The Queen's Chapel of Savoy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? Is it the Queen? my youngest says.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Toot toot toot, the golden horn played right in my ear. I have had enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'

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.

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.

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,

'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'.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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....'

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,

'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.'

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.

'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'.

Finally I look again at the Canaletto:

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/canaletto/the-river-thames-with-st-paul-s-cathedral-on-lord-mayor-s-day-

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.'

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'

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.

Amen.

St George's Hanover Square

I feel briefly that I am living in a black and white film.
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.
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.
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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.
'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'
'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.
Brzezinski quotes a senior Chinese official who reportedly said of America: 'Please don't decline too quickly'.
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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=38871 ( if you have time - have a look - there are lovely details!)
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.

By 1726 a workhouse was built too:
'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.'
'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.'
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.

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.
"No London church has ever purchased an organ from an American company. Never in history," said organ builder and company co-owner Ralph Richards.'
'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.

'They found a slightly more historical flavor to our organs. They wanted something 'interesting' and not generic," Richards said.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'

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.

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:
"Pity it's such a neoclassical instrument - an organ built in Chattanooga ought to have a Wurlitzer-style train effect labelled 'Choo Choo'

And an apology from the forum administrators:
'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.'


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.

Amen. I think. Amen.

Chapel Royal, St James's Palace

Sunday morning. It is Radio 2 love songs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle time and I am waiting for exh to come and look after the boys so I can go to church. He is late. I am disorganised. My hair is wet and I am trying to wrap christmas presents for my best friend who I haven't seen since just before christmas. How does that happen? We are going to hers for sunday lunch. I am starting to think I will have to miss the church, that I won't get there in time when exh bursts through the door panting and gasping. He just woke up he says.

I put lipstick on and dash for it. Out into the damp sunday morning and quiet streets. A gathering of men on a street corner looks like one of those history walks and I lean into to hear what they are saying. But then I see a dungeons and dragon style book clutched by one and realise it is a queue for some sort of convention in a pub. The men have the happy animated faces of being with their own kind, of being understood. I pass by onto St James Park where there are snowdrops and pink blossom in the mist. It feels lovely to be out. I would have been dreading going before, really dreading it but I realise the fear has gone, now it is just what I do. No one is going to hurt or mock me. I enjoy it.

Oh and I have been looking forward to going to the Chapel Royal. There seems such a mystery to it. Within the dark slightly foreboding thick walls of St James palace there is a chapel where the services are open to all. I wouldn't even know about it if I hadn't tried before to get into the Lady Chapel just around the corner. A notice there said that it was only open in the summer months but services went on within the palace all year. On Pall Mall I find the gateway flanked by empty sentry boxes and a policeman standing guard. Is it ok to go to the church service? I falter. He waves me in. I am only just in time and a robed 'greeter' in the thick old stone walls of the doorway ushers me through the door into the tiny narrow church, opening a small, high up, hinged door of a pew to squeeze me into a seat. I am next to a smart politician-like couple and a tweed man who smells of clean strong soap. The plush chapel, is soft-lit with desk style lamps, like an expensive but characterless hotel and it is packed. Instead of sitting looking forward towards the altar we are all sat either side of the nave staring at each other. I remember with embarrassment that my hair is still wet and that I must look rather dishevelled and unkempt. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I feel I have tumbled into another world.

Above the heads of the congregation the organ, pounds and soars joyfully.

Everyone rises as the choir enters. Small boys like white mice in extraordinary red jackets with gold braid and big gold buttons, red breeches and oliver cromwell shoes with buckles, the older choir flamingoes in white surplices with respectful bent necks and dipped heads, a man in crow robes, intricate ruffled sleeves and a black staff, some more men in surplices and the vicar all sailing in like swans. They process to the front of the church. Wow. I think. This goes on every sunday and who would know? This has happened every Sunday for hundreds of years.

We sit. Stand again and sing. Sit. The choir sings. There is a reading. Then another. The lord's prayer. Psalms from the St James prayer book. The tweed and soap man next to me relishes each word, really enjoys each one, as if reaching his tongue for an oyster, pulling and sucking the texture. It is almost embarrassing how much pleasure he is obtaining from speaking them aloud as if he is talking dirty alongside. I mumble along. Thinking I really don't believe what I'm saying but I think being here saying them is good. The kneelers are purple velvet. Very royal. Very posh hotel plush. And everyone kneels. In the parish church of my childhood there was a bit of laziness about kneeling - you could, but most people just put their hands together and crouched.

How funny - I find later, having written this that Samuel Pepys on the 10th May, 1663 'I walked to St. James's, and was there at masse, and was forced in the crowd to kneel down"

Observed by an elderly man on the opposite side I gaze around the room. The ceiling is panelled and intricately painted. Up high is the organ, tapestries hung high either side of the altar, a big quite modern looking stained glass window above the altar depicting a tree and at the back, just above me, a sort of royal box facing the altar. I imagine this is where the royal family worship if they come. It is completely hidden from view. Do you just not know if they are here I wonder? Are they here I think. The pews we are sat in have high walls as if we are fenced and stalled like animals. Or part of a lock-in with the Establishment.

The 'Chapel Royal' initially was not a place but a body of priests and singers who cared for the spiritual needs of the Sovereign and travelled with him. But Henry V111 took a fancy to the site of a female leper colony that had stood in this then remote corner since the saxon times. There was good hunting alongside and good access to the woods of Kensington and he comandeered the hospital, building a palace including the chapel as a home for the Chapel Royal. Like a fly digesting time in longer flashes, slowed down, opened up, it is impossible to understand that this place that is a brief stroll from my flat, from the Thames, from Whitehall could seem remote but perhaps the outskirts, the outside, the edge is always the furthest place away and therefore distant.

I read too that the chapel was considered the cradle of English church music - Tallis, Handel, and Henry Purcell were all organists or composers of the chapel and the poet Dryden escaped his many creditors by staying with Henry Purcell in a turret room of the composers apartments.

The vicar's sermon is of love. He talks well and passionately about showing up everyday to love, of being free from the limitations of romantic love to form a deeper and fundamental joy. He talks about faith and doubt. He is talking about God. But love is love I think. Mary I's heart is buried beneath the chapel. Charles I recieved the sacrament of Holy Communion prior to his execution here. Diana's body lay by the altar before her funeral. Victoria and Albert married here. Though I find all this out later. But it is me that is wracked by doubt. As if trust is something I haven't used for a while I keep opening the store cupboard door to find the basics, all the horded tins and packets look ok but are infact old, past their sell by date, no longer quite nice. Something has grown unknown and unexpected like mould or weevils in the everyday ingredients. I am horrified. I thought everything was just put away dry and stored. Here I say, and here, look at this, and this, showing ul what leaving did, what has been done. I have prided myself on my sanity and find now occasionally a raw madness in attempting to trust.

At the end of the service the white mice, the flamingoes, the black crow, all process out, the organ playing.

I shake hands with the vicar in the old walls of the palace as I leave but I notice that others keep his hand, holding it tight, maintaining steady eye contact. Not me. I flinch from the warmth and sincerity of the greeting. Bobbing my head in embarrassment. In the park though I feel fresh, restored. I need faith I think. I need to clean those cupboards and keep only the nourishment of good.