a brief boast I will still thank every day it is true. Often he puts his hand in mine to walk to school and conceals blown kisses behind his hand in the school line. A boy who used to wake and shout 'Mum! I hate you! The grave things he has had to face in his 9 years make him thoughtful, passionate and generous. In an argument with his brother he occasionally shouts 'I want to hurt you' but he keeps his hands by his side. We have come a long way.<br />
Though I am writing all this late at night and then start to look up on the internet about Nietzsche. I can't remember now the path of this thought though I know it went via Foucault's sado masochism at one point. I start copying and pasting details of Nietzsche's ideas to use later. Only in the morning do I discover a part has been pasted in the middle of my description of the journey to ikea:<br />
I think when I am lost "Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." I am sure you think I am staging this but I am not - it has made me laugh so much for somehow there is something hilarious or true there. Myself parked just off the north circular pondering the lack of god. Though I think I almost did feel that, I just couldn't have said it. I felt spectacularly bleak. Once a long time ago I wrote a story about myself - like a detective story about a teenage romance I had ( though it included an erotic tale of shaving ul's head) the nearest thing to this scrapbook style of confessional writing that I seem to employ now - and in the relatively early days of home computers and temperamental printers it once chewed a whole page spitting out a short piece of text "!@£E$%^^&make a point to all this me me me !@£$TGJNBjnc". I kept it for ages because I thought it was so funny. ( though I have lost that story somehow - though oh, I wish hadn't.) <br />
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I wonder too if I need to keep so busy as ul and I have finished our relationship. We intend to see each other but not attempt a reunion. I wish wish wish this wasn't true but it seems necessary. He is a drowned man, though still kicking, white flesh submerged in murky water, too far to get to, his stored anger like heavy stones stiched into his pockets, a current dragging him distorted and grey too far away. I wait in the few quiet, still moments of the day to be hit by grief. But it doesn't come. I am not sure if I am hiding out treading water in my homemaking or nearing dry land. Though I am back to a life alone without the cheer of a supporter.<br />
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The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory formerly The Bavarian Chapel is a flat-faced dark brick building on a dark back street behind Regent St with an open side door. I find later a description - 'In its humble guise of eighteenth-century domesticity (it) seems to shrink from attracting the notice of the passers-by' W.de l'Hopital. Then I read more and more and see it was hiding out. As indeed it feels this day as I go through the dark rather depressing door a bit reluctantly and then open another side door into the body of the church discovering a wonderful place, small and elegant, almost like a private chapel . Oh I think. This peaceful space has just been sat here as if waiting. I feel I can breathe for the first time in weeks. I am always rushing to get to a church, always rushing to find the scrap of time to write and here I am, here where I rushed to be and just for a few minutes I can enjoy it. There are a couple of people devoutly praying and a few people moving round. I stand at the back and think anxiously - I am going to end up needing this. This feeling of the devout. I pause writing this and look up the word - it means a pious regard of religion but also geniune and sincere.<br />
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The Church was initially a Catholic chapel attached to the Portugese embassy on Golden Square, though there is a whiff of an idea it may even have existed as a clandestine chapel for secret worship prior to the Embassy's cloak of permitted Catholicism. I grasp fully from the 'Warwick Street Church' A short history and guide' what the historic restrictions on Catholics were in the 18th century:<br />
'The penal laws by excluding Catholics from both houses of Parliament made it impossible for them to take part in public life. If a catholic was a land-owner he was threatened with financial ruin, for not only was he subject to the double land tax, but his family estates might pass to his Protestant next-of-kin should they choose to dispossess him. He was forbidden to keep arms and was liable to be deprived of any horse above the value of five pounds. He was incapable of holding any office in the army or navy , or practising as barrister, doctor or school-master. He could not send his children to be educated abroad without a fine and in order that due check might be kept on him and his property he was bound to register his name and estate under penalty of forfeiture, and to enrol all deeds. Some of these laws were, it is true, rarely enforced, but on occasion the individual Catholic was made to bear the full force of them so that the threat of their being put into operation still had to be reckoned with.'<br />
Only in these chapels of diplomatic immunity could mass be heard and here in an invisible and probably smaller building than the present one, squeezed between 23 and 24 Golden Square with an entrance through the stables at the back on Warwick St the Catholics of London could make their furtive worship. Golden Square itself had been developed from 1670 on land where horses grazed. Warwick St was then the highway to Tyburn ( a tiny village at Marble Arch, a place where criminals were hung/there was no Regent Street then ) and particular attention had to be taken of the drainage because the route became impassable in winter when market people travelling that way were in danger of being lost in 'the great waters perpetually lying there all the Winter Season.' Though the development, surrounded by the land of former plague pits and the stench of breweries was only fashionable for a short time. By 1747 the Portugese embassy had moved west to a grander location and the Bavarian embassy moved in keeping the chapel's immunity.<br />
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In 1778 the necessity of finding extra men to fight in The American War of Independence ( soldiers had not been allowed to join the armed forces without taking an oath of being a Protestant) meant Parliament passed a piecmeal Catholic Relief Bill. But anti catholic feeling was high in England and Scotland and Protestant Associations were formed nationwide to defend the heritage of Englishmen. The Pope was seen as the bogeyman, Catholic France the enemy, Papists themselves disloyal and dangerous. 'Wild stories began to circulate as, for example, that twenty thousand Jesuits were concealed a network of underground tunnels near the Thames, waiting for orders from Rome to blow up the banks and so flood London.' Lord George Gordon fanned this hatred with speeches in parliament attempting to have the Bill repealed. As the leader of London Protestant Association he presented the Protestant Petition on 2nd June 1780 with a big demonstration gathered outside Parliament. By early evening the petition was turned down because of the circumstances of it's presentation, and the mob grew restless. Troops were called out to move the people from the vicinity of Parliament. Once dispersed, groups of men, some of them drunk, armed with lighted torches and weapons began to move against known Catholic targets - chapels and the residences of well known Catholics. One group burned down the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador in Lincoln's Inn Fields while another set upon The Bavarian Chapel. The rioters broke in, windows were smashed, and the contents of the chapel burnt in the street - books, the altar piece, the organ, balastrades and pews. An old German blacksmith called Bund saved what valuables he could including discovering the Bavarian minister's stash of contraband tea and commodities that he sold to supplement his income. The military arrived and stayed to protect the chapel, sleeping out on straw in the shell of the building. The riots went on for a week, gathering momentum until the anti catholic sentiments were replaced by anti authority of any sort. Prisons were broken into, prisoners released and gaols burnt down. <br />
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A subscription was launched in 1788 to rebuild the damaged Warwick St Chapel under the control of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District whilst preserving its links with the Bavarian Legation. Indeed memories of the Gordon Riots inform their decision to build on the same site and the design of the church too:<br />
'It will be in every respect more eligible than to build in another place as it will probably pass unobserved by the Public in general".<br />
'The walls of the new chapel were made of great solidity, being almost a yard thick; there were no windows at all at ground level in Warwick Street and the solid wooden doors were lined with sheet metal on the inside.' <br />
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Though despite the riots many Catholics began to push for increased freedom - for it was seen that the reform bill of 1778 had been passed easily by Parliament. There was division within the church as this second relief bill was prepared, even talk of a schism between more conservative and liberal elements of the Church about the oath that must be taken to receive these new privileges - but in June 1791 the Catholic Relief Act was passed allowing Catholics to live without persecution and to be able to worship freely and to be able to build their own churches or chapels. ( Though without bells or steeples)<br />
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The Warwick St chapel was opened on 12th March 1790, the feast of St Gregory the Great, to whom it was dedicated. It was the first church erected by native-born Catholics to take advantage of the new liberty accorded to them a few months later by the Relief Act of 1791 whilst keeping its heritage in the penal times of Catholic history and the umbrella of an embassy.<br />
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The French revolution which started in 1789 brought large numbers of the French clergy and aristocracy to London where they were well received. The Bavarian Chapel became one of the most fashionable of the Catholic Chapels and it is even believed that a Requiem for Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette may have been sung there in 1793.<br />
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Though by 1840 Charles Dickens described Golden Square in Nicholas Nickleby:<br />
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'Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee- singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.'<br />
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Here in the church it is quiet. I sit for a minute in a simple wooden pew. Then walk around the small church. Above is the gallery, an intimate audience to the chapel. There are beautiful things - a shrine to Our Lady Immaculate with columns of silver hearts and charms behind glass. I am not sure what these are but discover they were medals brought in thanksgiving for favours received by prayer and that the walls of Warwick St had in previous times been covered by them. A custom brought from the continent they were derided by the architect John Francis Bentley who had been given the task to restore the now unfashionable church 'It is a poor, shapeless and unsightly edifice built after the commonest type of non-Conformist chapels of the time with heavy galleries'. But the priest Monsignor Talbot remonstrated for the practice to continue and here, they are combined in the altarpice. Though the architect ( who later designed Westminster Cathedral) did not succeed in many of his plans - he intended to build a Minor Roman basilica of marble and mosaic which he started with the present apse behind the altar - which would have have left nothing of the old church except the four walls - though money ran out preserving most of the rest of the only remaining Embassy chapel of the 18th century. I discover later I miss the jewel of the church - The Assumption that brought the chapel it's name in 1854 - a bas-relief by the sculptor John Edwards Carew. It has been placed high up somewhere that I didn't see. As the guide says 'Its position over the door is unworthy of it but no better site is now possible.'<br />
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At the side just before I leave I see a door ajar to a cupboard like confessional. I am not completely certain you are going to stay with me on this but I have had a thing about small cupboards for as long as I can remember. I always want to know if they will 'fit'. I have scared boyfriends in European cities, not being able to resist just climbing into check a hotel wardrobe, thinking they will be a while in a shower down a creaky lino floored halls. Forgotten soap finds me curled up in the thin floored space, the door pulled to. In my novel I have the heroine crying in such a cupbord in a hut in the middle of a forest:<br />
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'The cupboard is somewhere between a wardrobe and a chest and I open the door to find one tweed jacket hanging from a rail. I step inside. My scalp pressing to the splinters of the roof, my back curved, the thin floor bending at the unexpected weight. I pull the door to. I am in the dark, in warm still air and the scratchy smell of male and tweed. Amazed by my own actions I just sit there listening to my breath fill the shape. Sat quiet, it is a surprise to hear crying. Gulping, rattling sobs. The sound comes from a very long way a way and when I hold my breath to listen to them they stop. I touch my face in the pitch black and find tears. Wet and salt like blood. Shocked. I haven't cried like this since I was a little girl and it feels like discovering an unknown muscle, somethin flexing its strength. I don't immediately hear the door of the hut open but I become aware of footfalls and the slam of it close. I am squatting in a shut cupboard in a stranger's place.'<br />
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Here in the church I am tempted by this dark and secret space just to try. But I pull myself together and leave the church.<br />
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On a boris bike in Piccadilly circus I look up to the neon to see a huge hand play repeated and random rock, paper, scissors. It is a Macdonalds ad. It seems like a big, gaudy, lonely thing. I imagine a lost place late at night, a face lit by a computer screen swaying, gulping another drink, repeatedly counting one two, three, a hand making simple shapes in rhythm, the nearest thing to companionship. Like the touch of a hairdresser when you have been single for a long time, a guilt that this is the nearest thing to intimacy or human warmth. a simple child's game taken over by a computer.<br />
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I discover too on the internet 'The Soho Masses Pastoral Council welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered Catholics, their parents, families and friends to Masses at 5.00 pm, on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of every month, at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London'. Though I also find some internet outrage to this. I think this church has been brave in the 'home' it has made, it's plain facade, still hiding its worshippers.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-45750896244073360742012-01-12T06:03:00.001-08:002012-05-04T02:09:52.767-07:00St George's Hanover SquareI feel briefly that I am living in a black and white film.<br />At Christmas the boys received Laurel and Hardy and Marx brother dvds as well as pocket-sized sound effect machines as stocking fillers. Though they were reluctant at first to enter an old fashioned world of a fat man and his thin kick, and a man with a moustache and glasses that talked too much, the perfect physical timing and impetuous violence presented drew them in and caused them to rock with laughter and slap the floor with mirth.<br />Then my youngest son started tap dancing. Mainly because his new back-to-school trainers have heavy soles and he is fascinated by the sound they make. On the school run he stood and danced, listening to the thick tread make a rhythm as he kicked and flipped his feet. Later, on the way home he indicated he no longer wanted to talk. He found the sound machine - wah wah wah waaaaa ( bad news ) and a whiteboard and wipe pen - ding! ( good idea/light bulb) and made physical gestures and wrote messages, illuminated by sound effects. <br />He is of course ( my son!) physically perfect to me - but his little intense body making slapstick mime routines is mesmerizing. Though there is a slight dread that this seemingly amusing anecdote will become the new reality, and that in some recent future I will be in a quiet room discussing this with a box of tissues and a sound effect machine, a white board and a still silent son.<br /><br />Walking to school the first day after the christmas holidays I notice glumly the boarded up buildings and closed down businesses - Horseferry Magistrates Court previously so busy with riot offenders has closed and it's windows are boarded up, and just around the corner a local pub that always seemed packed with after work drinkers is also closed and sealed. Perhaps the pub was dependent on the court I think. Though I can't believe the court has gone - there has always been a tv crew parked round the corner and a draggle of journalists or wellwishers outside and it was as overworked as I was in the late summer. I google to find it has been moved to Marylebone. Also I have noticed sadly The Westminster Bookshop, the lovely local bookshop and the London Map shop where UL bought me my mapping book have both closed. Though the first day back to school for the boys is also the first day of obvious unemployment for me and here I am walking through a plyboard lined landscape of economic gloom - and this after all is Westminster! I discovered recently that despite the repeated bombing of the Houses of Parliament during the Blitz, Winston Churchill ordered that broken glass in the windows should be replaced immediately. He understood the impact on morale would be severe if the seat of power was seen to be damaged and glaziers were kept in steady employment. It feels like the thing these Conservatives shake and shake and shake at - a sense of pride or buoyancy or putting on a good front.<br /><br />With the children back to school I face the normal housework chores and time finally to feel whatever it is I should feel losing a job and the uncertaintity of my future. I e mail people I haven't seen for years asking about the possibilities of work and feel embarrassed by my neediness and brittle jovial tone. If people answer at all they say there isn't much around. Wa wa waaaha I think. But in the late afternoon the phone rings and I am asked to come in to an establishment broadsheet to talk. Like a flipped coin, I am excited and optimistic, shiny, high as a kite.<br /><br />Funnily enough UL has had new work for a while. I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. It is so perfectly Jonathan Franzenean. He has become a part-time media monitor of Turkmenistan for a consultancy that reports to the gas industry - which he combines with being the carer for disabled children on a daycare bus. I suspect that our fascination with each other is our complicated minds or is it lives? Our slight outsider vantage points? Though it is a circus tent mirror at times distorting what is wrong and right between us. <br />Where? I said when he first got the job. And he sent me links, maps, a blog, youtube snippets of the crazy president. It has the fourth largest reserves of natural gas in the world though mainly the country is black sand desert. Until now I haven't really had time to look these things up or follow them, I just thought an almost unknown, ex soviet, repressive republic rich in natural resources - oh I will definitely be able to use that in my writing . When I finally open a map to find out where it is, I just feel worried. It is in the middle of everything I think. Slap bang in the middle of everything. Bordering Afghanistan and Iran and already supplying a huge percentage of China's gas with a direct pipe. Russia is a bossy elder sibling to its trade and America and Europe are now negotiating pipelines. The increments of shift and movement that UL tells me about seem to reflect the transition of the world and the adjustments of power taking place.<br /><br />Over Christmas late night conversations turned to world politics and sometimes to war. Nursing that final glass of red wine with my elder brother as our families slept we touched on it briefly. He lives in Dubai and until recently worked in Damascus. I tell him that a muslim boy in the playground said 'when I grow up I am going to kill christians' and that a few of the mums (though not many) snub my smiles. Another time in a pub with an art school friend married to an American we had the same sort of hushed, fearful conversation. As we were talking I realised suddenly this is how things build - conversations after the children have gone to bed, hints and whispers in the corner of pubs, just a feeling things are brewing. This is what has always happened I think. Until the currents form whatever it is that is going to happen next there is just a sense that there is trouble on the horizon. When I was young and frightened ( walking home at night through the dark woods to our house for example ) - I learnt to dissapate fear with the idea it is very rare for bad things to happen but my fascination for history has meant I have lost this comfort for it seems more certain that bad things happen fairly regularly, even cyclically. The sense 'it would always be someone else, someone you didn't know' mantra also failed when a girl in the block of flats I lived in for years, went missing and was then discovered buried at the side of a road, murdered. This girl with her beautiful smile and a roguish cheerfulness not unlike my own - had been carried past my front door by a two timing boyfriend, her dead body wrapped in sheets and then hidden in bins by my kitchen while he hatched a plan to depose of the body. This is a long time ago now but it still makes me feel sad and shocked and angry.<br /><br />I read too an interview in the Financial Times with american/polish political scientist Brzezinski 'Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global power.' Blimey! It is better than reading TOWIE girl interviews.<br />'The book offers a bracing portrait of a 'receding west' with one half, Europe turning into a 'comfortable retirement home', and the other, the US, beset by relative economic decline and a dsyfunctional politics. In this rapidly changing new world, America's growing 'strategic isolation' is matched only by China's 'strategic patience' in a challenge likely to strain the electoral horizons of US policymakers'<br />'We ( Americans) are too obsessed with today.' Brzezinski continues. 'If we slide into a pattern of just thinking about today, we'll end up reacting to yesterday instead of shaping something more constructive in the world' By contrast, he says, the Chinese are thinking decades ahead.<br />Brzezinski quotes a senior Chinese official who reportedly said of America: 'Please don't decline too quickly'.<br />I was also struck by how well informed the top Chinese leaders are about the world,' he says 'And then you watch one of our Republican presidential debates....' he trails away.<br /><br />I get given quite a lot of work on the establishment broadsheet - on the Arts and Books pages. It feels like perfect work for me, like getting my life back on a ship I would like to be sailing on. My sails puffed up briefly with pride and contentment though the work doesn't start until February.<br /><br />With time on my hands and still drumming up work I meet an editor friend who works in Soho. The picture editor that works with her comes to meet us too - a nice woman who tells me there is no work anywhere. We eat lavender and pear cake and order coffee that would put hairs on your chest, presented by a young man with a jesus beard and a holy expression of artistic endeavour as he proffers the cup. Everything seems to be closing apart from cake shops and sandwich bars and artisan food seems to be an economic almost political movement. <br />Afterwards I go and look at velvet for cushions in the beautiful shops on Berwick St. Oh I love these caves of bright fabric and people. Show girls draped in feathered-net stand sandwiched between rolls and rolls of material, assistants like starlings pecking and pulling the cloth around them admiringly. Peacock prints, shot silks, heavy brocades and velvet like peach plush flesh, in muted tones. But I don't buy anything. I need to check the measurements, check my sewing machine is working, plus I am in a cash limbo, not sure if I can use some of my redundancy to sort the flat out/ pay for the crown on my teeth, replace my glasses or if I just need to baton down and inch every penny.<br /><br />I get on a bike back over Regent St and weave my way to find St George's - because I have been there before on Christmas Eve I think I know roughly what I will find. But I approach from a different direction and there is this church carved into the road, a short old pavement, a corner of London that looks secret, the back entrance to the church, much more ordinairy than the columns and steps of the grand entrance but somehow fascinating. The church is open and I park the bike by an old print shop that has beautiful old maps of London in the window.<br /><br />Up the steps, into the plain but beautiful church, the names of church wardens, year on year since the opening of the church in 1725 surround the stalls on wooden plaques. Above, in this gallery is the whistle and chat of workmen and suddenly I notice that the upper stalls are packed with huge grey pipes, that the organ is being renovated. I wonder at the career route that means you become an organ renovater. The specialism this must involve especially as it becomes apparent that Handel worshipped and played here. He moved to nearby Brook Street in 1724, just as the church was nearing completion, and became involved in the affairs of the new parish. His opinion was sought on the suitability of the organ, and when candidates for the post of organist were being tested, he supplied a theme for extemporisation. From then onwards he had his pew in the church and was a regular worshipper.<br /><br />St George's was built as result of the rapid growth of population in the prosperity of the late 17th Century. As the new and elegant 'suburbs' began to cover the open countryside Parliament passed the Queen Anne's Act in 1711 for the erection of fifty new churches in and about the Cities of London and Westminster. <br />http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=38871 ( if you have time - have a look - there are lovely details!)<br />Ten years later the building of St. George's was begun on a plot of ground given by General William Steuart. The architect chosen was John James, one of Sir Christopher Wren's assistants. The new Parish covered an area stretching from Regent Street (then called Swallow Street) westward to the Serpentine, and southward from Oxford Street to include the whole of what is now Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico. The countryside then came in close to the Church and in 1725 it was still possible to shoot woodcock in the Conduit Mead a few hundred yards from St. George Street and snipe at the western end of Brook Street.<br /><br />By 1726 a workhouse was built too:<br /> 'The 2 first Churchwardens, being Persons of Distinction and Compassion took an early Care, with the Consent of the Vestry, to provide for the Poor; and in 1726, erected a large, plain, commodious Edifice in Mount-street near the Burying Ground, fit for the reception of several hundred Persons, which being on a Model worthy of the Imitation of other Places, a Plan of it was afterwards engraven on Copper, and printed for the Service of the Publick.'<br /> 'ALL that are able, both old and young, are employed in spinning Mop Yarn, or picking Ockam, and being helpful to each other under the Direction of the Steward and Matron; and the frugality of their Management, under the Honourable Persons, their present Churchwardens, and Overseers, is such, that at a Medium of their Expences for 1730, 154 Poor were lodged and dieted 4 Weeks at 55l. 1s. 7d. which is 1s. 9d. ½ a Week for each Person.'<br />By 1777 it was recorded that the St George Hanover Square workhouse could accommodate 700 people, making it one of the largest in the country.<br /><br />I find too that the new organ was built in Chattanooga USA and that the work reconstructing it on site has only just began. I happened to visit just as the team began to put it together.<br />"No London church has ever purchased an organ from an American company. Never in history," said organ builder and company co-owner Ralph Richards.'<br />'Over the past 21 years Richards Fowkes and Company have built 17 pipe organs for churches and universities in the United States. With the completion of Opus 18, their most recent creation, they will become the first American organ builders to sell "the king of instruments" to a London church.<br /><br />'They found a slightly more historical flavor to our organs. They wanted something 'interesting' and not generic," Richards said.<br /><br />Richards and Fowkes' team of master pipe organ builders, cabinet makers, pipe builders, and wood carvers took approximately 30,000 man hours to build nearly every part and piece of the mechanical-action organ from scratch in their shop. <br />Up to 12,000 individual parts were made by hand by less than 10 craftsman, most of whom have been working for the company for nearly 20 years. Nearly every construction method used is an old-world technique.<br />The organ contains 2,851 hand-built metal and wooden pipes, and 174 hand-carved keys made from the shinbones of cows. All of the wood used to encase the swell boxes, make the mechanical trackers, and house the guts of the organ are made from raw milled lumber.<br />Custom alloys for pipes are made in the shop from tin and lead, which are cast into sheets on a stone table, then planed, soldered and rolled by hand.<br />From that point, Richards expects his team to be working at the church for up to 6 months putting it all back together and completing the sometimes very slow task of "voicing," or tuning, the nearly 3,000 pipes one by one.'<br /><br />This is where I walked in. Though I wonder if it would be worth visting again in a few months and just sit and listen to the tuning process.<br /><br />Though like towns in tv murder mystery series emotions must run high in such small worlds of extreme expertise for there is a bitchy remark on the site that I find all this information:<br />"Pity it's such a neoclassical instrument - an organ built in Chattanooga ought to have a Wurlitzer-style train effect labelled 'Choo Choo' <br /> <br />And an apology from the forum administrators:<br />'Whilst humour is an important spice of life and some bantering can always be a bit of fun even in a more serious context, this of AnOrganCornucopia's posts is of a quality of intellect demonstrative of being engaged at 4am at which the posting was timed.'<br /><br /><br />As I walk out of the street into the sunlight I see a familiar woman walking to me - pretty, beautifully dressed, with a slight hunch and droop as if her clothes are too heavy for her frame. It is Sam Cam but she stoops her gaze from mine.<br /><br />Amen. I think. Amen.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-61435031094946596172011-12-24T15:53:00.002-08:002012-05-04T02:15:11.980-07:00St Patrick's, Soho Square. The ( belated ) Christmas SpecialStill writing this the day I snip the bare twigs off the Xmas tree - trying to fit the denuded trunk into a black bin liner and sweep panfuls of needles into the rubbish bag - the magic and petty concerns of Christmas are over. Though like concealing a dead body it takes ages to reduce the tree to a size that can be carried downstairs. So this - the isictt christmas special is out of date, almost redundant - though I hope like coconut Quality Street sweets and tiny cracker toys that sit in indecisive piles, it isn't just another unwanted leftover of Christmas for I did try for the back to back bonanza but just ran out of time.<br /><br />The night before Christmas I walked out on everything I was meant to be doing. I had cooked and cleaned and wrapped and worried and yet nothing seemed cooked or cleaned or wrapped and I was still worried. I had cried the night before cooking a ham dinner. There are hundreds of mum's crying over a ham dinner the night before xmas eve I realise or hope, as exh and the boys lay curled up on the sofa watching telly. It is ludicrous what we invent for ourselves I think. Though when Exh remarks about the beautiful snowflake cookies that I have made with my eldest - you just try and do too much - I know he is right but I am furious. Can I say - you just try and do too little? Can I? I watch couples work alongside each other as teams and they are still sometimes tired or cross or infuriated and they are allowed to say it.<br /><br />I walked out - knowing I would be up to the wee hours making stuffing and wrapping stocking fillers - got on a bb bike and cycled up to Mayfair. I just needed not to do all those things, just needed to have some space or a break. I worry that against this backdrop of anxiety at having lost my job and festive overwork I will end up in a ludicrously over the top lisping nativity with donkeys and heavenly choirs and that it will become like some Richard Curtis feelgood factor film moment when either I will have to believe something or I will shut my angry heart to a magical thing. But the wealthy church in Hanover Square that I imagine tempting me with all this on the late afternoon of christmas eve is dark and shut and not going to open it's doors again. Oh I think - I need a Catholic church now, they always provide a welcome. I wander over Regent Street, where everything is still bustling and shoppers are frantic and greedy like a Patricia Highsmith crowd lit in electric light. I know there is a church tucked away somewhere. I find it on dark side streets but the church is shut despite being Catholic. 'All the churches are shut on Christmas eve' I text UL. He is in a pub with a friend near the British Museum as I walk through Soho our paths getting nearer. 'I want to see you' he says. I try on a 'I heart xmas' red apron in an art upstairs/porn downstairs bookshop. Another one says 'ho bloody ho' and I wonder if I could alternate them throughout the day as an indication of how christmas is going but they are both too big. Shops are starting to shut now. I see a rail of sequin dresses being loaded into a van in a multi storey carpark. I see gay men packed into pubs. Walking past these bright lit windows with people jostling and laughing I feel lonely, nursing my petty but heartfelt grievances of too much to do and too much washing up and cleaning done. Then I head up grey streets to Soho Square where so much is shut it feels like even the street lights have been dimmed. I remember from my map that there is a church here but I have no recollection of ever seeing it. I used to work in restaurants in Soho when I first left college and can remember the sense of being on the edge of an adventure - that there were secrets all around - though really all that ever happened was being winked at by a popstar in the street or spotting a few famous drunks in pubs, or going to a few classy members clubs without membership and discovering delicious delis that sold great cheese and ham and pumpkin ravioli wrapped lovingly in cellophane and placed as gently as expensive and beautiful silk lingerie into boxes.<br /><br />In the dark square a huge tower looms. If I could get this over with quickly I would just about have time to meet UL for a drink I think craning to see if the church is open. Golden light pours from an open door. It is a Catholic church. From the stone floored vestibule I can see that the church is empty apart from one man hunched kneeling and praying and a priest with a really genuine smile and a kind and good face descending the stairs from the tower. I think he is about to lock up. Is it ok to have a look - 'Of course' he says with a generous smile. 'Are you trying to close for the evening?' I ask. 'Oh you're fine - we have mass shortly' he says waving me inside. The church inside is clean and bright and really fresh. With that very brittle european catholic trapped air, as if sieved. In each niche at the sides of the long, narrow nave there are altars and statues and paintings - some of them really beautiful. Because it is Christmas, or because I want to feel something and no longer be cross I light a candle at a beautiful white statue of what I think to be the Virgin Mary though I discover later to be St Anne, her mother.<br /><br />This church was built on the site of the town residence of Earl of Carisle - a grand house built in 1690. The square itself had first been developed in 1681 and was originally called King's Square after Charles II becoming one of London's most fashionable addresses. It later became Soho Square named after an ancient hunting cry akin to Tally Ho refering to the area's rural and hunting past. By the 18th century the square had become more a more 'colourful' area and a Mrs Cornelys rented the Earl of Carisle's town house in around 1760. And oh she was an adventuress - like a Jeanette Winterson heroine - born on the island of Venice - an opera singer and impresario - she had many lovers and husbands and children across Europe including a daughter from an affair with Casanova. At Carisle House she put on elaborate masked balls and concerts of great imagination, sumptious design, slightly dubious reputation and great popularity:<br />'It was at one of Mrs. Cornelys' masquerades that the beautiful daughter of a peer wore the costume of an Indian princess, three black girls bearing her train, a canopy held over her head by two negro boys, and her dress covered with jewels worth £100,000. It was at another that Adam, in fleshcoloured tights and an apron of fig-leaves, was to be seen in company with the Duchess of Bolton as Diana.'<br />These gatherings were so popular 'In February 1770, Parliament adjourned early to enable members to attend one of her masquerades.' Laurence Sterne called a visit to Mrs Cornelys' "the best assembly and the best concert I ever had the honour to be at." In Humphrey Clinker, published in 1771, Tobias Smollett writes of "Mrs. Cornelys' assembly, which for the rooms, the company, the dresses, and decorations, surpasses all description". In Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon the narrator recalls that "[a]ll the high and low demireps of the town gathered there". Dickens wrote in an article on Soho that "the world was dying to be on Mrs. Cornelys's list." <br />Though she was in and out of debtor's prison because she paid so much out for her ventures and by 1772 Carisle House was seized and it's contents auctioned off. Later out of prison she organised a Venetian regatta on the Thames and then returned to Carlisle House, this time as manager. She held two immensely successful seasons of 'rural masquerades', decorating the interiors of the reception rooms with fresh turf, hedges, exotic blooms, goldfish swimming in a fountain and pine trees in the concert room. However ( or because of ) she then slid back into bankruptcy and in 1779 was imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison. She escaped in June the next year when the prison was set on fire during the Gordon Riots, but was recaptured in Westminster in August.'<br />Again out of prison she renamed herself Mrs Smith selling asses milk in Knightsbridge and finally died in Newgate prison at the age of 74 apparently from breast cancer.<br /><br />Though 18th century pleasure seems a fascinating and imaginative thing. Across the square at number 21 was a famous magic brothel, the White House - in which commercial sex was enhanced by dark, baroque special-effects and natural magic devices:<br />"The white house was a notorious place of ill fame," writes Mayhew in 1851 "Some of the apartments, it is said were funished in a style of costly luxury; while others were fitted up with springs, traps and other contrivances, so as to present no appearance other than that of an ordinary room, until the machinery was set in motion. In one room, into which some wretched girl might be introduced, on her drawing a curtain as she would be desired , a skeleton grinning horribly was precipitated forward and caught the terrified creature in his, to all appearence, bony arms. In another chamber the lights grew dim and then seemed gradually to go out. In some little time some candles, apparently self ingnited, revealed to a horror stricken woman, a black coffin on the lid of which might be seen in brass letters, Anne, or whatever name it had been ascertained the poor wretch was known by. A sofa, in another part of the mansion was made to descend into some place of utter darkness, or, it was alleged, into a room in which was store of soot or ashes."<br /><br />I remember a friend telling me about a Japanese Love Hotel she took her girlfriend to in the 1980s and I text her for details. I walk to collect the children from school imagining beautiful, luxurious but erotic hotels. Mirrored mazes, silver swans, and silken rooms devoid of light. Peep holes, finger holes, flaming torches and showers of feathers. Tipping floors, tumbling tunnels, singing canaries and a brook bringing thimbles of dessert wine on trays. I couldn't afford what I would like, I think. And I am too shy anyhow, caught in the awkward bulk of self. She texts later to say there was a vibrating bed and you paid by the hour. Though another friend reported a scented bath on stilts.<br /><br />Also in the square was a 'bazaar' set up in 1816 by John Trotter. A man who had ambitions to set up an universal language and had run the army stores for the Napoleonic wars he converted a warehouse in Soho Square no longer required for army provision as an encouragement for 'Female and Domesticity' being anxious to stop the country from pouring 'its happy and innocent virgins into the common sink of London'. The interior of the disused warehouse was laid out with stalls and counters arranged on two floors of the building in the manner of a closed market. The vendors hired their selling spaces by the day and there were stringent rules for the conduct of business, but everything was conducted on the 'fairest and most liberal plan'. The goods sold consisted chiefly of millinery, gloves, lace, jewellery and potted plants. Despite it's seemingly worthy beginning this fashionable and famous bazaar was copied across London, a precusor to the department stores of Oxford Street.<br /><br />I dither about putting this in but the chance to write about sex AND shopping is too enticing. I have had my novel rejected a few times for just being too depressing so the chance to revel in the bones of the chick lit genre is just too much to miss.<br /> <br />The church was the first Catholic Church to be founded after the 1791 second Catholic Relief Act was passed by parliament. A group of eminent Irish Catholics formed the Confraternity of St. Patrick “to consider the most effectual means of establishing a chapel to be called St. Patrick’s, on a liberal and permanent foundation.” An ambition they achieved by taking a 62-year lease on Mrs. Cornelys’, by then vacant, Carlisle House. Nearby stretching from New Oxford St to Seven Dials was an area known as the Rookeries - where criminals, the drunken and destitute, and a large population of the Irish Catholic poor lived.<br /> On this corner of Soho and Covent Garden it 'was somewhat like the wild west with the priests often rather sheriff-like as they tried to bring order to disorder, and establish Christian family values in the face of the evil elements that were destroying the dignity of the lower classes, namely alcohol, crime and exploitation.' And the priest Father Arthur O'Leary who raised the funds and drummed up support and directed the consecration of the chapel on September 29th 1792 continued his work for 10 years until as it says on his memorial stone in the porch of the church ‘he wore himself out by his labours’ in 1802.<br /><br />Also celebrated in a plaque in the porch is the 1940 bomb that broke through the roof and embedded itself in the nave but did not go off.<br /><br />While the entertainer Danny La Rue who was an altar server here for many years donated the two statues at the back of the church in the memory of his mother and aunt. And Tommy Steel was married here. <br /><br />The church appears to have as an inspiring though as yet less careworn leader as it's founder. The Reverend Alexander Sherbrooke has overseen the recent 3.5 million renovation of the church and also the hosting of addiction counselling in it's crypt ( it is the only Catholic Church to do so). Each week under his lead St Patrick's with a team of volunteers feeds 80 to 90 local homeless people in conjunction with the Groucho club – a nearby private members' club - that supplys the puddings. He also runs an SOS prayer line manned by volunteers from 7pm to 11pm every night in the tower of the church. A light on at high window of the tower like a beacon to Soho proclaims the two telephone lines open and they take calls from across the world. I read that at the heart of his ministry is the new Evangelization in the Catholic Church and that he believes that beauty in a secular age is a privileged pathway to God making the Eucharist, the music and the church itself central to the worship.<br /><br />Sherbrooke says: "You get a knock on the door and it can be someone who is successful in business, someone who wants a sandwich or someone caught up in the sex industry. We leave our SOS prayer line calling cards in telephone boxes – where you might see other services advertised.<br /><br />I don't know - writing this blog I have witnessed how much good work is done by the London churches but this seems inspiring - his breadth of ambition and desire to help people in a simple but direct way. I pass him as I walk down the nave on my way out, the man who had welcomed me in, a man of obvious peace and energy. Unexpectedly behind him down the aisle comes a soppy eyed King Charles Spaniel, neat claws on the clean new marble, completely at home, obedient to his master. I think of a Christmas Day once when I went to a service with my Mum and Dad in my hometown and a butterfly flew in the church on the cold morning for it felt like a surprising gift of beauty.<br /><br />As I leave the church, rushing now, for a quick guilty drink with UL before returning to my patched together family, a short man in a fawn anorak runs up the stairs. 'Is there someone, somewhere who will hear my confession now?' he pants. 'He is in there.' I say.<br /><br />I think of the light on in the tower.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-81573827512815560272011-12-11T10:57:00.001-08:002011-12-25T16:58:08.465-08:00Christian Scientist Reading Room, MayfairIt is the third time I have tried to get into the magnificently fronted Christian Scientist Church on Curzon Street. I have been refused politely but determinedly twice - no, I am sorry, you have to come to a service, no I am sorry, the service has started we cannot let you enter. The first time a man with dried spittle on his lip appeared from the back of the slightly smelly reading room ( opposite to the door of the church) looked suspiciously at me and turned me away. The second occasion a black man with an old weary face on guard at the doorway of the church ( though I was certain the service had not started. ) They both acted as if they have been guardians of the doorway for a long time and that I ( red tights, metallic red dance shoes, big fur hat/I wonder if I sound loathsome? ) am just who should be turned away.<br /><br />This time I am determined, though dreading the encounter. I have decided to try the end of a service on a Sunday rather than the random weekday or the beginning of a service on a weekday evening that I have tried before and I know there is a bb docking bay opposite the grand, almost american college-like building so I have chanced split-hair-timing of when I think the service will finish.<br /><br />I have lost my job. Even writing this down it shocks me. I have never lost a job. Those closed door meetings dragged on for 10 days, wounding the build up to xmas - how could I sit and order stocking fillers on line - when it seemed likely there would be no money coming in afterwards? Though I attempt to think golden positive thoughts when I wake, I attempt to think good can come out of change for a few minutes every morning. I don't know - it does seem to help. The opposite is helpless, hopeless worrying and a flailing 'it's not fair.' Finally on a Friday I am taken into a room and offered money and allowed to still work for the company. I think I will cry but I am bold to the two men who deliver the news 'I feel I have worked really hard and done a really good job' and they concur and say yes, it is very sad, they are sure they will see me back but I feel they resent my bitterly spoken pride. When I open the envelope they offer me I am much more pleased with the money than I can imagine. Though despite wanting to write a story of 'our time' and everything I can see from the corner I live on I feel like a method actor actually losing a leg. It was only just a level of pretending before.<br /><br />On a day I wouldn't have worked anyhow I sit at the kitchen table and write careful lists in pale pencil. Under headings - christmas, writing, job hunting, money, children - the items range from the ambitious - contact Granta, to the life saving - phone about smoke alarm, the needy - e mail 3 work contacts a day and mundane slightly over fussy - check gravy boat and cutlery for Christmas. Listening to Radio 4 that morning as I start these chores I hear amazing accounts of:<br /><br />A transexual's life and the apparent prediliction for electronic engineering.<br /><br />Chinese migrant workers status and the hukou system which means that household registration cannot be moved from countryside to the cities despite modern China's dependence on this workforce - how such workers have to lead second class lives, unable to obtain healthcare, their children unable to attend state schools. "Wo shi nongmin [I am a peasant]," a fixed status, shown on ID.<br /><br />Then a whole programme about a writer I had never heard of - Robert Aickman. 'He had the ability to invest the daylight world with all the terrors of the night, and specialised in subverting notions of safety and sunshine into something sinister and unforgiving. His work is best summed up by a wonderful German word, unheimlich, meaning "uncanny", which has the deeper connotation of suggesting the unease caused by being away from home, literally un-homelike.'<br /><br />I think as I do the cleaning this is a rich life. Make it what you want. <br /><br />In my attempt to get into the church I rush up the grand stairs from the street, pass a few stragglers of congregation in the atrium between the reading room and the church and I am at the door of the church in that furry hat and gold buttoned coat, pink cheeks from the cold and the rush and the bike ride and both the dried spittle man and the weary faced seated man are there. Both are shaking their head - they are just closing up, they say. They look at me as if I am loathsome. I say - I will only be 5 minutes - less than that even - I am doing a local history project - oh please, I plead. The two guardians exchange slightly fearful glances and say ok reluctantly. I bolt up the carpeted stairs, like the winding stairway of a well vacuumed bed and breakfast and reach the plain but beautiful airy room. Like a horror film DS man has followed me, lurking behind but I say truly - oh it is beautiful - and he smiles finally trusting that I do not want to harm whatever it is he protects. <br /><br />'Christian Science, a new American religion based largely in both Puritan and Transcendental strains of theology, was formulated by New Englander Mary Baker Eddy and organized as a denomination in the 1880s and 1890s, based on her discovery of a radical method of Christian healing found through a spiritual interpretation of the Bible—a science of Christianity.<br />This room is airy and simple with lovely proportions and texts carved on the walls.<br /><br />Christian Science came to Britain in 1890. Mrs. Eddy sent students to London, where fashionable West End women began to be attracted to it<br /><br />'By 1907, the Christian Scientists had grown in influence enough to interest over 9000 people to attend a Christian Science lecture delivered by American Bicknell Young in London’s Albert Hall. The idea that the acoustically perfected lecture hall or theater provided the best vehicle for Christian Science churches in Britain was henceforth continually suggested in the architectural press and demonstrated in several branch church designs: Byzantine styled Second Church by Sir John Burnett (1924-25); Lanchester and Rickard’s monumental Baroque Third Church (1910) in Mayfair, which included a lamp of wisdom in its elaborate entry cartouche surmounted by a tower of Wren derivation.<br />Likewise the First Church, Manchester England, a striking expressionist Arts and Crafts design by Edgar Wood, was one of the most celebrated churches in Britain of any denomination.<br /><br />Though a falling congregation meant this church was divided in 1980. The facade and front part of the building was kept - the rest developed as flats. I find a story of the magnificent oak case of the organ from the huge church being sold and shipped to Australia, 'the timber used in the case came from oak retrieved from English manor houses and shipwrecks, and was designed by L.F. Roslyn to incorporate biblical images, floral motifs, sheaves of wheat and doves.'<br /><br />Finally, returning home one night from the Southbank after a night out with ul I turn into the dark closed huts of the christmas Thameside market. The gingerbread twinkly fairytale world has flipped it's artifice to the slightly sinister grey tones of garden sheds and cheap magic shut away and out of reach. Oh I suddenly realise - I don't want this to be the ISICTT xmas special - I need to get to another church. Of course posting this on xmas day I have missed my own ambitious deadlines - but I aiming for two this week! I don't know! Let's see!amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-53802612706085133742011-11-13T05:35:00.001-08:002011-12-11T10:52:11.972-08:00Christchurch MayfairI feel that I am a walking advert for a Kindle as I read War and Peace on the tube. The book that I have been reading since July was initially just heavy, then it got wet on our camping holiday, lost it's cover and grew flabby. Since then it has become increasingly battered alongside the junk in my bag - the notebooks, the toy guns, stray sweets, flat shoes, favourite lip gloss, child gloves, church leaflets, pta meeting announcements and now the spine has weakened and pages flutter loose. I carry it almost everywhere, a big heavy brick in my bag, just in case, just in case, there are a snatched five minutes to spare - too early for the library after dropping the boys off to school, sitting in the doctors surgery waiting for my name to be called, on the tube to work making the 15 minute journey ( that I kid myself to be only 10, shaving time in the morning to vacuum the flat, hang a load of washing out - finding myself late day after day, slightly sheepish but smiling as I arrive at my desk) and here sitting in a cafe ordering coffee and toast in a smart but 'artisan' cafe in Mayfair waiting for a church service to finish. I open the book, happy, almost exalted to be back in this other crystal sharp world. I have become someone who folds the pages rather than use a bookmark though with this wreck of a book it hardly matters - but I like the tiny increments of folded pages - the tick of time it has taken me to read it. I have always been a fast reader but this slow, increasingly loose paged read has become an almost physical relationship with the book - a passionate, time taken at any opportunity, absorbing thing.<br /><br />This morning I have already done the dithering in a porch but the church looked packed and they were singing a hymm. I darted out and back down the narrow street. Behind me I heard the door open and the shuffle of someone coming out and looking both ways down the street, looking for whoever had just departed, as if I had played knock down ginger on God's door. Instinctively, I slink into the wall not wanting to be caught and there is a slight kink in the road so it is easy to remain undetected. I think I hear a small shrug and then the door closing.<br /><br />The cafe is lovely, like being in San Franciso, as the smiley waitress takes my order and brings really good coffee. I am in Shepherd Market, a tucked away historic 'village' - like a toy model of some other time but with boutiques and lots of restaurants including a polish mexican restaurant (now there is a heady combination of seemingly physical opposites.) Corralled by the grand streets nearby this area has the dolls house charm and scaled down period details of narrow alleyways and old lamp posts. Though the toast takes ages and I feel agitated by having finished my coffee before it appears. A couple nearby read tabloid sunday newspapers but not the one I work for. I feel somehow cheated. I want to observe people turn the pages of the magazine and watch to see where their eye's rest. Instead I read 'War and Peace' and it is wonderful.<br /><br /><br />This whole area - Mayfair - but specifically the site this market was built on was the home of the annual fifteen day May Fairs set up in the 1680s by James II as a cattle market. The haunt of soldiers and women of loose morals it grew too rowdy, and was closed down in the 18th century:<br />The last Mayfair was remembered by Pennant as "covered with booths, temporary theatres, and every enticement to low pleasure."<br />Including a fashion for puppet beheading shows with the explanation, "After the Scottish rebellion of 1745," writes Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "the beheading of puppets formed one of the most regular and attractive parts of the exhibitions at the 'May Fair,' and was continued for several years.”<br /><br />The May Fair, which had long been falling into disrepute, ceased to be held in the reign of George I. It was "presented by the grand jury of Middlesex for four years successively as a public scandal; and the county magistrates then presented an address to the Crown, praying for its suppression by royal proclamation." Its abolition was brought about mainly through the influence of the Earl of Coventry, to whose house in Piccadilly it was an annual nuisance.<br /><br />Edward Shepherd was commissioned to develop the site and built the paved alleys, a duck pond and a two storey market topped with a theatre between 1735-46. A better clientele attended the entertainments here than the boisterous May Fairs - though the relationship between high money and sex seems to have kept the area's dubious reputation - indeed in the 1980s Jeffrey Archer's ( then the chairman of the conservative party) met with prostitute Monica Coghlan in a flat in Shepherd Market and the subsequent cover up led to his imprisonment.<br /><br />I walk into the church. The service is finished but the church is packed and noisy - families with cradled, crawling, feeding, tottering, shouting, running tots like a Ahlberg children's book illustration, and exhausted but smiley looking parents drinking cups of tea. There is amplification and presentation equipment where the altar is, and the chairs laid out for the congregation are in an almost untidy arrangement. Though maybe it is just without the pews the layout seems to lack order and be almost too roomy for itself.<br /><br />Alongside a pretty girl sidles close. Hello' she welcomes. 'I haven't seen you here before?'<br />I have just come to have a quick look at the church, I say, looking up at the huge stained glass windows.<br />She keeps talking, asking what would I like to find. I surprise myself by talking very truthfully. I say I just like visiting these spaces and thinking about history and belief and faith but that I don't have any. I imagine suddenly Rachel Whiteread's 'House' and the imprint of space filled with something, the space itself described by matter. I can see her 'inner' angler hold her expression steady as if watching the fish just nibbling the bait. We talk about the congregation and my surprise at how young everyone is. 'We are a group that came together and now we are blessed with all these children' - she waves her hands around as if surveying the many offspring of rabbits but with a slight wrinkling of her pretty nose to the din. We talk about the location of the church and she says it makes it easy to invite friends to come because they can go shopping afterwards. She says the church was an Ethopian church before, and now Church of England but evangelical. She does not leave my side as I go to look at leaflets by strange phone box style cupboards with big headings pinned above. 'Investigating Christianity' says one. She doesn't leave my side as I pick out a few leaflets but we shake hands and I thank her as I leave.<br /><br />I find very little about the history of Christchuch, Down St. Errected in 1865 by F and H Francis as a subdivision of St George's of Hanover Square there seems to have been a fire at the beginning of the 20th century and the only other scrap of architectural information is that the multicoloured interior brick work was painted over in 1955. Apparently Mary, Princess Royal, daughter of George V worshipped here at the beginning of her married life. But that is all I find though I fish and fish and fish for history for hours.<br /> <br />I do discover details of nearby Keith's Chapel where clergyman Alexander Keith conducted clandestine ( with an element of secrecy to them: perhaps they took place away from a home parish, and without either banns or marriage licence and at any hour of the day or night) marriages and I wonder if I am onto something. Though there is no connection between the churches. He appears to be entreuperunarial in his marriage business placing adverts of great detail<br />Daily Post of July 20th, 1744: <br />"To prevent mistakes, the little new chapel in May Fair, near Hyde Park corner, is in the corner house, opposite to the city side of the great chapel, and within ten yards of it, and the minister and clerk live in the same corner house where the little chapel is; and the licence on a crown stamp, minister and clerk's fees, together with the certificate, amount to one guinea, as heretofore, at any hour till four in the afternoon. And that it may be the better known, there is a porch at the door like a country church porch."<br />While in prison, Keith seems to have had a keen eye to business. During his incarceration his wife died, and he kept her corpse embalmed and unburied for many months, but he used the unfortunate circumstances as a pr exercise - Daily Advertiser of January 30, 1750:—"We are informed that Mrs. Keith's corpse was removed from her husband's house in May Fair the middle of October last, to an apothecary's in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there till Mr. Keith can attend the funeral. The way to Mr. Keith's chapel is through Piccadilly, by the end of St. James's Street, and down Clarges Street, and turn on the left hand." Then follows the announcement that the marriages are still carried on as usual by "another regular clergyman," as quoted above.<br />Some 60.000 marriages seemed to have taken place with neat and ordered records, so at a guinea a pop it must have been a lucrative trade.<br /><br />Also while looking for details of Christchurch I find John Gay's 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London,' which appeared in 1716 - a poem in three books. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/skilton/poetry/gay01a.html <br />It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of walking in the London of that period. Read the poem! But here to give an idea of the content is fragments from the index:<br />Alley, the pleasure of walking in one,<br />Barber, by whom to be shunned,<br />Butchers, to be avoided,<br />Cane, the convenience of one.<br />Coat, how to chuse one for the winter,<br />Countryman, perplexed to find the way,<br />Coachman, his whip dangerous,<br />Crowd parted by a coach,<br />Cellar, the misfortunes of falling into one.<br />Dustman, to whom offensive,<br />Fop, the ill consequence of passing too near one,<br />Father, the happiness of a child who knows his own,<br />Ladies dress neither by reason nor instinct,<br />Milkman of the city unlike a rural one.<br />Oyster, the courage of him that first ate one,<br />Periwigs, how stolen off the head,<br />Playhouse, a caution when you lead a lady out of it,<br />Shoes, what most proper for walkers.<br />Stockings, how to prevent their being spattered,<br />Schoolboys mischievous in frosty weather.<br />Umbrella, its use,<br />Wig, what to be worn in a mist,<br />Way, of whom to be inquired,<br /><br /><br />On my way to work - what I have been dreading happens - I turn the page 936 and find no 937 of War and Peace. At work, unexpectedly the owner of the paper I work for announces that he doesn't like the magazine. It is like a tantrum but it escalates and the work is taken off us, these people that have worked so hard, and we believed so well, and given to a special projects team. We wait days for news, as doors close for meetings around us but none comes. Coming up to Christmas it seems the wrong time to lose a job. What will I do I want to wail but I think oh something will have to turn up and what I want to do is write.<br />Relieved I find the missing page of the book in the flotsam of my bag and carry on reading.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-50246696826635351032011-10-30T07:01:00.001-07:002011-11-18T02:30:23.007-08:00St Mary's Bourne StreetI stand in porches to peer I think, squinting through the reflected light of the glass door into the dark church. I can see the backs of heads of a few worshippers and hear the beautiful soaring high voices of a choir. It is the sunday morning after the clocks turned back and I just didn't get it together to be on time for the service. I don't know what to do. I dither. I can't enter now, it would be rude or just a bit dramatic. I'll have to wait until everyone comes out I think, annoyed with myself for being late. I feel like I have a lot to do though I am slightly lonely and the boys are away. Then I sit in a coffee shop to wait. At the cafe I overhear a pretty very young woman say she lost 20 million recently - though I am straining to hear 2O million what? Shares? Pounds? What else could it possibly be? Over the next few days I wonder what else she could have meant but can't think of anything. Try it. Stamps? Sweets? er Kilograms? Handkerchiefs? I don't know. The church service still hasn't finished when I finish my coffee so I walk round the block a couple of times. In the peace of Sunday morning posh streets, well heeled people walk dogs or children and I peer into luxe lives.<br /><br />I see immaculately tidy, plush rooms and search for stray details of life - a ginger cat still as an ornament in the corner of a window, a doll tipped up face down on a toy high chair, a family slightly squashed around a table eating a meal in a basement with the window open and some really beautiful yolk yellow cast iron cooking pots on a window shelf. Each time round the block I come again to the long view of the church. I have never seen this chuch before today - had no idea what to expect. It is a fairly ordinary dark red brick with a pitched roof and a solitary bell in a cote, a church from a northern town not a parish church of this wealthy hushed neighbourhood. But the doors at the side are locked and I have to turn the corner to the entrance set back from the street sandwiched between houses.<br /><br />The night before I came back over Westminster Bridge on a night bus with UL and looked up to see Big Ben dark orange from reflected light, dimmed as if eclipsed, the hands of the clock straight up to twelve o'clock. Oh, I say. Oh. Big Ben has become to me a lighthouse, a beacon - the boom of hundreds of new years eves and new resolutions made - a big bright licked dinner plate of light. I live here! I am nearly home! I live here! I am nearly home! But this night it is dull, shut down, as if resting and no bell rings out. Oh I think - the time is being changed on the clock but the bus sails past and I don't think to watch. I am fiddling with this image in my mind for days - lost time, limbo time, time travel, time turned back - there seems a gap in normal time at least. I imagine unexpectedly seeing the hands go backwards and the shock of seeing it. ( Once long ago I lived in a flat in White City overlooking the Westway and opened the blinds one morning to see all the traffic go backwards - what seemed like the world tipping, something, possibly just me, having fallen off an axis of sense was infact a road accident and traffic reversing to exit a slip road.) I google changing the clocks on Big Ben and find out that the clock would have been stopped the following midday - and worked on since then, checked over, then restarted exactly at 12 o'clock in the new time. So what I see is not midnight but held onto midday. Is it literally time stood still I wonder? Thinking of UL and me. Though perhaps it is just limbo. A place pretending to have no time, not recognising time has moved on. Later I mention seeing the shut down clock to my eldest son who explains the process I had only just discovered in great detail. How did you know that? I say amazed. 'It was on Newsround Mum.' He says nonchalantly.<br /><br />Another night with the boys away I cycle up into Bloomsbury on a Boris Bike to meet a friend and talk about an art project. He works at the university of London. Cycling along the dark damp beautiful streets I feel suddenly and rather unexpectedly that I am in a dream. I pass earnestly happy young people deep in discussion, as if passing my own ambitions and ideals through the light drizzle. In the bright electric light of his university office we sit and talk about recording nearly extinct languages around the world and the hand gestures that accompany them as exactly as possible with as little 'surface' or manipulation to the representation. There is something here I want badly I think. Though it isn't an envious reaction. Just a realisation.<br /><br />I want the pursuit of knowledge. Time to do what interests me.<br /><br />On the third lap around the streets alongside the church elegant, elderly, made-up women come around the corner sparrow fawn, pearls and gold chokered at their neck. The church service is finished, the congregation departing. At the door an effusive handsome vicar in a black robe like a friendly wolf talks flamboyantly of a church in europe that he had visited. Worshippers are coming out, queueing to talk to him. Against the tide I stand near, waiting. Can I just go in to see your church? I ask. He waves me in ebulliently.<br /><br />I'll just whizz in and I will have done it I think. But the bit of the church I could see when I peered in from the porch is just a side chapel, and the organ music is loud and passionate. Wow. I think. turning into the main body of the church. Dense grey clouds of strong smelling incense fill the space like special effects. People stand heads turned up to the organ playing triumphantly high in a gallery up at the back of the church. Two men absorbed - one playing, one stood close turning the pages. Just for one minute I feel, I feel what? The power and the glory? Mystery? Absolute wonder? It is exhilarating. The organ stops, everyone claps. The two men nod from the balcony.<br /><br />I think later, of all the churches I have been to and all the tall pipes and ornate details of church organs I have turned my head to see without perhaps realising the impact of the actual music had on the service. I google 'organ music' and discover that the first organ ( a water hydraulis) was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria in the third century bc and described later in latin in the late 4th century by the poet Claudian - Magna levi detrudens murmura tactu....intonet 'let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch.' Used as a musical accompaniment to gladiatorial combat ( blimey - history - a dip into the gladiatorial games is the most fascinatingly brutal display of human cruelty I have read: <br />http://legvi.tripod.com/gladiators/id1.html)<br />But by the 8th century the organ is prominent in the liturgy of the Catholic Church for it's ability to 'simultaneously provide a musical foundation below the vocal register, support in the vocal register, and increased brightness above the vocal register.' compliment the human voice and the human voices of a choir. Though during the renaissance the hydraulic organ was used in magical grottos and gardens - run only by water (often waterfalls) whilst the air generated in the pipes were used to make automata figurines dance and birds fly. Other times hidden to simulate the music played by statues in mythological scenes. <br />But today - something - the frequency, the passion, the immensity of the sound - like a soaring dramatic sound track has unexpectedly transported me from mild lurking depression to joy.<br /><br />The initially humble chapel was designed by a little known church architect RJ Withers and consecrated in 1874. Built over the underground railway on land where houses had been demolished, it was still an area of slums.<br />'The chapel as a whole is remarkably effective and has a solid and substantial look which is highly satisfactory. It is, in a word, an excellent specimen of an inexpensive chuch, the cost of the whole, not counting special gifts such as the reredos, altar, font etc, being about £4,500.' The Church Times 1874<br />It is another Trachaterian church ( as near as dammit catholic whilst still being allowed to be in the Church of England ) set up by Friar WJE Bennett of St Paul's Wilton St and then St Barnabus, Pimlico then taken over by Rev the hon Robert Liddell when he resigned. I have written already of this resignation and the riots that were caused by the high catholic rituals of the movement at St Barnabus.<br />http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html<br /><br />Less controversial St Mary's is described in The Chuch Times 1874. 'The service at eleven o'clock was well attended by people from the neighbourhood, and we were glad to notice a good sprinkling of poor women. Mr Eyton, the Curate-in-Charge, was the clebrant, and an unconscionably long sermon was preached by Mr Knox-Little ( curate of St Thomas, Regent Street) which, considering the broiling weather, was little better than cruelty.'<br /><br />For halloween I tell the boys I have prepared a 'mystery'. There is great excitement as we bob apples and play the game where you cut a cake of flour and have to fish out the fallen sweet with your mouth. In my bedroom I have adapted the huge child sized cardboard box that was has been their 'tank' and hung crepe paper streamers inside like cobwebs. Each child ( there are five boys who take it in turns) sits inside the box. PSM ( under my nervous instruction ) and I wail into a tube, drop cobwebs on their heads, blow through straws onto the back of their necks, put icy fingers on their arms and hang a skull with red shining eyes to a peep hole.<br /><br />But the room isn't quite dark enough and I forget my lines and indeed my props for I am just too nervy to be a natural performer. 'Lame' each boy says. 'Was that a mystery?' says my eldest in disgust. <br /><br />I keep remembering Graham Greene's conversion to Catholicism - I read it in his early autobiography 'A sort of Life' and loved the mix of mystery and mundanity. I look for the book on my book shelf and can't find it but here, oh it is worth the read.<br />http://www.basicincome.com/bp/greenesconversion.htm<br /><br />Finally, I find a part time local history course that can be done on the internet that I can apply for in January. It will be a start I think excitedly. <br /><br />Amenamenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-50552812738452573132011-09-25T06:31:00.001-07:002011-10-20T06:10:44.791-07:00Church of Holy ApostlesSitting in my kitchen late at night texting a quite nice girl from The Only Way is Essex about pictures of her as a little girl I think, really, something has got to change. Increasingly I just feel really, really stressed. Since the closure of the News of the World my part-time job share - like an unnoticed gas leak has invisibly filled every nook and crany of my life. I wake in the morning worrying that a car I have booked will not have picked up a celebrity, that a shot that the editor would like will not get taken, that I will not possibly get everything done. I work long hours at incredible speed and with great concentration, then take the paperwork home. I have gone to work the last three Sundays because I didn't know how the work would get done if I didn't. I have always worked hard but this is different. I don't know what to do. Of course I need the money but I have started to make mistakes and the amount of work I am getting through is impossible to maintain. All I really want to do is write. Sometimes I think if I only I stopped doing some of the things I don't really want to do, don't believe in maybe things would get better. Though I deliberately flatter the TOWIE girl to get the results I want and it works. She calls me babe as she agrees to send the pictures. <br /><br />I slip into the Holy Apostles Catholic Church on a Sunday morning, parking the Boris Bike round the back of nearby St Gabriel's church. I can see on the surrounding Pimlico skyline the spires of three churches. Almost a year ago I signed up for a BB, almost a year ago I visited this church, almost a year ago I met UL after an absence of 12 years. It is a kind of anniversary. Though he is still in his very bad marriage despite declarations of separation that were made in the summer and I feel caught by the twine of their unhealthy life. After escaping an alcoholic relationship I am anxious this can only be another trap. Perhaps we are both just too damaged I think. Or am I just better at spotting unhealthy patterns? Did we have a bad relationship before? All I have remembered was our fascination with each other. But oh oh oh I feel sad.<br /><br />I used to attend a mother and toddler group in the church hall of Holy Apostles with my youngest son - little girls in sparkly-heeled cinderella slippers doggedly shuffling dolls in buggies as he donned a policeman outfit and a batman mask before driving a plastic hooded car around the hall. Mothers resigned to the display of these apparently intrinsic roles. The church hall has a beautiful, nicely-planted, mediterreanean 50s style sunny courtyard and I assume the entrance of the church is there. But it isn't and I have to walk around to the next street to find the door. Up some steps, the door is open, I can hear singing, there is a service. I stand in the porch, like a phone box dense with cards - advertising religious services including counselling for those who have suffered from the abuse of priests.<br /><br />The church is quite long and narrow and plain though busy. The congregation are queueing for communion. Vaulted like the interior bones of a whale the room has neutral colours that make the colours of people's sunday best vibrant.<br /><br />The old Holy Apostles Church (then on Claverton Street - on the site of an old rather grand columned Wesleyen chapel) was bombed out in the war on 16th April 1941. The attack on Pimlico that night was ferocious. In nearby Sutherland Terrace the whole terrace of thirty odd houses was obliterated apart from three dwellings:<br /><br />'But here, in the night, in a place ringed with fires, the devastation seemed endless, a wide earthern space swelling with mounds and pitted with hole. In all the noise, in all the urgency of the moment there was felt in the air that shroud of emptiness that hangs over a battlefield.'<br /><br />'When rescue and first aid parties were already engaged on this field, engaged in what one heavy rescue man could only describe as digging, digging, digging', wardens away at a post in Glasgow Terrace saw through the flared and spitting skyscape the drifting pale glint of another parachute. It was coming from the south of the river.'<br /><br />As this new blast hit Sutherland Terrace:<br /><br />'Over two thousand kilos of high explosive split over vehicles, men, wounded. Excavations made were filled in, men were killed and lorries blown up. A stretcher bearer remembers that 'it was just as though a huge orange flare had gone up under your throat. A hell of a bang. Then it was like a sandpapered ramrod down your throat, and your lungs puffing out like a pouter pigeon. Then dead dead silence. Then, as though some time afterwards. a slow shower of bricks everywhere.'<br />'The Blitz. Westminster at War' William Sansom<br /><br />That night in London 450 bombers were used. In Westminster there were 148 dead. 564 injured seriously. It was called 'The Wednesday'<br /><br />'Keep calm and carry' on is not just a tea towel. <br /><br />Missionaries sheltering under the porch were left unscathed when the Church of Holy Apostles was hit and the parish priest Canon Hadfield clambered through the smoking debris to rescue the Blessed Sacrament, and then carry it on his bike through the blackout and continued bombing and fires of the night to Westminster Cathedral.<br /><br />The Monster Tavern was also bombed out that night, a relic of the bygone more pastoral past of Pimlico - it had set up as a rival to 'Jenny's whim' - a tea garden and drinking house on the pimlico side of Ebury Bridge in the then fields between Chelsea and Westminster. Among the ponds and flower beds, clever spring devices released effigies of grotesque animals and theatrical characters to surprise patrons. The Monster tavern gained it's name by adopting similiar terrifying displays but kept going into the 20th century. In the book I have 'Blitz over Westminster' - photographs showing bombed out sites with casualty numbers and reference numbers to the reports made of bombs dropped - even the remains of the Monster Tavern just looks like a pub not the dark dreamlike place of entertainment I imagined.<br /><br />With no home the Holy Apostles Church continued to hold services in another bombed site, and after the war in a prefab hut on their old site. This was then requisitioned for the Churchill Garden estate and the future of the Holy Apostles Church looked very uncertain. Canon Hadfield again cycled around at night planting 'miraculous medals' on bombed sites to demand to build a new church. I spend ages trying to find out about this character, consulting the Catholic Herald Archive, trawling through a whole history of catholic ramblers, even phoning the Holy Apostles Church for a copy of their history. The lady on the phone says they have run out, she has even given her own copy away and gives me a few numbers to try. No one rings me back.<br /><br />All I find is that this Yorkshire man Canon Hadfield '<span style="font-style:italic;">was</span> Pimlico' and it was his determination that obtained the Cumberland/Winchester St site. He then got his architect father's Sheffield based firm to design the new church. It opened in 1957. Described by a more recent friar as a false tooth in the orderly splendour of Winchester and Cumberland Streets - 'But in our case it is a beautiful false tooth especially when viewed from Cumberland St.'<br /><br />In the playground I am able to talk about War and Peace with the Russian mum that exh and I christened momdel. She is beautiful. I am certain she has been a model at some point but since our eldest children started school together she has been studying english literature. She finished her MA in the summer. She said her mother who is staying now to help with the children is horrified by the dirt on her crockery because she puts a book on the taps to read whilst washing up. I said maybe we should buy those transparent recipe book holders and read through most of the housework.<br /><br />But oh, it is so good:<br /><br />'Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told about soldiers in a shelter under fire with nothing to do, trying their best to keep busy and thus make the danger easier to bear. and Pierre pictured all men as soldiers like these, escaping from life through ambition, cards, law-making, women, little playthings, horses, politics, sport, wine, even government service. 'Everything matters, nothing matters, it's all the same. If I can only escape, one way or another!' Thought Pierre . 'And not see <span style="font-style:italic;">it</span>, the terrible <span style="font-style:italic;">it</span>.'<br /><br /><br />On the way back from school the children find a huge clean empty cardboard box on the street. They plead with me to be allowed to take it home, they want to build a tank. We take it in turns to carry it though it is a big as me and double the size of the youngest. Civil servants smile as with arms spread wide he manages to walk it along the pavement. Huge in our tiny flat, they play in it for days, muffled games overheard, friends coming to play disappearing into it's well armoured depths.<br /><br /><br />Another day on our way back from St James's park climbing trees my eldest son tells me that his class had to write what they would like to be when they grow up. He says his best friend wrote down artist and that he wrote he would like to be a soldier or an explorer. I wince. A friend's son who has always wanted to be a soldier is now 15. She is an artist, a brilliant single mum. I have watched at her sidelines as he escalates his once childish obsession to nearly become a career. Once I said ridiculously, hopelessly, ludicrously - I couldn't bear him to go to war. Another friend - formerly known as FB quite rightly snapped at me reminding me to think how she felt. I thought I had. But I couldn't. But my son says his friend Rami says he would like to be a pilot so that when the 'mighty war' does come he can fly his family to safety.<br /><br />oh, I think, with fear. oh.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-14400432599554902011-08-28T05:31:00.001-07:002011-09-22T16:23:18.830-07:00St Anne's SohoI wear my I heart London hoodie with some leather-look shorts I got free from work and some sparkly tights and get the bus up to Soho on a Sunday morning. I love what I am wearing. I feel jaunty and perky and somehow witty. Though I probably look ridiculous. It has been a theme since the breakdown of my marriage that I have enjoyed clothes even more whilst trying to spend as little as I can. Bright clashing colours, a rainbow selection of tights, higher and higher heels, sequins, shorts, a jumpsuit - careful purchases made on ebay and at the sales, occasional ( but not many) grit the teeth full price purchases. The confidence of my clothes is like a disguise of who I am. Or just an illustration of the mad bravery with which I believe I conduct my life, all showy and ridiculous and based on almost nothing. Though sometimes I have thought the brighter the outfit the more invisible I am. For a while, age, circumstances, isolation it felt like no one noticed me anymore and despite the mad, garish waving, I started to enjoy my secret agent special mission- to become completely invisible in bright colours and hotpants. Though I could make myself laugh with the nuttiness, could make myself laugh with a crazy combination, could gain so much pleasure from the surprise of colours together and yet no one ever seemed to bat an eyelid. My mum was horrified by an exposed zip on a red dress but it was the zip that was worrying her not the red And yet it all seems so shallow. I wondered if I looked like someone obsessed by clothes ( though I am), someone who cared only about shopping ( which I am not), as if perhaps I dressed like someone I wouldn't perhaps like. Occasionally people talk to me as if I am an idiot or a child and I realise the disguise of my clothes have done their job.<br /><br />When I walk off the street into St Anne's Church Soho, I haven't really thought through what I am doing. The outside of the church is flat to the street, more like the entrance to a church hall. It is Sunday so I imagine there is a good chance of getting in and indeed a sign on the pavement says 'Church Open' so I walk down a stone passageway to where I can hear singing. The paving stones are old. I think I can just loiter by the door until the service is over or peer through and sit at the back. I can see a room at the end of the passageway with chairs and tea cups laid out and a reception area - so it is a complete surprise to be ambushed from the side by a verger with a service sheet and ushered to a chair in a carpeted room, like a large lounge with an altar piece in it. Communion is just being blessed, and I am sat at the side of the room alongside the altar but not facing it, like a naughty step for late comers. The congregation of about 11 ( which seems large in this small room) all face the altar and the vicar, blessing the wine and wafers, all peer at me in my I heart London hoodie. I feel a bit of a fool. As if I look like the worst sort of tourist. Someone who just gapes and moves on.<br /><br />Then a man appears at the doorway that I have just come through, that I am sat beside and beckons me out. I have been found out I think panicking. But of what!? I wonder later. I don't have to believe in God to be here. The man, about my own age, good looking starts saying talking intently to me - indicating we should go to a room at the back of the church. 'I have just walked in off the street.' I say. 'I just wanted to have a look.' 'You're not Karen?' He says. 'No.' ( so of all the names that I might, just might be called that is not it ) He apologises and leads me back to my seat. I am peered at again, but it is not unfriendly, just attentive to detail. <br /><br />Once after exh had left but was still drinking I got him to babysit while I went to an Al anon meeting. They are the meetings for families and friends of alcoholics. I wanted help with the impact of exh's alcoholism on the boys. Or I just wanted help. In a forlorn church basement a similar mismatched group of 11 all sat, disciples arched around empty chairs. I did think oh bloody hell I never wanted to be here and I remembered a friend saying someone she knew had been and that AA met down the hall and it sounded much more fun. But just like writing this I thought - face it. You are in on this. You are involved. Every time you take a step to telling the truth it gets better. These meetings are secret but I wanted to say how warmly I was welcomed and how kind and considerate they were of each other - though it became apparent they were a sort of family - they had know each other for years. Go to a bigger group they told me, we are too comfortable here. I look back into that room in my mind and see a rather disparate group of people but they had become a true family for they told and accepted each others truth and understood the extreme velcro of their attachments. I remember a very damaged seeming woman saying, yes, good, get ok for the children and another ( very like me, indeed ) stood slightly reluctantly but then talked with passion about how she had become well and how she had first come to this group when she was pregnant with her second baby and that child was now in it's late twenties. Their encouragement was really valuable to me. Though I never went back. Something happened after that and exh no longer had unsupervised access for a while so there was no babysitting anymore and by the time he did again I thought I was ok. I remembered this suddenly in this carpeted room with people queueing for communion and in my anxieties to make a good relationship now, and my fears that I am only capable of making a bad one I think should I go back again. That I need some sort of family to watch me wisely.<br /><br />Out of the church I wander home. I don't have the boys for the weekend and feel aimless. On a whim I go into the National Gallery - I just think I'll do a whistlestop tour of my favourite paintings, aiming for Courbet. There are such fantastic paintings there, Velazquez 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary', Titian 'The Death of Actaeon', a beautiful new Monet with sunset light and some fascinating Norwegian landscape painter Peder Balke that I have never heard of - almost japanese in his brush strokes - whose career as a painter foundered because of his lack of success though he privately continued with these intimate and passionate landscapes perhaps daring more. I end with 'Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine' by Courbet with their disturbing trotter limbs. I feel connected and buzzing. How often I forget if you see or engage with great things you can feel better.<br /><br />This summer I have felt very down. Almost despairing. I have been working too hard and I have felt exhausted. The balance of my life has felt wrong, in need of adjustment.<br /> <br />Though I have been meaning to boast for a while that I am reading War and Peace. After Jonathan Franzen - who seemed to refer to it a lot - and another friend with a fabulous child heart raved about it - I thought it best be done. I never cared for Anna Karenina though I think I read it twice - but this is the most amazing writing, most fantastic tale. I have always thought I was a I 'heart' Dostoyevsky girl with his dense psychological currents of the soul but here the writing is almost transparent, a clean camera eye, swivelling to describe a whole battlefield, turning to the petty conceits of a soiree, gathering together the trifling mistakes that can become a marriage. I am still less than half the way through ( I read it in short bursts on the tube ) but oh, I am pleased I have left it until now - when I was young I would have wolfed it down and not taken time to admire the immensity and beauty of it. I think when I have finished it I will just start again. Set myself to read it every year.<br /><br />When I get home and read about the church I realise I haven't understood at all. The church is much much older than I imagined - consecrated in 1686 but bombed out during the blitz. It lay between Wardour St and Dean St and there is still a proper church facade and a churchyard on the Wardour Street side opened as St Anne's gardens. Though I hadn't seen this, have never noticed it. Built in the fields of Soho - Christopher Wren or William Talman are said to be the architects - though there seems to be difficulty in assigning authorship - later repairs in 1830 caused James Savage the architect and surveyor 'to criticize Talman's incapacity on the assumption that he was the designer of the roof, contrasting it with Wren's superficially similar 'Master piece of construction' at St. James's: for 'Mr Talman at St. Anne's has missed the proper Principle of constructing a roof of this form'.<br /><br />During the war the church was hit twice during savage raids - 24th September 1940 and then again on May 10th 1941 ( an intense night of bombing. 300 german bombers arriving over London on a moonlit night, 110 killed and 385 seriously injured in the raids.) That night a bomb passed right through a block of flats opposite my son's school into the earth. It exploded on the clay of the ancient foundations of the old Millbank prison bringing down 24 flats. 24 died though 20 people trapped in a shelter were rescued after an hour and a half digging. Then in February 1944 ( which I include because it is such a poignant and revealing description) 'In the shadow of St Anne's sad but beautiful ruin' there was another bomb nearby. 'A gas main was alight opposite, a mound of brown earth steamed where a small club, fortunately unfilled at that time, had been accomodated: up Wardour Street firemen trailed their hoses among dress maker's dummies; on the trees in St Anne's churchyard hung a tattering of scarecrow garments blasted from a second hand clothiers. The Prime Minster arrived and talked with rescuers and rescued. It was a cold February night: firelight, water on the streets, a woman sobbing dark in a doorway, a great kernel of activity gradually decreasing as the incident was cleared and the night wore on.' The Blitz Westminster at War. William Sansom<br /><br />Afterwards, between 1941 and 1958 the church promoted a link between the church and the literary world with the St Anne's Society meeting at St Anne's house - Agatha Christie and T.S. Elliott attended meetings and the ashes of Dorothy L Sayers ( a longtime church warden ) are buried deep beneath a brick chamber under the tower.<br /><br /> By 1953 it was thought the church would not be re built and the remains of the east wall were demolished, the site deconsecrated and prepared for sale. In the 60s as Piccadilly became a centre for drug addicts Ken Leech a priest on the staff of St Anne's opened a temporary night shelter for the homeless in the basement of St Anne's house. Soho had become a troubled place 'The site of the Church was a car park. The Parish School in Great Windmill Street was threatened with closure. The sex industry had taken over the area and the local authority was moving tenants out of Soho'. The Soho Society ( a group formed in the early 70s to stop the demoliton and redevelopment of Soho) restored the tower in 1979. 'Let people know that life and heart and hope are in Soho', wrote John Betjeman, patron of the fund raising appeal.<br /><br />By 1990 the church was rebuilt with a community centre and flats. By 1999 it was a place of community focus for the grief connected to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan.<br /><br />I go back just to look at the building I had not seen, to visit the churchyard. It is early evening in Soho. I can glimpse further down Wardour street throngs of people, bright lights and rainbow flags. The churchyard is gated - almost armed against intrusion - and I realise I have walked past hundreds of times and not noticed the garden or the chuchyard. I peer through the smell of piss and the mesh of the gate and the surprise of the church facade and tower. Hazlitt I see in huge lettering on a tomb. A couple argue rather theatrically about cigarettes by the wall of the churchyard. I don't know if they are friends or lovers but I think he is gay and she is kidding herself about something.<br /><br />Amen.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-58031743270485391502011-07-07T17:48:00.000-07:002011-08-28T07:31:51.662-07:00St Paul's Covent GardenThe day before it was announced the News of The World would close I had to leave work - the story gathering momentum on the overhead tv in the office - and rush rush rush to the Wigmore Hall in a lunch break I rarely take to see my son in a school choir sing a song composed at school with musicians from Wigmore Hall about being evacuated from London during World War II.
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<br />It was beautiful and moving to be there in the middle of my working day - to see bright faces and young voices on a stage singing about war. Though there were choirs of old people singing too - watching the children with stoic kindness and patience to the unfeasibly cheerful interpretations of terrifying events some of them had witnessed.
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<br />Back under the telly I am slightly breathless from squeezing an hour lunch break into the hour and a half rush it took and the NOTW story gathers momentum. Each news bulletin reports advertisers refusing to advertise with a newspaper that hacked the phones of young girls who had been murdered and soldiers that had been killed. Remember I work for a rival Sunday tabloid magazine with a tiny budget. I sit at the end of the newspapers news desk underneath the tv attached high up to the ceiling and if it fell it would land on my head. Often I hear stories as they come in before anyone else notices, though I rarely crick my neck to turn to see it because I am usually too busy. Though sometimes I have watched while journalists start to notice or gather around the tv up to 10 minutes later, heads tilted, mouths slightly slack or sometimes chewing.
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<br />The day it was announced the NOTW would close I notice the ticker tape underneath the picture of the tv screen saying the last edition of the News of the World would be this coming Sunday. My eyebrows are Gromit-like with shock. Then furrowed as the men gather opposite the screen shouting 'Fuck fuck fuck.' Over and over. I fiddle with my phone daring myself to take a picture of them but I don't. Someone is shouting 'Who is she fucking?' as the report of Rebecca Brooks breaking the news to the workforce of over 200 comes in. It really looks like she had been saved while others thrown overboard. Indeed even to this day it seems if she had gone they might might have saved something. A couple of journalists who had worked briefly for the NOTW caw caw with glee. It was never a nice place to work. Though no one was surprised by the hacking accusations. I think we had always known enough to know it was probably true. How did they get the stories otherwise?
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<br />I start writing this post just after the NOTW closure. It's going to be a good one I think. I am an eye witness I think. But my computer starts behaving badly and I can't seem to save onto the blog, and I haven't been to a church and then like a tidal wave the knock on effect reaches me. The small cheap but densely worked on magazine doubles overnight. We work flat out until 10pm. The staff of about 6 people. We congratulate ourselves as the bumper issue goes to press. Then a day later a completely new bumper glossy fat magazine is demanded and we worked until 2am as the mice scamper in the office. I cycle back that night on a Boris Bike but it is a beautiful straight line out from the City of London to Westminter passing church after church and Christopher Wren's St Paul's is like a ghostly white whale passed in a dark ocean and I think oh it is beautiful - and despite my tiredness - briefly feel somehow I am in the right place.
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<br />The following lunchtime we are told we have done the wrong sort of magazine and another is produced in 2 hours. Later when the Murdochs are challenged by custard and questions we work flat out to produce this new glossy celebrity magazine week after week still with a staff of 6. The question to be asked is why did you not wonder why your newspaper was so outrageously better than the competitors? I don't think it was asked or answered.
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<br />Standing manning a stall at the school bazaar to throw wet sponges at teachers poking their heads through a painted board I get texts saying the office has been raided by the police searching the computer of an ex NOTW journo who sits near my desk at the weekend. It seems ludicrous though I wish I hadn't missed 'the action'.
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<br />Timing has become a blur but in the middle of all this my Indonesian friend leaves her husband appearing at my door sobbing with her son and they sleep in my bed as I drink wine guiltily at my small computer desk trying to get this written. Though they have gone by the time we wake up the next morning.
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<br />By the time school breaks up 2 issues of the new magazine have been completed and I have been working until 9 or 10 everynight, doing extra days too. Exh has looked after the boys as I come home late but preparations and cleaning for the holidays are behind. We go camping in a friend's ( huge ) garden in Norfolk and I organise fashion shoots by mobile phone while my sons make amazing shelters by the side of a dank smelling stream. I am near exhaustion. But I have become a strangely welcome person at social events. A talking head, our man on the ground - my slightly strange and reviled world, like insects under a stone, suddenly revealed, examined and interesting.
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<br />Then it is the annual camp to Dorset and I still haven't been to a church. I am missing the moment I think ruefully as I pack sleeping bags and folding kitchen cupboards, consulting my camping checklist, ticking corkscrew, washing up liquid, matches, first aid kit. I am organised in a disorganised way and when I write this I am not sure which way round the sentence should go. By the coast in Dorset the children are allowed idyllic freedom to play in hay bales, explore, fish in rockpools, walk dogs and we sit at campfires every night. Text reports start coming in that London is burning. It seem overdramatic and unlikely. But suddenly everyone is texting the same thing and everyone is scared. My friend in Notting Hills says that a crowd is rampaging down her street with baseball bats, burning a motorbike and breaking windows, and that a black girl she talked to said - 'We all just hate Cameron.' The riot police collect in a church at the end of her street. From the distance of the warmth of a campfire in a field and with no images I imagine it to be organised and political, those spidery violent bloc kids banging their staves down wealthy streets, an organised mob realising numbers are on their side. I know if I was young I would find it exciting but I would want to know what I was aiming for - to tip the world so dangerously. But when I come back and look at news reports it just looks really nasty, a hooded mob flexing it's muscles and the desire for desirable things itself burning capitalism down. I like Pauline Pearce who stood in a rioting crowd in Hackney 'We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker...if we are fighting for a cause let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me off.' I don't know. Some people do have a lot more than others. Though a lot of us have the same sort of things. It is opportunity that is missing. And this was an opportunity for some. And just excitement too. I think that property has made the haves and the have no hope of having more extreme though really it would be possible for everyone to easily have enough. People with nothing are working really hard and people with lots are too. Both eye other's lives angrily.
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<br />The boys give me a 'I heart LONDON' hoodie for my birthday. I have always wanted one. But the day I get it is ironic.
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<br />Back in London I am given a couple of hours to buy my son's birthday present. London is full of exhausted coppers from all across the country. I have a quick drink with UL and walk through the beautiful and sweet smelling rose garden into St Paul's Church in Covent Garden. In a big airy space there are singers practising for a concert. Pure voices singing Agnus Dei 'The Lamb of God.' Known as the Actor's Church there are tablets and inscriptions to many famous names. Just glancing around I see engraved plaques to Noel Coward and Vivian Leigh and then sit at a pew not thinking anything very much apart from it is nice just to sit and not rush, not wash up in a field, not be cross with children, not be cross, just not do anything. The church was designed by Inigo Jones as part of the development on the site of an old walled garden belonging to Westminster Abbey commisioned by Francis Russell 4th Earl of Bedford to build a square for the gentry. Inigo based his designs on what he had seen on his Italian travels and the vast square became a template for town planning. The first victim of the plague was buried here - Margaret Ponteous 1665 and J. M. W. Turner baptised here too.
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<br />I discover that Thomas Manton, the first minister was a puritan who had to leave under the Great Ejection of 1662 when 2.000 members of the clergy refused to sign the Act of Uniformity oath agreeing to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Only repreived in 1872 by the Act of Uniformity Amendment the efforts to outlaw non conformists left many clergy out of service and out of society. I want to cover this and read this. But I just don't have time.
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<br />http://www.archive.org/details/nonconformistsm00calagoog
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<br />Samuel Pepys notes the first 'Italian puppet play' seen under the portico of St Paul's on 9 May 1662 - the first recorded performance of 'Punch and Judy' commorated by the annual MayFayre service in May.
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<br />When I walk out of the church to the front of the portico there is a shouting escapologist in chains surrounded by a large cheering crowd.
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<br />My Indonesian friend shyly borrows the boy's disco light. Her husband wants to go clubbing with her like they used to do before they were married. It would mean she had to take the scarf from her hair and she is frightened. She thinks the disco light is a start. That evening I try to imagine their small flat with the coloured lights revolving, then hesitate from intruding on their lives. Though I do by writing about them.
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<br />Amen.
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<br />amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-40349525728749402302011-06-19T15:02:00.001-07:002011-07-20T16:17:07.530-07:00Queen's Chapel, St James'sI go back to Rymans and buy purple stickers then stick them on the map to mark the churches I have been to. Dark dots radiating out from Westminster Abbey, clustering near the centre then broadening out into Pimlico, Chelsea, Mayfair and two stray dots south of the river. The only yellow dot ( marking churches I haven't been to on this street map of London) surrounded by purple ones still is the Queen's Chapel at St James's. I have tried a couple of times to get in, but it is only open on Sundays for services and is only open certain months of the year.<br /><br />I try again when the boys are away with exh and his mum, though I haven't finished writing Corpus Christi. I think oh good I am going to speed the whole project up, go back to visiting a church a week, mainly write about the churches IT IS GOING TO BE GREAT I THINK.<br />The night before UL and I drink too much, argue, cry and then walk through London in the middle of the night, holding hands. It feels way too dramatic for the sort of people we are really. When we were together we never spoke much of love or ourselves - we just were. We did things side by side and we allowed each other enormous personal freedom. By the end I wanted to talk about love, I wanted a plan. I probably sat like a slightly intense puppy waiting for that ball - but it never came. Now and completely unexpectedly it has been dropped at my feet. <br /><br />I wake that sunday morning way too early feeling delicate and slightly desperate. The flat is quiet. This would be my life without the children I think and it feels unbearable. All that myself. All that not them. For they are so completely and utterly fascinating to me. I am not sure if at the core of me is depression or joy sometimes but having limitations to being me - all that thinking about myself - the worry and energy and slight paranoia and over bearing generosity - seems more manageable spread out and focussed on two clever bright and funny boys. I wonder how I will suffer when they've had enough, grown out of it completely - and it is a title for something - all that me. Though - and possibly because so much of myself has been provided - they are nonchalent and rebellious of it already. But adapting at each age from the tiny dry and nervous papery nappies of new borns and the beat of their sparrow hearts under soft baby gros to the seemingly endless school uniform trousers growing too short and feet too big for trainers and vivid moments when I turn to watch them, sometimes just briefly, with absolute wonder and pride and laughter. I hope when the time comes it will just be a new stage. Somedays I shout at them. ' You NEED to grow up to be smart, clever, funny, kind young men.' YOU CAN DO IT!' And oh oh oh I hope they do.<br /><br />I walk through St James's Park on a sunday morning and it is packed. There is a royal wedding knock on to tourism. The crowds are thronging. Enthusiastic about where they are. Though all the flags are gone and the flesh of the pink tarmac where that beautiful and jaunty navy Aston Martin drove is slightly naked without them.<br /><br />The Queen's Chapel is tucked at the side of the little street alongside St James's Palace on the opposite side. A white house flat to the street - nicely proportioned, a simple gable roof, large windows like wide-opened eyes and a high forehead. There is a verger standing outside the chapel and when I nod to her and ask if it is ok to come in, she takes me in and seats me. It is hushed and wealthy, though less secret than the dark surprise of the packed Chapel Royal which is it's sister church. This Chapel is open in the summer the other - the Chapel Royal in the winter. Here light pours in from huge windows of blurry old leaded glass, and the ceiling though strangely only half gilded is oppulent. There is rich gold plates at the altar and a painting. I spend ages looking at this picture trying to work out what it is before realising I should put my glasses on. When I do I see a mother and baby with another child and I can't remember what I thought it was before I could see it. It had just seemed a mystery. The organ is playing majestically. A woman on her own, of roughly the same age and reassuringly not grand is seated next to me. I think wouldn't it be funny if we were doing the same thing. Then I think what if she were a 'mystery worshipper'. You would probably need to be a dedicated reader to know who 'Mystery worshipper' is? But there is a site<br />http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/specials/london_05/index.html<br />that reviews church services and early on, when I first went very fearfully into churches, avoiding services, barely getting into them at all I seemed to be in their wake. Early on my friend even said if your life was a film - mystery worshipper would be the romantic interest. Though at that point I didn't know I needed one.<br /><br />At the back I can see the choir and clergy gather in the sunshine of the pavement before the procession down the aisle. I recognise some of them from before, the little mice boys, the man with the black folded and pleated sleeves but it is less surprising, less Alice in Wonderland. The establishment of establishment is more open here because it is daylight and also because we face forwards towards the altar not each other watching the procession. Maybe too the trappings of establishment have had a resurgence, even since I wrote the Chapel Royal - standing alongside a ladder at the Royal Wedding watching golden coaches and soldiers I was moved by the continuity of history and the acceptance of it even if I didn't really believe what I was being moved by or tacitly accepting.<br /><br />Next to this other woman - strangely more like me than I anticipate in this church - and someone who also declines the communion offered when the congregation rises and queues at the altar. I sense a relief from both of us - I am pleased not to be the only outsider and she must be pleased I don't need to clamber past her to get to the altar. Or both. <br /><br />As communion is taken the choir sing Tallis. Thomas Tallis was part of the Chapel Royal ( living within St James's Palace) from 1543 and composed and performed for Henry V111, Edward V1, Mary 1 and Elizabeth 1 (1558 until he died in 1585). As composer and organist under the royal wing he managed to avoid the religious controversies of the times though he remained an unreformed roman catholic. It was a difficult and suspicious position to be. Early in his career he was part of the monastery at Holy Cross in Waltham until the abbey was dissovled in 1540. There he acquired a volume of treatises by Leonel Power at this dissolution and preserved it - one of the treatise prohibited consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves. Later Queen Elizabeth granted him and Byrd 21 years sole rights to compose polyphonic music from 1575 and a patent to print and publish music too, which was one of the first arrangements of that type in the country. I struggle to understand this. The restrictions sound very tight. UL is a muscian and when I ask him he sends me a thoughtful essay explaining the central ideas of of sacred proportion, of chiming simple notes perfectly.<br /><br />In the service with the beautiful music and the choir's voices building one of those boys - not much older than my son and with reassuringly scruffy hair and a thoughtful but not goody goody expression, opens his mouth, and this sound of gold and heaven and height soars out - his eyes slightly baffled by the voice he posseses.<br /><br /> I think the personal restriction of having a family has made me happier, more fulfilled, more open to people, more keen on joy. <br /> <br />At a time when Catholic worship was illegal in England The Queen's Chapel was built as a roman catholic place of worship for the Spanish Infanta to aid negotiations in a potential marriage with Charles 1 that fell through. Though it was then used for the wife he married - the french catholic Henrietta Maria. The beautiful building was completed in 1629 causing resentment and suspicion, indeed it's plain exterior was meant to deflect this outcry. But in troubled times it contributed to the conflict that eventually erupted between Charles and Parliament into the English Civil War and Charles 1's eventual execution infront of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall. <br /><br />Both the Queen's Chapel and the Banqueting house were designed by Inigo Jones - a welsh catholic cloth makers son who travelled in Italy studying architecture with 'Collector' Earl of Arundel. He brought a version of the Italian architect Palladio's work home and translated it into early Palladianism here in England. Based on the proportion and symmetry of formal classical temples of the Ancient Greeks and Romans Inigo Jones fascination even led him to our own ancient structures - he was the first to measure Stonehenge. I don't know why - I find the scene, those old stones on a windswept plain being studied by a man in the thrall of classical mathematics beautiful and mysterious. <br /><br />Walking back from dropping the boys off at school one morning I hear and then see a horse drawn cart move across the traffic lights crossroads of Horseferry Road and Marsham Street, I have been deep in thought about the boys, about writing this, about all the things that make my life. I look up and laugh as if there is a tear in modern life and some old bit of history is coming towards me, two beautiful horses pulling this open carriage with two men in top hats perched high. On our street, on the thin dark street that Charles Dickens called 'Devil's Acre' the street where my sons have said that they are scared by something - it feels dark to them - a building oppposite has been taken over by a pack of youth. I wonder if they are squattting. They sit and smoke at the huge windows and watch people pass below though my brother who is a surveyer came to dinner one night ( roast chicken, gratin dauphinoise and salad) and texted me as he left to say that he forgot to tell me his company surveyed a brothel down here. I think how funny, the ground is the same, this dark street has not changed.<br /><br />Amenamenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-65644293743251017652011-06-11T05:29:00.000-07:002011-06-28T13:50:50.010-07:00Corpus Christi Covent GardenI buy a street map of London and a pack of fluorescent yellow dot stickers. The boys and I lay the map out on the kitchen table and 'spot' the cross symbols of churches dotted across London. I don't ask them to help but they want to. I am trying to sort out a plan. Where to go to next, how far to go. We take it in turns to laugh uproariously at the amount of stickers used, the amount of churches found, the amount of yellow circles covering the map. There are over a 150 churches that I haven't visited in a central London area stretching from St John's Wood in the North and Kennington in the South then Earl's Court in the West to Whitchapel in the East. Even later when all of us are doing other things, the map is still laid out and we take it in turns<br /> to chuckle as we pass by the table at mum's crazy plan, at the exhausting look of it, at the density of churches in this city. These children have barely ever been to a church, do not really understand what I am up to, but are almost giddy with the madness of the challenge laid out. 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Maddox Ford is one of my favourite novels - the surface tension of the story as tight as a stretched balloon, the bleakness written with an ominous lilting charm, the structure held by spokes of taut engineering - and in it a description of a man lining up a polo shot, an affair, the sidelong squint of concentration and determination - the 'it might just be done' glance. I feel like that now. I am washing up, tidying up, but when I see the map, I stop briefly, suck in my breath and think that 'it might' a pause, 'just be done'.<br /><br />Since the Royal Wedding I have been suffering a kind of 'low' about my own project. I sort of wished I had stopped then - it would have been roughly a year and would have been a decent ending - a bit of a fanfare finale. I would have been able to hold my head up high that I had the discipline to carry it out and that I had learnt so much by doing it. Though as soon as I left Rymans I realised I should have bought another colour sticker for the churches I have visited and mark them too. But even without I am impressed by the shape made in the midst of the constellation of bright dots for with very little research or plan, just a nosing around, I seem to have caught almost all the local churches in this spiralling net. There is just one Pimlico church left out, left to do, right out towards the river. <br /><br />I regret now I haven't taken pictures of each church, I regret sometimes too that I haven't just written dry descriptions of each building not muddled myself within their stories. I have become sick of my own slightly melodic moaning - for my rage with exh seems quietly and unexpectedly to have passed. Initially I shocked myself by my own repeated and public telling of the events within our family for what started a quiet painful whisper when I didn't know anyone would read it became a strident and public banging of pots and pans as I knew they were. I hoped and imagined it could help someone else in the same situation - someone struggling with a drunken partner, someone stuck in something they knew they had to escape from - and I still hope this is true. But I woke up one morning recently and thought I am not angry any more, I am repeating myself, it has to stop, the story has to shift, move on, become a better one. I apologise to exh for telling it, but I also wonder if it has been the shortest and cheapest way for me to recover from what happened. I needed to tell it. I needed to come back from the isolation of survival to some sort of acceptance.<br /><br />At my friend's birthday party standing in a beautiful room in towering high heels and a glass of white wine in my hand with many beautiful women wearing party dresses and handsome urbane men chatting I suddenly realise with humour and horror that some of them know about the fat that hung over my knickers but I am not certain which ones. It makes it hard for me to look people in the eye, worrying that they can only pity me. A failed marriage, a single mum, breadline existence AND the detailed description of that hanging fat. Like those puzzles I had as a child where you searched for faces hidden within the picture there is a shifting searching of their expressions to try and spot who knows. Mainly I feel proud, really proud of what I have achieved by our family's recovery but interested too by my attempt to describe what Diane Arbus called 'What's left after what one isn't is taken is what one is'.<br /> <br />Now I feel I am tipping into a new madness, I want to go to ALL these churches - I want to discover their stories, I am fascinated by the history they tell. Even sometimes passing churches at the edges of surburban London travelling somewhere in the car I think - hmm interesting, how long will it take me to get there? I should get on with my second novel, should try and make more money, Even fiddle with the first one again. But something about being obedient to the task set is attractive. I would like to visit all of them. <br /><br />Though when I write that I feel exhausted.<br /><br />In my mapping London book there is a large and beautiful watercolour drawing showing a bird's eye view of the City of London circa 1810 - called the Rhinebeck Panorama - it shows opulent boats crowded on the Thames alongside the Tower of London and infront of the many many spired City. Behind this dense cluster of towers and spires the dome of St Pauls can be seen, even Westminster Abbey in the distance, then London petering out to fields and gentle hills. Ever since I've seen this picture I have thought I would love to match the spires and towers of this old City of London to the churches that still exist today. So maybe that is my plan. The extent of my ambition. I work in the City and look around some days going up to Waterstone's to buy a new book to read to the boys, or a quick look in New Look and there are churches tucked in corners everywhere, squeezed amidst the glass and steel and concrete of the modern buildings. But though it is completely obvious it takes a while for the simple truth to dawn on me the steeples and turrets are hidden now in the height of office blocks, nuzzled alongside banks, an occasional scrap of view appearing overhead. Here in this panaroma the churches that reach up to the sky from low lying buildings are the awe of the skyline. I wonder about the history of London's horizon- of the first spire to The Shard. Man's ambition and attempts at glory. Initially a symbol of the heavenly aspirations of pious medieval men the word is derived from the Old English word spir, meaning a sprout, shoot, or stalk of grass. Though surely a phallic possession of the sky, a boast of power too.<br /><br />http://www.artfund.org/artwork/7179/the-rhinebeck-panorama-of-london<br /><br />I discover that the Rhinebeck Panorama is at the Museum of London. That the four sheets were found in the barrel of a pistol in 1941 in America and sold to the museum in 1998. UL and I go to see it. We don't have much time. We never have much time. And sometimes we squander the time we have with misunderstandings and the savagery of old hurts. At the Museum of London we are almost shy in the public light of day but race alongside through the exhibits looking for the picture - ignoring the prehistoric remains, the romans ruins, the medieval section- we miss a whole floor of history, much of the history before there were churches at all until I spot the Panorama up high. Initially I am disappointed. It isn't as sharp as the reproduction I have in the book or as big as somehow I hoped and it is hard to see, with a lot of reflected light. We look slowly, there are tiny soldiers training, a fire has burst out in a South London building and with a 'Where's Wally' instruction the label says can you find a man flying a kite - though we don't. Then I discover magnifying sheets at the side of the picture and with these angled carefully towards the picture it becomes a minature world, almost 3D, the tone and detailed shadows of the architecture like stage sets, the churches like the weft of the fabric of the city. It is fantastic and the pair of us are animated and exuberant by our curiousity and sense of discovery.<br /><br />I am onto something I think and I feel excited to be on route to the churches of the City to have a map of what is possible, what is there.<br /><br />I take a Boris Bike up Whitehall, past Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden. It is hot and beautiful. I want to visit St Paul's Covent Garden and also find out about the opening times for the Savoy chapel I know! A church with a hotel! I wouldn't have known about it without my map. But I have placed yellow spots on both. I nose the bike around the cobbled streets of Covent Garden glimpsing St Paul's church initially set back from the road, through a gate with a garden infront of it. I have never ever noticed it before, As I cycle round I realise it's other entrance is on the palazzo of Covent Garden behind a cheering crowd for a clowning acrobat. I go to park the bike, passing a church I didn't know was there, hadn't spotted on my map.<br /><br />There is a heavy bodied helicopter hovering stationary just a bit further on but almost over head. I like seeing helicopters just above I like the sensation of changed perspective, of being in aquarium, of layers of air above, of something heavy being held still. The docking bay is full. I weave the bike further up, even nearer to the helicopter, almost to Waterloo Bridge, the helicopter is straight overhead now, giving the air a density and the distance of the sky a scale, and again the docking bay is full. I start out again then realise that the Strand has been completely taped off, that there are fire engines and ambulances everywhere and police at every junction, some still taping the roads off. It looks like a newspaper picture of a bomb attack. But there is little urgency to the movements of the emergency services. I check a map but can't see where else to leave the bike, I have to wait until someone ( a Spanish women fiddling with her credit card) takes one. A young american man, just behind me pulls up on a bike and says, I hate this city and we laugh. l go to explore around the Savoy Chapel to keep an eye on whatever is happening here. Then worry I will be caught up in an explosion because I am nosy. The Savoy Chapel, tucked behind the Savoy in a garden should be open but isn't. I cross the Strand again to walk up to St Paul's and the road is now taped off back to Trafalgar Square, policemen loitering on traffic islands. I can see light grey smoke above a high building in the centre of Aldwych that looks like a building site and as I watch the dove grey talc gives way to billows of black smoke. But I think it is just a fire not a terrorist attack though I am unable to catch a policeman's eye to ask.<br /><br />At St Pauls there are alcoholics gathered in the courtyard and a sign up saying the church is closed for a memorial service. Oh I think I will have to go to the church, I just glimpsed, the one I know I haven't put a yellow dot on. How strange to have a map and a plan, even options and be left still just finding my way about, to find something unknown, unsupposed. The road has been closed for roadworks with those high metal grilles protecting the pavement and as I walk past a drill shakes the soles of my feet and my teeth and the helicopter is still grinding away overhead. But the church is open, I have to step down to a stone floored vestibule and then open a door and into the quiet grey air of a catholic church. It doesn't feel like being in London, it feels as if I am in Spain or Italy. An american woman accosts me, 'Is there about to be a mass here?' 'I don't know.' I say. Slightly alarmed that there might be.<br /><br />Later I discover that the architect Pownall dropped the church three feet below street level to mollify critics about the height of the church. Built in 1873 nestled between the then Market and the Strand. Maiden Lane was originally a path running along the southern edge of the ‘Covent Garden’ (i.e. Convent Garden) belonging to the monks of Westminster Abbey though later Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli and Voltaire all lived here, the artist J.M.W. Turner was born here, Edward V11 and Lily Langtry dined here, and the celebrated actor of his day, William Terriss was murdered here by a crazed understudy in 1897. Before all this but discovered only fairly recently in excavations from 1985 and 2005 ( for King Alfred's London had been a shifting legend and a mystery ) it seems King Alfred had built a settlement called Lundenwic, a port and town stretching from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Later it looks likely he moved back into the more fortified abandoned roman town of Londinium ( The City), Lundenwic just left, ploughed over reverting to fields. <br /><br />On wooden pews there are a few bent heads in prayer. I sit. There is a rustling at the altar, bright lights being switched on, an attractive asian woman fiddling with flowers and a bible. It starts to look likely that yes, a service is about to start. Outside the helicopter and the roadworks are loud then muffled to a drone as the door of the church is closed. then wide to the noise as it is opened again, then closed like hands over ears.<br /><br />Catholic worship was made legal in 1791 and here in Covent Garden there had been a huge presence of open and closet Catholics including such names as St Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, the Jesuit missioner St Robert Southwell, Mary Ward, foundress of the ISBVM’s, St Claude la Colombiere (who introduced devotion to the Sacred Heart to England), Charles I’s architect Inigo Jones, the poet John Dryden and the composer of ‘Rule Britannia’, Thomas Arne ( Rule Britannia coincidentally written for a musical called Alfred about Alfred the Great ) as well as vast numbers of poor Catholics including large Irish colonies swelled by the Potato Famine - many of them working in the market of Covent Garden and living mainly in Drury Lane or the slums of St Giles’, Holborn and Saffron Hill. Initially the London Oratory was opened for Catholic worship in a former dance hall in King William St Charing Cross in 1849- but moved out to the 'village' of Brompton in 1854. By 1872 the land for Corpus Christi was leased though within a few years slum clearance drove out many of the poorer families, reducing parishioner numbers. Later international guests from the nearby grand hotels brought new visitors and congregations.<br /><br />The church is narrow, as if crammed into an awkward space, thin arches reaching high and spindly to the light of top windows. There is a gentle shabby quietness and slightly yellowing icing sugar walls. Behind me the asian lady has gone into a dark cupboard and I can see the dirty string of a mop and cleaning materials on shelves. At shrines there are candles flickering infront of camp lurid statues. I think about Graham Greene. I feel really really peaceful here. For a minute I think I will stay for the mass but then dither. Stand up. Move across the church, sit again infront of a smaller chapel, the statues skin like pink plastic though plaster, the asian lady eyeing my jumpiness uneasily.<br /><br /><br />I leave. Back on a Boris Bike, weaving around the Strand still ineffectually taped off, back to the Mall. The flags are still draped triumphantly but I realise there is a cherry picker crane taking the huge heavy draped union jacks down. The Royal Family's grand bunting. Their street party over. Two men working together stowing the flags carefully in a van marked Enterprise - Maintaining the Infrastructure of England. As if this infrastructure was the very fabric of englishness created. I imagine the same van turning up around the country checking on scones and jam and clotted cream and roast beefs and victoria sponges and putting deckchairs out in the rain.<br /><br />Amen.amenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3086803628175764646.post-88587636936635466652011-05-15T08:27:00.001-07:002011-06-28T13:45:32.341-07:00St Barnabus PimlicoAnybody who knows me would know that I am the least likely person to put the words Fun and Run together. And yet somehow, I have been volunteered by work to do exactly that - a 5km Fun Run. If only I could write the words as I would say them. Fun Run, the short syllables dragged into sarcasm and withering wonder mixed with fear. <br /><br />For a few weeks I just dreaded it. Then I bought a pair of trainers and a sports bra. Dithered for another week. Finally I looked up 'how to train for a 5km fun run' on the internet and followed the 7 week plan in just over 3 weeks. I run and walk around the lake in St James's Park. Starting at 15 seconds running 40 seconds walking and building to the heady 20 seconds running - 30 seconds walking for 5km. Not really a run more of a run walk but still I have amazed myself - gaining my first exercise high ever and despite aching knees, sticking to the project.<br /><br />Late spring/ early summer in St James's park is beautiful. I feel free. Allowed out. Not at work. Not with children. At certain points I feel strong and connected to myself and my breath. Fearless. Ducks with ducklings, moorhens with chicks and pelicans folded like origami onto rocks. Feet the tick of the circumference. In beautiful planted flower beds tulips drop their petals, their colour textured by wallflowers and the gash of poppies alongside the spires of delphiniums. Young love, office affairs and arguments sit in couples on park benches. A weeping woman says ' I just want to be loved' to a man who eyes the floor. There are many, many different languages. And Buckingham Palace stands cock a hoop with flags and the surprised air of success. At dusk rats in the gloaming slink from view under the refreshment kiosk and at the side of the path as if testing their visibility in the grey furred light. I wonder how evolution has worked that the squirrels can sit on the railings eating a nut being photographed with Britney Spears-dark-eyes-cute to the camera and the rats know to keep cover, out of sight only daring just a little bit more as the park empties. The homeless gather too on benches and under trees, staking a pitch, carrying their careful systems of survival. One man whiskered and brown skinned from extreme outdoors arrives on a bike, plastic bags like swollen ballons packed like panniers, a bucket slung on the handlebars. He parks his bike and sits on a bench and waits. For dark, I assume. A black woman with dusty croc shoes, sits her head bowed into her lap a bag at her side. Not long now.<br /><br />Another evening I see a police car alongside a still prone figure under a tree. In the two laps around the lake it is never clear if it is just a body or still a person. <br /><br />The magazine I work for is full of 'Real Life' stories- plastic surgery, weight loss and weddings ( in any combination really - plastic surgery and weight loss weddings would be ideal.) When I first started working part time on this magazine I was living with an alcoholic husband and angry children, I had left my full time job and our house to try sort out the chaos within our family. Sometimes I wonder now if I tipped up our lives too hastily, if I did more damage with my nutty idealism of happiness and balance. The boys still accuse me 'You made dad leave.' But coming out the other side - I don't know. We could still be there within that madness of alcohol and rage. But I'm not sure how. My little children may have been less damaged by mum and dad splitting up and by the final spiral into alcoholic behaviour but the battles of mum and dad would have been awful. And I'm not sure I would have coped. That hostile and unsafe world was really poisonous to me. I was part of it but I didn't actually create it.<br />Initially I sneered at the magazine, at the stories of simple fat people making their lives better. Oh my harsh soul. Each week I would ring the people up from the case studies persuading them to send pictures of their hospital trips, fat holidays and weddings - before and after, before and after a refrain. I am reasonably slim, of small frame, bigger boobs than I would like, but in the many secrets I had then possibly the final one and who knows - least important - was that my post children tummy sagged as if I was a drugs mule for bags and bags of wet flour. I am not sure I was completely conscious of this but I couldn't see my knickers because they were covered by these drooping rolls of fat. And yet, and yet, I was someone who people assumed to be skinny at least slim. I thought it was just how it was after children, I am not even sure I was aware it was fat.<br /><br />I sat in that office - on a desk which was oddly perched on the end of another department's - like an island, as isolated at work as at home, just observing men putting together a tabloid newspaper - a fascinating, obscenely witty, sometimes disturbing thing. My marriage was on the very brink of being over and I never knew what I would return home to. I worked really hard in that office but somedays I hid tears behind the computer screen and in the brief minutes of freedom between home and work I would always always walk back from the tube crying, it was like I had time quickly to feel what I really felt, before I was back to reading bed time stories and the mayhem of trying to smile at someone who wanted to pick an argument so they could go and get drunk.<br />One day I clicked a link for an internet 'lose your tummy' diet - paid for the download - printed it out, read that I needed to get hold of almost 'pure' not pasturized milk and put it in a drawer. Later, quite a lot later, after we seperated, after we moved from the tiny flat to this one and things were already starting to get better I got it out again and realised these were just guide lines - I could try and make it work with less 'pure' things. Porridge and nuts in the morning, hardly any carbohydrates, no processed food, lots of eggs and avocados, a day off from the diet once a week. Everything was food I liked eating anyhow. The fat slowly retreated. Though I have been on that diet over 2 years now and my tummy is still not perfect but every month it gets a bit better. It has taken so long that I doubt I will every reach a flat tummy but I am proud to have turned it around. To be a simple fat person who made their life better. Alongside everything else there is a physical proof and pride that things can be changed.<br /><br />This morning the beautiful mum that I sometimes walk to school alongside ( clever, funny, elegant and very charming) who once sported the worst black eye I have ever seen on someone at 8 months pregnant ( how does that sentence make sense? how could any bit of the sentence make sense?) said to me ' I feel well. A small window has finally opened.' Her beautiful face lit up. I look at her. She smiles with her eyes. Good I said. Good. A long time ago she confessed some of her homelife to me in the time it took to cross road with the green man flashing. That her husband lay in bed depressed ( she didn't say he hit her, she assumed I knew, for she had averted her eyes with a proud tilt to her chin when I saw that black eye ) that the social services said she was too good a mum to take the children. Get as much help as you can I said. But shortly after she reverted to her smiles and waves and charm. Today we both smiled with our eyes to each other. That is really good news. I said. Yes. She said. I feel like a weight has gone. He has left. Though I wonder why everyone I know round here has some dramatic tale. Are we somehow adrift. Or just poor. Or do I spy it easily? Somehow my observant sympathy attracts only trauma? It seems I have told quite a few versions of the same tale.<br /><br />Oh but all these bank holidays plus extra days at work and very long hours has tipped up our family routine and left me exhausted and behind on everything. Have you noticed? This post must be the longest coming. And the dates are all wrong. I have done the fun run! I have tipped from the high of doing it to a low of not running and my knees feeling buggered. I am frankly ratty. <br />In a state of permanent ineffectual skidding on the surface of tasks needing to be done I fail to ring back the phone company in time to get the fault fixed on the home line to be told I will need to start the process again. I need the phone to ring the tax office because I know I will be left on hold for hours and don't want to do it from my mobile. I need to ring the tax office to see if I qualify for a tax rebate and to find out why my working tax credit has been slashed. I feel caught and trapped in my ineffectualness. Even UL becomes something on a list to be squeezed between other things. And when I see him I am not happy. I feel I should be doing something else on the list and I doubt him.<br /><br />But I make time to visit St Barnabas church between dropping off PSM's youngest son's swimming stuff to school, buying a toilet seat, paying library fines on 'Mill on the Floss' ( oh oh, I was so excited reading the introduction, for I loved Middlemarch when I read it years ago and I could see George Elliot was exactly what I needed to read, and here I am paying £3.25 to bring it back unread), buying birthday presents and picking my eldest son up early for a hospital dentistry trip. The flat is a tip and Barrack Obama is in town. I had tried to see him the day before. Another trip to Westminster Abbey! A detour on the way to pick the boys up from school. I put the tv on to time my departure - as I leave the flat the motorbikes are getting ready at Buckingham Palace gates. I walk fast. Nearing the Abbey door I can see a calvacade of cars and a glimpse of 'The Beast' through a splinter gap in the small crowd and stand on tip toe to see. I don't see anything and a young policewoman asks me to move on. I can hear a cheer and then people move away. I am slightly late to pick the boys up but strangely high that I nearly saw the President of the USA on my school run.<br />This day, the day I visit the church I cycle around parliament square on a BB between chores and realise the crowds are lining up again, that Obama must be about to pass by. Even though I would love to see him I don't have time to stop. Opposite the Houses of Parliament, there are hooded and bound/chained men, heads stooped, in orange jumpsuits protesting silently on top of the stop the war hut. Almost christ like in their quiet vigil. But I keep cycling round keen to get to the church. <br /><br />St Barnabas is open. I have been lucky. This tiny bit of time I have found is exactly the right piece of time because it is the one lunchtime of the week that there is a service and I am here twenty minutes before it starts. I walk through a pretty courtyard to the porch on the left and open the heavy door with a bull ring handle into the gloom and chatter of two old women preparing the church for the service. Is it ok to look around I ask and an old, rather fragile man nods and follows behind me as I move around the church. 'I never wear polish' I hear one woman say to the other as they put out prayer books 'I find it damages my nails' then they are into a conversation about the quality of the candles. The church is lovely, it's decoration is beautiful - really fine stained glass, mosaics, and an amazing chancel and altarpiece. The richness of the ceiling in the chancel is like a tapestry, ornately detailed, awe inspiring. I am surprised, I had assumed it would be another plain, slightly lacking in authenticity Pimlico church - indeed Thomas Cundy junior, the builder of those other pattern book churches was the architect here although this work is so different from his other churches that I find in my research a whiff of a rumour that the gothic architect Pugin was consulted too.<br /><br />I start to read the history. It was the first church built in England where the ideals and beliefs of what came to be known as Anglo-catholic movement were embodied in its architecture and liturgy. My heart sinks as I try to make sense of this Oxford Movement/The Tracterians that seems to result in rioting here at St Barnabus church. I have been here before with St Paul's, Wilton Place and found it hard to fathom, to understand the tiny details of belief that result in such outrage. Central seem to be two premises - that the Church of England is more Catholic than Protestant and that the most effective expression of giving worship to heaven is as it is described in the Book of Revelation in which the use of white robes and incense in a setting of considerable beauty is described;<br /><br />This time I have an amazing breakthrough I find on the internet: <br />http://anglicanhistory.org/england/bennett/bio/<br /><br />It is the history of the founding Reverend of St Barnabus - W.J.E. Bennett written by his son in 1909. Initially the vicar of the wealthy St Paul's, Wilton Place he describes the area before the church was built. <br /><br />'THERE had arisen in the lower portion of the district assigned to S. Paul's, amid the marshes of Pimlico, near the Hospital and to the east of Ebury Street, a series of deplorable slums, which extended down to the river. From 1742 to 1803 those gardens, which in still earlier times had belonged to the Earl of Ranelagh, attracted to their nightly shows, amid fashionable sin and frivolity, the princes and nobles of the land. But in that neighbourhood most unfashionable sin and brutal degradation reigned in 1850. There the streets were rugged and but half made, undrained, unpaved. The houses were not old but already ruinous. The foul sewer, which drained half of Western London, and had been originally "The Serpentine River," ran, open and uncovered, full of filth of every sort down to the Thames, between starved, half-decayed trees whose branches produced leaves that could be numbered. The appropriately named "Nell Gwynn's Court" looked down, in defiance of cholera, upon this flowing tide of abomination, and delighted in filth and foulness both of body and soul, which neither the Sanitary nor the Ecclesiastical Commissioners had been cruel enough to put to flight.<br /><br />The inhabitants matched, naturally enough, their surroundings. Men, women and children were half clad, without shoes, dirty, ragged, reckless. Their lot seemed so low and miserable that they were careless with despair and without power to desire to be otherwise than they were. The low lodging-houses were dens for profligates and thieves. The small beer-shops were receptacles for the veriest dregs of society. Street rows were incessant. Drink and gambling flourished. Dirty, disorderly, ill-conditioned children filled the streets. Blasphemy met the ear at every turn. The district presented an aspect of degradation and darkness scarcely to be exceeded in London.'<br /><br />All this resulted in his determination to build a church there. He lists the detailed mathematics of how the rich could pay for the church and the school that was to be built. Then joy that his high church architectural plans are approved by the Bishop.<br /><br />"I hardly dared to entertain the thought that" he would consecrate such a church. "I could not expect, I did not expect, in my own mind, that a rood screen, a chancel highly decorated, an altar of stone, diapered work and panelling throughout, painted glass in every window and gilded capitals" (what a terrible list of enormities!)--"I hardly thought that all this would pass without censure, or at least without some expression of unwillingness to stamp it with Episcopal sanction. I hardly thought that a piscina, a credence, an aumbry, sedilia, and all the furniture appertaining could pass without some words of remonstrance. I wished the Bishop personally to inspect it. Accordingly on May 2 he came. He did not like the screen as a matter of private taste, but made no objection 'as long as there was no rood (i.e. crucifix) on it.'"<br /><br />On May 17 Mr. Bennett pleaded for a "rood cross," i.e. without the Figure, and though the Bishop at first strongly objected, he "ultimately gave me my way." The only point to which the Bishop permanently objected was--the placing flowers on the altar. One is glad to reflect that flowers have now purged themselves from the charge of being of Romish proclivities, that the Pope is no longer supposed to lie concealed in a rosebud, that indulgences and papal bulls are no longer looked for among the petals of a lily, and that we now realize that we might have searched in vain for the Jesuit College even amidst the florets of the then newly evolved double dahlia.'<br /><br />When the building was finally finished in 1850 it is praised.<br /><br />"It is a noble work," said Archdeacon Manning in his sermon, "nobly conceived, and as nobly carried to its end; a work for God and for His poor wrought out of the costliest gifts, and with the most skilful art, in splendour and symmetry, in stateliness and beauty."<br /><br />But the Bishop of London, leaning increasingly to the Protestant side of the church and Mr Bennett's beliefs become increasingly divergent. Differences about which way the vicar faces at communion, the disputed rood cross ( later it is nailed to the altar to attempt to make it part of the building after one church warden would take it away and another put it out again) and tiny details that align St Barnabus to Catholiscism are exchanged in heated letters. Important to this row is the central idea that Mr Bennett should be obedient to the Bishop as part of the Apostolical Succession for indeed within his faith it is impossible for him to disobey a Bishop. The row gathers momentum, the Bishop of London not listening to the well formed and heart felt arguments of obedience. The Prime Minister - a recent worshipper at the Oxford movement St Paul's denounces St Barnabus for it's popery, and the bishop sends the exchange of letters between himself and Bennett to be published in the Times 'proving' St Barnabus's Catholic allegiance. A mob gathers, gaining momentum Sunday after Sunday.<br /><br />"I wish to inform you that on Sunday, November 17, a very large mob of most tumultuous and disorderly persons collected together a second time round the church, and this with a much greater demonstration of force than on the preceding Sunday--that a force of one hundred constables was required to keep the mob from overt acts of violence; that notwithstanding the exertions of the police much violence was committed, and a leader of the rioters taken into custody; that the mob again assembled at the evening service at three o'clock, and were guilty again of violent cries, yells, and other noises, battering at the doors of the church and disturbing the whole congregation--that similar scenes occurred again on Sunday, the 24th of November, when I was interrupted in my sermon by outcries and other signs of disaffection as before; all this tumult, your Lordship will please to remember, arising from persons collected from all parts of London--non-parishioners.<br /><br />"NO VIRGIN MARY."<br />"NO WAFER GODS."<br />"NO BISHOPS."<br />"NO CREED WORSHIP."<br />"NO FORGIVENESS OF SINS.<br />is chalked on walls in surrounding streets.<br /><br />It gives dramatic details of the sermon Mr Bennett preached from his heart as the mob breaks into the church and how they turn tail and retreat.<br /><br />Then Mr Bennett's resignation to the Bishop of London with his stated belief that 'The Church is superior to any individual bishop.'<br /><br />Despite the working men's presentation which the Bishop will not hear.<br /><br />"We beseech your Lordship to let Mr. Bennett remain with us; but, if not, we do hope your Lordship will see that our church, which was built expressly for us, is still a poor man's church.'<br /><br />But he leaves. The church packed hours early service after service before he departs. A last meal when he is presented with a silver inkwell, candlesticks and from the "Committee of the Poor " a silver teapot.<br /><br />All this in this little beautiful and peaceful church. The principles fought for seem so unimportant to me, so minute in the details of faith but the bravery and intelligent honesty and honour seem really moving.<br /><br />Amenamenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08972713497221923771noreply@blogger.com0