'Your life sounds like a film at the moment.' a friend says. 'Yes.' I say . But I feel slightly detached as if writing my life separates me from myself. That sometimes I don't have time to experience what is happening to me, for I am always worrying about the next bit, what other people think, about the neighbours, about money, about what to make for tea. Also, I boasted about time having expanded but it just isn't true. I am swimming upstream, slightly harried, flailing against whatever is oncoming. Though occasionally the fast currents form warm deep pools and briefly I kick out my legs and tread water.
The night I started writing this blog I could not sleep for I knew somehow this was my adventure. Though I had no idea what I would write and when the words first tumbled out I held my breath as if they were escaping. The adventure turned out to be to tell my truth and my ambition became to make it as honest and real as possible. Though the stories have gathered unexpected momentum as if into a plot. But reality seems a difficult story to write. It becomes invasive and perhaps questionable for different realities are owned by different people.
Today at the doctor's I heard an older receptionist talking to a young pretty colleague. With great kindness and concern she was talking about her alcoholic partner. The pretty girl seemed to have experience of alcoholic behaviour too and asked deftly 'Does he take it out on you, does he get nasty towards you, are his outbursts directed at you?' 'Oh yes. Of course.' said the kindly and chatty woman. I was only eavesdropping but I realised she was oblivious of what she had said. Why? 'Of course? ' Why? 'Oh yes? ' Though I understood.
My pride meant I did not tell people what was happening to me as our family life gathered speed to the point where h was really really dh. I felt I peered out of a 'hide', a camouflaged place - observing normality from a smiley face. I thought it was all my fault. I thought others would think that too. I thought I have children now and I better make it work for all. Some of the tales I have told or events that have happened have been so truly painful and what a funny word - embarrassing - how did I get here - how did I let these things happen - how did I become so trapped - that writing the words, telling the truth freed me from that hidden, isolated observation post of pride and shame. Recently I went to see the twin babies of a couple I know and really like and in the midst of all the love and beauty and wow how lovely I am holding a baby, ooh now I am holding another one, and how do you ever get time to do anything ever again, one of the women said oh I read your recent blog this afternoon and she said it so matter of factly and warmly I felt like crying. Everything I once screened and desperately hid was just accepted in a nice calm room.
Years ago I worked with a picture editor - an honourable but difficult and demanding man who was brilliant and determined about what he did. He helped discover the artist Richard Billingham and in a junior position I spent a lot of time within office hours helping colour photocopy ( remember it was a while ago ) Richard Billingham's brilliant pictures from the snap shots originally taken for the work to be edited into a book. RB was a young art student who wanted to be a painter. His Dad Ray was a chronic alcoholic. His Mum Liz obese, with a love of colour and decoration and pets. They lived in a council flat in Dudley. RB had taken hundreds of pictures of his family life. His Dad slumped by a bed, his mum in a big dress raising a fist to his Dad infront of a gaudy carnival of colourful knick knacks and a dog and a cat eating dropped peas and carrots off the dirty floor. Richard had intended to make paintings from them. Understandable for the colour in his pictures has the verve of brushstrokes. But his tutors, this man I worked for and some others I didn't know, found them - greedily understanding their painful and beautiful honesty. At the time there was almost a blood lust for 'reality' in photography and a hunting mentality about obtaining it. As publication of the book loomed - letters come from a german art gallery that advised them all to leave the young man alone. This gallery had worked with a very young german female artist on a reality project and built her up and she had not been able to cope and killed herself.
But the book 'Ray's a laugh' is a masterpiece. And Richard Billingham is still an artist. I get it down from the shelf to look at it to write this. They are better even than I remembered. Very shocking but very very beautiful. Despite and including the violence and dirt they feel to me to be about love. And I remember there is a quote from Richard that when he came home the first thing he always did was check Ray was breathing, check he was still alive, and the photographs started with this.
I didn't write about these because they are about an alcoholic I just wanted to think about the ethics of portraying 'reality'. Of describing other people's lives involved in your own. I always think of the 'authorship' of Richard's pictures. That when the scratched and badly cared for negatives were lovingly hand printed to exhibition quality there was more to the pictures than the lazily cropped snaps printed on a machine at the chemists had shown. In these unseen edges there was more compositional balance, even more of an exact idea of a whole picture. Richard 'constructed' the pictures from the real events that occured infront of his eyes. He 'told' these lives. His skill makes them real. Not just them being in them. Though when the book was first published it felt like a boundary of reality was crossed. That there was no longer any privacy. Not even within the family.
Oh it is tricky.
In Mayfair I try to obain access to the grand fronted Christian Scientist reading room but only a bookshop is open. The man who appears from a back room says the 'church' ( is that what it is called - I am not sure?) is only open for services. There is a slight smell of wee and unwashed clothes. I take a BB from right outside and weave again up through the beautiful streets tucked between Park Lane and Berkeley Square. I don't have much time, I have an appointment with the bank which I am dreading and later exh wants to talk to me. Belatedly he has been reading the blog.
These streets are where I walked just after christmas trying to decide whether UOL ( unexpected old love) could or would become UL. It felt like a journey that day into a beautiful and unknown place, the church I eventually found a surprise, like one of those precious beautiful eggs that open to reveal intricate treasure.
Today though the church I had hoped to go into on that day is open and fortunately there is a BB locking station alongside. It is a relief because I am running out of time. Grosvenor Chapel. I don't know why it looks Dutch to me or maybe just American. Simple and charming with painted doors and a white portico. A clock and a steeple. I slip in through the door and there are buckets of flowers in the hallway. I am not sure if these are being stored for the flower stall at the side or if the church is about to be decorated. There is no one around. Inside it is plain and spacious with a wooden gallery and a simple shallow marble font on a slim stem.
At the altar there are pillars and fences and railings as if to keep the eye moving inwards, as if somewhere in the centre of these arrangements something is hidden. I read afterwards that the simple georgian church was built in 1730. On a peppercorn rent for 99 years given by Sir Grosvenor to developers including Benjamin Timbrell who designed it almost from a 'pattern book' of recently built churches like St Martin's in the Field and St George's of Hanover Square without having to bother with an architect. It's simple emphasis on the pulpit and the spoken word was changed by John Ninian Compern in 1912 'to a prayerful church in which attention is directed to the mystery of the altar.'
'In the body of the church Comper brought the iron Georgian communion rails forward to enclose a new sanctuary within which the High Altar stands against the screen. It is flanked by two Corinthian columns intended to carry a canopy which was never completed, and the giant Ionic columns at each side set the scale for colonnades which were to run the whole length of the building, replacing the gallery columns. They carry a beam on which stands the rood with the crucified Christ, attended by his Virgin Mother and the beloved disciple John, triumphing over the dragons of evil. Two angels kneel below with chalices to gather the sacred blood. The three delicate stained glass windows in the south wall are also by Comper two of which contain his trademark strawberry motif.'
I find also photographs of a beautiful installation on the internet by Claire Morgan in 2005 made on the stairs up to the church galleries of the Grosvenor Chapel where she made an arch of real strawberries hung on nylon thread
http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/page18.htm
I am so worried about what is about to come - the bank/exh- my reality - that I leave quickly. Back onto the bike in cold sunshine.
Since Richard Billingham's pictures were published technology has increased the pursuit of 'reality' I think. Like a mass produced invasion. Digital cameras, home computers. How we process what we see has changed. For example I read that the advent of computer-based non-linear editing systems for video in 1989 made it easy to quickly edit hours of video footage into a usable form, something that had been very difficult to do before. (Film, which was easy to edit, was too expensive to shoot enough hours of footage with on a regular basis.) This became reality TV. But it is a strange reality - Big Brother, Jade Goody, Katie Price, The Only Way is Essex, even some programme I saw mentioned recently 'The Batchlorette' where a man chose a bride from a group of girls - leaving the spurned girl from the final two with a kiss, sobbing, heartbroken.
Big personalities acting out what being a human being is under the eye of a camera.
Finally I want to mention Nigel Shafran who is another photographer whose work I love. He takes beautiful pictures of rather unnoticed parts of life - the washing up on the draining board, his girlfriend, gentle ordinary domestic scenes. A very early picture shows the mark left by a sock on his girlfriend's leg, just the imprint on her skin. Time, love, a whisper of something noticed. Observation rather than entertainment from reality. 'An acceptance of the way things are.' he says.
The bank manager consolidates my debts. Exh says he won't babysit anymore.
Amen
Showing posts with label alcoholic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alcoholic. Show all posts
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Westminster Abbey II
Children back to school. Back to the mantra of Westminster Abbey/ Westminster Archive. I try to get the cleaning done as fast as I can to get to the Abbey again. I have a plan. I am going to hire one of the audio guides. Though I feel slightly rudderless and melancholic, the children have consumed my time for weeks and I am back to the solitary duel of trying to write and keep us all respectable. But the chores take longer than I want: the washing, the beds, phoning for appointments, stowing camping equipment into cupboards, sorting out worn out clothes or clothes too small. Just as I am finishing the vacuuming the machine loses suction and I realise I haven't changed the bag for ages. Somehow (just full?) the bag has burst inside the machine and months of dust and hair has been collecting around the bag not just in it. Like very fine grey flour, our skin, clouds in the clean kitchen. I can see into the dusty belly of our home - dried pasta, cheerios, hair clips, quite a lot of lego, two gogos, a favourite glove matted with doormat hair.
At that moment I get a text from 'capitalist' dad saying that he wants to read the blog. I panic. At least, as my brother says when I text him frantically for advice it isn't the feudal bastards.
I feel I am starting to get myself into difficult water. Exexdh recently read it, he fished around and found it. He seems ok but sometimes it is hard to tell. I am not completely sure I would be. I am not sure 'captitalist' dad will be either though there is nothing really wrong with what I said. Also, and importantly I was just trying to bend circumstances into an idea or a debate. My aim is to write as truthfully as I possibly can but it is hard thing to do. I want to be able to describe and include everything. All the strands of life. I want it to be as near how I feel and think and see as possible. But just the way I write is sometimes too pretty, too la, la, too contrived. Though really there should be more inane thoughts: clothes, celebrities, the diet I am on to try and lose my tummy fat (porridge, lots of omelettes, no white flour) and perhaps a little bit more day to day anguish. I really do find things hard sometimes. I have to trick myself with a fantastic new navy blue coat with beautiful big buttons and gold trim. I have to meditate, make jokes, try not to drink too much. I have to keep going. But there are also truths at the edge of what I'm writing, things that don't make sense to the picture I am building, things that are too complicated to explain. For example I spent the last week of the school holidays with the boys and a friend on a fabulous trip to a water park in Egypt. It was a free press trip from my work. I have to write a feature for the paper. Which I have never done before. I was tempted not to mention it, I didn't go to a church there and it doesn't fit in with what I want to write about. But the omission allows me to build the fiction of the poor me, poor me stoic brave heroine without mentioning the ridiculously lucky perks.
Also, and there is a deep breath here, I had no idea when I started writing this that I would want to try to tell the truth. My truth. When exexDH was just H and I started to notice empty cans of lager hidden in our home, I didn't tell anyone. When I noticed that all the holiday souvenir bottles, the cheap tequila with a bright red plastic hat top, the greek brandy, the firewater without a name, tucked away in the downstairs toilet had been secretly finished, left empty. ( We had a house then, I had bought it, and paid for it with a long commute, a house I could only just afford.) I didn't tell anyone. I didn't say that I would get up in the morning at the weekend and play intricate games with playmobil for hours with my young sons while H lay in bed, hungover, cross, depressed. Or worse when I thought the morning was going well, everybody up, everybody cheerful and I would suddenly realise that H was completely D and it was perhaps only 11 in the morning. My boss at the job I did and hated had a DH and she told me she lay on the kitchen floor and cried because she felt so trapped. She said she phoned the Samaritans. I said - 'Get him out! Get counselling! Get the children ok!' She followed my advice and I learned from what she said and lay on the kitchen floor and cried, I phoned Samaritans, I felt so trapped. But I didn't let myself name what was happening.
Third time down to parliament square. Tarpaulin still tight to the fenced off square. I thought I had read that everyone but Brian Haw ( the peace camp founder) had been removed but it isn't true. Haw ( I think ) is the only tent allowed on the green but others still cluster on the edge of the pavements. I fish around now on the internet to find out what is happening Two tents perched on a corner, flat on the slabs.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9277/
I have also found a sort of precedent in 1887, the unemployed took to sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St James’ Park, and the Social Democratic Federation began organising them under the slogan ‘not charity but work’. The police began clearing the Square using force, so that minor clashes between the police and the unemployed became a daily event. Finally, all meetings in it were banned. November 13th 1887 two squadrons of life guards from Whitehall dispersed the crowds, one man dying on 'Bloody Sunday'. I have also read that the suffragettes detonated a bomb in Westminster Abbey June 1914 and I am shocked and suddenly interested in the history of civil disobedience, the powerful undercurrent of the history of protest, the power of organised anger. Here from a newspaper report the next day.
'Beyond the fact that the police have in their possession a feather boa, a guidebook and a small silk bag found in a chair nearby there is nothing in the nature of a clue to the perpetrator of the outrage and such articles, or course, may have belonged to an ordinary Abbey visitor.' NYT 12 June 1914
The posters here say, 'The Dispossessed.' 'Not a protest for peace. A demand.'
For the second time I use my wes res card to gain free entrance into Westminster Abbey. Inside, something has changed I think. I can see, turning my eyes right, down the nave, to the high narrow beauty of the vaulted ceiling, as if air and vision is trapped up there in the delicate fanned shapes and it is stunning. I cannot believe that this view was here before. I remember some restoration work taking place, maybe the view was blocked off, I think, I cannot have seen it so differently. But the audio guides, which I queue to receive, are small and grey, like a block in my hand. I want to ask the girl about the view and what happened to the white, long thin phones from a few weeks ago? But I don't. What I described wasn't quite right. My truth is hazy. Perhaps if I went again the audio guides would be black and sleek?
I follow the guide diligently. But there isn't really anything here in the main church that I didn't notice without it - the commentary feels as piecemeal and pecking at the whole thing as my own attempt, just an approximation. But I feel tense and miserable. I needn't have come back I think. Then in the old cloister, through an entrance that I hadn't found, hadn't seen, under a beautiful carved christ is a beautiful octagonal room, the Chapter House, light with old vaulting and the remnants of 1400 wall paintings, scenes from the Apocalypse including Doomsday. This is where the monks came and worshipped every day before the abbey that stands now was built. Beside this, to the left, coming out, a sign saying the oldest door in England. The oak door put in place in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey's founder, Edward the Confessor. It makes it the only surviving Anglo Saxon door in Britain. Apparently made from one tree, its rings suggest it grew between AD 924 and 1030, probably in Essex. The simple function of it, a door that has been opened and shut for nearly a thousand years.
Back out and under the old, thick, cold arched walls to the beautiful small cloister with the thin, pretty fountain is the infirmary clustured round the courtyard. The audio guide tells me the monks suffered from obesity and drink, perhaps like us, protected and safe, they had lost the strict boundaries of survival and couldn't control the basic instinct for more. Though at one pont half the monks were killed by bubonic plague. I find too, three beautiful early tombs in the main cloister, the earliest - Gilbert Crispin Abbot 1085 -1117, the figure flattened and polished by time, but the form, so simple, so exactly human I find it really moving.
That night ironing school uniforms I have a sudden realisation. I have viewed it all wrong. I should have started in the oldest part, moved through and away from the thick walls, past the cloister into the Abbey, then the soaring heights and beauty and human acheivement of the vaulted high light ceilings would be a revelation. It is like finding the beginning unexpectedly, right in the middle of something else, a knot untangled.
At that moment I get a text from 'capitalist' dad saying that he wants to read the blog. I panic. At least, as my brother says when I text him frantically for advice it isn't the feudal bastards.
I feel I am starting to get myself into difficult water. Exexdh recently read it, he fished around and found it. He seems ok but sometimes it is hard to tell. I am not completely sure I would be. I am not sure 'captitalist' dad will be either though there is nothing really wrong with what I said. Also, and importantly I was just trying to bend circumstances into an idea or a debate. My aim is to write as truthfully as I possibly can but it is hard thing to do. I want to be able to describe and include everything. All the strands of life. I want it to be as near how I feel and think and see as possible. But just the way I write is sometimes too pretty, too la, la, too contrived. Though really there should be more inane thoughts: clothes, celebrities, the diet I am on to try and lose my tummy fat (porridge, lots of omelettes, no white flour) and perhaps a little bit more day to day anguish. I really do find things hard sometimes. I have to trick myself with a fantastic new navy blue coat with beautiful big buttons and gold trim. I have to meditate, make jokes, try not to drink too much. I have to keep going. But there are also truths at the edge of what I'm writing, things that don't make sense to the picture I am building, things that are too complicated to explain. For example I spent the last week of the school holidays with the boys and a friend on a fabulous trip to a water park in Egypt. It was a free press trip from my work. I have to write a feature for the paper. Which I have never done before. I was tempted not to mention it, I didn't go to a church there and it doesn't fit in with what I want to write about. But the omission allows me to build the fiction of the poor me, poor me stoic brave heroine without mentioning the ridiculously lucky perks.
Also, and there is a deep breath here, I had no idea when I started writing this that I would want to try to tell the truth. My truth. When exexDH was just H and I started to notice empty cans of lager hidden in our home, I didn't tell anyone. When I noticed that all the holiday souvenir bottles, the cheap tequila with a bright red plastic hat top, the greek brandy, the firewater without a name, tucked away in the downstairs toilet had been secretly finished, left empty. ( We had a house then, I had bought it, and paid for it with a long commute, a house I could only just afford.) I didn't tell anyone. I didn't say that I would get up in the morning at the weekend and play intricate games with playmobil for hours with my young sons while H lay in bed, hungover, cross, depressed. Or worse when I thought the morning was going well, everybody up, everybody cheerful and I would suddenly realise that H was completely D and it was perhaps only 11 in the morning. My boss at the job I did and hated had a DH and she told me she lay on the kitchen floor and cried because she felt so trapped. She said she phoned the Samaritans. I said - 'Get him out! Get counselling! Get the children ok!' She followed my advice and I learned from what she said and lay on the kitchen floor and cried, I phoned Samaritans, I felt so trapped. But I didn't let myself name what was happening.
Third time down to parliament square. Tarpaulin still tight to the fenced off square. I thought I had read that everyone but Brian Haw ( the peace camp founder) had been removed but it isn't true. Haw ( I think ) is the only tent allowed on the green but others still cluster on the edge of the pavements. I fish around now on the internet to find out what is happening Two tents perched on a corner, flat on the slabs.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9277/
I have also found a sort of precedent in 1887, the unemployed took to sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St James’ Park, and the Social Democratic Federation began organising them under the slogan ‘not charity but work’. The police began clearing the Square using force, so that minor clashes between the police and the unemployed became a daily event. Finally, all meetings in it were banned. November 13th 1887 two squadrons of life guards from Whitehall dispersed the crowds, one man dying on 'Bloody Sunday'. I have also read that the suffragettes detonated a bomb in Westminster Abbey June 1914 and I am shocked and suddenly interested in the history of civil disobedience, the powerful undercurrent of the history of protest, the power of organised anger. Here from a newspaper report the next day.
'Beyond the fact that the police have in their possession a feather boa, a guidebook and a small silk bag found in a chair nearby there is nothing in the nature of a clue to the perpetrator of the outrage and such articles, or course, may have belonged to an ordinary Abbey visitor.' NYT 12 June 1914
The posters here say, 'The Dispossessed.' 'Not a protest for peace. A demand.'
For the second time I use my wes res card to gain free entrance into Westminster Abbey. Inside, something has changed I think. I can see, turning my eyes right, down the nave, to the high narrow beauty of the vaulted ceiling, as if air and vision is trapped up there in the delicate fanned shapes and it is stunning. I cannot believe that this view was here before. I remember some restoration work taking place, maybe the view was blocked off, I think, I cannot have seen it so differently. But the audio guides, which I queue to receive, are small and grey, like a block in my hand. I want to ask the girl about the view and what happened to the white, long thin phones from a few weeks ago? But I don't. What I described wasn't quite right. My truth is hazy. Perhaps if I went again the audio guides would be black and sleek?
I follow the guide diligently. But there isn't really anything here in the main church that I didn't notice without it - the commentary feels as piecemeal and pecking at the whole thing as my own attempt, just an approximation. But I feel tense and miserable. I needn't have come back I think. Then in the old cloister, through an entrance that I hadn't found, hadn't seen, under a beautiful carved christ is a beautiful octagonal room, the Chapter House, light with old vaulting and the remnants of 1400 wall paintings, scenes from the Apocalypse including Doomsday. This is where the monks came and worshipped every day before the abbey that stands now was built. Beside this, to the left, coming out, a sign saying the oldest door in England. The oak door put in place in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey's founder, Edward the Confessor. It makes it the only surviving Anglo Saxon door in Britain. Apparently made from one tree, its rings suggest it grew between AD 924 and 1030, probably in Essex. The simple function of it, a door that has been opened and shut for nearly a thousand years.
Back out and under the old, thick, cold arched walls to the beautiful small cloister with the thin, pretty fountain is the infirmary clustured round the courtyard. The audio guide tells me the monks suffered from obesity and drink, perhaps like us, protected and safe, they had lost the strict boundaries of survival and couldn't control the basic instinct for more. Though at one pont half the monks were killed by bubonic plague. I find too, three beautiful early tombs in the main cloister, the earliest - Gilbert Crispin Abbot 1085 -1117, the figure flattened and polished by time, but the form, so simple, so exactly human I find it really moving.
That night ironing school uniforms I have a sudden realisation. I have viewed it all wrong. I should have started in the oldest part, moved through and away from the thick walls, past the cloister into the Abbey, then the soaring heights and beauty and human acheivement of the vaulted high light ceilings would be a revelation. It is like finding the beginning unexpectedly, right in the middle of something else, a knot untangled.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Westminster Chapel
Sunday. The boys with their Dad at his mum's for the weekend. A day of rest indeed. The flat so quiet that I hear the neighbours wake up. Sandwiched between single mums of single girls I know we are the noisy ones in our block but the quiet of the area at the weekend, with no passing traffic is like an island. I think we must drive the neighbours crazy. Those boys shout MUM! when they wake up. They shout when they go to bed. I miss them though. I wish we'd watched the football together last night. Instead I went to a party to watch it. Missed the goal walking down Seven Sisters lane without an AZ.
But today I have written and worked and read. Then I miss them again. Panic that they will have a car crash and die. That in my heartbreak I will start smoking after eight years abstinence ( I worry there is some sneaky desire to do this here - almost like the bonus.) Sometimes I can even imagine dragging on the cigarette. Perhaps I have to explain that their Dad did drive them home from his mum's once so drunk that they went missing for a couple of hours, finally appearing, Dad's face bloated, swaying, falling like a felled tree in the boys bedroom. I shouted and threatened to call the police, and then realised I couldn't do it infront of the boys. Though later, I called the social services. I don't know how many of the rest of you have done that but it didn't feel good. He has stopped drinking now, but still, it is hard to lose the fears.
As it is a Sunday, I think I should get out there and try and and get in a church that always seems closed. But then a whole new area of dread opens, does that mean actually going to a service? I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to. Though since I have started this project I have discovered this fascinating site - mystery worshipper/ ship of fools - http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/. When I first found it, after visiting St Matthews, not sure exactly what my plan was, I thought I had a rival, or even that the task I had set myself had been done. But Mystery worshipper is a detailed account of pew comfort, biscuit count and the unquantifiable measure of worship, of the feeling of god. Oh, oh, I am always pleased after visiting a church if I find mystery worshipper has been before. I love the tiny details of their undercover mission. I feel we are in each other's footsteps. I laugh that I could indeed be wrongly unmasked as mystery worshipper if I got to close to service time. Or spot them myself. Apparently they leave a calling card in the font. Should I do something similar?
I have been skirting Westminster Chapel for weeks. It is a huge church, almost half way between our flat and Buckingham Palace. I can't work out from the outside exactly what denomination it is. I can barely describe it. Dull brown brick, Italianate arches, a church from a Hitchcock film, but less interesting. I know the afternoon service is at 5.30 and try to go at 4pm. I can't get in. I go back at about 5.10. The automatic glass sliding doors open. There are two men at the front desk, like cloakroom attendants. I have braced myself. 'I know your service is about to start but I would love to have a quick look inside the church.' They wave me in. At that moment, briefly, I think maybe I can just go ahead with it.
I can't explain my own reticence to be visible, to take a stand, to stand out, but walking through those doors into a huge room, like a theatre in tiers, with people dotted around chatting - I have taken on way too much for myself. In the centre stage is the kit for a band, and a huge tv display screen, with bad graphics procaiming their message for the Lord. Behind this ugly paraphernalia is a beautiful huge organ, another wizard of oz prop. I can't explain my reaction but I can't stay. I find it creepy, I don't want to smile and be welcomed. I bolt. An old lady at the door misunderstands my movement out, and for ages we are both left holding the door, welcoming each other into the church. I feel like a comedy baddie on the run.
I have to go with how it is. But I don't have much description. Though, when I return home, and google the church, the history is riveting. It is probably the earliest church I have been to. Initially the chapel started in 1840, in what was 'one of London's poorest slums- rife with prostitution, squalor and drug addiction. Alms houses and schools were built, orphans were cared for and work schemes were organised for unemployed men. Rev Martin's gospel-preaching and Biblical authority made Westminster Chapel stand out as a light of hope. Even influential leaders of that time like Lord Shaftesbury and Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey began to hear of the Chapel's impact in the area.' So popular was the chapel that by 1860 a 1,500 seater building, the building I went into today was designed and built opening in 1864. Between 1904 with Dr George Campbell Morgan and then his even more celebrated successor Dr Lloyd Jones until 1968, they had queues round the block. People queueing to hear the friday evening lectures and the sunday sermons. Their words travelling the world, big in USA, even Korea.
I have begun to be inspired by the history of this area's transition, the frantic building of churches in the late 19th century and I have bought a series of local maps, Westminster and Victoria 1869, 1894, 1916. I feel that I am onto something, as I colour in the churches on the b/w maps, noticing the increase of feltpenned rectangles as time passes. I'm not sure what yet. But just a fascinating movement of change. Of intention for good.
And yes, mystery worshipper had been before. Reporting on the plentiful digestive biscuits, and a 52 minute sermon! MW horrified by such length. Though my concerns about hanging around at the back of the church are validated by this short report:
'What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?
Nothing much. Few spoke to me and I spent some time sitting alone on a chair by the wall. One man in full camouflage gear came and spoke to me. He offered me his phone number and said I should visit him and see his neighbour's cat. He also said if I ever needed prayer I could phone him and he would come and pray with me, since he liked prayer. Oddly enough, I declined the invite.'
My boys came home safe and sound.
amen
But today I have written and worked and read. Then I miss them again. Panic that they will have a car crash and die. That in my heartbreak I will start smoking after eight years abstinence ( I worry there is some sneaky desire to do this here - almost like the bonus.) Sometimes I can even imagine dragging on the cigarette. Perhaps I have to explain that their Dad did drive them home from his mum's once so drunk that they went missing for a couple of hours, finally appearing, Dad's face bloated, swaying, falling like a felled tree in the boys bedroom. I shouted and threatened to call the police, and then realised I couldn't do it infront of the boys. Though later, I called the social services. I don't know how many of the rest of you have done that but it didn't feel good. He has stopped drinking now, but still, it is hard to lose the fears.
As it is a Sunday, I think I should get out there and try and and get in a church that always seems closed. But then a whole new area of dread opens, does that mean actually going to a service? I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to. Though since I have started this project I have discovered this fascinating site - mystery worshipper/ ship of fools - http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/. When I first found it, after visiting St Matthews, not sure exactly what my plan was, I thought I had a rival, or even that the task I had set myself had been done. But Mystery worshipper is a detailed account of pew comfort, biscuit count and the unquantifiable measure of worship, of the feeling of god. Oh, oh, I am always pleased after visiting a church if I find mystery worshipper has been before. I love the tiny details of their undercover mission. I feel we are in each other's footsteps. I laugh that I could indeed be wrongly unmasked as mystery worshipper if I got to close to service time. Or spot them myself. Apparently they leave a calling card in the font. Should I do something similar?
I have been skirting Westminster Chapel for weeks. It is a huge church, almost half way between our flat and Buckingham Palace. I can't work out from the outside exactly what denomination it is. I can barely describe it. Dull brown brick, Italianate arches, a church from a Hitchcock film, but less interesting. I know the afternoon service is at 5.30 and try to go at 4pm. I can't get in. I go back at about 5.10. The automatic glass sliding doors open. There are two men at the front desk, like cloakroom attendants. I have braced myself. 'I know your service is about to start but I would love to have a quick look inside the church.' They wave me in. At that moment, briefly, I think maybe I can just go ahead with it.
I can't explain my own reticence to be visible, to take a stand, to stand out, but walking through those doors into a huge room, like a theatre in tiers, with people dotted around chatting - I have taken on way too much for myself. In the centre stage is the kit for a band, and a huge tv display screen, with bad graphics procaiming their message for the Lord. Behind this ugly paraphernalia is a beautiful huge organ, another wizard of oz prop. I can't explain my reaction but I can't stay. I find it creepy, I don't want to smile and be welcomed. I bolt. An old lady at the door misunderstands my movement out, and for ages we are both left holding the door, welcoming each other into the church. I feel like a comedy baddie on the run.
I have to go with how it is. But I don't have much description. Though, when I return home, and google the church, the history is riveting. It is probably the earliest church I have been to. Initially the chapel started in 1840, in what was 'one of London's poorest slums- rife with prostitution, squalor and drug addiction. Alms houses and schools were built, orphans were cared for and work schemes were organised for unemployed men. Rev Martin's gospel-preaching and Biblical authority made Westminster Chapel stand out as a light of hope. Even influential leaders of that time like Lord Shaftesbury and Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey began to hear of the Chapel's impact in the area.' So popular was the chapel that by 1860 a 1,500 seater building, the building I went into today was designed and built opening in 1864. Between 1904 with Dr George Campbell Morgan and then his even more celebrated successor Dr Lloyd Jones until 1968, they had queues round the block. People queueing to hear the friday evening lectures and the sunday sermons. Their words travelling the world, big in USA, even Korea.
I have begun to be inspired by the history of this area's transition, the frantic building of churches in the late 19th century and I have bought a series of local maps, Westminster and Victoria 1869, 1894, 1916. I feel that I am onto something, as I colour in the churches on the b/w maps, noticing the increase of feltpenned rectangles as time passes. I'm not sure what yet. But just a fascinating movement of change. Of intention for good.
And yes, mystery worshipper had been before. Reporting on the plentiful digestive biscuits, and a 52 minute sermon! MW horrified by such length. Though my concerns about hanging around at the back of the church are validated by this short report:
'What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?
Nothing much. Few spoke to me and I spent some time sitting alone on a chair by the wall. One man in full camouflage gear came and spoke to me. He offered me his phone number and said I should visit him and see his neighbour's cat. He also said if I ever needed prayer I could phone him and he would come and pray with me, since he liked prayer. Oddly enough, I declined the invite.'
My boys came home safe and sound.
amen
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Westminster Cathedral
Probably I should have gone to Westminster Abbey next. But I didn't want to. It seemed too historic and busy for me today. There are also a couple of small churches that are nearer too, but I have walked past them hundreds of times and they never seem to be open. I don't really know what to do about them - should I try and ring and make an appointment? What would I say? Anyhow, Westminster Cathedral is nearer to Sainsbury's and even nearer to Zara where I want to look at a dress I am obsessing about. I go and look at it for the fourth time. It is a navy blue sundress with big print flowers. I love it. But I don't have time to try it on. Don't have £35.90 either. I will probably keep going to look at it until it sells out. Then maybe try and track it down on e bay. Or move on to another obsession. Only when it has nearly gone or completely gone, will I know if I really, really want it. Sort of extreme sport imaginary shopping. It is an occasional hobby.
This morning is warm, blue skies, beautiful. I have taken my sons to their counsellor, and sat in a small room with them, watching them draw disturbing but fascinating pictures. My eldest son, in all the confusion of our lives started suffering massive violent rages, like x rated episodes of supernany which had me in the end, calling in some help. I felt so badly that I had failed, that despite my absolute love and what I believe to be my kindness and care I had failed. Since then, I have thought and thought and worked out some strategies to help us all, and now sitting laughing or playing a game, things we always did but sometimes on tiptoe, on eggshells, waiting and expecting another terrifying outburst, I feel very fully that we are all present, all participating, that I have turned it round. I almost hope that the woman is going to say, 'you three don't need to be here, be on your way' but then I sit and watch my youngest take a pen and say 'it feels like this', and do the most extraordinary map, with pages and pages turning into different levels, like a console game, that keeps going, (the pair of them work together, consulting each other, taking it in turns and it is the youngest taking the lead, which rarely happens, but here they are colouring together, adding arrows, sketching the structure almost oblivious of me and her in the room) and just as I think, after the initial recognition of the situation he has drawn, and the exact model of emotion he has precisely conveyed, I begin to think, he is pushing it now, just keeping us entertained, he has forgotten his purpose (not a criticism, he is a little kid, he has our attention) he announces the final level and adds a figure, putting the most excruciating exact and painful details of his emotional landscape to it that I am almost breathless with pride and winded with the pain and confusion he must feel. I am not certain about the ethics of reporting this, and have left the detail general to keep their privacy but I feel exhausted by what I witnessed.
Also this morning my mum friend from the school who is at present living in a refuge ( I know!? It is so awful I couldn't/wouldn't make this up) texted me to say that she has to go to hospital, she needs an operation. Could I collect her children this afternoon and take them home? Only this weekend I said to her 'Things can only get better from here.' And we laughed. But they just got a whole lot worse. I instinctively believe that hardship is finite, that there is a bag of it for everyone, and if you carry your load long enough then it will lift. But it isn't true. Here is some bleak truth. You can soldier your load bravely and stoically with humour and fortitude and only be given another huge bag to carry.
The cathedral though is like a fairy tale drawing. I can remember years ago, when I first moved to London as a student, seeing it from a bus, and craning back to try and make sense of it, 'what was that?' Stripey stone, multiple layered domes, a huge rapunzel tower, a large plaza at the front. It is the Catholic cathedral
Above the doorways the signs for alpha and omega in stone held by carved birds. The door opens to the musky, dirty, sweet smell of incense. I have been inside once before and loved it. I am looking forward to the experience, looking forward to describing it. It is a surprise then, the noise. It sounds like a lorry reversing, a lorry reversing in a huge echoey church, an incessant high pitched beeping, and the sound of mechanical levering. There is somewhat unexpectedly, just in the part of the church, where previously I got the first magnificent view, a yellow cherry picker crane, extending up and down, a man perched, doing high cleaning. The view is obliterated. The power of the church, the power I expected to feel is lost. I move to find it. This cathedral is absolutely massive, an amazing patchwork of different marbles and mosaics, and flowers and candles and wrought metalwork, all in dull snake colours, but, and this is the part I like, as the eye lifts above this, above the columns, above the normal eye-line, lifting higher and higher into the high domes of the cathedral ceiling there is only dusky, dense, ash black. I had never seen anything like it before. I believe it is normal in a church to lift your eyes to the heavens to find light and beauty and magnificence. This, is like looking into a void. The grey, gradually fading to the soot black of nothing. A kind of horror to the weight of darkness pressing down.
But the church below, is busy. Tourists, people praying, strangely a photographer taking a picture of a black man rocking in ecstatic prayer. Like an actor playing a part it looks a bit over the top, a little bit unnecessary. I see too a woman, a young woman, touching the stone of a small altar, her body slumped into it, as if in surrender. Another woman fills a plastic bottle from the tap of holy water, slowly and reverentially. A smart man in a suit with gold buttons on the sleeves, sits, eyes closed, completely still and devout, his face lifted to the dark ceiling, his whole body at peace. He looks like he has just left the office for a Pret a Manger sandwich not this total, absorbed prayer. Others are slumped on their knees, their supplications still and quiet. Here, ardent devotion is not private but public, expected.
Hanging, suspended from the volcanic ash of the ceiling there is an enormous red cross with Jesus on it, his arms, long, stretched wide to the pain of his hands attached by nails.
I sit. Eyes straight ahead. Interested and observing. It is almost like a prayer, my thoughts for my friend. I want her to have somewhere to live. I want her to be well. I attempt to fill the space with these wishes.
The church was opened in 1903 built on land that had originally been marshes, then had many uses, a market and fairground, a maze, a pleasure garden, a place for bull baiting, a prison, finally the catholic church bought the land and started building the cathedral in 1895. So close in date to the Methodist Great Hall I realise that I want to go back and date the chuches I forgot to. It seems fascinating, this area, with it's competitive church building. Also there are 14 stations of the cross by Eric Gill. I had seen a few and thought they looked like his work, but found everything else too fascinating to concentrate on them. I read that he called them 'a statement without adjectives'. 'The figures are impassive and are meant to be so, for the emotion must come from us.'
A small madonna and child statuette that I had liked best of everything turns out to be medieval. The most precious thing in the cathedral. I just thought there was something beautiful in the worn fragility and sensitivity of the pair and their gaze. A very old description made in alabaster of what we still feel.
Amen
This morning is warm, blue skies, beautiful. I have taken my sons to their counsellor, and sat in a small room with them, watching them draw disturbing but fascinating pictures. My eldest son, in all the confusion of our lives started suffering massive violent rages, like x rated episodes of supernany which had me in the end, calling in some help. I felt so badly that I had failed, that despite my absolute love and what I believe to be my kindness and care I had failed. Since then, I have thought and thought and worked out some strategies to help us all, and now sitting laughing or playing a game, things we always did but sometimes on tiptoe, on eggshells, waiting and expecting another terrifying outburst, I feel very fully that we are all present, all participating, that I have turned it round. I almost hope that the woman is going to say, 'you three don't need to be here, be on your way' but then I sit and watch my youngest take a pen and say 'it feels like this', and do the most extraordinary map, with pages and pages turning into different levels, like a console game, that keeps going, (the pair of them work together, consulting each other, taking it in turns and it is the youngest taking the lead, which rarely happens, but here they are colouring together, adding arrows, sketching the structure almost oblivious of me and her in the room) and just as I think, after the initial recognition of the situation he has drawn, and the exact model of emotion he has precisely conveyed, I begin to think, he is pushing it now, just keeping us entertained, he has forgotten his purpose (not a criticism, he is a little kid, he has our attention) he announces the final level and adds a figure, putting the most excruciating exact and painful details of his emotional landscape to it that I am almost breathless with pride and winded with the pain and confusion he must feel. I am not certain about the ethics of reporting this, and have left the detail general to keep their privacy but I feel exhausted by what I witnessed.
Also this morning my mum friend from the school who is at present living in a refuge ( I know!? It is so awful I couldn't/wouldn't make this up) texted me to say that she has to go to hospital, she needs an operation. Could I collect her children this afternoon and take them home? Only this weekend I said to her 'Things can only get better from here.' And we laughed. But they just got a whole lot worse. I instinctively believe that hardship is finite, that there is a bag of it for everyone, and if you carry your load long enough then it will lift. But it isn't true. Here is some bleak truth. You can soldier your load bravely and stoically with humour and fortitude and only be given another huge bag to carry.
The cathedral though is like a fairy tale drawing. I can remember years ago, when I first moved to London as a student, seeing it from a bus, and craning back to try and make sense of it, 'what was that?' Stripey stone, multiple layered domes, a huge rapunzel tower, a large plaza at the front. It is the Catholic cathedral
Above the doorways the signs for alpha and omega in stone held by carved birds. The door opens to the musky, dirty, sweet smell of incense. I have been inside once before and loved it. I am looking forward to the experience, looking forward to describing it. It is a surprise then, the noise. It sounds like a lorry reversing, a lorry reversing in a huge echoey church, an incessant high pitched beeping, and the sound of mechanical levering. There is somewhat unexpectedly, just in the part of the church, where previously I got the first magnificent view, a yellow cherry picker crane, extending up and down, a man perched, doing high cleaning. The view is obliterated. The power of the church, the power I expected to feel is lost. I move to find it. This cathedral is absolutely massive, an amazing patchwork of different marbles and mosaics, and flowers and candles and wrought metalwork, all in dull snake colours, but, and this is the part I like, as the eye lifts above this, above the columns, above the normal eye-line, lifting higher and higher into the high domes of the cathedral ceiling there is only dusky, dense, ash black. I had never seen anything like it before. I believe it is normal in a church to lift your eyes to the heavens to find light and beauty and magnificence. This, is like looking into a void. The grey, gradually fading to the soot black of nothing. A kind of horror to the weight of darkness pressing down.
But the church below, is busy. Tourists, people praying, strangely a photographer taking a picture of a black man rocking in ecstatic prayer. Like an actor playing a part it looks a bit over the top, a little bit unnecessary. I see too a woman, a young woman, touching the stone of a small altar, her body slumped into it, as if in surrender. Another woman fills a plastic bottle from the tap of holy water, slowly and reverentially. A smart man in a suit with gold buttons on the sleeves, sits, eyes closed, completely still and devout, his face lifted to the dark ceiling, his whole body at peace. He looks like he has just left the office for a Pret a Manger sandwich not this total, absorbed prayer. Others are slumped on their knees, their supplications still and quiet. Here, ardent devotion is not private but public, expected.
Hanging, suspended from the volcanic ash of the ceiling there is an enormous red cross with Jesus on it, his arms, long, stretched wide to the pain of his hands attached by nails.
I sit. Eyes straight ahead. Interested and observing. It is almost like a prayer, my thoughts for my friend. I want her to have somewhere to live. I want her to be well. I attempt to fill the space with these wishes.
The church was opened in 1903 built on land that had originally been marshes, then had many uses, a market and fairground, a maze, a pleasure garden, a place for bull baiting, a prison, finally the catholic church bought the land and started building the cathedral in 1895. So close in date to the Methodist Great Hall I realise that I want to go back and date the chuches I forgot to. It seems fascinating, this area, with it's competitive church building. Also there are 14 stations of the cross by Eric Gill. I had seen a few and thought they looked like his work, but found everything else too fascinating to concentrate on them. I read that he called them 'a statement without adjectives'. 'The figures are impassive and are meant to be so, for the emotion must come from us.'
A small madonna and child statuette that I had liked best of everything turns out to be medieval. The most precious thing in the cathedral. I just thought there was something beautiful in the worn fragility and sensitivity of the pair and their gaze. A very old description made in alabaster of what we still feel.
Amen
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
Westminster Methodist Great Hall
I can see one of the towers of the Houses of Parliament from our street and the helicopters overhead have been constant for days. It is still always a thrill however, the short walk, to Victoria Street and the sight of the London Eye squeezed between office blocks. Then the squash of the blank, concrete blocks giving way to Parliament Square. Big Ben's face familiar like a Dad's watch. The Houses of Parliament. Westminster Abbey. The peace camp tents. I live here. I always think. I live right here. With pride. Laughing at home on the night before the election that it would be possible to run out of the flat, round the block and wave to the tv cameras behind the political pundits and be back in time to watch it.
A week later, Nick Clegg twirling between the parties with the glee of Grayson Perry winning the Turner prize in a dress. Then the pair of them, school boys with men's pink, soap scrubbed faces. Our headboys. Gordon Brown a kind of left wing Coriolanus, his absolute honour and wilting strengths making tragedy inherent. I cried when he made his last speeches. He always seemed such a fundamentally good man. His son goes to my son's poor but beautifully behaved, high attaining, amazing school. Though presumably not for much longer.
Today I have been told I am no longer entitled to free dental care and glasses because I have taken on more work. I have been told that some of my childcare will not be paid because of an error. Most of my childcare isn't paid, it is just the little bit that might have been paid but won't be now. It has come as a bit of a blow. I don't think I have quite enough money to pay the rent this weekend. I don't know. I seem to fall a little bit between everything. I live in the heart of politics and just as we all are, I am it.
I had thought the Westminster Methodist Great Hall marginally nearer than Westminster Abbey, but as I get near I am not sure, they are so close to each other. Not much in it though and I decide to stick with my plan. It is a huge, white, wedding cake but though it is massive, it is somehow invisible, more like another government building than a church. But a sign says 'Whoever you are, wherever you are on life's journey. Welcome.' I walk in.
Inside I ask a man if I can just look at the church, and in the same moment see a poster for tours, 'do I have to take a tour?' I say. 'No.' he says 'you can just look'. He waves his arm around. The building is huge. 'Where do I go for the main bit?' I say. 'Upstairs.' He says.
Up the disney princess staircase, up and up, the curling, curving, ornate and marble stairs, to a sort of huge conference hotel corridor and then the doors into the ...........I don't know what the proper word is.......but I think assembly must be near. Like a parliament, I think. A god parliament. I didn't expect this, though I realise it is handy to be able to use parliament as a theme. There are chairs fanning out in neat rows, then a balcony with more chairs, all in the round. Except the focus at the middle is a low wooden stage and behind a wizard of oz organ. Absolutely massive. There are three cleaners staring at me as I enter, an industrial vacuum cleaner balanced on chairs. I bob and nod and smile at them. But they are busy. Cleaning and staring. The room has that funny brushed hush of corporate carpet. Above an enormous shallow dome, that should be beautiful and sort of is, but not quite enough. I don't stay.
Downstairs there is a table laid out with goody bags for some conference within the building. For a minute I think they say Prada. But they don't. A smaller more intimate chapel, at one side with book shelves just of the bible in the entrance. A statue of John Wesley, a short, energetic man, captured in wood. In a corner of the hallway, as if only stored, is a very plain cross. Again wood, but rough, visible brackets holding it together. I think I like this best.
I had read recently ' We secularists should forget the tedious fixation on belief, forget about being 'atheist' and concentrate on a conversation about the spiritual strategies for overcoming the common human resistance to living well.' Michael McGhee. Whatever parliament, I imagine this is the question. Perhaps my own question.
Later I read that the church was opened in 1912, built on the site of a music hall with £250,000 of the 'Million Guinea Fund' a fund where over a million Methodists gave a guinea. That the church was designed so that it did not look like a church, so that people from all walks of life would enter. That the suffragettes came here, and Ghandi.
Writing this at night. The helicopters still overhead. I hear Big Ben chime. I imagine David and Samantha Cameron listening too.
Amen.
A week later, Nick Clegg twirling between the parties with the glee of Grayson Perry winning the Turner prize in a dress. Then the pair of them, school boys with men's pink, soap scrubbed faces. Our headboys. Gordon Brown a kind of left wing Coriolanus, his absolute honour and wilting strengths making tragedy inherent. I cried when he made his last speeches. He always seemed such a fundamentally good man. His son goes to my son's poor but beautifully behaved, high attaining, amazing school. Though presumably not for much longer.
Today I have been told I am no longer entitled to free dental care and glasses because I have taken on more work. I have been told that some of my childcare will not be paid because of an error. Most of my childcare isn't paid, it is just the little bit that might have been paid but won't be now. It has come as a bit of a blow. I don't think I have quite enough money to pay the rent this weekend. I don't know. I seem to fall a little bit between everything. I live in the heart of politics and just as we all are, I am it.
I had thought the Westminster Methodist Great Hall marginally nearer than Westminster Abbey, but as I get near I am not sure, they are so close to each other. Not much in it though and I decide to stick with my plan. It is a huge, white, wedding cake but though it is massive, it is somehow invisible, more like another government building than a church. But a sign says 'Whoever you are, wherever you are on life's journey. Welcome.' I walk in.
Inside I ask a man if I can just look at the church, and in the same moment see a poster for tours, 'do I have to take a tour?' I say. 'No.' he says 'you can just look'. He waves his arm around. The building is huge. 'Where do I go for the main bit?' I say. 'Upstairs.' He says.
Up the disney princess staircase, up and up, the curling, curving, ornate and marble stairs, to a sort of huge conference hotel corridor and then the doors into the ...........I don't know what the proper word is.......but I think assembly must be near. Like a parliament, I think. A god parliament. I didn't expect this, though I realise it is handy to be able to use parliament as a theme. There are chairs fanning out in neat rows, then a balcony with more chairs, all in the round. Except the focus at the middle is a low wooden stage and behind a wizard of oz organ. Absolutely massive. There are three cleaners staring at me as I enter, an industrial vacuum cleaner balanced on chairs. I bob and nod and smile at them. But they are busy. Cleaning and staring. The room has that funny brushed hush of corporate carpet. Above an enormous shallow dome, that should be beautiful and sort of is, but not quite enough. I don't stay.
Downstairs there is a table laid out with goody bags for some conference within the building. For a minute I think they say Prada. But they don't. A smaller more intimate chapel, at one side with book shelves just of the bible in the entrance. A statue of John Wesley, a short, energetic man, captured in wood. In a corner of the hallway, as if only stored, is a very plain cross. Again wood, but rough, visible brackets holding it together. I think I like this best.
I had read recently ' We secularists should forget the tedious fixation on belief, forget about being 'atheist' and concentrate on a conversation about the spiritual strategies for overcoming the common human resistance to living well.' Michael McGhee. Whatever parliament, I imagine this is the question. Perhaps my own question.
Later I read that the church was opened in 1912, built on the site of a music hall with £250,000 of the 'Million Guinea Fund' a fund where over a million Methodists gave a guinea. That the church was designed so that it did not look like a church, so that people from all walks of life would enter. That the suffragettes came here, and Ghandi.
Writing this at night. The helicopters still overhead. I hear Big Ben chime. I imagine David and Samantha Cameron listening too.
Amen.
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