Notre Dame of France, Leicester Square

I think about Co Dependency and Christianity as I cycle to work across the parks, mainly in the rain. After a really horrible row with exh and an evening of tears and wine and good advice from a mum who spent a year in a refuge I grumpily get the co dependency books back out. It seems I need to accept my part in my problems. Though I believe I do mainly, I just need to guard the boundaries. The ride is beautiful: nosing the bike infront of Buckingham Palace, along the bottom of the damp dark green of Green Park, under Wellington Arch, up the steady incline of Hyde Park, past the barracks, alongside the lake, over the road, past the gallery and beneath the canopy of old trees. Dogs like cartoon characters in dog walker packs, all ears and eyebrows stretched taut on leads, then wet deck chairs blown inside out, billowed pregnant in the wind. At the brim of the hill The Round Pond is almost part of the sky, a grey disc of reflected cloud with swans and geese flapping their wings in a slow feathered cancan under the unseasonable gloom. Tourists at the gates of Kensington Palace, where the tide of cellophane flowers lapped when Diana died talk in hushed voices of where they were when she died ( in a teepee in New Mexico with shagging lesbians if you want to know.) Princess Diana is almost the patron saint of CD I think, all those unsuitable men, the middle of the night bedside hospital visits, the unhappy childhood, the open wound of that savagely caring heart dragged like heavy luggage. I imagine a catholic coloured statue of her, a Jeff Koons perhaps, a single tear in the corner of those dipped blue eyes dropping with the weight of the sorrow of the world.

This is the Christianity I learnt at home, at sunday school, at school:

Think of others before yourself.

Give without counting the cost.

Do a good turn every day.

As a family we said prayers every night until I was a teenager when I finally rebelled against the tradition, the words themselves exhausted by the speed with which we rattled them off. We didn't have a TV and I think my childhood was more old fashioned than my age. Exh still laughs at my 'Oranges are not the Only Fruit' story of collecting for Oxfam when the men landed on the moon. ( though not actually the first landing I suspect ). My younger brother and I peering round the dimpled glass front door of a house to see the grainy black and white picture of men in bulky suits as if made on Blue Peter. My Mum above us rattling the collecting tin circled by the pictures of starving children to a Dad who was surprised the door bell had rung.

Co d is what you learn when you detach from an alcoholic. What you have become or have always been. It is the unhealthy attachment to another, the willingness to take care of someone else's problems, a compulsive wish to control others by your care.

This is what Nietzsche said on christianity:

'Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.'

He 'called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a "calamitous error", and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian world.'

' Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Nietzsche sees slave-morality born out of the resentment of slaves. It works to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness." '

It seems a lot of the churches I want to get into now are only open on Sundays or odd times in the week and it is increasingly difficult just to slip into a church as I am working all but full time. Also I have discovered on my map behind the computer that charts churches I have been to and those still to visit, a purple sticker over a yellow one on a church in Soho - though I am not sure if this is a mistake or if the boys are playing a trick on me. I had a boyfriend once a long time ago, a college boyfriend, who kept adding extra birds to a large copy of Constable's Haywain that hung in his parents front room. They never noticed he said and the intricacy of the sly sabotage made me laugh.

It is pouring as I turn off Leicester Square into the narrow street of Notre Dame of France. Infront of the Odeon there is a woman with a clip board directing passersby away from the workmen creating a gothic landscape for the premiere of Snow White and the Hunstmen. A drunk man cackles to security guards behind the newly errected barriers 'It is pissing down, no one will be coming here.' 'They will come.' they say calmly - behind them green astro turf being rolled out and men placing fake crows in fake trees.

In a flat faced large 50s building I walk up the steps and into a huge rotunda room with grey light from a cupola skylight in the shallow domed roof. It is a bit murky, a bit municipal, a bit unkempt. I sit at a pew. Just sit. There are about five others sat in the pews with their heads bowed. Perhaps just sheltering I wonder - the heels of scruffy shoes and stowed bags visible, though they seem devout in their prayer. As I sit in the grey stillness it feels like an arbitary act that I am just sitting still on a Tuesday lunchtime here in this place. I begin to hear high holy music, as if almost at a frequency beyond human ear, I can't work out where it is coming from, and imagine a cd piped in for atmosphere. Later when I am researching the church I find a mention on flickr that there was an organ playing when the photographer took the pictures and I wonder now writing this whether someone was actually quietly playing.

Above the altar piece is an large ornate and richly detailed tapestry of Mary. Like a Disney princess she is surrounded by animals and birds - a cockerel, a peacock, a squirrel, a deer. I am mesmerized by the fine detail though I find it a bit sickly, a bit ugly.

Eventually I stand and walk to the back of the church, finding blue and white delft tiles depicting the Stations of the Cross and a notice board on the curved wall labelled 'Spiritual Life' listing retreats, and prayer groups, some of it in French. I find too a mention of Jean Cocteau's mural. Aha I think, they are here. A friend had mentioned that there were some of Cocteau murals in a french church in Soho but for some reason I had assumed they were in the French Protestant church in Soho Square which I still haven't got into. I have to wander around the church, up to the altar and then to the side curved wall where there are glass booths sectioned off from the church. It isn't clear if they are chapels or offices but pressing my face to the dark glass and through the reflection I see the slab of an altar and vibrant life-sized drawings of the Cruxifiction on the wall behind. Passionate but stylised line drawings in bright pencil crayon colours they show only the legs and bleeding feet of Jesus, the blood dripping from his feet to a rose. Homoerotic soldiers, bereft women, a gold ringed black sun, there is an odd but modern narrative within the picture, a crucifixion of difficult human emotions.

The mural was painted over eight days in Novemeber 1959 when Jean Cocteau was promoting his film Le Testament d'Orphee in London. The church had been badly bombed in 1940 and then restored. The french cultural attache Renee Varin was commissioned to encourage eminent french artists to help create a sacred space. Though Cocteau's poetry, opium and homosexuality were seen to sit uneasily with his Catholicism he was invited to decorate a chapel and screens had to be errected to keep away the crowds while he worked.

'He arrived each morning about 10am and began by lighting a candle. He was heard talking to the Virgin Mary while working on the drawing. 'O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God's creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too....I am drawing you with light strokes....You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.'

And when he left,

'I am sorry to go, as if the wall of the chapel had drawn me into another world.' 'I shall never forget that wide open heart of Notre Dame de France and the place you allowed me to take within it'

Though as I begin researching the murals I am tipped through a door of conspiracy and complicated plots attached to Cocteau. A lot seems to be based on the discredited Priory of Sion - a lineage invented by the frenchman Pierre Plantard in 1956 to prove he was descended from the true King of France. The plot included fake documents being planted by Plantard and accomplices in the Biblioteque Nationale and across France to establish his claim. (Oh I love the idea of false history embedded in the real. ) Despite Plantard admitting his hoax the story seems to have gathered momentum, being used to prove the lineage of Jesus and Mary Magdalegne and becoming the basis of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. The son of a suicide Cocteau was listed by Plantard as a Grand Master of Sion along with Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. The murals at Notre Dame fuel the debate:

'The Priory of Sion has, in the past, purposely used the letters "MM", or sometimes jus "M" to symbolize Magdalene and Cocteau used them as well. In the Church of Notre Dame de France ("Our Lady of France") in London, which Cocteau decorated with fantastic murals, this letter "M" is mysteriously placed on the altar, directly beneath the scene of the crucifixion. To the left are depicted the dice thrown by the Roman soldiers who according to the Gospels, cast lots to determine who should get Christ's clothing after he died. The number of dots that are shown on the dice is fifty-eight, a significant number. The skull of Baphomet, which the Templars and later the Priory of Sion are said to have possessed, was referred to cryptically as "Caput 58M" 5 +8= 13, and "M" is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Therefore "58M" could be a code for "Mary Magdalene" who is traditionally shown praying before a skull.'

'The same statement is being made in Cocteau's mural at Notre Dame. This statement is further reinforced by the fact that the 'M' on the altar is directly below a rose that Cocteau has placed on the cross, precisely beneath Christ's feet. Not only does that make it a 'rose cross' but the rose is above the initial for 'Mary'. The term 'Rosemary' is used in occult parlance to refer to the female consort of a god or demon. (Thus the title for the film Rosemary's Baby.) This is exactly what Magdalene's symbolism entailed. The fact that the rose as well as the blood drops beneath it, are coloured both red and blue may indicate the 'blue blood' of Christ's royal line. Given all of this, the Church's title 'Notre Dame de France' is interesting. Most would assume this to be a reference to the Virgin Mary, who is called by Catholics 'Our Lady'. But the true 'Lady of France' is the goddess Marianne, their national symbol. Perhaps 'Marianne' and Magdalene' are representations of the same archetype.'

http://quintessentialpublications.com/tymman/?page_id=26

Phew, I find this stuff exhausting. Though ( and I think this is my favourite bit) I also read fascinating accounts of two female academics of impeccable reputation being transported through time in the gardens of Versailles in 1901. Cocteau calling it 'the most important experiences of our time'

http://www.kathleenmcgowan.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52:the-mystery-of-the-versailles-time-slip&catid=38:articles&Itemid=62

Notre Dame of France itself was established by the Marist Fathers for the French community in London in the 1860s in a building that had previously been 'Burford's Panaroma' accounting for its circular shape. Consecrated in 1868 the church's mission included a hospital, an orphanage and two schools which were run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. The Marist fathers wished to put the sacrifice of Mary at the centre of their faith - Mary's close and gentle but human relationship to Jesus to mirror their own. They call themselves rather intriguingly 'hidden and unknown' - I think they mean that their work is 'unsung' 'unobserved' - again like Mary - with the sacrifice of her holy motherhood.

The original panoramic building was built in 1793 by Richard Barker. He had invented a circular drawing on a cylindrical surface to convey complete 360 degree scenes in 1792 and obtained a royal lincence in 1787 for the exclusive use of his invention for fourteen years. Initially setting up with his son he showed huge panoraomic drawings in a make shift shed in his back garden near Leicester Square before purchasing this site and commissioning the purpose designed rotunda building. 'Panorama painting seems to be all the rage' wrote Constable in a letter of 1803 and Ruskin later described a visit to Milan:

'I had been partly prepared for this view [of the city from the cathedral roof] by the admirable presentation of it in London a year or two before, in a great exhibition of which the vanishing has been in later life a greatly felt loss to me,--Burford's panorama in Leicester Square, which was an educational institution of the highest and purest value, and ought to have been supported by the government as one of the most beneficial school instruments in London. There I had seen, exquisitely painted, the view from the roof of Milan Cathedral, when I had no hope of ever seeing the reality, but with a joy and wonder of the deepest;--and now to be there indeed, made a deep wonder become fathomless. (from Praeterita: TheAutobiography of John Ruskin [Oxford 1978]

http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/2003/panorama/new_001.htm for a picture.

It was not the only spectacular attraction of Leicester Square - in 1851 the area was occupied by a large, circular, domed building, in which was exhibited Wyld's "Great Globe."

http://www.ssplprints.com/image/105139/unattributed-wylds-globe-leicester-square-london-12-july-1851 Do look! It is a fascinating illustration!

The representation of the world was sixty-five feet in diameter, and comprised a surface of some ten thousand square feet. Galleries encircled the interior of the building at different heights from the ground, by which means visitors were enabled to walk round and inspect every portion of the globe, an attendant, staff in hand, pointing out its principal features; lectures were likewise delivered at intervals during the day.

Though anybody who complains about Leicester Square these days will like the later description of the central patch of land once the Globe had closed down: 'Overgrown with rank and fetid vegetation, it was a public nuisance, both in an æsthetic and in a sanitary point of view; covered with the débris of tin pots and kettles, cast-off shoes, old clothes, and dead cats and dogs, it was an eye-sore to every one forced to pass by it. '

The Notre Dame Hall beneath the church later hosted many punk gigs. Here, a description from John Springate from the Glitter Band:

'Gerry Shephard and I went to see The Sex Pistols at Notre Dame Hall in Leicester Square, which I think was late-76. Gerry and I were dressed in our snazziest gear with flared trousers and all that, and there's all these punks there with drainpipe jeans, short hair, really sort of 'now'. The Sex Pistols came on and did four numbers and I said to Gerry - cos we'd had had enough by then, we'd seen enough and we came out - I said, 'Well that's it then.' I just knew.'

http://www.alwynwturner.com/glitter/punk.html ( a music site charting glam rock in its proponents own words including its demise as punk arrived. Here too is this great description from Tina Charles ( 'I love to love ( But my Baby Loves to Dance') ):

'I did a TV show in Germany with The Clash and Dana and Showaddywaddy, which was a very strange group of people. And we were all on the 'plane going over and I always remember The Clash were so badly behaved, taking all the mini-bar from the hotel and everything - they were just shocking. And there was Dana and I behaving ourselves totally.'

And in the late 80s when I helped my neighbours in the opposite bedsit in Baron's Court run a party business we hosted a Burns Night party there - attaching stag's heads to sandy concrete and borrowed tartan draped round pillars and folding endless purple and green napkins. Thatcher's children indeed.

I struggle writing the Cocteau conspiracy theories for days then wipe out the whole post by accident. In tears I text friends to see if they can help me retrieve what I have written. I take it on myself to delve deep into the bowels of the computer getting as far as 'meta data and hidden cache' but not knowing the software to open them with.

Still cycling back and forth across the parks - preparations for the Queen's celebrations are underway. One morning with traffic at a standstill I have to push the bike infront of the palace because the roads are shut. Soldiers in Nutcracker suite outfits dotted across Green Park move in a slow pace sweeping for bombs. Another day, I turn the bike onto Birdcage Walk to find myself at the head of a busby-clad brass band regiment like a middle aged masthead on a hired bike. I treat myself to an out of character self-waved circular cheer - a booyah! to the world, though no one is watching .

I rewrite the blog - remembering almost word for word some of the early stuff then getting bogged down in religious conspiracies again. It feels like it takes me ages - an extra week at least to rewrite and I don't even have the satisfaction of a purple sticker to place.

OL sends me an image of a church sign he has seen in Cambridgeshire visiting his parents. 'The Hokey Cokey is NOT what its all about' it says. He says it is the sister image to a nearby off licence which says 'What if the Hokey Cokey IS all it's about?'

Amen.

St Clement Danes

It is Sunday afternoon and I am cycling down the Strand really really fast, wearing a cape, with a man in a white van gesticulating at me and I am absolutely hopping mad. I have discovered this morning that there has been an incident at Exh's new place yesterday that includes our children, a knife, a screwdriver, PSM's sons, and an altercation with some big boys. The children had been allowed to roam Bermondsey unattended. I am furious and frightened. I feel sick. Everyone is safe and all is well and in many ways the incident is better than it sounds but in many others it is worse. I have the sense that my optimism that everything will be ok is not true. That my foggy cheer that by the teenage years we will have worked out so much I will not be shocked by what is to come is only an essential lie that I tell myself. Once a woman cornered me to say how much I would suffer when they were teenagers. Her beautiful and seemingly biddable son had turned unexpectedly drunken and nasty. I thought grumpily that she should keep quiet, as if transgressing the sanctity of motherhood truths like talking about childbirth to a first time pregnant mum. After all my oldest friend's son is 21 this year and I have witnessed some of the pain of a son growing up. Though he is a fantastic. However my eldest child has a warrior heart - brave and fearless and while you would want him on your side in any battle he is a difficult child to fit into the mild mannered expectations of our time. I believe he would stoop to pick up the wounded in a battle if they were on his side but I believe too he would be a ferocious enemy. Also and this is understandable as a 9 year old boy he has no comprehension that he is mortal. I believe too he needs more freedom - I have seen his engrossed and happy face as he made camps in muddy fields on his own for hours, and yet I trap him in a second floor flat with a making box, a wii, a load of lego and a lot of paper and pens. Of course I get them out to the park, to the countryside, to Richmond Park as much as possible, but he needs freedom to make mistakes on his own.


'Oh' I feel like roaring. Sometimes I don't know what to do. I think of everything tender in him, the care and thought with which he picks presents, the dedicated attention and gentle patience he lavishes on his young cousins, the enthusiasm and beauty with which he makes a japanese garden on a beach and the question he asked me the day before - did you realise when you were a little girl that the people around you had witnessed the war? - but I have realised this morning for the first time he is a danger to himself. He will swagger down the street, he will challenge others, he will get into fights. I have to teach him to be safe but I worry it is inherent in him.


I am aiming for the Savoy Chapel but I sort of know I am late. The incident has taken hours of discussion and detective work to sort out what is being said and what is nearest the truth. Then just before getting on the bike I spoke to PSM and she has added extra details which seem to change everything and mean that someone/everyone is lying. Though I suspect infact everyone believes the truth they are telling. It just doesn't all add up.

The Chapel, just off the Strand is shut. It is only open for a service at 11am on Sundays, there seems to be some restoration work going on which means it is shut in the week. Oh, I think, what shall I do now. I still have the anger and tears choked in my throat, stuck like a swallowed spoon. I am in a haze. Shall I get another bike and go up to try Soho? Or South London? I have got to get into a church today for I am starting full time work the next day - I have just over a month booked at one newspaper and then a contract at the quality broadsheet for six months potentially being extended for a year. I got the job! Though the combination of pending full time work and being less available to my sons is an additional worry.
Then I look up and laugh. It is a game that is easy to play in London - how many churches can you see at one time - and here in easy view are two churches as if under my nose. The first, at the bottom of Aldwych, St Mary Le Strand is shut. But, a little bit further down the Strand, on a kind of traffic island in the wide thoroughfare St Clement Danes is open. Oh I think a rush of excitement - this is nearly the City - this is the Oranges and Lemons church.

At the gate I see that the church is affiliated with the Royal airforce and as I walk in I can see display cases of airforce memorabilia and postcards for sale. A man in the office at the side nods to me as I enter. The church is light and bright and beautiful - dark wood at the lower floor and white columns reaching up from the gallery, ornate plaster work of swags and rich gilding in the vaulted roof, I sit in a pew. I want just to think.

Across from me an old woman with a peaceful face also sits at a pew. She is folding things into plastic bags. Large with bare arms she is like a painting, somehow monumental, completely at ease with herself, engrossed in her task, oblivious of my sidelong eyes observing her.

Infront, hung on the back of each pew there are beautiful cross stitched kneelers. I love the time and care of their work. Nimble fingers counting out in stitches airforce ensignia. I bought recently on ebay a half finished patchwork cushion cover for £15 - it is one of the most beautiful things I possess - possibly from the 30s, the rich colour and textures of the velvets and silks stiched together with highly visible herringbone stitch are in irregular triangular shapes. Like the structure of a leaf the construction is visible, a show of the craft and care and time of a woman's work. I would like to have it framed, would like it one day to hang above my desk while I write. If I was stuck for words or stories I would look at the combinations of colours and patterns, the unexpected arrangements that work so beautifully. When I try to identify the herringbone pattern of the stitch I find:

'Patchwork represents religious poverty in several cultures. A prominent example is the kesa or kasay which origninated in India in the fourth century BC. It arrived in Japan with Buddhism in the sixth century c.e and became a Western Asian tradition. The patched shawl is a symbol of Buddha, who was often depicted with a patched robe draped over his left shoulder. Worn for worship and ritual, the kesa represented a vow of poverty and served as a symbol of humility. The rectangular kesa is about one yard wide and two and a half times the length of the human body.
As a devotional act, monks cleaned and stitched together discarded fabric in a traditional manner, based on seven vertical columns. The pieces of fabric are sewn from the centre, slightly overlapping one another. Patterns are based on rank and position, including the quality and colour of the cloth. In some cases, a brocade fabric was cut up, rearranged and put back together in an artistic manner. Prayers were repeated while the kesa was being sewn, put on, and taken off. the kesa was only cleaned with purified water and incense. In most cases it was the only personal possession owned by a Buddhist monk. Needlework through history: An enclylopedia Catherine Amoroso Leslie

On a whim I have started taking pictures of my washing up on the draining board. I spend so much time doing it day in day out - breakfast bowls, coffee cups, wine glasses, cooking pots, bread tins, stacking clean colourful cups and plates in a higher and higher perfectly balanced arrangements that I thought it would be funny take a record of my work. Also, sometimes, the early morning sunlight hitting a colour combination - a green patterned tea cup with a pink, yellow and orange plastic beaker is just beautiful.

'I believe life is sacred' a man says simply in a discussion about euthanasia on the radio. Ah, I think with a comic book light bulb above my head - get that sound effect machine back out - Ding! That is the key. That is what is celebrated in all these churches, what is found when I come through the doors. It seems very simple and yet completely overlooked most of the time. Life is sacred. Here in the space of these churches is the acceptance of mystery at the heart of life and the celebration of it too. Just sitting still here I understand this for the first time. I don't have to believe I think looking at the cruxifix and the flicker of an altar candle - just accept the statement of sacred. Perhaps it is what my children are missing. I remember travelling in Greece and admiring the inventiveness of the roadside shrines. Votive candles flickering in spindly glass boxes, pictures, a small glass of something, some herbs, once I saw a bottle of coca cola. I thought they were like 'welcome' boxes to god, like a hostess offering some small nibbles to a guest on arrival. This was years ago when I was an art student and I wanted then to make my own, to give thanks by what I kept precious in that box. Though I never did it. Now I would keep an orange, an apple, an egg, a large glass of wine, a candle, maybe a slice of home made bread and something that smells nice, maybe some basil or sage and a bowl of Walker's Chilli Sensations crisps. Simple things that could be shared. I write all this and then google these boxes and discover infact all my ideas are wrong - shockingly they mark road accidents - in memorial for those who died or in thanks for survival. Oh.

Sport I think. That is what we need. More sport for the boys. I will just have to organise them.

I notice the beatiful wooden pulpit, like an intricately carved look out post. I find out it was carved by Grinling Gibbons who's work I have admired before in a Wren church.

In the St Clement Danes guide book I read:
'The Romans, having founded Londinium and occupied it for 400 years, abandoned it in the early 5th century. They left behind them the walled City of London and an embryonic Christian worship.'
Ding! Again that light bulb. Oh I suddenly realise, understanding my stupidity - it is because of the Romans there is Christianity in Britain. I can't tell you what a complete revelation this is to me - and with it the realisation of why it is called the Roman Catholic Church. I think it is almost too embarrassing to mention this it seems so completely obvious but somehow it makes many things very clear to me. The baton on and on of worship. Not only was London created by the Romans but the churches are their legacy. I had only thought of the roman gods as their religion, forgetting St Paul and his travels. On a recent quick dip into the British Museum I was also fascinated by the crossover sarcophogases - egyptian to roman. Again I hadn't understood this movement of change from one to another. It is something that interests me the shifts of power blending and merging, we were taught in 'periods' at school not the gaps between, the downhill run to a new order. I start reading about the Romans in quiet moments on a very rare not busy day at work, I catch Mary Beard on TV talking about the Romans and showing us their remains littered under the streets of Rome - a block of flats still standing, basement burial chambers under modern apartment blocks. We live on the patterns of their lives I think, the Strand itself the straight line of a Roman road.

As the Romans departed the City of London the walled city seems chiefly to have been abandoned though there is some mystery surrounding this - I think of it though - a desolate place, temples left to decay, the rain beating down on elegant columns, the ruins of Roman life fading away. Lundenwic, a port area near the present St Clement Danes was established but when the warriors of Denmark came up the Thames spreading slaughter at the beginning of the 9th century the Saxon population retreated back within the city walls. Eventually Alfred the Great overcame the Danes in 878AD and Guthrum their leader accepted baptism and peace. It is thought that Alfred allowed Danes with English wives to settle in the old 'wic' or port ( hence Aldwych) and that these people took over a small wooden church already in existence. Later, under the Danish king Canute (1017-35) a small stone church was built, dedicated to St Clement. Over the years it was enlarged and restored many times, acquiring a tower in about 1100. This is the church that became known as St Clement of the Danes.

According to the confession of Thomas Winter, it was here that the Gunpowder Plot in was concocted in 1605. He says, "So we met behind St. Clement's, Mr. Catesby, Mr. Percy, Mr. Wright, Mr. Guy Fawkes, and myself, and having, upon a primer, given each other the oath of secrecy, in a chamber where no other body was, we went after into the next room and heard Mass, and received the blessed Sacrament upon the same.'

John Donne lived (1573 - 1631) in the parish and his wife was buried here - though the gravestone no longer exists Donne's epitaph to her remains, now engraved on a tablet within the church. 'Her husband John Donne made speechless by grief, sets up this stone to speak, brings his ashes to hers in a new marriage under God'. She died giving birth to their twelth child.

Despite escaping the Great Fire of London in 1666 the church had become run down or even derelict and became one of the few 51 London churches Christopher Wren designed and supervised in the late 17th century outside the City of London after the fire.

I look up the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' but it seems little is known, though the first written record of it is from 1744. There appears to be another version too:

Gay go up and gay go down,
To ring the bells of London town.

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clements.

Bull's eyes and targets,
Say the bells of St. Marg'ret's.

Brickbats and tiles,
Say the bells of St. Giles'.

Halfpence and farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin's.

Pancakes and fritters,
Say the bells of St. Peter's.

Two sticks and an apple,
Say the bells of Whitechapel.

Pokers and tongs,
Say the bells of St. John's.

Kettles and pans,
Say the bells of St. Ann's.

Old Father Baldpate,
Say the slow bells of Aldgate.

You owe me ten shillings,
Say the bells of St. Helen's.

When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.

Pray when will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

Chop chop chop chop
The last man's dead!

Theories suggest that these are all the bells of the churches that could be heard from Newgate prison where executions took place and that the meter of the couplets match the sound of the peal of the bells. Another that St Clement Danes' churchyard once stretched to the bank of the Thames and the local children helped to unload cargoes of ships attempting to evade customs duty, receiving foreign fruit as a reward. Then I find the suggestion: 'The round singing of the ancients, of which this game is a fitting illustration, is probably a relic of Celtic festivity. The burden of a song, chorused by the entire company, followed the stanza sung by the vocalist, and this soloist, having finished, had license to appoint the next singer, 'canere ad myrtum,' by handing him the myrtle branch. At all events round singing was anciently so performed by the Druids, the Bardic custom of the men of the wand."
In 1920 a service was introduced at the church for the children of the local school to be given an orange and a lemon which still exists today.

On the 10th May 1941 St Clement Danes received a direct hit from an enemy bomber. Fire roared through the building, Wren's woodwork catching easily, flames as high as the steeple. In the guide book there is a picture of the tower lit like a light house in the dark night, fire spewing from the windows and arches. That night a heavy night of bombing in the capital 1,480 people were killed

Geoff Sanfield recalls his family house in Barnet north London being hit for it was the suburbs just as much as the centre of London that lay at risk. This was just one incident from the thousands that night:

'The bombing had eased somewhat by April 1941, so we came home. The grass in the garden was waist high and the five sycamore trees were even higher and made for great climbing.

On Saturday, May 10th, 1941, the biggest raid on London took place when Hitler sent over everything. For some reason, we had not gone to the Anderson shelter that night, probably fed up with all the various privations, and also things had been beginning to ease a little. We were bombed at around 11 pm. Four bombs in all; one three houses along from us, one on the allotment at the bottom of the garden and two further away.

The various blasts blew the curtains in and most of the windows out, some ceilings out and plaster came in. My sister and I, who were sleeping in a double bed in a downstairs rear room, were still asleep beneath curtains, dust and plaster etc. Dad had been in the kitchen making cocoa, and finished up amidst all the pots and pans. Mum had been standing in the doorway to our room and was narrowly missed by the front door, which was blown in. I can still smell the cordite, explosions, plaster, dust and fractured sewers etc.

We were dragged out of the house and up the front garden path, and I can remember stooping to pick up a large bomb splinter that had become embedded in the garden gate, now hanging by one hinge: I was promptly pulled away as it was still very hot, but what a souvenir to have had!

We were taken to neighbours for the night and Dad returned to what was left of the house, but it had already been looted, mostly food, but also some cutlery and cut glass. One particular piece was a wedding present to my parents from an uncle who had recently been killed. Dad pulled back the debris-covered bedclothes and went to bed, remarking that Mr Hitler was not going to deprive him of his bed.'

http://ww2today.com/10th-may-1941-huge-raid-on-london

I think of my son's astute question about my childhood and think - no - I had no idea that my parents generation witnessed such destruction. (I am an old mother and my mother was an old mother within her generation.) I just longed for hotpants and thought the Osmonds sounded dangerous belted from a dark shop doorway in a Welwyn Garden City precinct. When my Grandad and my grandparents next door neighbour died a day apart the funerals were held back to back in the small village in the Lake District where my mum had been brought up. I witnessed and kept like a stone in a secret pocket, my fingers occasionally fiddling the shape in a thin silky lining, the scene in my grandma's house when my aunt still with her coat on broke down crying after the neighbour's funeral. It wasn't the grief that was hard to understand from the hidden curl of a large chair but the hushed but palpable scorn of my mother and assembled relatives that she had done so.


The Rector of St Clement Danes was said to die from shock within five weeks of the bombing of the church and his funeral was held in the ruins. By 1953 the parish was combined with that of St Mary le Strand and it must have seemed that the church would be forgotten for wildflowers and grasses grew in the remains. However it was given into the keep of the Air Council and rebuilt faithful to Wren's designs, restored as a perpetual shrine of rememebrance to those killed in RAF service. The chancel arch is surmounted by the restored Stuart coat of arms and carries a latin inscription which translated reads, 'Built by Christopher Wren 1681. Destroyed by the thunderbolts of air warfare 1941. Restored by the Royal Air Force 1958.'

Walking up to Victoria Street on St George's day I hear the tinny sound of amplified brass bands and car horns blaring. What's happening I think, catching the streak of red and white flags and the bounce of red and white balloons dragged fast by a parade of scruffy vehicles at the end of the street. People stand bemused by the rattle of vans and scaffolding lorries careering past decked out with a few St George's flags and a couple of random inflatable figures attached to the back of a truck. It goes quickly passed and it seems as if everyone breathes again, frightened by the brief rough display of patriotism.

Finally, the work I am doing at the moment is at High Street Kensington and I can cycle every day through the parks to work. It is lovely - if often damp. Though I wonder if this has caused this blog to take so long - I sit to work in the evenings as usual but I am exhausted, tired physically. In some ways it is good for me because I tuck myself into bed by 11pm when normally I am up until at least 12pm and then read a few pages of War and Peace before sleeping well. ( Losing my job stopped me reading, then I lost a page and finally when I had worked out a plan to borrow someone's kindle to read just that page before recommencing the book, the missing page turned up folded in the ruin of the paperback.) Thinking about War and Peace as I pedal the slight incline up from Hyde Park Corner through the fine sheen of oily rain coating the park, I worry I have fallen out of love with fiction. I still think W and P is the most fantastic thing I have read but as I near the end, the shocking violence and tidying of plot that is accumulating to the finish doesn't interest me as much as the vast vistas of the main book. I like the mundane immensity and non symmetrical nature of life as it plods on, too awkward and sad and sometimes pointless to be tied into a plot, though occasionally finding the rhyme of coincidence and joy. At that moment I see a battalion of plumed golden helmeted soldiers on magnificent black horses on the brow of the hill in the mist of steady drizzle. I can hear the creak of their breast plates and saddles and the jangle of their reins - I imagine a Russian landscape with similar officers step step stepping huge black horses into a village. I see the power and awe they would instill from the discipline of horses moving in time, the straight backs and anonymity of fighting men. These are the Life Guards of the British Household Cavalary exercising near their barracks.

I get used to seeing the soldiers on horseback each morning as I cycle to the brow of the gentle hill, always in a slightly different place, always involved in slight different exercises - marching in line, turning as a unit, galloping, soldiers tilting in their saddles to joust hoops from the ground. Another morning under wet trees I see only soldiers training. Dressed in black they are doing a fast continous circuit - lying on their backs stomach crunching, then sprinting, then jogging back to stomach crunches, their steady fast, obedient and repeated actions reducing them to ants, limbs busy, following orders.



As I pass Kensington Palace on the bike one morning into the pleasure of the downhill, feet off the pedals swoop, I hear distant screams, girls voices high and far away like on a fairground ride. As I cycle down alongside the parkside hotel the screams get louder. Girls in school uniforms cluster in hoodies, screaming and waving handmade posters - 'Justin Bieber' they scream. 'Justin Bieber.'

Amen

St Giles in the Field

I am sick of my own whiny voice. Early on writing this blog Exh emailed a cartoon to me. Two dogs sat together, 'I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking.'
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/60/6068/MIID100Z/posters/alex-gregory-i-had-my-own-blog-for-a-while-but-i-decided-to-go-back-to-just-pointless-new-yorker-cartoon.jpg
I thought it was his way of drily condoning what I was writing about though I think at that point he just hadn't read it. It seemed hilarious for it coincided exactly with how I saw the on and on yap of the compulsive and painful truth telling. I stuck the cartoon up, can see it now on the right hand side of the computer, the London map dense with the yellow and purple spots of churches visited and still to visit stretched out on the wall behind.

It seems a big debate at the moment - how the family is written about. I caught something on the radio whilst hurrying out to work, and read in the Guardian about the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard who has written a six-volume literary epic based on his famiy in particular his alcoholic father. Half of his family no longer speak to him though it is hailed as a masterpiece. In the article he says,
'As a person, I'm polite - I want to please. One of the reasons for that is my father; he had that grip on me. For 40 years I'd lived that tension between my inner and outer selves. Suddenly now the point was not to please, it was to speak the truth. To write reality."
Though he also realised it was:
''Just me and the computer in a room by myself. It never occured to me that it might cause problems - I was just telling the truth, wasn't I? But I was also being very naive. I sent a copy to everyone involved before the first volume was published, and then I discovered how difficult this was going to be. It was like hell."

On the radio ( Start the Week R4): I thought it suggested if it was good writing it was ok and if it wasn't it wasn't. But then I go back and find the podcast ( I have never done this before - and there is an excitement and a slight panic that I will spend my time just listening to back catalogues of R4) and hear Will Eaves express my own anxiety to these rules that there is no way of knowing while you do it that you are able to achieve this. He believes too that writing creates a 'Freestanding structure, whatever the origins maybe.' While AS Byatt countered 'Writing about people you know is always an exercise in power.' and that it is a dangerous thing to have a writer close'. 'an appalling thing' she says. I don't know. I wanted to describe good and bad things that have happened fairly. Though I may have failed. In the last blog I meant only to describe one more time exh's alcoholism to describe my own continuing reaction to it. The attachment I made to his behaviour. The trigger of hyper alertness it seemed to switch on. Though I do think - what else would or could you do? With children? A woman - a friend of exh said at a party, her arms heaved righteously under her bosom, but of course - you are the co dependent. A wagging slightly mean finger to her tongue. Oh yes, I said but I still don't think there is another way to behave once the shock of alcoholism takes hold. Though perhaps it is co dependent to take them on? Take a risk on dangerous things? Ignore the warning signals? I don't know, I do feel rebellious of the label given but understand I took part in a pattern, even hide my own drinking issues in the pockets of ex's own problems.

A voice coach that I had never heard of talks on desert island discs about the horror and pain of living with an alcoholic husband and how coming out of it she felt she fought every day for survival. How pleased she was not to have had children within that relationship and how damaging it was. Oh I thought, a catch of pain, as I heard her talk, that is what it was like, I didn't make it up. It really was that tough. She picked really beautiful music too, classical music that I jotted down.
The dusty smugness of DIDiscs seems to have been replaced by people talking quite honestly about the route and pain of their lives. But perhaps again that is how we speak now? I have heard John Prescott, James Corden and some rugby player discuss eloquently the difficulty at times of being themselves.
James Corden was very honest and charming ( is that compatible?) about his Salvation Army family, the love they gave him, his own ambition, and the loneliness and lost feelings induced by a party life style. His family arriving at his London flat to rescue him, only a lindt chocolate rabbit and some vitamin water in the fridge - no milk to make a cup of tea - but his Dad hugging and praying with him.

I hear too on the radio that before her death Angela Carter was asked to be on Desert Island discs then they put her recording slot back ( possibly for John Major ) and by the time the BBC could do the interview she was too ill. She organised her own funeral to be a Desert Island discs show and a final revelation was that she had chosen a zebra as her luxury. I laugh out loud at the beauty of a desert island with a zebra alongside. I love zebras for I always think that they make unicorns look possible, indeed almost anything possible.

I have been ill for bloody weeks. Just as I started the broadsheet work I was so excited about I got a cold. Then it knocked me sideways as it mutated from the normal sniff and splutter of a few days and I shivered and sweated and ached and it carried on and on and on, briefly ceasing, then returning with renewed vigour, evolving new symptoms. I sneezed and blew my nose raw in the hush of the civilised office where decorous journalists with principles, debated art and books. I couldn't not go, I needed to prove my reliability but I was soggy and sweating, barely able to cope and slightly wild-eyed to stress, though always trying to smile. It was a manic combination. I wanted to be asked back but in the circumstances it was hard to make a great impression. Luckily I get other work with other newspapers but I wait to know if they are going to book me for a long stint that was mooted.

Though UL now back to the acroynym of OL loses his Turkmenistan job because a client pulls out and then gets it back a week later because there are new clients.

I cycle up to the corner of Oxford St/Tottenham Court Rd/Covent Garden on a strangely warm saturday early evening, looking for a church to visit. I realise in the throng of Soho that there is no way that a church will be open now at this time. But still I steer the bike round the options. I feel slightly weary of my task, I want to get to the City churches not be weaving around the dust and I heart london tat of this end of Oxford St. Not really surprisingly The French Protestant church on Soho Square, The Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, St Giles in The Field and the Swiss Church are all closed but partly because I am against the tide of people in couples and groups out to bars and restaurants and theatres with what feels like a forlorn task set and I don't have anything else to do on a Saturday evening I keep moving round. I'll find something I think but the nearest I get to a church is two men coming out of a side door of a monumental grand building at the end of Covent Garden which I see is the Freemasons Hall, the headquaters of the United Grand Lodge of England. I am resentful sometimes of my obedience to the task - the spiral around of the purple dots - but if I didn't stick to my plan I would miss out the ones I didn't like the look of and would already have missed some of the best stories. Though increasingly I think that I will continue this arc of the spiral that I am on, which is going to take me round the cusp of south london shortly but use Oxford Street as a rough boundary for a while, then make a bit of a dash east. When I say 'dash' I am probably talking about a year away really. Blimey! I seem resigned to the long haul. I don't seem to get more than one a month done these days. Anyhow, I am not sure what I am saying makes sense! Unless you are such an isictt fan that you have your own map and sticker system at home! Oh go on! Tell me you are!

For some reason though I think St Giles in the Field is a Hawksmoor church and I feel excited as I cycle up again on a Tuesday lunchtime. I am going into Peter Ackroyd territory I think, though I have never read Hawksmoor only tried. I think oh good - I will have to try harder, try again. I read his TS Eliot biography which I loved and I used to waitress in a small restaurant where he had a regular table. He seemed a good man. The church flanks the north end of Covent Garden, the east of Charing Cross Rd, a scruffy, confusing patch of one way streets made dusty by the Crossrail building work consuming the area, a huge crater behind hoardings. The church is a large slab of a building, elegant but huge, set back from the road, resting in gardens surrounded by railings. There is a coffee stall to one side of the entrance and a cluster of dirty comrades in overcoats sat on benches, cans of beer tucked at their legs, Inside the church it is completely empty and quiet. Later I find a leaflet that describes the church as a representation of the journey of Christianity, the font near the doorway signifying baptism as the start of a Christian life, the clear sweep of the nave from the back of the church to the east end past the word of God of the pulpit and lectern through to the sanctuary of the altar where the sacraments were given all the way to the image of Jesus. I only really saw a plain space, galleries either side, plain glass windows apart from behind the altar where there is stained glass. To the left is a large architectural model of the church as it is. I peer in through the windows. I want to see a representation of my own solitary figure in a cape stooping to look at a tiny model of the same church within the wooden interior but of course it is empty. Known as the Poet's church, Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning married here, John Milton's daughter was baptized here and Andrew Marvell buried in 1678.

It appears there has been a place of worship on this site since Saxon times. I write this and then start looking up about Saxon beliefs and feel swamped. Though there is very little solid information just lots of gods and ritual sacrifice ( animals).
Though I find Pope Gregory the Great instructing Abbot Mellitus that:
'I have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols in England should not on any account be destroyed. Augustine must smash the idols, but the temples themselves should be sprinkled with holy water, and altars set up in them in which relics are to be enclosed. For we ought to take advantage of well-built temples by purifying them from devil-worship and dedicating them to the service of the true God.'
In 1120 Henry 1's wife Matilda founded a christian leper hospital called St Giles here in the countryside, out of the city and away from Westminster, in a place of marshy land that would seperate the diseased from the able bodied. St. Giles was the patron saint of woodland, of lepers, beggars, cripples, and of those struck by sudden misery, and driven into solitude. Years ago when post modernism seemed a complicated thing that needed studying, not just the scrapbook of our lives I tried to read french philosophy though most of it was just too dense for me to understand. I recorded myself reading Blanchot believing that I would be able to decode the layered text if I did. OL then just my boyfriend, was caught on the tape in the background just coming round, the door opening, the shuffle of his step in the hall before the cassette is switched off. When he went to Russia and disappeared I used to play the scrap of recorded time and listen to the mundane moment of our life together, the assumption of the here and now fluttering and observed like something trapped in a jar. Anyhow, in Foucault's 'Madness and Civilisation' ( frankly a page turner in comparison to Blanchot) I can remember with fascination the suggestion that lepers existed in the place later consigned to the mad - literally outside of the city walls. Though I discover now some medieval sources suggest that those suffering from leprosy were considered to be going through Purgatory on Earth, and for this reason their suffering was considered holier than the ordinary person's. More frequently, lepers were seen to exist in a place between life and death. Though leprosy mainly disappeared in the mid sixteenth century and the 'outsider' position - the 'not us' - was taken by poverty, poor vagabonds, criminals and ‘dangerous minds.' Indeed after the reformation a post catholic church was built at St Giles in the Field in 1632 and the poor flocked to the area - vagrants expelled from the City, irish, french refugees and the 'st giles blackbirds' - the poor and black who had escaped from slavery or the army. At the crossroads of Oxford St, Charing Cross Rd and Tottenham Court Rd there was a gallows and a 'cage' for miscreants and even after the 15th century when the gallows was moved further to the edge of the developing city, the condemned would stop on their journey at the Resurrection gate of St Giles in the Fields and be given a bowl of ale.
In this 'damp and unwholesome' parish of St Giles the great plague of 1664 started and the first victim was buried in the churchyard. By the end 3,216 plague deaths were recorded in this parish of 2,000 households. Indeed so many were buried that the ground of the churchyard rose, the land got soggier and the application for a new, the present church was passed in 1730.


I stand in Foyles bookshop on the Southbank reading Peter Ackroyd's London biography. I am struggling a bit with Ackroyd envy, his work is so good and I am worried that it means mine is pointless, these tales have been told already. I have discovered already the design of the present church is not a Hawksmoor though he did submit designs for the Church under the commission of 50 churches but it was turned down in favour of the Palladian scheme by Flitcroft but also that Peter Ackroyd has written a whole chapter on the St Giles area. A crossroads of time and eternity, he calls it. He seems to believe like I do that a place holds an imprint of history, that the homeless and drunken and derranged gather like migrating souls, to an old nest. Though perhaps it is just that aid is given in these historical areas of poverty. I live on the corner of what was once the slum known as Devil's Acre and there are at least two hostels nearby. The homeless fold themselves into boxes and bins in our courtyard and sleep in snagged nylon sleeping bags outside office blocks. Recently I saw a man in a hospital gown and bare feet, his toes clenched like pigeon claws to the pavement and when it was really cold earlier in the year I saw a figure crouched over an army stove, sheltering down our thin dark street as if it were an ancient ditch.

Hogarth the master of detail of such depraved squalor used the St Giles parish as the backdrop for 'Gin Lane' 1751.
'Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay pervade the scene. The only businesses that flourish are those which serve the gin industry: gin sellers; distillers (the aptly named Kilman); the pawnbroker where the avaricious Mr. Gripe greedily takes the vital possessions (the carpenter offers his saw and the housewife her cooking utensils) of the alcoholic residents of the street in return for a few pennies to feed their habit; and the undertaker, for whom Hogarth implies at least a handful of new customers from this scene alone. Most shockingly, the focus of the picture is a woman in the foreground, who, addled by gin and driven to prostitution by her habit —as evidenced by the syphilitic sores on her legs— lets her baby slip unheeded from her arms and plunge to its death in the stairwell of the gin cellar below. Half-naked, she has no concern for anything other than a pinch of snuff.[a] This mother was not such an exaggeration as she might appear: in 1734, Judith Dufour reclaimed her two-year-old child from the workhouse where it had been given a new set of clothes; she then strangled it and left the infant's body in a ditch so that she could sell the clothes (for 1s. 4d.) to buy gin.[10] In another case, an elderly woman, Mary Estwick, let a toddler burn to death while she slept in a gin-induced stupor.'

Round here the worst casualties are the crack addicts, the yellow-faced lost souls with their tatoos pale on the nicotine stain of liver damaged skin. I saw near Victoria station a man, barely human, stopping a bus. He was in the middle of the road with two fingers up. his clothes barely covering his body, just a blur of hair and flesh, his back arched like a snarling kicked dog, more a hound than a man. Another howled down our street, his arms gibbering his own body in comfort.

I discover too that attempts in the nineteenth century to clear the slums of St Giles to make way for sanitation and transport systems meant that the evicted just moved into near by slums, such as 'Devil's Acre and Church Lane making them more overcrowded still'. So this corner I live on holds the trace of St Giles's history.

It is Spring now and I see a heavily bearded man sat in a doorway, in a corner with the most sun, he has taken his shoes and socks off, undone the layers of his coats, and sits stretched out and smiling into the warmth, his large gnarled feet bare. If I ever have time or money I would pay for or push a foot health trolley round for the homeless. It seems the thing most needed. Socks on demand, new boots if needed, antiseptic cream, a foot massage and toe nail clippers.

Amen

Church of Our Lady of The Assumption and St Gregory ( formerly The Royal Bavarian Chapel )

I find it very hard to switch off. Not to be on 'guard'. Even to sit still. I think since the first time I stood on the toilet lid to reach the toilet rolls on a Sunday morning and found a regiment of empty and full cans of stella, tucked behind the pack at the back of the shelf and in mid-tiptoe-stretch realised in a wash, a wave, a flood of stark understanding exactly what was happening within our family I have found it difficult not to concentrate on life with an almost magnified watchfulness. I was busy already with two young children, a long commute and a nearly full time job - but in that chilly downstairs toilet I stood aghast but alert, hyper-aware listening to the children playing with their seemingly exuberant but erratic dad.
That home was in a coastal town on the mouth of an estuary, a cowboy town with one road in and a lot of people who never left, never moved from it. I would hear the clunk of pile-driving on and on as the foundations of a big seafront development were attempted but they just couldn't reach solid ground on the estuary mud. It took months to get the foundations in and the austere, ugly flats with the beautiful view missed the certaintity of that seemingly never ending property boom just as I did.

Though I imagine that having lost my job and with weeks to spare I would be able to sit and write a blog a week, wrestle the first novel into a publishable package ( I even have an idea - ding! - how to do it!) then make sense of my ideas for the second. But I don't. I go ( slightly unsuccesfully ) homemaker crazy. I fill every second with manic effort - cleaning all the cupboards, driving to ikea twice ( boys beds, a wardrobe for me, underbed drawers ( more later) ), pasting a forest photo mural on a wall in the boys room, buying storage on ebay and nice sheets for all. I have a plan that if I can hold back the tide of dressing up box, airfix, lego. that we will all feel well, and that with a mere flick of my wrist I will scoot the vacuum cleaner/ duster around and then sit to read a book/ write. And yet all this unceasing effort creates a tidal scurf - there is a dismantled platform bed in the hall, child stained mattresses, jigsaws for charity shops, even a playmobil ark ( though I am too fond of the animals to give them away, so it is a shell of a toy, almost useless) and all this tidying feels like it has created only more havoc. I need Exh to move the stuff, need him to help me. But ( and this is indeed a celebration ) Exh has a new home too. He is moving from the hostel on our street to a live/work unit in nearby south london with some friends. The boys are so excited. Though exh has always struggled with change ( as perhaps I do ) so he dips badly before getting back into his stride but a little bit edgy and anxious.


I think when I am lost on one of these lone, obsessive trips to Ikea, this time to the Edmonton one which I have never been to before, because it is the only branch that says underbed storage is 'instock', though because I have left the directions on the kitchen table and then confused right and left from the snatched instructions my kind brother relays over the mobile phone in a layby, I am parked up off a dimly lit roundabout - this is a fantasy - I am chasing something impossible to obtain from flat pack furniture. Can enough Billy bookshelves, a Pax wardrobe and some brightly coloured children's bedroom accessories give peace? And yet the boys new room coincides with many things to achieve it. Though the anger has already mainly blown out of my eldest son - and if this is a brief boast I will still thank every day it is true. Often he puts his hand in mine to walk to school and conceals blown kisses behind his hand in the school line. A boy who used to wake and shout 'Mum! I hate you! The grave things he has had to face in his 9 years make him thoughtful, passionate and generous. In an argument with his brother he occasionally shouts 'I want to hurt you' but he keeps his hands by his side. We have come a long way.
Though I am writing all this late at night and then start to look up on the internet about Nietzsche. I can't remember now the path of this thought though I know it went via Foucault's sado masochism at one point. I start copying and pasting details of Nietzsche's ideas to use later. Only in the morning do I discover a part has been pasted in the middle of my description of the journey to ikea:
I think when I am lost "Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." I am sure you think I am staging this but I am not - it has made me laugh so much for somehow there is something hilarious or true there. Myself parked just off the north circular pondering the lack of god. Though I think I almost did feel that, I just couldn't have said it. I felt spectacularly bleak. Once a long time ago I wrote a story about myself - like a detective story about a teenage romance I had ( though it included an erotic tale of shaving ul's head) the nearest thing to this scrapbook style of confessional writing that I seem to employ now - and in the relatively early days of home computers and temperamental printers it once chewed a whole page spitting out a short piece of text "!@£E$%^^&make a point to all this me me me !@£$TGJNBjnc". I kept it for ages because I thought it was so funny. ( though I have lost that story somehow - though oh, I wish hadn't.)

I wonder too if I need to keep so busy as ul and I have finished our relationship. We intend to see each other but not attempt a reunion. I wish wish wish this wasn't true but it seems necessary. He is a drowned man, though still kicking, white flesh submerged in murky water, too far to get to, his stored anger like heavy stones stiched into his pockets, a current dragging him distorted and grey too far away. I wait in the few quiet, still moments of the day to be hit by grief. But it doesn't come. I am not sure if I am hiding out treading water in my homemaking or nearing dry land. Though I am back to a life alone without the cheer of a supporter.

The Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory formerly The Bavarian Chapel is a flat-faced dark brick building on a dark back street behind Regent St with an open side door. I find later a description - 'In its humble guise of eighteenth-century domesticity (it) seems to shrink from attracting the notice of the passers-by' W.de l'Hopital. Then I read more and more and see it was hiding out. As indeed it feels this day as I go through the dark rather depressing door a bit reluctantly and then open another side door into the body of the church discovering a wonderful place, small and elegant, almost like a private chapel . Oh I think. This peaceful space has just been sat here as if waiting. I feel I can breathe for the first time in weeks. I am always rushing to get to a church, always rushing to find the scrap of time to write and here I am, here where I rushed to be and just for a few minutes I can enjoy it. There are a couple of people devoutly praying and a few people moving round. I stand at the back and think anxiously - I am going to end up needing this. This feeling of the devout. I pause writing this and look up the word - it means a pious regard of religion but also geniune and sincere.

The Church was initially a Catholic chapel attached to the Portugese embassy on Golden Square, though there is a whiff of an idea it may even have existed as a clandestine chapel for secret worship prior to the Embassy's cloak of permitted Catholicism. I grasp fully from the 'Warwick Street Church' A short history and guide' what the historic restrictions on Catholics were in the 18th century:
'The penal laws by excluding Catholics from both houses of Parliament made it impossible for them to take part in public life. If a catholic was a land-owner he was threatened with financial ruin, for not only was he subject to the double land tax, but his family estates might pass to his Protestant next-of-kin should they choose to dispossess him. He was forbidden to keep arms and was liable to be deprived of any horse above the value of five pounds. He was incapable of holding any office in the army or navy , or practising as barrister, doctor or school-master. He could not send his children to be educated abroad without a fine and in order that due check might be kept on him and his property he was bound to register his name and estate under penalty of forfeiture, and to enrol all deeds. Some of these laws were, it is true, rarely enforced, but on occasion the individual Catholic was made to bear the full force of them so that the threat of their being put into operation still had to be reckoned with.'
Only in these chapels of diplomatic immunity could mass be heard and here in an invisible and probably smaller building than the present one, squeezed between 23 and 24 Golden Square with an entrance through the stables at the back on Warwick St the Catholics of London could make their furtive worship. Golden Square itself had been developed from 1670 on land where horses grazed. Warwick St was then the highway to Tyburn ( a tiny village at Marble Arch, a place where criminals were hung/there was no Regent Street then ) and particular attention had to be taken of the drainage because the route became impassable in winter when market people travelling that way were in danger of being lost in 'the great waters perpetually lying there all the Winter Season.' Though the development, surrounded by the land of former plague pits and the stench of breweries was only fashionable for a short time. By 1747 the Portugese embassy had moved west to a grander location and the Bavarian embassy moved in keeping the chapel's immunity.

In 1778 the necessity of finding extra men to fight in The American War of Independence ( soldiers had not been allowed to join the armed forces without taking an oath of being a Protestant) meant Parliament passed a piecmeal Catholic Relief Bill. But anti catholic feeling was high in England and Scotland and Protestant Associations were formed nationwide to defend the heritage of Englishmen. The Pope was seen as the bogeyman, Catholic France the enemy, Papists themselves disloyal and dangerous. 'Wild stories began to circulate as, for example, that twenty thousand Jesuits were concealed a network of underground tunnels near the Thames, waiting for orders from Rome to blow up the banks and so flood London.' Lord George Gordon fanned this hatred with speeches in parliament attempting to have the Bill repealed. As the leader of London Protestant Association he presented the Protestant Petition on 2nd June 1780 with a big demonstration gathered outside Parliament. By early evening the petition was turned down because of the circumstances of it's presentation, and the mob grew restless. Troops were called out to move the people from the vicinity of Parliament. Once dispersed, groups of men, some of them drunk, armed with lighted torches and weapons began to move against known Catholic targets - chapels and the residences of well known Catholics. One group burned down the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador in Lincoln's Inn Fields while another set upon The Bavarian Chapel. The rioters broke in, windows were smashed, and the contents of the chapel burnt in the street - books, the altar piece, the organ, balastrades and pews. An old German blacksmith called Bund saved what valuables he could including discovering the Bavarian minister's stash of contraband tea and commodities that he sold to supplement his income. The military arrived and stayed to protect the chapel, sleeping out on straw in the shell of the building. The riots went on for a week, gathering momentum until the anti catholic sentiments were replaced by anti authority of any sort. Prisons were broken into, prisoners released and gaols burnt down.

A subscription was launched in 1788 to rebuild the damaged Warwick St Chapel under the control of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District whilst preserving its links with the Bavarian Legation. Indeed memories of the Gordon Riots inform their decision to build on the same site and the design of the church too:
'It will be in every respect more eligible than to build in another place as it will probably pass unobserved by the Public in general".
'The walls of the new chapel were made of great solidity, being almost a yard thick; there were no windows at all at ground level in Warwick Street and the solid wooden doors were lined with sheet metal on the inside.'

Though despite the riots many Catholics began to push for increased freedom - for it was seen that the reform bill of 1778 had been passed easily by Parliament. There was division within the church as this second relief bill was prepared, even talk of a schism between more conservative and liberal elements of the Church about the oath that must be taken to receive these new privileges - but in June 1791 the Catholic Relief Act was passed allowing Catholics to live without persecution and to be able to worship freely and to be able to build their own churches or chapels. ( Though without bells or steeples)

The Warwick St chapel was opened on 12th March 1790, the feast of St Gregory the Great, to whom it was dedicated. It was the first church erected by native-born Catholics to take advantage of the new liberty accorded to them a few months later by the Relief Act of 1791 whilst keeping its heritage in the penal times of Catholic history and the umbrella of an embassy.

The French revolution which started in 1789 brought large numbers of the French clergy and aristocracy to London where they were well received. The Bavarian Chapel became one of the most fashionable of the Catholic Chapels and it is even believed that a Requiem for Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette may have been sung there in 1793.

Though by 1840 Charles Dickens described Golden Square in Nicholas Nickleby:

'Although a few members of the graver professions live about Golden Square, it is not exactly in anybody's way to or from anywhere. It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world, and taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon, when they give away the orders,--all live in Golden Square, or within a street of it. Two or three violins and a wind instrument from the Opera band reside within its precincts. Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square. On a summer's night, windows are thrown open, and groups of swarthy moustached men are seen by the passer-by, lounging at the casements, and smoking fearfully. Sounds of gruff voices practising vocal music invade the evening's silence; and the fumes of choice tobacco scent the air. There, snuff and cigars, and German pipes and flutes, and violins and violoncellos, divide the supremacy between them. It is the region of song and smoke. Street bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee- singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its boundaries.'


Here in the church it is quiet. I sit for a minute in a simple wooden pew. Then walk around the small church. Above is the gallery, an intimate audience to the chapel. There are beautiful things - a shrine to Our Lady Immaculate with columns of silver hearts and charms behind glass. I am not sure what these are but discover they were medals brought in thanksgiving for favours received by prayer and that the walls of Warwick St had in previous times been covered by them. A custom brought from the continent they were derided by the architect John Francis Bentley who had been given the task to restore the now unfashionable church 'It is a poor, shapeless and unsightly edifice built after the commonest type of non-Conformist chapels of the time with heavy galleries'. But the priest Monsignor Talbot remonstrated for the practice to continue and here, they are combined in the altarpice. Though the architect ( who later designed Westminster Cathedral) did not succeed in many of his plans - he intended to build a Minor Roman basilica of marble and mosaic which he started with the present apse behind the altar - which would have have left nothing of the old church except the four walls - though money ran out preserving most of the rest of the only remaining Embassy chapel of the 18th century. I discover later I miss the jewel of the church - The Assumption that brought the chapel it's name in 1854 - a bas-relief by the sculptor John Edwards Carew. It has been placed high up somewhere that I didn't see. As the guide says 'Its position over the door is unworthy of it but no better site is now possible.'

At the side just before I leave I see a door ajar to a cupboard like confessional. I am not completely certain you are going to stay with me on this but I have had a thing about small cupboards for as long as I can remember. I always want to know if they will 'fit'. I have scared boyfriends in European cities, not being able to resist just climbing into check a hotel wardrobe, thinking they will be a while in a shower down a creaky lino floored halls. Forgotten soap finds me curled up in the thin floored space, the door pulled to. In my novel I have the heroine crying in such a cupbord in a hut in the middle of a forest:

'The cupboard is somewhere between a wardrobe and a chest and I open the door to find one tweed jacket hanging from a rail. I step inside. My scalp pressing to the splinters of the roof, my back curved, the thin floor bending at the unexpected weight. I pull the door to. I am in the dark, in warm still air and the scratchy smell of male and tweed. Amazed by my own actions I just sit there listening to my breath fill the shape. Sat quiet, it is a surprise to hear crying. Gulping, rattling sobs. The sound comes from a very long way a way and when I hold my breath to listen to them they stop. I touch my face in the pitch black and find tears. Wet and salt like blood. Shocked. I haven't cried like this since I was a little girl and it feels like discovering an unknown muscle, somethin flexing its strength. I don't immediately hear the door of the hut open but I become aware of footfalls and the slam of it close. I am squatting in a shut cupboard in a stranger's place.'

Here in the church I am tempted by this dark and secret space just to try. But I pull myself together and leave the church.

On a boris bike in Piccadilly circus I look up to the neon to see a huge hand play repeated and random rock, paper, scissors. It is a Macdonalds ad. It seems like a big, gaudy, lonely thing. I imagine a lost place late at night, a face lit by a computer screen swaying, gulping another drink, repeatedly counting one two, three, a hand making simple shapes in rhythm, the nearest thing to companionship. Like the touch of a hairdresser when you have been single for a long time, a guilt that this is the nearest thing to intimacy or human warmth. a simple child's game taken over by a computer.

I discover too on the internet 'The Soho Masses Pastoral Council welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered Catholics, their parents, families and friends to Masses at 5.00 pm, on the 1st & 3rd Sundays of every month, at the Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London'. Though I also find some internet outrage to this. I think this church has been brave in the 'home' it has made, it's plain facade, still hiding its worshippers.

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.