Sunday morning. It is Radio 2 love songs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle time and I am waiting for exh to come and look after the boys so I can go to church. He is late. I am disorganised. My hair is wet and I am trying to wrap christmas presents for my best friend who I haven't seen since just before christmas. How does that happen? We are going to hers for sunday lunch. I am starting to think I will have to miss the church, that I won't get there in time when exh bursts through the door panting and gasping. He just woke up he says.
I put lipstick on and dash for it. Out into the damp sunday morning and quiet streets. A gathering of men on a street corner looks like one of those history walks and I lean into to hear what they are saying. But then I see a dungeons and dragon style book clutched by one and realise it is a queue for some sort of convention in a pub. The men have the happy animated faces of being with their own kind, of being understood. I pass by onto St James Park where there are snowdrops and pink blossom in the mist. It feels lovely to be out. I would have been dreading going before, really dreading it but I realise the fear has gone, now it is just what I do. No one is going to hurt or mock me. I enjoy it.
Oh and I have been looking forward to going to the Chapel Royal. There seems such a mystery to it. Within the dark slightly foreboding thick walls of St James palace there is a chapel where the services are open to all. I wouldn't even know about it if I hadn't tried before to get into the Lady Chapel just around the corner. A notice there said that it was only open in the summer months but services went on within the palace all year. On Pall Mall I find the gateway flanked by empty sentry boxes and a policeman standing guard. Is it ok to go to the church service? I falter. He waves me in. I am only just in time and a robed 'greeter' in the thick old stone walls of the doorway ushers me through the door into the tiny narrow church, opening a small, high up, hinged door of a pew to squeeze me into a seat. I am next to a smart politician-like couple and a tweed man who smells of clean strong soap. The plush chapel, is soft-lit with desk style lamps, like an expensive but characterless hotel and it is packed. Instead of sitting looking forward towards the altar we are all sat either side of the nave staring at each other. I remember with embarrassment that my hair is still wet and that I must look rather dishevelled and unkempt. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I feel I have tumbled into another world.
Above the heads of the congregation the organ, pounds and soars joyfully.
Everyone rises as the choir enters. Small boys like white mice in extraordinary red jackets with gold braid and big gold buttons, red breeches and oliver cromwell shoes with buckles, the older choir flamingoes in white surplices with respectful bent necks and dipped heads, a man in crow robes, intricate ruffled sleeves and a black staff, some more men in surplices and the vicar all sailing in like swans. They process to the front of the church. Wow. I think. This goes on every sunday and who would know? This has happened every Sunday for hundreds of years.
We sit. Stand again and sing. Sit. The choir sings. There is a reading. Then another. The lord's prayer. Psalms from the St James prayer book. The tweed and soap man next to me relishes each word, really enjoys each one, as if reaching his tongue for an oyster, pulling and sucking the texture. It is almost embarrassing how much pleasure he is obtaining from speaking them aloud as if he is talking dirty alongside. I mumble along. Thinking I really don't believe what I'm saying but I think being here saying them is good. The kneelers are purple velvet. Very royal. Very posh hotel plush. And everyone kneels. In the parish church of my childhood there was a bit of laziness about kneeling - you could, but most people just put their hands together and crouched.
How funny - I find later, having written this that Samuel Pepys on the 10th May, 1663 'I walked to St. James's, and was there at masse, and was forced in the crowd to kneel down"
Observed by an elderly man on the opposite side I gaze around the room. The ceiling is panelled and intricately painted. Up high is the organ, tapestries hung high either side of the altar, a big quite modern looking stained glass window above the altar depicting a tree and at the back, just above me, a sort of royal box facing the altar. I imagine this is where the royal family worship if they come. It is completely hidden from view. Do you just not know if they are here I wonder? Are they here I think. The pews we are sat in have high walls as if we are fenced and stalled like animals. Or part of a lock-in with the Establishment.
The 'Chapel Royal' initially was not a place but a body of priests and singers who cared for the spiritual needs of the Sovereign and travelled with him. But Henry V111 took a fancy to the site of a female leper colony that had stood in this then remote corner since the saxon times. There was good hunting alongside and good access to the woods of Kensington and he comandeered the hospital, building a palace including the chapel as a home for the Chapel Royal. Like a fly digesting time in longer flashes, slowed down, opened up, it is impossible to understand that this place that is a brief stroll from my flat, from the Thames, from Whitehall could seem remote but perhaps the outskirts, the outside, the edge is always the furthest place away and therefore distant.
I read too that the chapel was considered the cradle of English church music - Tallis, Handel, and Henry Purcell were all organists or composers of the chapel and the poet Dryden escaped his many creditors by staying with Henry Purcell in a turret room of the composers apartments.
The vicar's sermon is of love. He talks well and passionately about showing up everyday to love, of being free from the limitations of romantic love to form a deeper and fundamental joy. He talks about faith and doubt. He is talking about God. But love is love I think. Mary I's heart is buried beneath the chapel. Charles I recieved the sacrament of Holy Communion prior to his execution here. Diana's body lay by the altar before her funeral. Victoria and Albert married here. Though I find all this out later. But it is me that is wracked by doubt. As if trust is something I haven't used for a while I keep opening the store cupboard door to find the basics, all the horded tins and packets look ok but are infact old, past their sell by date, no longer quite nice. Something has grown unknown and unexpected like mould or weevils in the everyday ingredients. I am horrified. I thought everything was just put away dry and stored. Here I say, and here, look at this, and this, showing ul what leaving did, what has been done. I have prided myself on my sanity and find now occasionally a raw madness in attempting to trust.
At the end of the service the white mice, the flamingoes, the black crow, all process out, the organ playing.
I shake hands with the vicar in the old walls of the palace as I leave but I notice that others keep his hand, holding it tight, maintaining steady eye contact. Not me. I flinch from the warmth and sincerity of the greeting. Bobbing my head in embarrassment. In the park though I feel fresh, restored. I need faith I think. I need to clean those cupboards and keep only the nourishment of good.
Monday, 21 February 2011
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
St Saviour's, Pimlico
Something has happened. Whether I have got more organised or the children's increasing contentment and my own upsurge of happiness has combined to good effect but I am less manic, less stricken with the poverty of time. Before I felt I was running, literally running between everything needing to be done, wheras now, I feel I am ambling, able to take in some of the scenery. I painted my nails at the weekend while the boys played lego. My elder son saying sternly to the younger one, let mum sit there - she can't do ANYTHING while her nails are drying. Thank you. I said, admiring the shiny red gloss and the rare view from the sofa understanding for the first time the benefits of nail varnish.
But really it is as if time itself has expanded. I seem able to fit in two or three dates a week with ul without anyone really noticing. Perhaps if the neighbours watched the windows really carefully they would see him here occasionally after the children have gone to bed or briefly when they are at school. But it isn't just time for dates there just feels more time for everything. Today I did a supermarket shop, the vacuuming, the paperwork, I made appointments for the doctor and the dentist, and registered for tickets for the Olympics. I left the flat clean and tidy to go to St Saviour's on a BB, knowing the church would be open for a Tuesday lunchtime mass, I caught the end of the service, had a good look round, then went and bought hamster bedding (from a newsgents/come pet store), good salami and Italian cheese from the Italian cafe and was back at the flat starting to write with a good two hours clear before picking the children. Even now writing this in the evening - I have already made minestrone soup, tidied up, put the children to bed and again I have a couple of hours stretching ahead. Plus as if this new telescopic time, extends even further I have started reading again. Sitting on the tube and just before I go to sleep. Finally I have read The Corrections ( loved it, but not completely convinced it had the depth of it's touted masterpiece/ maybe squandered 'Christmas' at the end) I have read Invisible by Paul Auster. Oh I love Paul Auster. But it isn't his best. Now I am reading Island on the Edge of the World. The story of St Kilda by Charles Maclean.
St Saviours is at the Vauxhall Bridge Rd end of Lupus Street, just before the tube station. In the not just manic but nearly mad days when we lived round the corner from the other end of Lupus St and had a two mile journey to school each day and another two on the way back and exh was very, very dh - I used the clock on the church to know if we were late or not. Pushing the youngest still in his buggy, encouraging the eldest on his bike, singing, telling stories, chanting positive affirmations and taking deep breaths. Shall we go down the 'secret path' this morning I would encourage as I led them on a route through the vast Churchill Garden estate. Every morning stopping to say 'We're going to rescue you!' to a teddy bear rotting behind a wire fence that had been thrown in a tangled piece of undergrowth behind some flats, his dirty fur and sad face slumped in leaves. We talked about bringing a fishing line to rescue him. Of cleaning him up. Of loving him back to life. I even thought about writing a children's story about the bear and that school route - the herons we spotted at the edge of the Thames dock ( once even a kingfisher ), the tough dogs and very very occasionally tough people we skirted in the estate, the concrete and the patches of nature combined. But perhaps I knew it wasn't really a children's story. Though it was my children's story. There was a slumped unhappy figure in our lives and those boys certainly wanted to love him back to life and even I would have perhaps still have attempted to try on their behalf.
When I creep into the church today it looks completely empty but I can hear the end of the Lord's prayer sing-songed from a side chapel and a woman in orange perched on a chair mouthing the words. I can hear the voices of others but she is the only one I can see. Stepping out of the day into those old words, I can feel the soothing peace. Despite my personal feelings of wellbeing something truly terrible has happened and a church seems a really good place to go.
Yesterday was Valentine's day. My sons made me perfume with a strong top note of toothpaste in a milk carton. UL brought me some supermarket flowers (no one can be completely perfect). Exh broke the rules and let himself into the flat also to leave some flowers. But as I left to pick the boys up from school I miss a call from my bestfriend and then a text comes in. The text is from my elder sons best friend's mother who is living in a refuge, though finally, finally she is going to be housed, but she texts me to say she has terrible news, two children who lived at the refuge and were really good friends with her children were murdered yesterday by their dad. It is all over the news. she says. Reading the text I feel sick to the stomach. I feel angry and shaky. I feel, and this is so instinctive and the thoughts feel so old - so completely weary of men and their dangerous harboured thoughts.
Sometimes I have thought that if I finish this blog I'll do another about madonna and child representations. It is a hard plural to work out - madonnas and child? madonnas and children? Though I imagine if I started looking they would probably be everywhere ( also I could go back into the churches and look again and look more carefully ). I remember at school an amazing and inspiring art teacher teaching us art history and we studied so many - Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Duccio. Now most of those are around the corner at the National Gallery and what a pleasure to find time to see them. But only very recently did I truly understand that these sculptures and paintings are attempts made by generations and generations to describe the bond and strength and sacrifice by mothers for children. I want to find one in this church and think of the strength and power of this woman who escaped this brutal man with her children and then fought in the courts for two years not to allow him access to the children knowing he was not safe. Whilst week in week out testing their spellings, feeding them, washing their clothes, keeping their finger and toe nails straight and short. Oh! but it was overturned. All that strength and fight and journey for them to be murdered. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I am not sure I have the right to write about this, it is not my story. But still I know just enough about chaos to watch at school and see the Mums who feel frightened, the ones with bruises. But I only find a michaelangelo copy of a madonna and child and I don't know how you know what is a copy or not but I felt I did.
It is nice in the church, the communion being taken, the words being said, some nice stained glass, nice kneelers hung neatly on the back of the pews, but nothing I latch onto. A font topped by a huge gothic wooden top like an ornate spire with a pulley system to lift the lid off. I imagine having a baby christened and worrying that the rope would snap, the great heavy wooden structure hurtling to hurt the baby. It is one of the fears that I wake in the night with - that somehow the bunk bed ( which isn't really a bunk bed but a platform bed with a mattress underneath) will collapse and crush my younger son. Lying in the dark I can picture the bolts working loose from the structure, the wooden slats tumbling, the noise of the crash and screaming. But then I make myself listen to the silence, imagine a big 'golf sale' sign arrow that means 'I can't think about this now' and finally tumble back into sleep.
St Saviour's is part of Thomas Cubitt's Pimlico, like square feet of building rolled out with churches attached. Previously it was where vegetables were grown for Westminster and the City of London, with a tea garden in the meadows, reed banks, a steel works and a distillery. Thomas Cubitt pieced together the land from different landowners and by 1839 he had established an eleven acre factory area on the river bank on the present site of Dolphin Square, just round the corner from St Saviour's.
'Here the joinery, glass, plasterwork, steel and marble, as well as some of the bricks and cement for the various building operations were produced, using the latest steam-driven technology, enabling the business in Pimlico and beyond to benefit from the sheer scale of production as well as control of the entire process.'
While Cubitt had to clear most of the older generation gardening businesses out of the area in order to make the roads he then sub-let again for gardening, until he was ready to sponsor building on a large scale in 1840. Like the ferry man who sabotaged the building of Westminster Bridge the market gardeners must have taken this changing world badly.
St Saviour's was consecrated in 1864 and designed by Thomas Cundy. But Pimlico struggled as an area as early as 1852 - Henry Mayhew noted the neighbourhood 'prolific in loose women' in particular he identified this neighbourhood as one where an affluent man might seek a discreet introduction to the sort of 'quiet lady whose secrecy he can reply upon...who in all probability does not reside at any great distance.' Though I also read that at Victoria station there were complaints of being accosted by a 'low class of unfortunates who come from Great Peter Street, Laundry Yard and the black area that lies in the very shadow of the Houses of Parliament' Which is where I live.
Today I ring my best friend back. She says on valentines day afternoon she was upstairs in her house tidying the bedroom and saw flames leaping behind the blinds in the opposite house's bedroom and called the firebrigade. Then she ran across the road and knocked at the door to save the occupants. Her son who is nearly twenty was shouting out of her upstairs window 'Come away mum come away mum come away from the fire'. Standing on the step she suddenly realises somehow ( I don't get this bit but that is what she says) that what she has seen is infact the glint of hundreds of candles and valentine balloons. Too late, the operator says the fire engine is on it's way. The man in his dressing gown descends the stairs, tying the belt and shuffling his parts, opening the door as the fire engine arrives. I hope it was HIS wife I say.
Amen.
But really it is as if time itself has expanded. I seem able to fit in two or three dates a week with ul without anyone really noticing. Perhaps if the neighbours watched the windows really carefully they would see him here occasionally after the children have gone to bed or briefly when they are at school. But it isn't just time for dates there just feels more time for everything. Today I did a supermarket shop, the vacuuming, the paperwork, I made appointments for the doctor and the dentist, and registered for tickets for the Olympics. I left the flat clean and tidy to go to St Saviour's on a BB, knowing the church would be open for a Tuesday lunchtime mass, I caught the end of the service, had a good look round, then went and bought hamster bedding (from a newsgents/come pet store), good salami and Italian cheese from the Italian cafe and was back at the flat starting to write with a good two hours clear before picking the children. Even now writing this in the evening - I have already made minestrone soup, tidied up, put the children to bed and again I have a couple of hours stretching ahead. Plus as if this new telescopic time, extends even further I have started reading again. Sitting on the tube and just before I go to sleep. Finally I have read The Corrections ( loved it, but not completely convinced it had the depth of it's touted masterpiece/ maybe squandered 'Christmas' at the end) I have read Invisible by Paul Auster. Oh I love Paul Auster. But it isn't his best. Now I am reading Island on the Edge of the World. The story of St Kilda by Charles Maclean.
St Saviours is at the Vauxhall Bridge Rd end of Lupus Street, just before the tube station. In the not just manic but nearly mad days when we lived round the corner from the other end of Lupus St and had a two mile journey to school each day and another two on the way back and exh was very, very dh - I used the clock on the church to know if we were late or not. Pushing the youngest still in his buggy, encouraging the eldest on his bike, singing, telling stories, chanting positive affirmations and taking deep breaths. Shall we go down the 'secret path' this morning I would encourage as I led them on a route through the vast Churchill Garden estate. Every morning stopping to say 'We're going to rescue you!' to a teddy bear rotting behind a wire fence that had been thrown in a tangled piece of undergrowth behind some flats, his dirty fur and sad face slumped in leaves. We talked about bringing a fishing line to rescue him. Of cleaning him up. Of loving him back to life. I even thought about writing a children's story about the bear and that school route - the herons we spotted at the edge of the Thames dock ( once even a kingfisher ), the tough dogs and very very occasionally tough people we skirted in the estate, the concrete and the patches of nature combined. But perhaps I knew it wasn't really a children's story. Though it was my children's story. There was a slumped unhappy figure in our lives and those boys certainly wanted to love him back to life and even I would have perhaps still have attempted to try on their behalf.
When I creep into the church today it looks completely empty but I can hear the end of the Lord's prayer sing-songed from a side chapel and a woman in orange perched on a chair mouthing the words. I can hear the voices of others but she is the only one I can see. Stepping out of the day into those old words, I can feel the soothing peace. Despite my personal feelings of wellbeing something truly terrible has happened and a church seems a really good place to go.
Yesterday was Valentine's day. My sons made me perfume with a strong top note of toothpaste in a milk carton. UL brought me some supermarket flowers (no one can be completely perfect). Exh broke the rules and let himself into the flat also to leave some flowers. But as I left to pick the boys up from school I miss a call from my bestfriend and then a text comes in. The text is from my elder sons best friend's mother who is living in a refuge, though finally, finally she is going to be housed, but she texts me to say she has terrible news, two children who lived at the refuge and were really good friends with her children were murdered yesterday by their dad. It is all over the news. she says. Reading the text I feel sick to the stomach. I feel angry and shaky. I feel, and this is so instinctive and the thoughts feel so old - so completely weary of men and their dangerous harboured thoughts.
Sometimes I have thought that if I finish this blog I'll do another about madonna and child representations. It is a hard plural to work out - madonnas and child? madonnas and children? Though I imagine if I started looking they would probably be everywhere ( also I could go back into the churches and look again and look more carefully ). I remember at school an amazing and inspiring art teacher teaching us art history and we studied so many - Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Duccio. Now most of those are around the corner at the National Gallery and what a pleasure to find time to see them. But only very recently did I truly understand that these sculptures and paintings are attempts made by generations and generations to describe the bond and strength and sacrifice by mothers for children. I want to find one in this church and think of the strength and power of this woman who escaped this brutal man with her children and then fought in the courts for two years not to allow him access to the children knowing he was not safe. Whilst week in week out testing their spellings, feeding them, washing their clothes, keeping their finger and toe nails straight and short. Oh! but it was overturned. All that strength and fight and journey for them to be murdered. Oh, oh, oh, oh. I am not sure I have the right to write about this, it is not my story. But still I know just enough about chaos to watch at school and see the Mums who feel frightened, the ones with bruises. But I only find a michaelangelo copy of a madonna and child and I don't know how you know what is a copy or not but I felt I did.
It is nice in the church, the communion being taken, the words being said, some nice stained glass, nice kneelers hung neatly on the back of the pews, but nothing I latch onto. A font topped by a huge gothic wooden top like an ornate spire with a pulley system to lift the lid off. I imagine having a baby christened and worrying that the rope would snap, the great heavy wooden structure hurtling to hurt the baby. It is one of the fears that I wake in the night with - that somehow the bunk bed ( which isn't really a bunk bed but a platform bed with a mattress underneath) will collapse and crush my younger son. Lying in the dark I can picture the bolts working loose from the structure, the wooden slats tumbling, the noise of the crash and screaming. But then I make myself listen to the silence, imagine a big 'golf sale' sign arrow that means 'I can't think about this now' and finally tumble back into sleep.
St Saviour's is part of Thomas Cubitt's Pimlico, like square feet of building rolled out with churches attached. Previously it was where vegetables were grown for Westminster and the City of London, with a tea garden in the meadows, reed banks, a steel works and a distillery. Thomas Cubitt pieced together the land from different landowners and by 1839 he had established an eleven acre factory area on the river bank on the present site of Dolphin Square, just round the corner from St Saviour's.
'Here the joinery, glass, plasterwork, steel and marble, as well as some of the bricks and cement for the various building operations were produced, using the latest steam-driven technology, enabling the business in Pimlico and beyond to benefit from the sheer scale of production as well as control of the entire process.'
While Cubitt had to clear most of the older generation gardening businesses out of the area in order to make the roads he then sub-let again for gardening, until he was ready to sponsor building on a large scale in 1840. Like the ferry man who sabotaged the building of Westminster Bridge the market gardeners must have taken this changing world badly.
St Saviour's was consecrated in 1864 and designed by Thomas Cundy. But Pimlico struggled as an area as early as 1852 - Henry Mayhew noted the neighbourhood 'prolific in loose women' in particular he identified this neighbourhood as one where an affluent man might seek a discreet introduction to the sort of 'quiet lady whose secrecy he can reply upon...who in all probability does not reside at any great distance.' Though I also read that at Victoria station there were complaints of being accosted by a 'low class of unfortunates who come from Great Peter Street, Laundry Yard and the black area that lies in the very shadow of the Houses of Parliament' Which is where I live.
Today I ring my best friend back. She says on valentines day afternoon she was upstairs in her house tidying the bedroom and saw flames leaping behind the blinds in the opposite house's bedroom and called the firebrigade. Then she ran across the road and knocked at the door to save the occupants. Her son who is nearly twenty was shouting out of her upstairs window 'Come away mum come away mum come away from the fire'. Standing on the step she suddenly realises somehow ( I don't get this bit but that is what she says) that what she has seen is infact the glint of hundreds of candles and valentine balloons. Too late, the operator says the fire engine is on it's way. The man in his dressing gown descends the stairs, tying the belt and shuffling his parts, opening the door as the fire engine arrives. I hope it was HIS wife I say.
Amen.
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
St-Mary- at-Lambeth
I forgot to mention the windmills last week.
I think of them as I cross over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge for I have seen maps and pictures with the sails dotted on the pastoral and then industrial South London skyline
Today from the bridge I see the Houses of Parliament dipping steeply into the deep water of the river, the London Eye turning impercetibly, the yellow, cartoon-like amphibean vehicle of the Duck tours passing underneath, the new south london skyscrapers awkward on the horizon - that triple clock one with the head like a 70s pencil case and whatever the new really tall one is going to be - underneath all that sky. This is an ancient place to cross the river, where the horse ferry between Westminster and Lambeth Palace operated with flat bottomed punts capable of fitting a coach and six horses.
I have remembered that there is a church south of the river much nearer home than the last one I wrote about but it is not a church anymore but The Garden Museum. Tucked right next to the Palace of Lambeth on the corner of a mini roundabout and a block of modern flats I wonder too if there might be a church within Lambeth Palace. The big gates are open in the old gate house which is unusual and I find a reception. The helpful east european man doesn't think there is a church but gives me a telephone number and a form to fill in to organise visits with parties of over 50. I take the form and think I will ring and see.
This week I asked UL why he did not stay in Russia? Why he did not make his life there? Remember that is where he went. That he can speak Russian fluently. That his wife is from an ex soviet state. He talked to me of eventually missing the home of language, of living inside what you can say, the layers of what is understood. I imagined my own interior space like the cave of a walnut, a finely woven nest - tongued by words and the tilt and tip of comprehension when fully attended to, the lilt and rhythm of questions, the playfulness, the understanding, the vibration and power of humour, passion and kindness. I think it is possibly the one thing I have always known I needed is that central pleasure of language. What I always enjoyed with him. I find it hard at most times to maintain confidence and often strangely writing or talking is where I feel most at ease - like taking a little hammer to chip away at the bother of being. Only occasionally and preciously, reaching the rare silence of truly understanding or truly being understood as if kept kernalled safe.
The church/museum is set back in the scrap of a graveyard by this overplanned mini roundabout surrounded by traffic lights. I have been once before. I went with the boys and my mum and dad after Sunday lunch. The boys with their bikes and cooped up races and my mum and dad behind and disapproving but brave with limping hips. At the museum which seemed at the time ludicrously expensive when they paid, ( give me the money! give me the money! I could buy washing powder with it! funny how pride is?) they dawdled over each watering can and I stood the boys in the graveyard garden feeling the exhaustion of being a single parent and the weary position of doing the best bad job I could - understanding the day wasn't going very well and knowing it was unlikely to get much better.
Today it costs me £6 to get in even though I explain ( look at me these days! haggling to get into a church!) that I don't want to go to the museum I just want to look at the remains of the church. Though in the end I am late to pick the children up because I spend so long there. The church interior has been blanked out by plain plywood boxed structures and a stairway that creates the exhibition space. It is as if the details of the church have been packed away in a packing case but inside out with the church architecture wrapped round the exterior of the box. I am not sure that gets there exactly but it is confused and complicated, obliterating and making neutral the church itself. On the west side the shelved wall of an L shaped souvenir shop selling greetings cards, dinky garden inspired gifts and historical gardening books is lined against a detail of the rood screen. On the east a cafe crouched in the plywood partitions and under old windows - though in a church with so little left of itself there is some bad stained glass.
The back garden grave yard is beautiful. I remember being there with the boys and feel I have come along way. I don't feel desperate anymore. There is the grave of the Tradescants, an amazing tomb with finely detailed relief. On one side a scene with a crocodile, beautiful shells at the bottom of the sea and some egyptian buildings. On the other the suggestion of unrelenting History and Time - with classical pillars broken and buried underground and spires tumbling with the movement of earth. John Tradescant father and son were travellers, diplomats, horticultural pioneers, and polymaths, they were also collectors, acquiring (and asking their friends to acquire) specimens of the wonders of the world. This grave is the reason the garden museum is here for they were impotant botanists and horticulturists, the younger said to be the first man to grow a pineapple in England. Indeed there are stone pineapples on Lambeth Bridge in celebration. Their botanical garden in Lambeth became the centre of horitcultural interest in Britain and thier collections could be viewed by the public at a large house 'The Ark'. Described by a German traveller George Christoph Sirn in 1638
'In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones'.
All this (apparently in dubious circumstances) was taken over by Elias Ashmole and formed the foundation of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. 'Museum' itself a new word listed a few years later in the New World of Words (1706) as `a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for `Ashmole's Museum', described as `a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.
Though there is another grave in this beautifully planted place that just says 'Reader, prepare to meet thy god.'
I discover later that the tower of the church is medieval and I feel ashamed I did not notice it. The church just seemed bland, though checking the photos I realise that the tower is the part nearest to Lambeth Palace and maybe I wasn't concentrating when I entered and the rest of the mainly victorian building is so hidden by its clumsy museum purpose. The church is mentioned in the Domesday Book and apparently even before the Norman Conquest there was a church dedicated to St Mary's here which belonged to the Countess Goda, sister to King Edward the Confessor. I think the site was higher and drier than much of the south bank of the thames for the land around was low and sodden and developed very slowly. The Archbishop of Canterbury took up residence of the Manor of Lambeth in 1197 - giving the church a special importance and the bells of the church rang out whenever royal personages came to visit the Archbishop, the boats pulling up at the landing alongside.
Up the staircase of the museum, is the engraving of 'The Prospect of London and Westminster taken form Lambeth' by W.Hollar 1707 edition of a 1647 plate. Oh, it is beautiful with intricately inked detail, the arch of the wide river, Westminster Abbey high in the distance across the river, rural Lambeth etched on the bend of the Thames and St Mary's central, the Tradescant tomb clearly visible. Wencelas Hollar 1607 - 1677 was an engraver and map maker from Prague who came to London in 1637. Charging 4 pence an hour he was prolific with 2733 examples of his work known and listed - views of London, a map after the Great fire, detailed depictions of women's fashions, animals and engraved portraits of both of the Tradescant's. A biography written by a contemporary John Aubrey has this detail of Holler leaving London during the civil war and then returning.
“I remember he told me that when he first came into England, (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poore and rich, did looke cheerfully, but at his returne, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spightfull, as if bewitched.
But somehow he died penniless. “He was a very friendly good-natured man as could be, but shiftlesse as to the world, and dyed not rich."
I engineer time to spend with ul. Though on a rare weekend I don't have the boys we see each other until late and then meet again early in the morning. This is what an affair feels like I think. But I know him so well I skate round the guilt. Just. Perhaps only just. The following morning I phone exh to make arrangements about the children. But they have all stayed with friends and exh is in the shower. His friend answers and pretends to be him tired, shouting, explaining the children woke them all up at five in the morning.
He means it so genuinely as a joke. But I think it is exh. I think he is drunk. It sounds so perfectly like when he was. And exactly the right time of day. It is 10 oclock in the morning. I just keep saying 'I can't really understand what you are saying' I keep saying it. I am terrified. This life, my life, the boys life that I believe to be on solid ground is suddenly tipped up, I am drowning. I want to puke. I want to cry. Also I understand I have been arrogant - our life has got better because exh stopped drinking - not really anything to do with me. I have worked hard but not made the fundamental difference.
I buy a book on amazon called 'Lambeth windmills' a careful piece of detective work tracing windmills from the end of the 16th century that appear and disappear from maps - as the fickle design mind of the cartographer decides whether he fancied using the nice symbol of sails or didn't have enough space to squeeze it in. Normally windmills are associated with corn milling but in Lambeth, famous for wood yards, glassmaking, pottery and boat building the spread of industrialization caused the power of the wind to be set to other tasks - mechanical saws and crushing materials for the production of china ware. The Garden museum had a history of Lambeth powerpoint installation, outlining the industries, the smell, the fast development south of the river, it was what made me late to pick the boys up from school - so many details I wanted to catch them all. From 'A Map of the New Roads from Westminster Bridge' published in 1753 showing the three windmills near St Mary-at-Lambeth in almost open fields progress hurtled on, steam, the railways, mass production and the windmills disappearing. My final detail and oh, there seems so many, even lovely ones I can't really fit in - the poetry of Herrick, a toll path across the Lambeth marshes, even Lambeth Bridge featured in the 1982 music video hit 'pass the dutchie' by Musical Youth - is the history of Doulton's pottery in Lambeth. A patnership formed in 1815 when John Doulton ( who had just finished an apprenticeship with early commercial potter John Dwight) and John Watts ( previous forman of the existing pottery) were taken into partnership by a young widow Martha Jones who had inherited the business from her late husband. Alongside beautiful tiles and beautiful porcelain they made drain pipes. Thousands of drain pipes. High temperature firing taking stoneware to its true vitrified form. Expanded by Doulton's son Henry these drainpipes drained and dried the boggy land of London for building and allowed the vanguard of Victorian sanitation to be brought to Metropolitan London. This is the land our city is built on. Our waste matter taken away.
Amen.
I think of them as I cross over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge for I have seen maps and pictures with the sails dotted on the pastoral and then industrial South London skyline
Today from the bridge I see the Houses of Parliament dipping steeply into the deep water of the river, the London Eye turning impercetibly, the yellow, cartoon-like amphibean vehicle of the Duck tours passing underneath, the new south london skyscrapers awkward on the horizon - that triple clock one with the head like a 70s pencil case and whatever the new really tall one is going to be - underneath all that sky. This is an ancient place to cross the river, where the horse ferry between Westminster and Lambeth Palace operated with flat bottomed punts capable of fitting a coach and six horses.
I have remembered that there is a church south of the river much nearer home than the last one I wrote about but it is not a church anymore but The Garden Museum. Tucked right next to the Palace of Lambeth on the corner of a mini roundabout and a block of modern flats I wonder too if there might be a church within Lambeth Palace. The big gates are open in the old gate house which is unusual and I find a reception. The helpful east european man doesn't think there is a church but gives me a telephone number and a form to fill in to organise visits with parties of over 50. I take the form and think I will ring and see.
This week I asked UL why he did not stay in Russia? Why he did not make his life there? Remember that is where he went. That he can speak Russian fluently. That his wife is from an ex soviet state. He talked to me of eventually missing the home of language, of living inside what you can say, the layers of what is understood. I imagined my own interior space like the cave of a walnut, a finely woven nest - tongued by words and the tilt and tip of comprehension when fully attended to, the lilt and rhythm of questions, the playfulness, the understanding, the vibration and power of humour, passion and kindness. I think it is possibly the one thing I have always known I needed is that central pleasure of language. What I always enjoyed with him. I find it hard at most times to maintain confidence and often strangely writing or talking is where I feel most at ease - like taking a little hammer to chip away at the bother of being. Only occasionally and preciously, reaching the rare silence of truly understanding or truly being understood as if kept kernalled safe.
The church/museum is set back in the scrap of a graveyard by this overplanned mini roundabout surrounded by traffic lights. I have been once before. I went with the boys and my mum and dad after Sunday lunch. The boys with their bikes and cooped up races and my mum and dad behind and disapproving but brave with limping hips. At the museum which seemed at the time ludicrously expensive when they paid, ( give me the money! give me the money! I could buy washing powder with it! funny how pride is?) they dawdled over each watering can and I stood the boys in the graveyard garden feeling the exhaustion of being a single parent and the weary position of doing the best bad job I could - understanding the day wasn't going very well and knowing it was unlikely to get much better.
Today it costs me £6 to get in even though I explain ( look at me these days! haggling to get into a church!) that I don't want to go to the museum I just want to look at the remains of the church. Though in the end I am late to pick the children up because I spend so long there. The church interior has been blanked out by plain plywood boxed structures and a stairway that creates the exhibition space. It is as if the details of the church have been packed away in a packing case but inside out with the church architecture wrapped round the exterior of the box. I am not sure that gets there exactly but it is confused and complicated, obliterating and making neutral the church itself. On the west side the shelved wall of an L shaped souvenir shop selling greetings cards, dinky garden inspired gifts and historical gardening books is lined against a detail of the rood screen. On the east a cafe crouched in the plywood partitions and under old windows - though in a church with so little left of itself there is some bad stained glass.
The back garden grave yard is beautiful. I remember being there with the boys and feel I have come along way. I don't feel desperate anymore. There is the grave of the Tradescants, an amazing tomb with finely detailed relief. On one side a scene with a crocodile, beautiful shells at the bottom of the sea and some egyptian buildings. On the other the suggestion of unrelenting History and Time - with classical pillars broken and buried underground and spires tumbling with the movement of earth. John Tradescant father and son were travellers, diplomats, horticultural pioneers, and polymaths, they were also collectors, acquiring (and asking their friends to acquire) specimens of the wonders of the world. This grave is the reason the garden museum is here for they were impotant botanists and horticulturists, the younger said to be the first man to grow a pineapple in England. Indeed there are stone pineapples on Lambeth Bridge in celebration. Their botanical garden in Lambeth became the centre of horitcultural interest in Britain and thier collections could be viewed by the public at a large house 'The Ark'. Described by a German traveller George Christoph Sirn in 1638
'In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones'.
All this (apparently in dubious circumstances) was taken over by Elias Ashmole and formed the foundation of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. 'Museum' itself a new word listed a few years later in the New World of Words (1706) as `a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for `Ashmole's Museum', described as `a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.
Though there is another grave in this beautifully planted place that just says 'Reader, prepare to meet thy god.'
I discover later that the tower of the church is medieval and I feel ashamed I did not notice it. The church just seemed bland, though checking the photos I realise that the tower is the part nearest to Lambeth Palace and maybe I wasn't concentrating when I entered and the rest of the mainly victorian building is so hidden by its clumsy museum purpose. The church is mentioned in the Domesday Book and apparently even before the Norman Conquest there was a church dedicated to St Mary's here which belonged to the Countess Goda, sister to King Edward the Confessor. I think the site was higher and drier than much of the south bank of the thames for the land around was low and sodden and developed very slowly. The Archbishop of Canterbury took up residence of the Manor of Lambeth in 1197 - giving the church a special importance and the bells of the church rang out whenever royal personages came to visit the Archbishop, the boats pulling up at the landing alongside.
Up the staircase of the museum, is the engraving of 'The Prospect of London and Westminster taken form Lambeth' by W.Hollar 1707 edition of a 1647 plate. Oh, it is beautiful with intricately inked detail, the arch of the wide river, Westminster Abbey high in the distance across the river, rural Lambeth etched on the bend of the Thames and St Mary's central, the Tradescant tomb clearly visible. Wencelas Hollar 1607 - 1677 was an engraver and map maker from Prague who came to London in 1637. Charging 4 pence an hour he was prolific with 2733 examples of his work known and listed - views of London, a map after the Great fire, detailed depictions of women's fashions, animals and engraved portraits of both of the Tradescant's. A biography written by a contemporary John Aubrey has this detail of Holler leaving London during the civil war and then returning.
“I remember he told me that when he first came into England, (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poore and rich, did looke cheerfully, but at his returne, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spightfull, as if bewitched.
But somehow he died penniless. “He was a very friendly good-natured man as could be, but shiftlesse as to the world, and dyed not rich."
I engineer time to spend with ul. Though on a rare weekend I don't have the boys we see each other until late and then meet again early in the morning. This is what an affair feels like I think. But I know him so well I skate round the guilt. Just. Perhaps only just. The following morning I phone exh to make arrangements about the children. But they have all stayed with friends and exh is in the shower. His friend answers and pretends to be him tired, shouting, explaining the children woke them all up at five in the morning.
He means it so genuinely as a joke. But I think it is exh. I think he is drunk. It sounds so perfectly like when he was. And exactly the right time of day. It is 10 oclock in the morning. I just keep saying 'I can't really understand what you are saying' I keep saying it. I am terrified. This life, my life, the boys life that I believe to be on solid ground is suddenly tipped up, I am drowning. I want to puke. I want to cry. Also I understand I have been arrogant - our life has got better because exh stopped drinking - not really anything to do with me. I have worked hard but not made the fundamental difference.
I buy a book on amazon called 'Lambeth windmills' a careful piece of detective work tracing windmills from the end of the 16th century that appear and disappear from maps - as the fickle design mind of the cartographer decides whether he fancied using the nice symbol of sails or didn't have enough space to squeeze it in. Normally windmills are associated with corn milling but in Lambeth, famous for wood yards, glassmaking, pottery and boat building the spread of industrialization caused the power of the wind to be set to other tasks - mechanical saws and crushing materials for the production of china ware. The Garden museum had a history of Lambeth powerpoint installation, outlining the industries, the smell, the fast development south of the river, it was what made me late to pick the boys up from school - so many details I wanted to catch them all. From 'A Map of the New Roads from Westminster Bridge' published in 1753 showing the three windmills near St Mary-at-Lambeth in almost open fields progress hurtled on, steam, the railways, mass production and the windmills disappearing. My final detail and oh, there seems so many, even lovely ones I can't really fit in - the poetry of Herrick, a toll path across the Lambeth marshes, even Lambeth Bridge featured in the 1982 music video hit 'pass the dutchie' by Musical Youth - is the history of Doulton's pottery in Lambeth. A patnership formed in 1815 when John Doulton ( who had just finished an apprenticeship with early commercial potter John Dwight) and John Watts ( previous forman of the existing pottery) were taken into partnership by a young widow Martha Jones who had inherited the business from her late husband. Alongside beautiful tiles and beautiful porcelain they made drain pipes. Thousands of drain pipes. High temperature firing taking stoneware to its true vitrified form. Expanded by Doulton's son Henry these drainpipes drained and dried the boggy land of London for building and allowed the vanguard of Victorian sanitation to be brought to Metropolitan London. This is the land our city is built on. Our waste matter taken away.
Amen.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
St John the Evangelist, Waterloo Rd
After what has felt like weeks and weeks of grey and rain, even before that the cold and snow, and everyday waking the boys for school on dark mornings trying to describe spring to them - today the sky is blue. Briefly, cycling past parliament on a Boris bike, I sit at traffic lights warm in sunshine. How lovely I think. Over Westminster Bridge, there is the big expanse of sky with London spread out, and the bagpipe man playing. It is the first time isictt has gone south of the river.
I meet ul sometimes on mondays. This monday I make him wait for me while my friend cries in my kitchen. Then rush to get the clearing up done, clean sheets on the beds, the floors washed, the tidal scurf of football cards, lego, books, and feathers tidied in the boys bedroom. I find it hard not to be the parent. Not to be thinking of them. But he waits for me. Watches my face as it softens, relaxes. Are you ok now? He says. Yes. You work very hard. He is patient for me and with me which I don't remember. It is lovely. I doubt what we are doing, that it is possible, advisable, that it can be true. Though we discuss pop music, the economy, what to feed children. But at each turn, and each hurdle I make he says, I have missed you for a long time, I don't want to lose you. As if has found the password. Which it appears he has. But, and I find it hard to forget. He is married. To an unfaithful wife. And strangely I feel guilty to exh. I feel we have all reached dry land together, a modern reclaimed version of a family and now suddenly it is me that is endangering it. Though I got us here. I am proud of the path from bog through soggy marshlands and this solid ground we now stand on. But really I want to accept this new happiness which is precious and deserved and not squander it with doubt.
Since the naked Rembrandt lady in the window across the way I have thought it would be possible to do paintings of things I have seen at these windows. A small girl opposite stood patiently and silently at an open window, arms outstretched, feeding pigeons on her arms. The night Michael Jackson died when people talked across the street, just as the news was breaking. If anyone was watching my windows this monday they would have seen me embrace my Indonesian friend, her perfect, metallic threaded headscarf and my own tumbling untidy hair together in a hug , only hours later at the same window I kiss ul in his pants. That afternoon after school I dance a tango with my youngest son, his feet off the floor
I feel like I am in a film, that this range of emotions is not possible in one day. Though in the evening at a hen do at Pizza Express for my editor I get the giggles so badly on low alcohol wine, that I cannot speak.
The church is huge, set back from the imax cinema roundabout, greek style pillars, big doors, one of those shiny coffee trucks outside. The door is open, and inside the small hall way is a carved stone plaque with an old text on it. I can't quite work out what it says. I don't know why but I don't copy it down, don't try and work it out. I think, oh I'll look that up later, but later I find very little information about the church, as if slightly uncared for, it isn't documented very well, each bit I discover takes a while to piece together. Pushing the door open, I can hear voices and in this huge room is an overhead projector with a picture of a leaf lit on a screen. A woman talking, students sat on chairs. There is too a guard at a desk, who I nod to, and he smiles at me. It doesn't seem to matter to him who is there, and I just stand and look around. Students move around the room talking and an old woman behind me shuffles out of the door smiling serenely.
Despite the screen, the tutor, the students, the security guard, a whole kitchen area with a table, and carpet, and a curtained off bit like a ward which is stacked with the silent sculptural forms of musical instruments in their cases the room still seems massive and airy. Huge high windows letting in the light of the blue sky. A white and gold pulpit like something from Barbie's bedroom or Gracelands is pushed to one side to make room for the rows of chairs, and here is the trick - it is on wheels. Another, also on wheels seems to be roughly in the right place on the other side, but there is something skewed about the arrangement. On the back wall a triptych of huge expressionistic paintings, then another smaller one at the altar. I am surprised by all these people, all this activity, these jarrring paintings, the students lounging, shiny hair and flirting and I don't spend long enough looking or thinking about anything much.
The church was built in the peace and prosperity after the Napoleonic wars on a marshy site of land in 1824, when parliament gave money to build churches for the expanding population south of the river. Four churches were built and named after the evangelists - Kennington 'St Mark's', Brixton St Matthew's and Norwood St Luke's and here on the approach to Waterloo bridge St John's. Waterloo bridge itself had only opened in 1817 designed before the battle of Waterloo and originally known at the Strand bridge. It was rebuilt in the early 1940s by an architect who had little idea of engineering, shortly afterwards bombed in WW2 then built again by a mainly female work force, still known by a few as the 'ladies bridge.' The church itself was bombed too. I find a picture of it with the roof blown out, the balcony that isn't there any more damaged, people wrapped in thick coats praying at pews that still stand in the rubble. Restored in the 1950s it became the parish church of the Festival of Britain.
As I have a little bit of time to spare before picking the boys up I ride the Boris Bike to Tate Britain. At the shop I buy my Dad 'Night Walks' by Charles Dickens for his birthday, a 70% off cut price ' Family at One End Street' to read to the boys. and 'Con men and Cutpurses - Scenes from Hogarthian Underworld for myself. I was given the exquisite Mapping London for christmas by ul. A man that once bought me a battery recharger as a christmas present bought me exactly, oh exactly, what I wanted. Though I felt a little bit guilty because I had written about it so precisely here - as if I had asked for it - set it as a test - demanded it.
I had just meant to write about money and about desire. Always wanting - a dress, a book, better quality butter - balancing what you can have. Ideally I would like to buy the best butter, to worry less, to have a small house with a garden but I don't actually want much, I have got used to relishing what I can have.
At the Tate I go to look for the proper painting of 'Christ in the House of his parents 1849-50' having seen the sketch the week before at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. The collection - which I know reasonably well is being re hung, put into categories - and I am annoyed because I don't understand it, don't have time to decode it and there seems to be modern paintings hung alongside old ones. But I keep going, finding the pre raphaelites and there, above eye level, slightly awkward for an intimate scene is the painting. I like it. Compared to the lurid technicolour of much pre raphaelite painting this seems subdued and simple. A family scene in a real place. The boy Jesus having hurt his hand on a nail in his father's workshop, the blood dripping onto his foot. His mother comforting him, his father inspecting the wound. I find out that Millais based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop in Oxford Street ( I feel my maps would come in handy to find this) and that he was viciously attacked by the press for showing the holy family as ‘ordinary’. Charles Dickens described Christ as ‘a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown.’ and Mary as an alcoholic '...so hideous in her ugliness that ... she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.'
Later I discover, piecing this together, (and it is a bit later, I don't know why this post seems to have taken me ages to write, and I worry that I have missed the moment, that there is more to say about all sorts of things but I have to finish this to say them about something else) but the painting above the altarpiece at St John' is a Nativity, painted in dull pastel colours by Hans Feibusch a jewish painter who escaped to England from the Third Reich. I find it a little bit mannered but the baby is beautiful, sat pert and inquisitive. When Hitler achieved power in January 1933, a new member joined Feibusch's art group in Frankfurt. At first he always had excuses for failing to produce any work. But as the new regime began to tighten its grip, this newcomer appeared in Nazi uniform. "You, you, you," he shouted, pointing his riding whip at the Jewish members of the group, "you can just go home and forget about art. You will never show anything again."
The Nazis' exhibition of Degenerate Art took place in 1937. "From now on," Hitler explained at the opening, "we are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegraton. From now on - you can be certain - all those mutually supporting cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated."
The exhibition was divided into various sections, including "Vilification of German Heroes of the World War", "Mockery of German Womanhood" and "Complete Madness". Feibusch qualified under "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul", with a canvas entitled Two Floating Figures. He was in good company: Chagall and Kokoschka also featured in the exhibition.
In my book of finely drawn maps, I find Waterloo in the 18th and 19th century. Amazingly the maps are on line, the detail of line and drawing and named wood yards amazing. And scrolling like walking.
http://www.oldlondonmaps.com/horwoodpages/horwoodthumb19.html
http://www.oldlondonmaps.com/greenwoodpages/greenwoodnorth12a.html
Now it is almost a week after the days I have described. I don't feel very well. Need to go to bed. I feel exhausted. But I can't quite work out how to finish this. Did I miss the moment? I am not sure. Just now time seems like doors I walk through, a narnian wardrobe of history, past, recent past, present and ideas of future all muddled together. Today, this real one, I give my counsellor a postcard with a Martin Creed illuminated sign on the exterior of the Tate Britain building saying 'Everything is going to be alright' as a thank you card for it is our last session. I am not sure she thought it was funny or apt. But I hope it is.
I meet ul sometimes on mondays. This monday I make him wait for me while my friend cries in my kitchen. Then rush to get the clearing up done, clean sheets on the beds, the floors washed, the tidal scurf of football cards, lego, books, and feathers tidied in the boys bedroom. I find it hard not to be the parent. Not to be thinking of them. But he waits for me. Watches my face as it softens, relaxes. Are you ok now? He says. Yes. You work very hard. He is patient for me and with me which I don't remember. It is lovely. I doubt what we are doing, that it is possible, advisable, that it can be true. Though we discuss pop music, the economy, what to feed children. But at each turn, and each hurdle I make he says, I have missed you for a long time, I don't want to lose you. As if has found the password. Which it appears he has. But, and I find it hard to forget. He is married. To an unfaithful wife. And strangely I feel guilty to exh. I feel we have all reached dry land together, a modern reclaimed version of a family and now suddenly it is me that is endangering it. Though I got us here. I am proud of the path from bog through soggy marshlands and this solid ground we now stand on. But really I want to accept this new happiness which is precious and deserved and not squander it with doubt.
Since the naked Rembrandt lady in the window across the way I have thought it would be possible to do paintings of things I have seen at these windows. A small girl opposite stood patiently and silently at an open window, arms outstretched, feeding pigeons on her arms. The night Michael Jackson died when people talked across the street, just as the news was breaking. If anyone was watching my windows this monday they would have seen me embrace my Indonesian friend, her perfect, metallic threaded headscarf and my own tumbling untidy hair together in a hug , only hours later at the same window I kiss ul in his pants. That afternoon after school I dance a tango with my youngest son, his feet off the floor
I feel like I am in a film, that this range of emotions is not possible in one day. Though in the evening at a hen do at Pizza Express for my editor I get the giggles so badly on low alcohol wine, that I cannot speak.
The church is huge, set back from the imax cinema roundabout, greek style pillars, big doors, one of those shiny coffee trucks outside. The door is open, and inside the small hall way is a carved stone plaque with an old text on it. I can't quite work out what it says. I don't know why but I don't copy it down, don't try and work it out. I think, oh I'll look that up later, but later I find very little information about the church, as if slightly uncared for, it isn't documented very well, each bit I discover takes a while to piece together. Pushing the door open, I can hear voices and in this huge room is an overhead projector with a picture of a leaf lit on a screen. A woman talking, students sat on chairs. There is too a guard at a desk, who I nod to, and he smiles at me. It doesn't seem to matter to him who is there, and I just stand and look around. Students move around the room talking and an old woman behind me shuffles out of the door smiling serenely.
Despite the screen, the tutor, the students, the security guard, a whole kitchen area with a table, and carpet, and a curtained off bit like a ward which is stacked with the silent sculptural forms of musical instruments in their cases the room still seems massive and airy. Huge high windows letting in the light of the blue sky. A white and gold pulpit like something from Barbie's bedroom or Gracelands is pushed to one side to make room for the rows of chairs, and here is the trick - it is on wheels. Another, also on wheels seems to be roughly in the right place on the other side, but there is something skewed about the arrangement. On the back wall a triptych of huge expressionistic paintings, then another smaller one at the altar. I am surprised by all these people, all this activity, these jarrring paintings, the students lounging, shiny hair and flirting and I don't spend long enough looking or thinking about anything much.
The church was built in the peace and prosperity after the Napoleonic wars on a marshy site of land in 1824, when parliament gave money to build churches for the expanding population south of the river. Four churches were built and named after the evangelists - Kennington 'St Mark's', Brixton St Matthew's and Norwood St Luke's and here on the approach to Waterloo bridge St John's. Waterloo bridge itself had only opened in 1817 designed before the battle of Waterloo and originally known at the Strand bridge. It was rebuilt in the early 1940s by an architect who had little idea of engineering, shortly afterwards bombed in WW2 then built again by a mainly female work force, still known by a few as the 'ladies bridge.' The church itself was bombed too. I find a picture of it with the roof blown out, the balcony that isn't there any more damaged, people wrapped in thick coats praying at pews that still stand in the rubble. Restored in the 1950s it became the parish church of the Festival of Britain.
As I have a little bit of time to spare before picking the boys up I ride the Boris Bike to Tate Britain. At the shop I buy my Dad 'Night Walks' by Charles Dickens for his birthday, a 70% off cut price ' Family at One End Street' to read to the boys. and 'Con men and Cutpurses - Scenes from Hogarthian Underworld for myself. I was given the exquisite Mapping London for christmas by ul. A man that once bought me a battery recharger as a christmas present bought me exactly, oh exactly, what I wanted. Though I felt a little bit guilty because I had written about it so precisely here - as if I had asked for it - set it as a test - demanded it.
I had just meant to write about money and about desire. Always wanting - a dress, a book, better quality butter - balancing what you can have. Ideally I would like to buy the best butter, to worry less, to have a small house with a garden but I don't actually want much, I have got used to relishing what I can have.
At the Tate I go to look for the proper painting of 'Christ in the House of his parents 1849-50' having seen the sketch the week before at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. The collection - which I know reasonably well is being re hung, put into categories - and I am annoyed because I don't understand it, don't have time to decode it and there seems to be modern paintings hung alongside old ones. But I keep going, finding the pre raphaelites and there, above eye level, slightly awkward for an intimate scene is the painting. I like it. Compared to the lurid technicolour of much pre raphaelite painting this seems subdued and simple. A family scene in a real place. The boy Jesus having hurt his hand on a nail in his father's workshop, the blood dripping onto his foot. His mother comforting him, his father inspecting the wound. I find out that Millais based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop in Oxford Street ( I feel my maps would come in handy to find this) and that he was viciously attacked by the press for showing the holy family as ‘ordinary’. Charles Dickens described Christ as ‘a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown.’ and Mary as an alcoholic '...so hideous in her ugliness that ... she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.'
Later I discover, piecing this together, (and it is a bit later, I don't know why this post seems to have taken me ages to write, and I worry that I have missed the moment, that there is more to say about all sorts of things but I have to finish this to say them about something else) but the painting above the altarpiece at St John' is a Nativity, painted in dull pastel colours by Hans Feibusch a jewish painter who escaped to England from the Third Reich. I find it a little bit mannered but the baby is beautiful, sat pert and inquisitive. When Hitler achieved power in January 1933, a new member joined Feibusch's art group in Frankfurt. At first he always had excuses for failing to produce any work. But as the new regime began to tighten its grip, this newcomer appeared in Nazi uniform. "You, you, you," he shouted, pointing his riding whip at the Jewish members of the group, "you can just go home and forget about art. You will never show anything again."
The Nazis' exhibition of Degenerate Art took place in 1937. "From now on," Hitler explained at the opening, "we are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegraton. From now on - you can be certain - all those mutually supporting cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated."
The exhibition was divided into various sections, including "Vilification of German Heroes of the World War", "Mockery of German Womanhood" and "Complete Madness". Feibusch qualified under "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul", with a canvas entitled Two Floating Figures. He was in good company: Chagall and Kokoschka also featured in the exhibition.
In my book of finely drawn maps, I find Waterloo in the 18th and 19th century. Amazingly the maps are on line, the detail of line and drawing and named wood yards amazing. And scrolling like walking.
http://www.oldlondonmaps.com/horwoodpages/horwoodthumb19.html
http://www.oldlondonmaps.com/greenwoodpages/greenwoodnorth12a.html
Now it is almost a week after the days I have described. I don't feel very well. Need to go to bed. I feel exhausted. But I can't quite work out how to finish this. Did I miss the moment? I am not sure. Just now time seems like doors I walk through, a narnian wardrobe of history, past, recent past, present and ideas of future all muddled together. Today, this real one, I give my counsellor a postcard with a Martin Creed illuminated sign on the exterior of the Tate Britain building saying 'Everything is going to be alright' as a thank you card for it is our last session. I am not sure she thought it was funny or apt. But I hope it is.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
The Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity with Saint Jude, Upper Chelsea, sometimes known as Holy Trinity Sloane Square
Today I take my eldest son to the church. He doesn't really want to go, but he is off school with a rather vague tummy ache. I was all ready to put him into class despite his grumbling but he had statistics and the time of year on his side - his teacher said, seeing his pleading face - 'there is a bug going round and it is contagious, I would take him home'. I could see a flicker of triumph in his pale blue eyes and by 11 o'clock after a few rounds of undisturbed-by-brother Wii while I vacuumed and cleaned he announced he was better. 'Oh good.' I said we can go to a church. He wanted to argue and did try but we went anyhow.
Briefly before that we played his christmas game of 'Rush Hour'. I bought it for him with some money from a great aunt. I think it is a game for one person really but we helped each other. I hadn't played before. On a gridded board small plastic coloured models of cars, vans and lorries fit in units of two or three squares. From a natty drawer under the grey square grid, cards tell you how to arrange the cars according to level - beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert - then you have to free a red car by reversing or advancing. I am not completely sure I have pinned down the essence of the game by this description - basically the car is stuck and you have to free it in as few moves as possible. We work through beginners to intermediate, high fiving, and only writing this do I think probably a pattern emerged, but I/we didn't notice it. We just started each match from scratch - always thrilled when the red car emerged free.
At Sloane Square I expect him to ask if we can go to Peter Jones. It is where we buy shoes and indeed toys. But he doesn't. I think he is slightly fascinated by this glimpse into his mum's secret world - what his mum does when he isn't there. Almost a philosophical question for a young child. If you are there for them? Who are you without them? Though perhaps I am worrying about this anyhow, for as UOL and I attempt to fathom our L there are a few pockets of uneasy but exciting secrets squeezed into my days and occasional evenings that never had any spare time before. Here too, writing this - attempting to describe what I think - it is apparent it is only ever an approximation, a sweeter more lilting version of the mess that I often feel, and it reveals the impossibility to trace or catch thought fully.
My eldest child is by nature an absolute unbeliever. 'God's a baby in the bible and Allah is a pigeon' he once said to me. His sharp brutal wit shocking me. He is still a little kid. Even Santa gets fairly short shrift - ' I know it is you mum.' Today, despite the irritation about the non tummy ache it is nice for the two of us just to be together. For he skips alongside and holds my hand. Which his younger brother normally does. Though his questions are like rounds of sharp pins.
'Can you measure a globe and work out how many miles the earth is?'
I have a stab at explaining scale
His mind fizzing like strip light flashing to on. Aha he says, it depends how big the drawing is. A drawing of a house could be more centimetres than a street. Or a town. Yes. I say.
How many is it?'
'What?'
'Miles round the earth?'
'I don't know. Shall we look it up when we get home?.....' That feeling other parents might just know.
A pause.
'I love you Mum.' Back into thought.
In the church he is ill at ease. He attempts to swagger against the dim grainy light. 'It's creepy Mum.' He says. No. I say, look at the pictures in the windows. The stained glass is rich with beautiful colours and drawn figures but he doesn't know the basic bible stories and can't really follow the narratives. I made this choice early, instinctively, not to take him to church, not to send him to a church school but seeing him so out of water in a place of worship makes me doubt myself. Not even to think about what to believe seems a position of lack. We look at the font, the ceiling buttresses, he notices and likes the light fittings. 'The whole place is HUGE mum' He says. He is right. The nave, the width of the church is extraordinary, almost a square. Later I read it is the widest church in London, eclipsing St Pauls by 4 inches. Then as we inspect the pulpit. 'Is this what you do for your JOB?' A slight incredulity. 'No' I say. 'I just like looking. Having a think. Having a think about the history.' 'Oh.' He says. We both like the Memorial Chapel at the south side. It is like an elegant peaceful room with dining chairs. But perhaps for both of us a more manageable size.
Sitting writing this, with a guide book on my knee, the Memorial chapel being slight denigrated for being a later, lesser design I realise I could have helped him more if I had been able to tell him the history. Broken my own rules by looking it up before we went. I feel slightly disappointed that I hadn't thought this through. Sometimes there just isn't the time to do things properly. Though also, I hope, just to look, without pressure is a good thing too.
Built in 1888 by John Dando Sedding who was inspired by the work of Pugin ( see Farm St ) and an exponent of the Arts and Craft Movement John Betjeman later called it 'the cathedral of Arts and Crafts'. Their message to make everyday things beautiful and to revere Nature through crafts, painting and architecture, in a time of industrialism, The East window (which saved the church from demolition in the 1970s with the help of JB ) is the work of Burne Jones and William Morris and was meant to be a window with 'thousands of bright little figures.' Though infact there are 48 prophets, apostles and saints against a William Morris natural foliage background. On the south wall, tucked into the back, under a stone carved freize of grapes that looks like it never got finished, there is a small Millais painting or sketch of Jesus in his father's carpentry workshop. Which is beautiful. A realistic idea of a workshop with dirt and dust, and wood. But I try to look it up and I can't find a reference to it. I wonder if I got it wrong. Though there is a painting at Tate Britain that seems to match some of what I remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_in_the_House_of_His_Parents, so maybe it is a sketch connected to that painting.
I have never liked the pre raphaelites or even the arts and crafts movement much. Both always seemed to be based on fantasy to me, but a slightly dishonest sexual/industrial fantasy, where women didn't come off very well. But I like this sketch, I like the realism, the sense of family. I might go back and look at it again. I wish too that we had slowed down and considered it together, but my son was itching by then to light the 20p candle I had promised if he was a good. Which we did.
Reading the history I start to like Mr Sedding - he designed and helped his wife complete the medieval style embroidery of the altar cloth, which is now at the side of the church behind glass, drawing the thistles at each end from those in his own garden and in an age when previously architects would not have spoken to the masons and carpenters he, an important architect of that time used 'to run across the scaffolding shouting with the builders in their own language'
Also I find he said.
"It is well for a man to have a circle of religious exercises that can so hedge him about, so get behind his life and wind themselves by long familiarity into his character, that they become part of his everyday existence…" .
Later, we pick up the youngest from school, and meet exh to go to the last counselling session for the boys. It is the first time exh has come and we are all nervous.
But we are signed off. The boys are really pleased that their Dad came. That he took part. That he saw their drawings. Though Exh says to me later, surprised. how disturbed the drawings seemed.
I think we have come a long way. A trapped red car surrounded by the juggernauts of alcoholism, denial, manipulation and my own part in all of those. I remember talking to someone I worked with at the time I felt completely trapped about setting up a website called 'Should I stay or should I go?' I would have liked it to exist. I wanted advice. I wanted to be given permission to leave. But, and I thought after playing that Rush Hour, that change is made by small moves of reverse and advance, reverse and advance, the pattern not quite clear, the solution often feeling far away, then a sudden run, a rush and the red car off the board into freedom. That it is worth learning to recognise even small feelings of being trapped and devising strategies of questioning curtailment early. But I also thought change itself is the same. It isn't a dramatic announcement but a series of tiny moves, of back tracking, sudden accelerations, of getting used to, of discovering, finding out if that route is possible while launching into happiness.
Amen
Briefly before that we played his christmas game of 'Rush Hour'. I bought it for him with some money from a great aunt. I think it is a game for one person really but we helped each other. I hadn't played before. On a gridded board small plastic coloured models of cars, vans and lorries fit in units of two or three squares. From a natty drawer under the grey square grid, cards tell you how to arrange the cars according to level - beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert - then you have to free a red car by reversing or advancing. I am not completely sure I have pinned down the essence of the game by this description - basically the car is stuck and you have to free it in as few moves as possible. We work through beginners to intermediate, high fiving, and only writing this do I think probably a pattern emerged, but I/we didn't notice it. We just started each match from scratch - always thrilled when the red car emerged free.
At Sloane Square I expect him to ask if we can go to Peter Jones. It is where we buy shoes and indeed toys. But he doesn't. I think he is slightly fascinated by this glimpse into his mum's secret world - what his mum does when he isn't there. Almost a philosophical question for a young child. If you are there for them? Who are you without them? Though perhaps I am worrying about this anyhow, for as UOL and I attempt to fathom our L there are a few pockets of uneasy but exciting secrets squeezed into my days and occasional evenings that never had any spare time before. Here too, writing this - attempting to describe what I think - it is apparent it is only ever an approximation, a sweeter more lilting version of the mess that I often feel, and it reveals the impossibility to trace or catch thought fully.
My eldest child is by nature an absolute unbeliever. 'God's a baby in the bible and Allah is a pigeon' he once said to me. His sharp brutal wit shocking me. He is still a little kid. Even Santa gets fairly short shrift - ' I know it is you mum.' Today, despite the irritation about the non tummy ache it is nice for the two of us just to be together. For he skips alongside and holds my hand. Which his younger brother normally does. Though his questions are like rounds of sharp pins.
'Can you measure a globe and work out how many miles the earth is?'
I have a stab at explaining scale
His mind fizzing like strip light flashing to on. Aha he says, it depends how big the drawing is. A drawing of a house could be more centimetres than a street. Or a town. Yes. I say.
How many is it?'
'What?'
'Miles round the earth?'
'I don't know. Shall we look it up when we get home?.....' That feeling other parents might just know.
A pause.
'I love you Mum.' Back into thought.
In the church he is ill at ease. He attempts to swagger against the dim grainy light. 'It's creepy Mum.' He says. No. I say, look at the pictures in the windows. The stained glass is rich with beautiful colours and drawn figures but he doesn't know the basic bible stories and can't really follow the narratives. I made this choice early, instinctively, not to take him to church, not to send him to a church school but seeing him so out of water in a place of worship makes me doubt myself. Not even to think about what to believe seems a position of lack. We look at the font, the ceiling buttresses, he notices and likes the light fittings. 'The whole place is HUGE mum' He says. He is right. The nave, the width of the church is extraordinary, almost a square. Later I read it is the widest church in London, eclipsing St Pauls by 4 inches. Then as we inspect the pulpit. 'Is this what you do for your JOB?' A slight incredulity. 'No' I say. 'I just like looking. Having a think. Having a think about the history.' 'Oh.' He says. We both like the Memorial Chapel at the south side. It is like an elegant peaceful room with dining chairs. But perhaps for both of us a more manageable size.
Sitting writing this, with a guide book on my knee, the Memorial chapel being slight denigrated for being a later, lesser design I realise I could have helped him more if I had been able to tell him the history. Broken my own rules by looking it up before we went. I feel slightly disappointed that I hadn't thought this through. Sometimes there just isn't the time to do things properly. Though also, I hope, just to look, without pressure is a good thing too.
Built in 1888 by John Dando Sedding who was inspired by the work of Pugin ( see Farm St ) and an exponent of the Arts and Craft Movement John Betjeman later called it 'the cathedral of Arts and Crafts'. Their message to make everyday things beautiful and to revere Nature through crafts, painting and architecture, in a time of industrialism, The East window (which saved the church from demolition in the 1970s with the help of JB ) is the work of Burne Jones and William Morris and was meant to be a window with 'thousands of bright little figures.' Though infact there are 48 prophets, apostles and saints against a William Morris natural foliage background. On the south wall, tucked into the back, under a stone carved freize of grapes that looks like it never got finished, there is a small Millais painting or sketch of Jesus in his father's carpentry workshop. Which is beautiful. A realistic idea of a workshop with dirt and dust, and wood. But I try to look it up and I can't find a reference to it. I wonder if I got it wrong. Though there is a painting at Tate Britain that seems to match some of what I remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_in_the_House_of_His_Parents, so maybe it is a sketch connected to that painting.
I have never liked the pre raphaelites or even the arts and crafts movement much. Both always seemed to be based on fantasy to me, but a slightly dishonest sexual/industrial fantasy, where women didn't come off very well. But I like this sketch, I like the realism, the sense of family. I might go back and look at it again. I wish too that we had slowed down and considered it together, but my son was itching by then to light the 20p candle I had promised if he was a good. Which we did.
Reading the history I start to like Mr Sedding - he designed and helped his wife complete the medieval style embroidery of the altar cloth, which is now at the side of the church behind glass, drawing the thistles at each end from those in his own garden and in an age when previously architects would not have spoken to the masons and carpenters he, an important architect of that time used 'to run across the scaffolding shouting with the builders in their own language'
Also I find he said.
"It is well for a man to have a circle of religious exercises that can so hedge him about, so get behind his life and wind themselves by long familiarity into his character, that they become part of his everyday existence…" .
Later, we pick up the youngest from school, and meet exh to go to the last counselling session for the boys. It is the first time exh has come and we are all nervous.
But we are signed off. The boys are really pleased that their Dad came. That he took part. That he saw their drawings. Though Exh says to me later, surprised. how disturbed the drawings seemed.
I think we have come a long way. A trapped red car surrounded by the juggernauts of alcoholism, denial, manipulation and my own part in all of those. I remember talking to someone I worked with at the time I felt completely trapped about setting up a website called 'Should I stay or should I go?' I would have liked it to exist. I wanted advice. I wanted to be given permission to leave. But, and I thought after playing that Rush Hour, that change is made by small moves of reverse and advance, reverse and advance, the pattern not quite clear, the solution often feeling far away, then a sudden run, a rush and the red car off the board into freedom. That it is worth learning to recognise even small feelings of being trapped and devising strategies of questioning curtailment early. But I also thought change itself is the same. It isn't a dramatic announcement but a series of tiny moves, of back tracking, sudden accelerations, of getting used to, of discovering, finding out if that route is possible while launching into happiness.
Amen
Tuesday, 28 December 2010
Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm St. Happy 2011.
I have few things I would boast about but I would say I had a good sense of direction. That I know London very well. I always think the children take it for granted that I pretty much know where I am going. If you said - let's go to Isleworth or Bow, or Catford or Tottenham - I could think briefly, and set off and get there pretty directly with no trouble. Even elsewhere, I can check a map and hold a route in my head. Though once going to Wales, meeting friends for our Bardsey holiday - the rain like fat, wet carwash brushes obstructing vision, I took a turning too soon off the motorway, but realised pretty quickly and turned the car round. Though it was one of those things, the bank had stopped letting me have any money, I had spent my last 25 quid on petrol and was already looking obsessively at the petrol needle - thinking jeez - I am only just about going to make it -all the food stowed in bags, everything we needed planned and measured for a weeks trip on an island - and here I was on a wrong turning that even though I had turned around, seemed to be sending me miles out of my way. The boys, sensing all was not well, began panicking 'Mum! You are not going the right way. Mum! You are not going the right way.' The rain lashing down. It was the day I shouted 'SHUT UP!' Which they still thought was a swear word. Though hours later, ten miles from our destination, on winding welsh roads, the petrol on reserve but not empty, the eldest was sick out of the window and after I cleaned the poor boy up I shut my finger in the car door and shouted the F word. But only once. Almost too high and pained to be heard. Though I think that is the second time I have said it in this blog.
Anyhow, I think of all this today when I go up to Mayfair - I am thinking about direction, about choosing a route, the paths in my life. I am thinking about hurt and forgiveness and love and telling absolute truth. Of not caring anymore about protecting myself behind indifference or wit. The church I have seen on the a- z is a christian scientist reading room but is not open. I thought it would be the one I saw briefly from the bus on Park Lane, but it isn't, and I haven't brought the a- z with me, but I think if I set off and just wiggle round these streets I will find it. Oh, but this area is beautiful. It isn't just wealth ( though it is superhuman wealth) but elegance and grace. These are the houses that I read about being built, like palaces at the edge of fields, these make look Belgravia look like dull doll's houses. I have never ever been or seen this area before - I have been once to Claridges, a couple of times to Berkley Square, but not here, not these huge elegant residences, with secret walled gardens, - some are offices, but quite a few are just massive, huge, elegant homes. This is beyond rich but graceful, beautiful and historic. I think you would feel pleased to live in these houses but awed by the beauty and history. Though who knows. and today, the day after the day after boxing day, it is so quiet you could film a period drama without a permit, without being bothered. Eventually, I find the church I had seen. Next door to an incredible glass shop - life sized baby elephants in the window in beautiful milky glass - I love luxury, love beautiful things, though I can just admire them not have them, I can love a postcard or a beautiful stone as much - but this shop looks bonkers - and I have never ever heard of it. A tacky gift store for the super rich. And the church is not open. Remember those days, when I turned away from the slightest set back - terrified of entering a church:
St Matthews http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html /
Emmanuel centre http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2010/05/emmanuel-church-marsham-st.html
But here I am peering through a key hole, walking all around the building, finding a side entrance, also shut. Then it is slightly magical - like the bit in a film when soft music plays - for there is a public garden at the side of this church - walled in by railings, and at the end of this garden that I have never ever seen but was once the burial ground for St George's church Hanover Square, there is what looks like the windows of another church. Dreamily, I walk through, to an open door.
I suspect I can't explain how beautiful this church is. It is ( though I have only been to a couple and one of those having hurt my eye, so it would not stop weeping ) like a mini french cathedral but tucked away almost hidden in these wealthy streets, though once it was, at the edge of everything, squeezed in by the stables, on the site of the Hay Hill Farm that extended from the present Hill stree and out towards Berkeley Square.
Everything is beautiful, but very slightly smaller than normal. The shiny pews have the surprise of infant school hall chairs, a forgotten size that used to fit, leaving you feeling big and slightly clumsy in size. There are a couple of other people moving around inside the hush and peace of the space, but it feels like walking in on something holy, slightly mysterious and precious. At the altar, under glowing stained glass is a delicately carved altarpiece centred with a palm sized jesus on the cross. In the adjacent chapel a nativity is laid out in straw a picture frame balanced around the scene. Mary is dewy skinned and though I have to lean in, really peer I look into the little manger and there is a small, beautiful chubby baby smiling in delight.
The review of the building written by a reporter for the Morning Post 1849 when it was completed describes what I see perfectly, better than I could manage, for the language is so transparent and modern:
'The church is of the decorated English style of architecture and reminds one of some of the earlier English churches....You enter at the very end of the church, and at once appreciate the merit of the design. The whole building is taken in at a glance; nothing distracts the eye or breaks the effect. You have the organ loft immediately overhead on entering. In front blazes the high altar under the great arched window, which is a masterpiece of stained and figured glass...There is no rood-screen. Nothing separates the eyes of the people from the solemnities of the sanctuary which they desire to behold. Turning from the 'dim religious light' of the church and the shadowy recesses of the aisles, the eye seeks the roof which is painted in blue and gold, and has the effect as it were of stars. Tracing ones way back the glance rests absorbed on the beautiful, flamboyant window above the organ-loft. On the right and left of the high altar, and in either side is a chapel - the one of the Blessed Sacrament, the other of St Ignatius ( the founder of the Order)...The sanctuary itself is a marvel of decoration, both graphic and coloured. The altar and attached brass work is by Pugin.'
Built in 1844 as a Jesuit church after Catholic freedom was granted in 1829. Jesuits had come to London as early as 1580, initially in disguise, but later more openly, practising with relative freedom - though with the 1688 Revolution toleration ended and the custom of referring to Catholic Churches in London by their street names grew as public places of worship were not allowed for 'dissenters'.
Chapels like pockets, glass domed cupoles letting in dull light, a book of prayers to be offered - the last entry in neat biro says
'For the courage to respond appropriately to every situation' Aha! I think. I am looking for omens. There is also a box with slots for money, each designated for different things in engraved script - candles, guide books, poor. I put a pound for the guide book and a pound for the poor.
I had felt on this quiet, questioning day that I needed to find something. That I needed to find wonder. That I needed wonder confirmed. Surprisingly here in this 'dim religious light' it is just there. But no more than the crepuscular vibration of beautiful things and a feeling of peace and warmth.
I walk and walk and walk. The children went on boxing day to exexdh's brothers and there has been a row about how long they are going for, and I lost. I feel tricked and angry and lonely, and redundant without them at christmas time. Though christmas was brilliant. Exexdh, my mum and dad and the boys on christmas day - everyone behaving beautifully, the food delicious, everyone happy and grateful with their gifts. I went the night before this day again to Winter Wonderland with U,OL and his velvet drape ex housemate, and we sat in the Spiegel bar laughing, all pleased to see each other again.
Exexdh walking past glancing at the screen has grumbled that he doesn't like his moniker. That it lacks respect. I will try exh if it seems better, if it seems like enough time has past. U,OL has got a new title too. And hold onto your hats it seems, amazingly, rather fabulously just to be L. Wish us well. There is a long way to go. But no rush. A lot to cover, a lot of people to consider. Happy New Year. Happy 2011 to all.
Anyhow, I think of all this today when I go up to Mayfair - I am thinking about direction, about choosing a route, the paths in my life. I am thinking about hurt and forgiveness and love and telling absolute truth. Of not caring anymore about protecting myself behind indifference or wit. The church I have seen on the a- z is a christian scientist reading room but is not open. I thought it would be the one I saw briefly from the bus on Park Lane, but it isn't, and I haven't brought the a- z with me, but I think if I set off and just wiggle round these streets I will find it. Oh, but this area is beautiful. It isn't just wealth ( though it is superhuman wealth) but elegance and grace. These are the houses that I read about being built, like palaces at the edge of fields, these make look Belgravia look like dull doll's houses. I have never ever been or seen this area before - I have been once to Claridges, a couple of times to Berkley Square, but not here, not these huge elegant residences, with secret walled gardens, - some are offices, but quite a few are just massive, huge, elegant homes. This is beyond rich but graceful, beautiful and historic. I think you would feel pleased to live in these houses but awed by the beauty and history. Though who knows. and today, the day after the day after boxing day, it is so quiet you could film a period drama without a permit, without being bothered. Eventually, I find the church I had seen. Next door to an incredible glass shop - life sized baby elephants in the window in beautiful milky glass - I love luxury, love beautiful things, though I can just admire them not have them, I can love a postcard or a beautiful stone as much - but this shop looks bonkers - and I have never ever heard of it. A tacky gift store for the super rich. And the church is not open. Remember those days, when I turned away from the slightest set back - terrified of entering a church:
St Matthews http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html /
Emmanuel centre http://i-sit-in-churches-to-think-amen.blogspot.com/2010/05/emmanuel-church-marsham-st.html
But here I am peering through a key hole, walking all around the building, finding a side entrance, also shut. Then it is slightly magical - like the bit in a film when soft music plays - for there is a public garden at the side of this church - walled in by railings, and at the end of this garden that I have never ever seen but was once the burial ground for St George's church Hanover Square, there is what looks like the windows of another church. Dreamily, I walk through, to an open door.
I suspect I can't explain how beautiful this church is. It is ( though I have only been to a couple and one of those having hurt my eye, so it would not stop weeping ) like a mini french cathedral but tucked away almost hidden in these wealthy streets, though once it was, at the edge of everything, squeezed in by the stables, on the site of the Hay Hill Farm that extended from the present Hill stree and out towards Berkeley Square.
Everything is beautiful, but very slightly smaller than normal. The shiny pews have the surprise of infant school hall chairs, a forgotten size that used to fit, leaving you feeling big and slightly clumsy in size. There are a couple of other people moving around inside the hush and peace of the space, but it feels like walking in on something holy, slightly mysterious and precious. At the altar, under glowing stained glass is a delicately carved altarpiece centred with a palm sized jesus on the cross. In the adjacent chapel a nativity is laid out in straw a picture frame balanced around the scene. Mary is dewy skinned and though I have to lean in, really peer I look into the little manger and there is a small, beautiful chubby baby smiling in delight.
The review of the building written by a reporter for the Morning Post 1849 when it was completed describes what I see perfectly, better than I could manage, for the language is so transparent and modern:
'The church is of the decorated English style of architecture and reminds one of some of the earlier English churches....You enter at the very end of the church, and at once appreciate the merit of the design. The whole building is taken in at a glance; nothing distracts the eye or breaks the effect. You have the organ loft immediately overhead on entering. In front blazes the high altar under the great arched window, which is a masterpiece of stained and figured glass...There is no rood-screen. Nothing separates the eyes of the people from the solemnities of the sanctuary which they desire to behold. Turning from the 'dim religious light' of the church and the shadowy recesses of the aisles, the eye seeks the roof which is painted in blue and gold, and has the effect as it were of stars. Tracing ones way back the glance rests absorbed on the beautiful, flamboyant window above the organ-loft. On the right and left of the high altar, and in either side is a chapel - the one of the Blessed Sacrament, the other of St Ignatius ( the founder of the Order)...The sanctuary itself is a marvel of decoration, both graphic and coloured. The altar and attached brass work is by Pugin.'
Built in 1844 as a Jesuit church after Catholic freedom was granted in 1829. Jesuits had come to London as early as 1580, initially in disguise, but later more openly, practising with relative freedom - though with the 1688 Revolution toleration ended and the custom of referring to Catholic Churches in London by their street names grew as public places of worship were not allowed for 'dissenters'.
Chapels like pockets, glass domed cupoles letting in dull light, a book of prayers to be offered - the last entry in neat biro says
'For the courage to respond appropriately to every situation' Aha! I think. I am looking for omens. There is also a box with slots for money, each designated for different things in engraved script - candles, guide books, poor. I put a pound for the guide book and a pound for the poor.
I had felt on this quiet, questioning day that I needed to find something. That I needed to find wonder. That I needed wonder confirmed. Surprisingly here in this 'dim religious light' it is just there. But no more than the crepuscular vibration of beautiful things and a feeling of peace and warmth.
I walk and walk and walk. The children went on boxing day to exexdh's brothers and there has been a row about how long they are going for, and I lost. I feel tricked and angry and lonely, and redundant without them at christmas time. Though christmas was brilliant. Exexdh, my mum and dad and the boys on christmas day - everyone behaving beautifully, the food delicious, everyone happy and grateful with their gifts. I went the night before this day again to Winter Wonderland with U,OL and his velvet drape ex housemate, and we sat in the Spiegel bar laughing, all pleased to see each other again.
Exexdh walking past glancing at the screen has grumbled that he doesn't like his moniker. That it lacks respect. I will try exh if it seems better, if it seems like enough time has past. U,OL has got a new title too. And hold onto your hats it seems, amazingly, rather fabulously just to be L. Wish us well. There is a long way to go. But no rush. A lot to cover, a lot of people to consider. Happy New Year. Happy 2011 to all.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
I sit in churches to think. The Christmas Special.
But like a favourite tv programme at Christmas it can, despite all the right elements, ( drama, religion, snow, romance, royalty, christmas ) go wrong.
I had it all planned. I had exexdh organised to come on Sunday morning so that I could go to the service at a chapel in St James's Palace. There is no other way in as far as I can see. It is a royal chapel, within the security of the palace. Though they say the public are welcome for services. Afterwards I intended to rush to House of Fraser to buy PSM's son a birthday present ( why had I not done this before?) get the boys with their shoes on - SHOES! SHOES! SHOES! and then to The Nightmare before Christmas in 3D at the BFI for PSM's youngest son's birthday celebration.
But. My Indonesian friend phoned up early morning crying. She managed to gulp out - would I be in this morning? Could she come round? I said yes. And phoned exexdh to say I would stay put, wait for her to come, not go to a royal chapel. I have known for ages that something is wrong. I have nearly written about it. But it seems something bigger than I can manage or understand. Something sinister and scary. I take her son to school quite often, when her husband does not come back from his nightshifts in time ( for she works full time now ) and her son ( who I love - his beautiful curly eyelashes like disney ink drawings, and his cheeky manly chats with my eldest, (though he is the same age as the youngest) are hilarious. And like my older son he has great balance and bravery and the pair of them dare each other further on skateboards and bikes. Though the lollipop lady looks at me as if I am mad - three boisterous boys barely controlled. But my friend's son told me one morning putting on his shoes by our front door - that someone had broken into their 'house' and messed up their things but he wasn't allowed to tell anyone. That his Dad slept under the bed when they came. I felt like he thought I was the grown up and that I might be able to do something about it. I would like to think I was. But there wasn't anything I could think to do. If it was me I would ring the police. But it isn't my choice. I texted and texted my friend saying I hoped she was ok. But I kept it neutral. I didn't want to get her son into trouble. But something very serious is up. I think they are being threatened.
I didn't meet her Yemenese husband for a long time and then when I did I didn't think I liked him. I see her as a rare flower - intelligent, kind and funny and strong, open to all. Which is so rare. Though she has to do what her husband says and runs out to buy gym vitamin supplements when he wants. Though she said he was a kind man for an arab husband. I felt from the way she said it that she meant he didn't hit her. He is a short, boyish and handsome. But I also felt he disapproved of me and our friendship and he never looks me in the eye. But increasingly I have noticed his unfriendliness is anxiety and the other morning he shook my hand, which seemed a mark of acceptance, though he still averted his gaze.
On this Sunday when she phones crying, they are meant to fly to Yemen either that evening or the next day - (I can't quite remember) - though because they don't have a credit card I helped book the tickets - my friend brought the money round to give me while I tried to put it on my card. But I wasn't allowed to do it. The name on the card had to be the name on the tickets they said when we phoned them up. Though writing this I bet my name has been stored as someone who tried to buy tickets for another to Yemen.
I can't explain my sense of trust. But I trust her implicitly though not him. Not him at all. I think he has charm but is very insecure. It is a weak combination.
Anyhow. I waited for her but she didn't come. And when I texted her to say I would love to see her, to know she was ok, but I had to leave for a birthday party at 12.30 she texted back don't worry, have a lovely holiday. A day later she texted to say, that because of the snow they were still waiting for their flight, but they were at Stansted now not Heathrow. They would be boarding in 15 mins.
Insyaallah. She texted. 'God willing' in brackets.
The snow had come the day before, on the Saturday. Great big flakes, hundreds, thousands, a brief blizzard that blanketed the ground. Me and the boys came back from a school project morning, mouths open, tasting the snow - then made a snowman in our courtyard.
That night I met U,OL in a pub near the flat. I ran out, excited to see him. The snow had made our arrangements complicated. But for the first time he was there. Not the angry, anxious person tucked in a shell of himself. Just himself. His face smiling. We went on the 148 bus that said 'White City' which was where I lived when I knew him, a bus into a happier time. We went to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. Like a christmas mini break, it is an over the top, finely-detailed, fairy-tale fun fair, sinister and romantic at the same time. He said as we got off the bus it looked like Gorky Park from a distance. And I winced, unexpectedly, ludicrously jealous. After all, I had wanted to go to Gorky Park, had wanted to share his adventures. But I wasn't allowed to go. And here, across the snow, these beautiful lights twinkling in the park - were magical, but something I had missed out on.
But. We had a brilliant time. I don't know what it means. I have no idea. But to stand alongside someone you love that had vanished from you. And know without touching and in a very fundamental way that they love you too. Is so peaceful. Whatever that can or mainly cannot mean. I worry about writing this. But I feel it is true.
When we sat and had drinks in the Spiegel tent - a velvet draped structure with 1930's glass, slightly random event chairs, leather sofas and a couple of incongruous bean bags - a future x factor boot camp (but no further) contestant singing - 'don't stop believing' infront of a twinkly star background - it felt like a dream. A really happy dream. It doesn't sound it but it was beautiful. I noticed a good looking double-date of married partners on the opposite leather sofa observe our annimation - as if we were breaking the rules of our age group. Looking at the velvet drapes U,OL told me a story of his old house mate that I knew and really loved who had constructed as part of a perfomance that took place on a walk around the east end of London, a velvet draped theatre in the foyer of an office block, which was designed to be taken down in ten minutes. The plan was that the performance was seen, then the audience led again on the east end walk, and then ten minutes later pass by the modern foyer perhaps ( and all that effort for only a perhaps ) observing the illusion of a place so beautiful that no longer existed. But, and I can't remember or couldn't understand the reason, the organizers decided that it would take too long to walk the audience back again to see this sleight of hand, so the masterpiece of transformation and memory was not observed. Perhaps it doesn't matter. It was possible. It could happen.
Hurtling towards christmas, living on lists of stocking fillers still to buy, food to cook and cleaning to do I try again to go to a church. On a boris bike, attempting to order a turkey on Lupus Street ( butcher's closed, Maria's gone) - St Saviour's Pimlico's lights are on. But the door is shut. Then I plan to go up to the edge of Mayfair and buy my friend's girlfriend pickled walnuts at Fortnum and Mason's and visit a church I have glimpsed from a bus on Park Lane. But I run out of time and realise I won't see them until after christmas, so I'll go up afterwards.
Desperate, I think I will listen to the carol service on Radio 4 and approximate, fob you off with a service at home. But I miss it queueing in Sainsbury's - food lists and present lists nearly all neatly crossed out.
My Christmas Special, like many tv spectaculars has something missing, doesn't quite hit the mark but it is the central thing not there - like an xmas day Dr Who without Dr Who - I didn't reach a church.
However I still wish you a Merry Christmas. And Peace on Earth.
Amen
I had it all planned. I had exexdh organised to come on Sunday morning so that I could go to the service at a chapel in St James's Palace. There is no other way in as far as I can see. It is a royal chapel, within the security of the palace. Though they say the public are welcome for services. Afterwards I intended to rush to House of Fraser to buy PSM's son a birthday present ( why had I not done this before?) get the boys with their shoes on - SHOES! SHOES! SHOES! and then to The Nightmare before Christmas in 3D at the BFI for PSM's youngest son's birthday celebration.
But. My Indonesian friend phoned up early morning crying. She managed to gulp out - would I be in this morning? Could she come round? I said yes. And phoned exexdh to say I would stay put, wait for her to come, not go to a royal chapel. I have known for ages that something is wrong. I have nearly written about it. But it seems something bigger than I can manage or understand. Something sinister and scary. I take her son to school quite often, when her husband does not come back from his nightshifts in time ( for she works full time now ) and her son ( who I love - his beautiful curly eyelashes like disney ink drawings, and his cheeky manly chats with my eldest, (though he is the same age as the youngest) are hilarious. And like my older son he has great balance and bravery and the pair of them dare each other further on skateboards and bikes. Though the lollipop lady looks at me as if I am mad - three boisterous boys barely controlled. But my friend's son told me one morning putting on his shoes by our front door - that someone had broken into their 'house' and messed up their things but he wasn't allowed to tell anyone. That his Dad slept under the bed when they came. I felt like he thought I was the grown up and that I might be able to do something about it. I would like to think I was. But there wasn't anything I could think to do. If it was me I would ring the police. But it isn't my choice. I texted and texted my friend saying I hoped she was ok. But I kept it neutral. I didn't want to get her son into trouble. But something very serious is up. I think they are being threatened.
I didn't meet her Yemenese husband for a long time and then when I did I didn't think I liked him. I see her as a rare flower - intelligent, kind and funny and strong, open to all. Which is so rare. Though she has to do what her husband says and runs out to buy gym vitamin supplements when he wants. Though she said he was a kind man for an arab husband. I felt from the way she said it that she meant he didn't hit her. He is a short, boyish and handsome. But I also felt he disapproved of me and our friendship and he never looks me in the eye. But increasingly I have noticed his unfriendliness is anxiety and the other morning he shook my hand, which seemed a mark of acceptance, though he still averted his gaze.
On this Sunday when she phones crying, they are meant to fly to Yemen either that evening or the next day - (I can't quite remember) - though because they don't have a credit card I helped book the tickets - my friend brought the money round to give me while I tried to put it on my card. But I wasn't allowed to do it. The name on the card had to be the name on the tickets they said when we phoned them up. Though writing this I bet my name has been stored as someone who tried to buy tickets for another to Yemen.
I can't explain my sense of trust. But I trust her implicitly though not him. Not him at all. I think he has charm but is very insecure. It is a weak combination.
Anyhow. I waited for her but she didn't come. And when I texted her to say I would love to see her, to know she was ok, but I had to leave for a birthday party at 12.30 she texted back don't worry, have a lovely holiday. A day later she texted to say, that because of the snow they were still waiting for their flight, but they were at Stansted now not Heathrow. They would be boarding in 15 mins.
Insyaallah. She texted. 'God willing' in brackets.
The snow had come the day before, on the Saturday. Great big flakes, hundreds, thousands, a brief blizzard that blanketed the ground. Me and the boys came back from a school project morning, mouths open, tasting the snow - then made a snowman in our courtyard.
That night I met U,OL in a pub near the flat. I ran out, excited to see him. The snow had made our arrangements complicated. But for the first time he was there. Not the angry, anxious person tucked in a shell of himself. Just himself. His face smiling. We went on the 148 bus that said 'White City' which was where I lived when I knew him, a bus into a happier time. We went to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. Like a christmas mini break, it is an over the top, finely-detailed, fairy-tale fun fair, sinister and romantic at the same time. He said as we got off the bus it looked like Gorky Park from a distance. And I winced, unexpectedly, ludicrously jealous. After all, I had wanted to go to Gorky Park, had wanted to share his adventures. But I wasn't allowed to go. And here, across the snow, these beautiful lights twinkling in the park - were magical, but something I had missed out on.
But. We had a brilliant time. I don't know what it means. I have no idea. But to stand alongside someone you love that had vanished from you. And know without touching and in a very fundamental way that they love you too. Is so peaceful. Whatever that can or mainly cannot mean. I worry about writing this. But I feel it is true.
When we sat and had drinks in the Spiegel tent - a velvet draped structure with 1930's glass, slightly random event chairs, leather sofas and a couple of incongruous bean bags - a future x factor boot camp (but no further) contestant singing - 'don't stop believing' infront of a twinkly star background - it felt like a dream. A really happy dream. It doesn't sound it but it was beautiful. I noticed a good looking double-date of married partners on the opposite leather sofa observe our annimation - as if we were breaking the rules of our age group. Looking at the velvet drapes U,OL told me a story of his old house mate that I knew and really loved who had constructed as part of a perfomance that took place on a walk around the east end of London, a velvet draped theatre in the foyer of an office block, which was designed to be taken down in ten minutes. The plan was that the performance was seen, then the audience led again on the east end walk, and then ten minutes later pass by the modern foyer perhaps ( and all that effort for only a perhaps ) observing the illusion of a place so beautiful that no longer existed. But, and I can't remember or couldn't understand the reason, the organizers decided that it would take too long to walk the audience back again to see this sleight of hand, so the masterpiece of transformation and memory was not observed. Perhaps it doesn't matter. It was possible. It could happen.
Hurtling towards christmas, living on lists of stocking fillers still to buy, food to cook and cleaning to do I try again to go to a church. On a boris bike, attempting to order a turkey on Lupus Street ( butcher's closed, Maria's gone) - St Saviour's Pimlico's lights are on. But the door is shut. Then I plan to go up to the edge of Mayfair and buy my friend's girlfriend pickled walnuts at Fortnum and Mason's and visit a church I have glimpsed from a bus on Park Lane. But I run out of time and realise I won't see them until after christmas, so I'll go up afterwards.
Desperate, I think I will listen to the carol service on Radio 4 and approximate, fob you off with a service at home. But I miss it queueing in Sainsbury's - food lists and present lists nearly all neatly crossed out.
My Christmas Special, like many tv spectaculars has something missing, doesn't quite hit the mark but it is the central thing not there - like an xmas day Dr Who without Dr Who - I didn't reach a church.
However I still wish you a Merry Christmas. And Peace on Earth.
Amen
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