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.

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

Monday 13 December 2010

St James's Piccadilly

Today, even more than a week ago, the narrow side-streets round here are packed with police vans. Strength hidden, tucked into old streets. At St James's Park tube station there are loads of them, grilles above their windows, stretching as far as the eye can see. Even on the street where I live, there are three, squeezed into the narrow bit where men hide to piss or deal drugs. Metal barriers armour the sides of roads and office workers, out to buy sandwiches, weave around battalions of coppers. It is like the preparation for an urban battle but everyone is attempting to carry on regardless. Later it appears that there is no demonstration. Though I find something on the internet that says there will be a gathering outside New Scotland Yard to protest against the serious head injuries suffered by one student last week. I think with all those police vans there won't be room for many.

Last week I watched on the TV at work as our coalition government voted for higher student fees and winced as the violence gathered momentum. When I got off the tube and walked home that night I walked up to where I had seen the pope and there at the end of Victoria Street and the edge of Parliament Square in the dark, people milled around, but beyond, there was a dense black wall of police. I don't know if you have ever seen that Hitchcock film - Marnie - but I always remember very clearly the street where Marnie lived, and the two terraces of houses shown, with the sea at one end with a huge liner blocking the small space but visually it just looked like a small gap filled with something monumental and dark. This felt like that too. Though as I walked away I could hear kettled student's cheering.

That night Sparky escaped. I was icing xmas cookies for the school bazaar, watching the news, helicopters and sirens continual outside. I was worried that people were going to die just around the corner from me while I put silver balls on cinnamon flavoured snowmen and stars. Sparky watched with his intelligent gaze. He had been making plans. Already he could jump from his seesaw onto the bars of the cage's ceiling and gnaw and worry and shake them and I had grown accustomed to the evening noise of his determined efforts to be off and out and onto a better life. As a friend said after reading his introduction 'I love Sparky - he's got balls!' But that evening, there was a sudden quiet, which took me a few minutes to identify, and even then it was no more than an inkling that something was up, and I looked over and there he was on top of the cage, the lid sprung. As if in a tiny top hat and tails doing a tap dance, he was puffed up with pride. But then, even as I got near, walking very quietly and gently carrying an empty pringles tube, I could see him attempting to fathom the freedom he had won. What do I do now? I thought I saw him formulate. But the choice he made was to walk, nose sniffing, long whiskers guiding, into the pringle tube, and Sparky was again caged, surprised, staring up at the ceiling being secured with heavy books.

This morning I go to Piccadilly. I have started to notice now, with all the history of London I have been reading, that the buildings above shop branded facades are beautiful. Looking up, there is old London, almost untouched. In the churchyard of St James's is a bustling antique and craft market that spills into the porch of the church. I have to push my way through people buying christmas cards to get in through the door. Inside though it is still and quiet and very, very beautiful. Christopher Wren built it in 1684 and had wanted to pack them in - in his letter 'Upon the Building of National Churches' he wrote:

'The Churches therefore must be large; but still, in our reformed Religion, it should seem vain to make a Parish-church larger, than that all who are present can both hear and see. The Romanists, indeed, may build larger Churches, it is enough if they hear the Murmer of the Mass, and see the Elevation of the Host, but ours are to be fitted for Auditories. I can hardly think it practicable to make a single Room so capacious, with Pews and Galleries, as to hold above 2,000 Persons, and all to hear the Service, and both to hear distinctly, and see the Preacher. I endeavoured to effect this, in building the Parish Church of St. James's, Westminster, which, I presume, is the most capacious, with these Qualifications, that hath yet been built; and yet at a solemn Time, when the Church was much crowded, I could not discern from a Gallery that 2,000 were present. In this Church I mention, though very broad, and the middle Nave arched up, yet there are no Walls of a second Order, nor Lanterns, nor Buttresses, but the whole Roof rests upon the Pillars, as do also the Galleries; I think it may be found beautiful and convenient, and as such, the cheapest of any Form I could invent.'

There is lovely stained glass windows at the front and really, really beautiful carved garlands and flowers in draped shapes with a pelican in the centre and carved doves at the sides on the wall behind the altar piece. I spy the font, which looks really old, really unusual with the figures of Adam and Eve at the base and the stem, like a tree supporting a delicately carved bowl. I walk over to have a look at it, and it is a surprise, even a shock, to notice there are men tucked into the pews, behind pillars, as if attempting to be invisible, though one is laid out asleep on the bench at the back. They have beards and are wrapped in coats like parcels. On this bitterly cold day they have found shelter, a place to rest. But I feel I have disturbed their hidden sanctuary though they frighten me a little. I sit for a while. I can hear the man snoring. Then a lady comes in with community policewoman and they disappear round the corner to inspect the sleeping man. I slip out, I don't want to witness his removal. I wish they would leave him be. Though as I haggle with a woman at a stall in the churchyard for a brooch for my Mum's christmas present, I see the commy bobby leave on her own.

As I walk away my friend texts me to see if I would like to go to the carol service in St James's on wednesday evening. It is a strange coincidence since she lives in Streatham and doesn't go to Church. But unfortunately I am going to my office party that evening.

On the chuch's website the history is detailed and put together with love and care. Both the font and the altarpiece's carving is by Grinling Gibbons I discover. I want to know more of his work. It is really exceptional. There is also a sermon that uses the history of the area and combines with fairness and inclusion a celebration of all people.

http://www.st-james-piccadilly.org/Library/HistorySermonSJP-HughV-%20Suprised%20in%20the%20closet-PP%20edit120207.pdf

I had been very disappointed with my last post - I did not feel I achieved what I had wanted to describe. I think it is this - the spread and scale of London - and it's growth. Months ago in the July post 'Christ Church' when I first discovered the 1755 map of Westminster I was fascinated by the edge of the city then being so close to my own door, and the knowledge that the building I lived in would have been built on marsh land. Increasingly, but it is so hard to picture, is the vision of this city evolving from clustered settlements at the banks of the huge river Thames. An unrelenting tide of many different people spreading out, draining and strengthening boggy ground. The Romans are believed to have forded the river at Westminster. Our amazing city built because the gravel beds make it the easiest point to cross or land inland. It is just hard to imagine the world so un populated, the people so much nearer to the beginning of human time. Also that our size means we only consider our own scale. A Boris bike, a stroll, all take me quickly beyond the edges of that early city.

I read too that when the Romans left their city on their site in The City and abandoned their empire in 410 to return to matters nearer home, the Angles and Saxons had no use for their elegant structures or towns. Though eventually, much later, they settled in Mitcham and Croydon. I imagine a ghost town of beautiful temples, an ampitheatre and bath houses at the side of the Thames, in a green wet valley divided by this wide river with the rain beating down.

On Radio 4 in a discussion on Wikileaks a caller describes the site another brick cementing the end of our 'empire' our modern order.

This day, police amassed for nothing, I go to get the boys from school. Every other vehicle is a police van. Though they seem sheepish, tootling, re ordering. Nearing Horseferry Rd I hear loud hailers roar. Aha! I think. There IS a demonstration. But instead it is the journalists and protestors packed outside Westminster Court to hear the bail of Julian Assange, TV vans lined down Marsham Street. How funny. I think. I live here. In the thick of all this. I think of A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book, which I thought was an amazing book describing well the bubbling of change. Though, the liner at the end of their street was the first world war.

Finally I need to say, I am behind. Today now means two days ago. The 14th December. This is always a chaotic time of year for me, however many lists I write in November this week and last week I always end up with too many cakes to make, too much to do, always busy at work and slightly ratty. Last Saturday we had my son's birthday party, this week his birthday and then it is the end of term. I also feel like the ex labour government - I am overspending but I believe my grit at doing so produces well being. If I scrimp and keep to the budget those boys lives will be too restricted. But I remember from last year and the year before it all has to be paid at the same time - swimming lessons, school clubs - chess and football, the birthday party, presents, xmas ( all of it - presents, stockings, christmas dinner, our photo family calendar. The little bits that make our life ours. But also this year, last year, the one before, I panic, nearly lose my nerve, half way through And everything has gone up. Chocolate that I need for the cakes cost about 1.10 in most shops last year. Now it is edging to £2. Though I mix cheap chocolate with 70% cocoa solids that I tracked down for a bargain 82p a bar. But I am shutting my eyes to the fact that the porridge I like has gone up about 40p. That my sums are not working.

My friend says when I speak to her today. The real today. Not the one I started with. But she says - the carol concert was beautiful but rather magically shambolic. And Ed Stewpot Stewart hosted it. It won't mean very much to lots of people. But if it does. It is hilarious.

Saturday 4 December 2010

St Paul's Wilton Place, Knightsbridge

My favourite toy on our shelves is a perspex children's tool box with red, slightly wobbly clasps, that we call 'The City Box'. In it are: shiny, shaped bricks, in 80s colours - old, wooden, coloured tiles, bought from a car boot sale in a 50s tin with a picture of a red-haired girl holding two puppies on the front - a string bag with German ( I think ), wooden houses, horses, hedges, a school house, a church - a tiny, slightly torn box with thin bits of wood painted as sky scrapers that funnily enough U,OL brought back from Russia as a present years ago, before he went to live there, when we were still together - a metal souvenir of the eiffel tower, another of grand central station in New York and a model of a bullet train and two bags of Muiji city blocks -those pale wood blank shapes of city monuments, one marked London and another New York. And the children always moan that I make them put everything back in the right bags and boxes. Though eventually, with encouragement they do.

Cycling alongside Buckingham Palace back from my trip to St Paul's, I am unsure how to write this. I don't feel attached to what I have to write about. The Tractarian movement initially championed by St Paul's church is difficult to fathom as a non believer in the twenty first century, though at it's core is the division between the Church of England and the Catholic church and the overlaps between the two. But, the beautiful view of Big Ben through a gap in the expanse of trees and then the hoop of the wheel above Horse Guards Parade remind me of the blank wood of the Muiji models and of the cities we have made laid out on the carpet. Invented metropolis that have included a school with horses in a hedged playground, the gherkin building alongside the statue of liberty and a high-speed, japanese-style train link made in bright orange and blue bricks alongside tiny skyscrapers of all colours. A city made from scratch.

To visit the church I park the bike in Hyde Park, jostling with the Winter Wonderland and Knightsbridge shopping crowds. Like time has tipped into Christmas. Everyone busy. A family walk past, wrapped up against the cold, talking about somewhere I know really well from my childhood in Hertfordshire - they must have come up on the train for the day. Though there are many different nationalities in the throng. Somehow I am against the tide, I am not going to Harrods or Harvey Nichols, I am not going ice skating or on a helter skelter. I am trying to cross the road into the quiet, grand, residential street, with a few Embassy flags visible, past a stately hotel with doormen outside.
St Paul's is set back from the road with a tall, dark tower, made from dirty stone, but I can see there are lights on, and the door is open. A man with a knapsack squeezes in before me as I stand in the porch fiddling my phone to silence. There is singing inside the church and for a minute I think maybe there is a service, though it is Saturday afternoon (the boys are at swimming lessons). When I step inside I realise it is a rehearsal. Gathered on the steps infront of an ornate rood screen, are singers and musicians, the music grand and beautiful. I stand, slightly self concious watching them, I am not sure where the man in the knapsack has gone. The church has a beautiful, high roof with wooden, carved trusses, a wooden gallery with carved angels looking down and tiled panels, like murals along the walls, almost pre-raphaelite drawn, showing scenes of Christ's life, and slightly awkward paintings of the stations of the cross sandwiched between each panel. The church is really clean, the carpets just vacuumed, everything polished. I am slightly embarrassed to interrupt the rehearsal as I look quickly round, worrying about mud from my boots on the carpet. When I leave I pick up a leaflet for the concert that evening, Handel's Coronation Anthems.

I know, I think, cycling home, I will let myself finally buy the book of London maps, that I have eyed covetously in the nearby amazing map shop 'The National Map Centre' on Caxton St. The shop is where I have found many of the old maps for this project. But this book 'Mapping London' which charts in maps, the growth and expansion of London from the initial clusters of population on the banks of the Thames costs £39.95 and I have looked and looked at it but not let myself buy it. I thought I would ask for it for christmas, but my mum and dad have already bought me an expensive cup and saucer to match the set I am collecting. ( I know, I know, I don't think my priorities are always right, but lovely things do make me happy.) And there isn't really anyone else I can ask for such an expensive book. But the building of this city, has become, suddenly the key - the population and expansion of London and for a moment with excitement, I think oh go on, just buy it. But the shop is not open. Perhaps a good thing, with christmas, my son's birthday and swimming lessons to pay for.

Instead I buy 'London. A Social History' by Roy Porter from the Westminster Bookshop on Artillery Row. Which is like a bookshop in a film, or a portal to another, slightly older, well-read world. I also buy a copy of 'On Churches' John Betjeman for my dad's christmas present and the nice, northern, gently spoken, man who is passionate about the books he sells gives me a pound off and we talk about the snow.

This is what I garner.

Around 1700 Celia Fiennes was impressed to find 'London joyned with Westminster...'

By 1760 When Lord Chesterfield built his mansion facing Hyde Park, the site was so rural he quipped he would need a dog for company.

It is just numbers really:

'London grew astonishingly in the nineteenth century, with its hordes of labourers and landlords, it pen-pushers and porters. Between 1841 and 1851 alone, some 330,000 migrants flooded into the capital, representing a staggering 17 per cent of London's total population. Of these 46,000 came from Ireland, fleeing famine and swelling the London Irish community to around 130,000. In the 1850s a further 286,000 migrants arrived; in the 1860s 331,000 Before 1840 the majority came from the south-east but by the 1860s, with agriculture in crisis, the net widened; all were drawn by the hope of work.'

Tobias Smollett's country character Matt Bramble says, 'What I left open fields, producing hay and corn, I now find covered with streets and squares and palaces and churches....Pimlico and Knightsbridge are now almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington and if this infatuation continues for half a century, I suppose the whole country of Middlesex will be covered with brick'

And a beautiful description by H. Llewellyn Smith,
'The contagion of numbers, the sense of something going on, the theatres, and the music halls, the brightly lighted streets and busy crowds - all, in short, that makes the difference between the Mile End fair on a Saturday night and a dark muddy land, with no glimmer of gas and with nothing to do. Who could wonder that men are drawn into such a vortex?'

Knightsbridge was, until 1824, a boggy and dangerous route threatened by highwaymen and thought too marshy for development. From 1825 Thomas Cubitt, the master builder developer who worked for the Marquess of Westminster, and on many projects ( including the nearby east front of Buckingham Palace, parts of Stoke Newington, Clapham, Camden and Pimlico) brought gravel up on barges from St Katherine's Dock ( which he was also developing ) and laid out his most prestigious development including Belgrave Square. He was the first builder to employ his own craftsmen and labourers. Also cannily he established brick fields in Barnsbury and built Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs, as a complex of sawmills, timber wharves, and cement and iron works which serviced his many projects. Thomas Cundy Junior ( there were three - senior, junior and the third) who all worked for the Grosvenor Estates alongside Cubitt designed St Paul's at Wilton Place. Initially ( and with great controversy ) the church was the first in London to champion the victorian Tractarian movement, ideas coming from Oxford emphasising a return to the ritual and traditions of the Catholic church and condemning the state as weakening the church.


I worry that I am an old fashioned mum, an old fashioned person, caught up in all these thoughts about old theological beliefs and educational toys. City boxes are not,after all, X boxes. Though my youngest son recently made a Wii out of a cardboard box, drew switches and cut handsets from card, biro-ing controls. The three of us played imaginary Wii for an hour. Tennis, running races, skateboarding, and ski ing. It was really good fun, though I wondered what the neighbours across the way would have thought at our strange antics. Though they probably just thought we were playing Wii. I don't think imaginary Wii and real Wii look much different from a distance.
Infact I have already bought the boys one for christmas ( though they haven't even asked for one - I think they just don't believe I will go for it) - so the neighbours will have to get used to us waving our arms around in our small living room. Though on Sunday, glancing across, Great Peter Street while we were having breakfast we saw framed in the window of one of the flats opposite a big, naked lady, like a Rembrandt painting. Which has made us laugh for days.

Finally, I read in the Guardian magazine this weekend in an interview with Gordon Brown and it says in a sneery kind of way,

'Brown would probably have been more at home a century or more ago when politics was about morality, principles and ideas.' Not bad things to aspire to I think, just not what we have at the moment.

This morning on Radio 4 it said Nick Clegg had been advised not to ride his bike in case someone pushes him off.


Amen

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Quaker Meeting House, St Martin's Lane

We have a new hamster. Sparky. Though we all keep calling him Buddy by accident. I had forgotten quite how anxious getting a new hamster makes me. Though probably the first time it coincided with a real low patch when I wasn't sleeping very well and I would wake to hear the poor caged thing running in its wheel. I am slightly phobic about hamster teeth and wee hamster hearts in their thin ribbed bodies. It just never seems much of a life. Though Buddy adapted reasonably well, getting a bit plump and weary, patient with the children's fingers and that crazy perspex ball. Then died young in his sleep, curled in kapok.

Who would of known how different hamsters could be? Or how a name picked so quick can hold so true. Sparky is fast and bright and intent on escape. He stands on the top green plastic platform within the cage and stares me in the eye with wild, brave reproach. He has an us and them attitude. When it is just me and him, the children asleep, I talk to him gently, sing-song like I did when the children were babies and he listens for a while and then skitters away. Though my eldest says sadly 'I don't think he wants to stay in our family' as we watch Sparky attempt to chew a Shawshank Redemption hole in the side of a cardboard box we have put him in to play in. 'He will.' I say. But for once I think I am lying. Exexdh is the only one daring enough to handle him and even then Sparky spins out of his hands like a bat in flight, legs stretched to land. Tonight, I come home from a concert, riding my Boris Bike around the wall of police vans, helicopters overhead, to find out Sparky bit Dad into his nail. Everyone looks grave. He has a beautiful face, big ears very inquisitive but no one wants to touch him. Strangely it is me that puts my hand in the cage, sorts out his food, puts his wheel into position despite my phobias. I corner PSM's ten year old son for advice in the playground, and he says, just let him run over your hand in the cage under the sawdust. Exexdh suggests gloves.

This Quaker meeting house is not open every day but will be open for a meeting on Tuesday lunchtime the sign says as I cycle past on a BB. I am meeting U,OL for a coffee, unexpectedly, on monday morning, and was hoping to visit it afterwards. Though I feel I look like I am stage managing things when I arrive late, pushing the bike, for I can't find a docking bay. As if I have become only the character that I write about. I am in my gold trimmed coat, red tights, with a bike. I have to phone my brother ( also a BB fan ) to find out where to park the bike. Yes, he says. You are in a Boris Bike black hole. But he works out the nearest place to park it and I do.
U,OL and I go to a model shop in Holborn - he wants to find polystyrene for a music case he is making, I want trees as stocking fillers for the boys to decorate a board we have made for battles. The inane detail and precise scale of the miniature world, is beautiful - a minute model of a house being built, a parade of terrace houses, fake moss, intricate trees- all of it fascinating but expensive. Another world that can be made, contained.

I have built this up to be my love story. But it isn't. Or is, because there is a lot of love in it. But I think it is just an old sad story of lives not going quite right, of people making bad choices, of timing just missing. Though part of me still wants a fairy tale ending. I want an easy doorway to open to happiness. To be a heroine to someone. But we have become different people. When we sit and drink our coffee, we are mainly silent. Though when we do talk about things we both nearly cry. Though for different reasons, we don't explain.

On Tuesday I ride up again on the Boris bike. The tarpaulin seems to be coming down around the peace camp in Parliament Square. Though I notice tents have appeared on the pavement by the ministry of defence. I do think I have come along way, as I just walk in to the Meeting House, twisting the tricky handle on the polished door, nodding to a man with a Roy Hattersley mouth, full of teeth and spit, 'yes, for the meeting house' I nod, and walk into the meeting itself. I feel no trepidation only purpose.

I sit on a simple chair in a beautiful proportioned room with a parquet floor. There is in the centre on a table a vase of daffodils under a warm lit light shade, some books placed alongside. When I walk in and sit down there are about eighteen people. And we sit in silence. A few more join. Opening the door, tip toeing in. Opposite where I sit is a huge tall oblong window looking out to bamboo. I am very happy to be there.

On R4 I had caught a scrap about middle aged women becoming increasingly attracted to retreats of silence with an interview with a woman who had gone for 30 days ( I think ) of no talking . She said how easy it was to feel irritation with others despite the silence. Sitting here I ponder it. Really, I think, looking at the beauty of the daffodils, wondering about spring, where they had been flown from, then out over the heads of people on chairs to the bamboo in the grey light outside, looking again at the man with the beard, the corduroy of the jacket infront of me, I can't imagine that. Then a woman in a bright knitted hat creeps in, with a jangly bag, and a cup of tea. A cup of tea! Any minute now I am going to hear slurping noises I think. Any minute now. I glower. Though she must be practised because there are none.

The only ornamentation to this lovely room is a clock. Sometimes 5 minutes of silence goes fast and sometimes slowly.

I think these things too. Can I sit here and not think about God, not about Jesus, what are the rules, I like it here, then a man with a long beard sighs quite heavily, I think about meditation but how that always has noise, a voice saying what to do, I think I would love to live in this room, I could put a kitchen in that corner and a platform for beds. I notice a small amplification system high up by the top recessed windows. Then look at the daffodils. Then the bamboo. A man in a red jumper stands and speaks. He says he went to a meeting recently about William Blake 'Jerusalem', and that they talked about Jesus walking here on this island. My heart sinks slightly that this peace is going to be distorted by nutty talk. He said that nothing was known of Christ's life between being a child and his thirties and it was quite possible he came as a merchant with Joseph of Arimathea. He said he himself, the man in the red jumper ( not Jesus! That would be quite a claim. ) was from Preston in Lancashire and he said that his father said the name came from Priest town and the Phoenicians came there. He said the message was Jerusalem could be built anywhere and within us. And that Salam meant peace. Salam is what I hear the mothers say every morning and every afternoon at the school gates. I thought it was just hello. Peace. It is a lovely thing to say. When he sits. There is still just silence. I see that the woman moves her cup to her face. As if for warmth. Here in this Central London room there is virtually no noise. No clue to lunchtime feet outside.

At the end we shake hands. As announcements are read out. I leave. A kind man in the corduroy signalling that it is ok to go. He waves silently to me as I close the door quietly. I think he means, take what you need.

I look for history about the place but there isn't much. The quakers in Westminster have met weekly since 1655. Even reading these words, I understand for the first time that all churches are connected by people showing up week after week after week. That is what makes the church. They turn up, they come. Former Meeting Houses were in Pall Mall, the Strand and near to Westminster Abbey. This building was bombed in the war and then re built in the 1950s

I read too,
'True silence ... is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.'
William Penn, 1699

'It is important that the waiting in silence and the listening are done as a group. The people taking part are trying to become something more than just a collection of individuals; they want to become aware of being part of a 'we', rather than just a solitary 'I'.'

Also, Patrick Newley's (the soho writer, raconteur and agent to the underbelly of the British entertainment scene) mother became warden of the meeting house in the 70s and he transformed part of it into a theatrical agency and PR office, acting chiefly for drag queens and a crony of the Krays.

Then the next day, the wednesday I go to, 'Towards Silence' John Taverner at St Martin's in the Field. I had picked up a leaflet when I had visited before, this concert part of an inter faith day of quiet within the church. I had wanted to take U,OL, with some plan of taking him to good things, to revive his spirit. But he couldn't come or chose not to. Though also I think later that isn't my job. He has the choice to revive himself.

Then I think about the chattiness of my whole project. The noise of me me me, me - on and on and on. Mainly I like to be very quiet about myself. Private. I have been surprised and mildly horrified by this insistence of telling, of attempting to tell my truth. Quite often, even writing it, I think SHUT UP, SHUT UP, STOP IT. Though strangely it feels like a silent thing, a black hole - this blog. I write, it sits, suspended, almost no where. But people are reading it. I have admittedly started sending it out, to people I know, but before that, I finally found the stats button, and there were readers. I was breathless.

Years ago I went on the tube to dinner at a friend's flat in Elephant and Castle. I think U,OL had just left for Russia and I was bereft. I sat in a nearly empty carriage alone. A mother and son got on and the mother, tall, very black, probably Ethiopian, with high proud cheekbones sat next to me, very close, swaying as if asleep and the child, as if in the same dream, sat on my knee, but not like he knew it was on my knee, but like he thought I was a chair or more exactly that I wasn't there. For some reason, as if they were sleepwalkers, which even now, I almost think they were, I knew I mustn't make a sound, mustn't disturb them in anyway though I think I held the child. So we sat tight together, not making a sound until they got off. Which they did. I remember thinking I must be dead, or not visible to them. I don't know. But I think now, we were just alongside, some strange trust together. And I almost think that is what this is like. A quiet space where I pour all these words. If you read it you are just alongside, with your own concerns that might, even briefly, match.

Anyhow, it is the day of the student demonstrations. The TV on at work is agog for violence. Which unfolds. A police van trashed, a beautiful girl with an old fashioned Anne Frank face talking eloquently for non violence. When I leave work, I think I will be able to go to the concert and then scout round on the way home to see what is going on. I am almost rubbing my hands in anticipation that I will have so much to write about. But as I walk up from Embankment tube against the tide of office workers, and into Trafalgar Square, I can hear chanting and dirty youths, like foot soldiers from an old, old battle, storm through the street, staves made from the spine of placards. They are not like the plush Millbank lot I saw, they have cheap dirty trainers and violent, hardened faces, they shout 'Don't visit London it is shit.' for they presume we are tourists, walking past on the pavements. And their voices are high on the new power of their old rage. Behind their stampede a fire has been lit in the street out of bollards and cardboard and rubbish is strewn. It is something medieval, a fire tossed casually but dangerously into the road. The traffic like a startled horse, nervy from the flames, holds back. And I, I don't know what to do, so I walk into the church, show my solo ticket and sit down, restricted view, behind a pillar for the concert.

It is calm and peaceful, full and plush. Behind, a man talks of icons, the British Museum, religious theologians his Kindle and a chapter in the Brothers Karamazof by Dostoevsky that he has downloaded (just the one chapter), because it is a philosophical debate of how things are. I just love gizmos he says. It is like an interior and exterior experience because all these things that seem fine and good and of wealth to the soul and spirit, seem also to depend on a lot of people not being there. Outside, even when the beautiful high, unaccompanied singing starts, harmonies of voice soaring, everyone intent, we can hear a steady angry chant and the pitch and squeak of the police amplified by megaphones. Blue lights revolve in the big windows of the church. 'Towards silence.' We have been asked not to clap when the concert that includes a tibetan bowl rung like a bell, ends to preserve the conversation with silence. I don't know. I enjoy it but I don't love it though I keep quiet, leaving, as the audience like a congregation flood out into Trafalgar Square, Police vans parked up. Helicopters overhead. Where the fire had been lit, there are more police vans packed like bricks and beyond that protesters that I can't see. I cycle back, nosing my way round the back of the ministry of defense, trying to find a short cut, trying to get a good look around. A policeman stood apart from his gang in a van, nearly lets me cycle down the last bit of Whitehall, but then says, 'Love, they have been breaking glass, You don't want to rip your tyres. A pause. 'Boris's tyres.' We laugh

This is my personal experience of the Tory cuts. At our school the Holiday play schemes no longer exist and probably after christmas the after school care play-centres will be cut. It doesn't work. Doesn't make sense. People who work. Who pay for this childcare. Will not have it. It may be that this childcare is funded, helped along. But no one is having a manicure while their children play Connect 4 in a bright lit school hall. They have jobs. They work really hard. They are trying, really trying, not to be on benefits. When exexdh had no unsupervised access to the children I had 7 minutes to do a 15 minute journey between the tube and the school playcentre after work. I did a soldiers run, jogging to the count of 15 and walking 15, dignity gone, slightly desperate, very tired.

I would never be violent but I am angry.

Sunday 14 November 2010

Orange Street Congregational Church

Standing trying to shelter from the thin, cold rain in a narrow patch of dry pavement with the puffed-up, dirty pigeons opposite the Orange Street Congregational Church I text my friend to say I wish I was a normal person. She replies she is about to go into her dark cupboard under the stairs and she wishes she was a normal person too. And ps. her girlfriend has gone to TK Maxx. And despite our wishes I think we are both relieved that we are not there.

The boys are away with exexdh and his mum and I feel like an outsider within the day.

It is Remembrance Sunday and I have walked up and past the cenotaph. Stood silent wearing my poppy near Westminster tube. Hurrying, trying to get nearer to the war memorial as Big Ben started chiming 11am, a women's cockney voice came out of a souvenir stall saying 'stand still'. I did. Looking up to Westminster Abbey's rooves and thinking about the bombs raining down. Gathered crowds stood quiet. There is something really powerful to the collective silence. Though I wonder if it is possible to record all the inane thoughts in those few minutes. I find my mind wandering to baking bread and X factor. Then as the silence is coming to an end a South American lady asks me 'Can you tell me what is going on?' I shake my head. She stands, her head on one side, puzzled, staring into my mute face. Finally people begin to pull themselves out of the stillness and I say and my voice seems really loud 'It is the Remembrance Day silence.'
Then because all the roads are blocked off I weave up behind the Ministry of Defense, through narrow streets I have never been before. Over Trafalgar Square. Under the ship in the bottle sculpture on the fouth plinth. Did you ever see the Mark Wallinger Ecce Homo 1999? It was the most beautiful thing. A life sized christ on the plinth, naked apart from a loin cloth and a crown of thorns, his hands tied. Made tiny by the scale of everything surrounding. A vulnerable human standing still and quiet. I have a little picture of it in my bedroom.
'I wanted to show him as an ordinary human being.' Mark Wallinger said.

I think Mark Wallinger is my celebrity crush. (You see perhaps how ill suited I am to work on a celebrity magazine?) I love the humour and humanity to his work. I met him years ago on a Lord Snowdon photo shoot. Should I say well known royal photographer? I'm not sure. I used to work for a Sunday supplement that used Lord Snowdon a lot. It was my job (among other things) to help get the props, help the shoots run smoothly. Snowdon wanted a life sized model of a horse for this shoot. Though I've just remembered he insisted everyone call them 'sittings'. This was before the internet and I remember phoning round every prop house, every lead I had for a horse model. I think it was probably two days work before, just in the nick of time I secured one, arranged for it to be delivered to the studio.
It was around the time of the deterioration of my relationship with U,OL. He was going to Russia. I wanted to get married. Like magnets repelling both desires could not meet. Now I think how young I was, and how silly. But the night before the Mark Wallinger shoot we split up. Finally honest with each other, almost close again as we agreed to part, but we could not sleep, both weeping throughout the night. But a car was booked to take me to the shoot in the morning (I can't remember why - but at this time, with this magazine though not paid very well there were these grand gestures.) and I leave, still weeping. Though this wasn't in fact the end. I think there was another couple of tries before he finally left for Russia.
Anyhow, red eyed and exhausted I arrive at the studio. The huge plastic moulded horse is there. Snowdon is making asides about Mark Wallinger behind his back, saying he is a bit stiff and his paintings are boring, then he decides after a few shots of the artist in jockey silks with the horse that he wants to try the shoot outside. I have one of those out of body moments as I carry a surprisingly light, life sized model of a horse over a zebra crossing, followed by Snowdon limping and Mark Wallinger in jockey gear, my heart broken. When the shoot finishes Mark offers me a lift back to the office, but the few hours of smiling and charm, have been enough for me and I want to have a good cry on the tube before getting back to work. At that point, I don't really like his paintings either. I find them a bit stiff. So I say, no thank you, it will be quicker on the tube. Now I wonder what we would have talked about. Strangely, I imagine him offering me a boiled sweet.

Today, turning the corner into Orange Street the lights are on within the small church and a sign above the door is lit up. Good. I think. It is another old fashioned, smelly looking church, though the building is beautiful, a simple, white, low, one storey chapel. Outside there is a plaque that details the history of the site as a huguenot chapel built in 1686. There are also glass covered notice boards with long tracts about the state of the world and the state of the United Reformed church and some signs of notice of service in chinese. The second coming of Christ is imminent it says and we must repent. I open the door and stand in the narrow porch I can hear the sermon, an angry voice talking about peace. It is a little bit musty smelling but not too bad. I wait there wondering what to do. I can't march in while the service is taking place, so I decide to wait outside and watch for people coming out of the service and then hope I can slip in.

I feel like a private detective standing on the corner, by the back door of the National Gallery in the drizzle waiting. Cold, I walk round the block a few times, up into Leicester Square and back round. I am standing there for about an hour, and when I hear music straining out of the building I think oh good they are nearly finished. But still no one comes out. Then a chinese woman goes in through the door, dithers in the porch and enters. I am so cold I follow her. Though I can hear organ music playing and I am still worried that I am bursting in on something. 'Would it be possible just to have a quick look at the church?' I say smiling. Strangely the tiny church is empty, neat dark pews in rows, only a man, his face hidden behind a curtain playing the organ. Where did they go? I think. But perhaps I missed the congregation leaving when I went round the block. Or maybe there hadn't been a congregation and the man behind the curtain had been shouting about peace on his own.

The walls are bright orange red, and the organ at the end is ornate. I like the simpleness of the space, the old fashioned scrub of it. Though when I look on the internet there are homophobic rants that make my skin crawl. There is a very precise mind working away patching the bible to our world. Another tract which I barely understand is about the israelites, and their ancestors, including the royal family.

The chinese woman who I followed welcomes me kindly but suspiciously. Did I read about the church in a tourist guide? She asks. I say no, I live near here. There is about to be a chinese service she says, the organ still playing, the man covered by the curtain, but if I want to come again, I should come come at 11am on a sunday. Is there a leaflet I could have, I ask but she says no. Though on a revolving stand there are a lot of booklets to buy.

The original Huguenot church was called the Temple of Leicester Fields because it was then, as described before in the St Martins in the Field blog, a place only of fields. Huguenots were the french protestants, who escaped persecution by the Roman Catholics after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 which had given them religious freedom. Many went to Holland, some to South Africa, even America, and here, thousands to England - in this area and also Spitalfields. They were skilled people, noblemen, intellectuals and craftsmen bringing silk weaving to London. That original church was much bigger than the tiny chapel now. Also I remember looking at old pictures for St Martins in the Fields and realising that this place was initially only the outskirts, along the route between the city and Westminster, a place where religious freedom could be practised, new communities could be built. Sir Isaac Newton lived in the house adjacent and owned by the church. I just looked it up to find out Newton moved to London in 1696, and that he was an MP and also the warden of the Royal Mint. All that and a physicist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and theologian. Now I have just found an inventory of everything in this house (even though he wasn't living in it) when he died.

http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/ntheman/NTMinv

how completely fascinating - a description of a man by his things - his feather bolsters, his sword, forty articles in Dutch.

At the time of the Wesley's the church passed from French protestantism to English protestantism, and the hymn written by the then minister Toplady 'Rock of Ages' was first sung here. In 1787 badly in need of repair it closed, and then passed from the Church of England to the Non Conformists becoming a Congregationalist Church. Just before WW1 Westminster council passed a demolition order first on the church and then on Newton's house. The congregationalists led a nomadic life until 1925 when the council leased most of the site for a library and a temporary chapel was built, the building that still stands.


Walking home, there are old soldiers everywhere and it is really raining. Outside a pub I see two pearly kings drinking with a Chelsea Pensioner. My umbrella is broken and I stop and buy a 'I love London' brolly. It makes me happy.


Amen

Monday 8 November 2010

St James the Less, Vauxhall Bridge Rd

St James the Less stands dark, slightly foreboding, set back from Vauxhall Bridge Rd, between an estate pub and a building site. Litter and leaves catch in eddies in the expanse of paving stones between the grimy main road and grimy church. I walk past once in the week but it isn't open and the only notice is the times of the services on Sunday.

So I go again on the Sunday. I aim to get there for 10.30 and have a look round before the service starts at 11am. I am taking the boys for lunch at my mum and dads with fireworks afterwards, so exexdh is to have them briefly, before we set out. But I am late. I hear 11 strike on Big Ben as I walk down Vauxhall Bridge Rd, a bit flustered, very slightly hungover, having thought I was being clever and taking a short cut but having gone the wrong way - though surprised to have done so, for I live here and know my way really well. Surprised too to hear the clock so clearly from this distance. I am starting to have to travel a bit further to visit churches but I can still hear Big Ben. I get as far as the porch under the tall four storey tower, with it's patterned brick arches, and intricately carved doorway and the wooden door open to a glass one where I can see a man standing just the other side, with a hymn book ready to hand out. I can make out people in pews and a large lit over head screen, and an unexpected richness of mosaic, and brickwork. But I can't sit through the service without being really late for my mum and dad's so I have to turn round and leave. But it feels unsatisfactory, I could see there was something fine to the detail of the church

My youngest son, (which seems as scripted as U'OL coming back on the scene), has started to demand to pray. He is five. He has been to church possibly, twice in his life, goes to a predominantly muslim school with no obvious religious worship, though they did a nativity the first year Gordon Brown's son was in reception ( the year before my youngest attended, and the year after the eldest started ), and beyond slipping out to visit churches twice I have barely mentioned my church visiting project at home. He started asking about two weeks ago, but I couldn't face mentioning it, it just seemed too much like an invented plot. Though years ago he had a dream he had stigmata. Of course he didn't know the word, but he described it exactly. Which scared the hell out of me. Anyhow we have started doing the Lord's Prayer each night. The old words incredibly soothing to speak out loud. And the youngest kneels and closes his eyes, beautiful in his pyjamas. The eldest initially sarcastic, has since asked for a prayer of trust. I find a prayer by Ignatius Loyola 1491-1556.
Saying the words, I wish I could believe something. I can see it would be good for us.

But in the back of the car, through the stop starting of traffic lights at the outskirts of London with a wildly inappropriate CD that we all adore - Leadbelly, Buddy Holly, The Damned, White Stripes, The Clash - the youngest sings 'I want to be a Christian, I want to go to Church' to the tune of I'm so bored of the USA. I wince at the combination. Though I promise I will take him.

Later, I look up St James the Less, to find out it is a celebrated Gothic Victorian Church. There is only a little bit of history - it was built by three sisters in memory of their father the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol between 1856 - 61 in one of the poorest areas. But there is an immense amount of architectural information - designed by G.E Street, a victorian gothic architect of note, he employed the best craftsmen for this, his first church in London- Thomas Earp for stone carving and Clayton and Bell for stained glass and the famous Victorian artist GF Wyatt painted the mural above the chancel, called the The Doom, later replaced by a mosaic he designed. I feel a bit of a fraud because I haven't really seen the interior. Also I discover, John Betjeman, a big fan of Gothic Victorian Churches, helped save it, writing letters to defend the church from demolition, which is amazing symmetry because I have just been reading 'On Churches' by JB, and how he saved loads of churches, writing many letters. Then I find a painting of St James the Less by John Piper in his book English Churches with an introduction by John Betjeman which includes:

'The more you look at churches the more you appreciate their varying atmospheres – whether the vicar is high or low or breezy or lazy or crazy. You notice too oddities of furnishing, hymn boards, oil lamps, electric lighting, pipes, wires and heating stoves.'

And I thought yes. Yes. Exactly.

But then I want to actually see the church, and it seems to suggest on a Victorian architecture history site that it is often open at lunchtimes. So I go back again. From a distance I can see the gate to the porch is chained shut, and I nearly just cycle away. But a man is walking up to the church so I follow him and see him ring the bell of a side door and disappear inside. I have to go and park up the Boris Bike and then come back. Another man rings the bell and disappears inside. I press the bell. The door buzzes and lets me in. Above the bell I suddenly notice two AAs in a triangle. Oh, I think, for after all I did look up all the local AA meetings for exexdh in the area when he first stopped drinking, I just didn't remember it here. Anyhow, I am in a hallway at the bottom of some stairs, with an empty dark kitchen with toddler toys stacked and no one and no noise. I see a sign for the office but when I open the door it is dark and closed. I move further into the building, I just want to ask someone if it is ok just to have a look around. I open another door, pushing it open into a bright lit empty room with chairs around a table. Only then do I really realise I could accidentally walk into the AA meeting and it would be hard to get the words out quick enough to explain the mistake.

I am about to chicken out, to leave, when I see a heavy wooden door to the side. I lift the latch, surprised it is open and feeling like I am in a fairytale I walk through into the dark, unlit church. The air is so quiet and still and subdued, I feel my lungs fill with the grainy peace. From very far away I can hear voices but no one challenges me and I walk quietly around. I am briefly worried that they will think I have got lost and come and collect me for the meeting and usher me out of the church and onto a chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit and everything to say about alcohol. Then I feel free, just allowed to be here under these high ceilings, in a huge space like finding lung capacity.

In this dull gloaming light, the church is pixellated with the patterns of red, black and cream bricks. There is an extraordinary font of wrought iron with a roof like a nutty hat at ascot. Then sofas crammed in the back. Beautiful stained glass, beautiful tiles, and the overhead screen hung from the high ceiling. The G.F. Watts mosaic is high up on the chancel wall picturing Christ in heaven. Far away, in the corner there looks to be a skeleton glowing out from the dark. Slightly wary, I get near, but it is a large figure of made out of parts of musical instruments, the body a squeezebox, the fingers keys from a piano, the legs saxophones. It is crazy loose-limbed - a strange, crude representation of Christ. I go back to look at the craftsmanship of the iron work, and the pulpit. But mainly I like the fact I shouldn't be here, there is no electric light, there is space and quiet to breathe deeply.

Then today at work on the TV above my head I see the scenes of fire and windows breaking, and demonstrators pouring into Millbank Tower. Just round the corner from us, just round the corner from the school. I watch fascinated, slightly admiring ( though later I think - of what? ) but anxious for my children. Also I know, having been to a children's birthday party at the Pizza Express in the wings of the building that diners, tucking into doughballs and a Veneziana would have surprise ringside seats to the burning of David Cameron and Nick Clegg effigies. Then cower at the back of the restuarant near the toilets (or watch - which would you do?) as windows were broken, youths showed their bottoms and young people overcame the police. I would have taken a photograph of those diners faces but I don't think anyone did.

Later, on my way home from work I think I will just go and see, getting off one stop early. Walking past the peace camp and the increased police presence at the Houses of Parliament, and in a straight line on. I wondered if I will recognise students in the normal crowds of tourists and office workers. But it is surprisingly easy. Young women wear DM's again and young men look earnest.

I get to Lambeth bridge where cars in a tailgated traffic jam are being diverted. It is dark and really cold. A runner flashes past and dips down the steps to the Thames path. There is police tape across the road, with a few coppers alongside but no barrier to the pavement. I think they will say 'Turn back now, lady' or some such. But no one stops me and I keep walking on an almost empty street. Above a helicopter hovers, as if focussing. I am carrying a Gap bag with a new coat for my eldest son, some jogging bottoms and pants for both, using one of those 30% off vouchers and a heavy tesco bag too. Nearing Millbank Tower, police like dark beetles in riot gear arch together herding the few demonstrators left. Apart from the helicopter, it is very quiet. Bystanders and students ( ex protestors?) stand on the pavement in the dark under the trees by the Thames, placards littered. Many are drinking. Cans or whole bottles. Better protest than drink, I think. But I worry about everyone's drinking these days, including my own, for it doesn't seem good for survival. You ain't the fittest if you are drinking and that seems to be how evolution works. Inside the foyer of the lit building I can see police in riot helmets and fluroscent yellow jackets jammed together, like fish in a tin. Too many and too big for the space. On the walls in surprisingly thin and ineffectual pen there is an anarchist A in a circle, 'Tory scum', and a drawing of a prick and a broken glass door with some girls taking photos on their phones, I walk on. It doesn't seem very substantial. Though I think the lib dems will not be trusted for a long time. Do you remember Nick Clegg's sudden credible status through the televised debate? - I think I had forgotten, I just thought he was a twit - but those young people had wanted to believe absolutely - and here they are disappointed. Combined with the gleeful cruelty of the Conservatives, I think people already feel trapped in having got what they didn't want.

Past the Tate and then circling back to home. I hear a young man say 'In the UK there just aren't many of the lower or upper classes' and I think maybe not where you live mate.
Behind the buildings, I look up and see the tower and I think there are still people up there. ghostly white against the dark night sky, with a helicopter coming in, really near as if herding. I imagine that they got in, went as far as they could and don't know what to do now. Though the power of having obtained the roof top, however briefly, must be amazing.

Amen

Tuesday 2 November 2010

St Martins in the Fields. Trafalgar Square

I think it is the tube strike but it isn't. I get the wrong day, the day before, not the actual day. A little bit like weather reports I find it hard to take in such details. Listening to the news I think ok, concentrate it is coming - rain or winter coat? And then I blink, or turn the tap on to wash up, and the report has gone, and yet again I make an ill informed guess, just looking out of the window and we are down the flights of stairs, late for school and standing outside, the children and me under blue skies and sunshine in thin clothes feeling a little bit cold. If we go fast we'll be alright I say.

This day though, I go to Notting Hill on the bus thinking I have been really clever and aren't I lucky because it isn't too packed for a tube strike day. I have an appointment with a counsellor I have started seeing and I didn't want to miss it. For some reason I don't really want to write this. Though perhaps it is just another truth barrier to go through. Angry children. Counselling through a domestic abuse charity.

The day I rang the domestic abuse charity it was well after the worst - after separating, after the drinking stopped. I had been given the leaflet initially by the woman who came after I phoned for help after exdh disappeared drunk driving the children around and held onto it, though I can remember well before that looking at the poster on the wall at a toddler group thinking that is what it feels like. But there was never any physical violence so I was unconfident that it described what it was. But exexdh had shouted and sworn and ranted at me one more time and after soothing the children back to bed, back to sleep I lay on the floor and sobbed and thought I cannot allow this to carry on anymore. This is my home. The next morning shaky and weary I took the children to school and then came back, took the phone into bed, lay under the covers and phoned the number. I told my tale to a kind, warm voiced woman.

I have always felt that I was a powerful person so it is a surprise to be or have to tell this.

She said you need a solicitor. She said yes, you need to talk through what has happened to you for you have been so strong and you have had no support. Yes. You do not have to live in this way.

So on this tube strike day that isn't - I think - I know, I can walk back through the parks afterwards and then onto a church. I can go and have a look at the Anish Kapoor sculptures. What a treat, I think, and the day is beautiful, warm, crisp blue skies and the autumn trees are strutted peacocks, flame coloured in amazing display.

This is beautiful. I am glad of everything that has put me there at exactly that moment. Not knowing it isn't really a tube strike yet.

In a bit of Hyde Park I don't know very well I find the first sculpture. A Rothko dark pink curved disc in a grey pond. Reflected clouds moving across the sheen of metal and swans and geese scudding beneath, like their home just got a satellite disc. Quite nice I think and move to a huge curved rectangular mirror. But the concrete base it is on causes a funny angled reflection and the scrub of mud and worn grass where people have walked round is ugly. Ho, ho, ho I think at the fairground fattening and upside down of behind but mainly I'm just not sure, not convinced as I tack back across the park to the robocop liquid metal of a spire reaching up. OK. It is OK, for I like the heaven reference, the church reference and I am reading John Betjeman 'On Churches.' But I am surprised by my friend's recommendation. Then, walking down to the lake I see the huge disc like a landed moon, clouds made monumental by their framing, energetic, like thick painted brushstrokes. Oh, I think oh. It is beautiful, And then I turn behind to see the red disc now glowing like a red orb. I feel in a constellation between the two. Earth and the sky combined unexpectedly into wonder.

How much art can you take? Passing the Serpentine Gallery I dither about going in, worried I have got to get everything done and I am working 4 days this week not 3 and time is tight and I still have to get into a church. But, I reason as I am here I might as well just whizz in. An exhibition by Klara Liden.

In a dark room a grainy projected film shows a man ( I think ) but it turns out to be a woman, the artist, slipping slowly backwards, feet sliding a moonwalk through night time streets. It is haunting and repetitive, her journey ending back where she started. A loop. A circumference.
In another room, the same fleshy youth, the artist, beats a bicycle with a stick. It starts out just a knocking, like finding a note, almost a sensual tracing of the form, then increases, but not so much, for the violence is sidelong, casual, a little bit sly, loses momentum and then gathers again. There is no real frenzy to it. Though the bike does topple over, does break into pieces but it never seems inevitable.

These are just observations. I am not sure what I want from them.

I buy some postcards and set off across the park again. It is a long walk and eventually I take a Boris bike from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square. I feel I am playing hookey on my own life to fit so much beauty into one morning.

I know St Martin's in The Field's has a cafe and has a lot of concerts but I don't know if I will be able to get in, I don't know if the actual church will be open.

But, walking up the steps, admiring the sky and view of Trafalgar Square which is so beautiful, letting light and space come into the heart of London, the doors are open. Though I still peer suspiciously in from the vestibule doors into the church. There are people sat at pews. I see people inside welcoming others. And walk in.

'There is a free concert.' The kind faces say. It starts at one o'clock. I am tempted to stay but think I will decide as I look around.

The church is beautiful. A huge space. Like an American church. I think, and then find out later that it's 1721 design was copied across North America Simple wood pews, a balcony above with more wooden pews, ornate chandeliers, and baroque white plaster ceilings with gold decorations and an amazing modern window at the end that later I find out to be by the Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. It has clear leaded glass that shapes into a patched cross in a hazy, optical illusion. As if there is a shimmer, a movement to it, like a vibration.

The first official reference to a church on the site was in 1222, when The Archbishop of Canterbury decided that William, the Abbot of Westminster had authority of the church over Eustace the Bishop of London. That church was surrounded by fields in an isolated position between the cities of London and Westminster. Imagine! Trafalgar Square! Though excavations in 2006 led to the discovery of a Roman aged grave from about 410. This body, so far outside the limits of Roman London burial has led to ideas that it was an early Christian centre. (possibly reusing the site or building of a pagan temple).
Much later Henry V111 around 1542 built a new church and extended the parish boundaries to keep plague victims being carried through his palace and this was enlarged in 1607 and then pulled down in 1721 to be replaced by the current building. designed by James Gibb. The Vicar of St Martin's Dick Shepherd during the WW1 saw St Martin's as 'the church of the ever open door' following the example of the patron saint St Martin a roman soldier, who became a christian and is remembered for giving half his cloak to a beggar, Dick Shepherd allowed soldiers to rest in the church on the way to France in WW1. And his open door policy led to the work with homeless people, then later the chinese population that arrived in the 1960s and this busy feeling of committed welcome that is apparent this day.

I discover too, on the internet that there is a CD of recordings from WW2 - THE BLITZ Vol 1 (1939-41)
Audiobook 2xCD on CD41 label
ISBN: 978-1-906310-00-4

'An evocative double-disc set, The Blitz (Vol 1) features 145 minutes of rare material recorded 1939 and 1941. Most of the 44 tracks cover the period of night air raids in British cities between September 1940 and May 1941, including the heavy raids on London known as Black Saturday (7 September 1940) and the Second Fire of London (29 December 1940). All the featured recordings are first-hand accounts made at the time, and include civilians, evacuees, ARP and civil defence personnel, RAF pilots, AA gunners and politicians, as well as actuality recordings made during raids and inside shelters.'
With a report from 'CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow from St Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square during an air raid alert on 24 August 1940. The crypt of this famous church was used as a public shelter. On this night German aircraft bound for Rochester and Thameshaven instead dropped bombs over Central London, causing the first damage from enemy bombs since 1918.'

I am fascinated that I might be able to just choose to play tracks of this. That I can buy it like a greatest hits. Though I will.

Reluctantly I think I really don't have time to stay for the concert but I follow an open door down some steps to explore what there is. In the basement, in this space where people sheltered night after night from bombs, the cafe is packed under vaulted bricks. It is lunchtime. I move on to a huge modern underground expanse of space where there is a shop and a brass rubbing centre, then a sprial staircase that goes back up to the street. I have seen a mention of the Dick Shepherd chapel available for private prayer at any time and follow the arrows to find it. At the back, down some stairs, very quiet, behind glass is a modern simple chapel, two candles either end of a table and some chairs. I look through the glass, to a space cutaway in the earth under the pavement of busy feet, a very very peaceful room. Even walking home tonight from work, thinking oh, oh I am behind writing this, how will I finish it, and then I just remember the peace of that room deep within the building.

But now, just finishing, I hear something creaking and moving in the kitchen. I am not sure what it could be. I listen intently. I feel slightly frightened that unexpectedly a mouse or rat or just something could somehow, not sure, have mangaged to get up here. Then there is a muffled flat bang. It is a balloon bursting within a paper mache mask we were making for halloween and didn't finish, it is such a peculiar sound, such a strange tectonic movement in our flat, that I laugh.






Amen

Sunday 24 October 2010

Guard's Chapel, Birdcage Walk

My guilty pleasure on Sunday mornings is Radio 2 Love Songs. While the children watch Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles ( I have a feeling that letting them do that should be on my guilt list too?) I clear up or put the washing on and turn the dial from R4 and sing. l love the combination of cheesy tunes and heartfelt messages. Everything I would have sneered at in my pre children, arty world seems really valuable and valid. 'To my darling wife. I love you so very much.' To my loving husband you are a great dad and a wonderful husband.' 'Through the ups and downs, through thick and thin we have made it together.'

Well done. I think. Well done. Like listening to shiny medals of courageous love.

I don't even think I have envy, I just appreciate the possibility, the 'proof' of a solid thing, a celebrated partnership. Care and kindness at the core.

Afterwards, the boys and I play playmobil - creating an expedition to rescue endangered species from a far flung land. Though, somehow there is a restaurant for monkeys to eat bananas with the money they made from selling the provisions for the voyage and a king who drives a police car with his friend the squirrel.

Exexdh arrives to take over because I have made the arrangement to slip out to go to the Guard's Chapel. I have broken my own rules and checked on the website, though it gave me no detail beyond a rather vague instruction that there is a service every sunday at 11am and sometimes at midday too. Though imagine my relief that the public are welcome. Otherwise I would have had to try and muscle my way in on a soldiers church!

The day is beautiful. Blue crisp sky, autumn light. A treat to be out, on my own, doing something I want to do. I enjoy this feeling briefly before remembering that this rarely won treat might be better spent reading a book with a delicious cup of coffee, or going to an exhibition, not dreading getting into a church.

Have you ever been to St James's Park? It is the most ludicrously pretty park in London. Squirrels sit on the railings and nuzzle nuts from your fingers ( not mine - I'm too hesitant - but the boys love it), there are really beautiful and thoughtfully planted flowerbeds, a bridge that crosses the man made lake, with views of the war office that look like a grown up Disney land ( tricky to imagine, but true! Go!) and ( I feel there should be a drum roll.........) Pelicans. Yes Pelicans! They are so completely bonkers a species. But here. Being photographed, ( or even weirder to imagine - asleep, in the dark , sitting on a nest, or still on the water) as you read this. In central london! Finally, a playground where you can push your kid in a swing and look to see if the flag is flying on Buckingham Palace, and wonder if the queen is lonely, and watching you, from her bedroom window.

However, I walk around the side of the park, by now, hesitant. I hope I can find the church easily for I never walk this way, have never actually seen it, only know it to exist from my compulsive map reading, for as early as my 1869 map it says 'Garrison chapel'. But it is easy - set back behind the railings a beautiful simple, unexpectedly-concrete building with a cross on it. Then posters that advertise the guardsmen's museum, and also a soldiers shop for children, and tanks at the gate.

On the steps of the chapel is a soldier in a kilt with bagpipes talking on his mobile. He says as I near, ' I better go, I will be playing shortly.' But remains chatting on his phone. I am trying to peer through the glass of the entrance, I can hear music but it looks dark within. Suddenly I realise it is packed. Men in the thick weave of uniform, stood, so close to the glass they cause the dark. I keep peering in, moving along the glass to work out the space, I catch a glimpse of the nave and a golden altar area, and then a door is pushed open from inside in invitation, an order of service is pushed into my hand and a handsome black guy in uniform has stepped aside to let me have a chair.

I am in a service!
The church is packed. The music is beautiful. Everyone is singing a hymn. There are dense pockets of only soldiers but many dignitaries too, standing tall, shoulder to shoulder. I am so amazed to come out of my own life to this, to this solidarity, and high soaring choir and strong men singing that I nearly cry, but I don't, unexpectedly I join in.

The chapel is beautiful. The main structure is plain smooth concrete, high walls up to a wooden ceiling and flags hanging down. At the end, is an amazing old, golden, painted apse, which doesn't make sense in this sixties building but looks beautiful. We are into the National Anthem. Everyone straight backed. Then:

O Trinity of love and power
Our brethren shield in danger's hour:
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoeer they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

Sung with such resolute demand.

I don't know about anything. But inside that church there is a certaintity and I think it is this: We are brave. We have survived in great adversity. Not everyone does. We give thanks. (I sometimes feel all of those things but I haven't been to war and even I can see it sounds trite.) This was a homecoming for the London Regiment of the Territorial army, back from Afghanistan. Men from all walks of life - estate agents, postmen, business consultants, who have gone on a tour of duty.

I found these quotes from people setting out:

Lance Corporal George Anderson- An estate agent working for Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward who described civilian life as “mincing around London making money for someone else”. and “The most exciting thing that happens all week is getting a parking ticket.”

Lieutenant Pete Quentin, 26, a Cambridge graduate and former research fellow at the think-tank Civitas, said the threat gave him a better perspective on life and made him appreciate his family and friends.

As if there is an evolutionary dead end to being safe. As if there is a sense of 'real' in these extremes. These men have been to the edge of that safety, to the rough terrain, to the skirmishes of life and death and returned. Here they are safe with their families and singing in this church. Their war carrying on a long, long way a way - a hazy, incomprehensible distance from us.

My favourite anti war story is seeing a sloaney middle-aged woman with a head scarf and a harvest festival-style, good-works basket on the tube years ago when I was a student. Pinned to her cardigan was a homemade badge, biro-scrawled, wonky writing on feint lined paper, and then wrapped in shiny sellotape wound round and round it said 'I don't like the armed forces.' Just that. It seemed an unlikely and mildly ridiculous protest but utterly heartfelt.

And when London stopped still and the estimated 2 million marched against going into war in Iraq, h and me went with our new tiny baby to Hyde Park and stood with a Picasso dove placard in the crowd. Though, beyond a lazy, ' I don't really like war ' and perhaps 'I don't think the truth is being told about the motives for this.' I didn't exactly know what I felt, and worried that it had been more of photo opportunity for a much photographed new baby and it's proud parents, though later we realised with disappointment that we hadn't put a film in the camera and there were no pictures.

We lived then, in the small peabody flat, near Chelsea Barracks, and witnessed one night, craning our heads, in the dark, above street lights, the military departing. Traffic lights stop-starting the column of camouflaged tanks, trucks, light guns, landrovers that rumbled on and and on, for a very, very long time. I imagined somebody, their head out of a window in Iraq watching their arrival with true fear. My own slightly sentimental anxieties for this world and my baby son, felt rather luxurious that night.

I am not certain what I think. The power in that church was incredible. It was like a world I had never known. True belief, belted out. Though what was being believed in I wasn't sure.

Later I discover Guard's Chapel, initially built in 1838 was bombed in the blitz and then again on 18th June 1944, later rebuilt in 1963. I have got used to these phrases, almost got used to how much was bombed around here. But, and I think there should be a careful pause here. I discover in 1944 it was bombed on a sunday morning, just after the service had started at 11 o'clock when the church was packed. A distant buzzing was heard by the congregation that grew louder and turned into a roar, drowning out the hymn. Then the engine cut out and the V1 glided down and exploded on the roof of the chapel. The whole roof collapsed. 121 military and civilians were killed and 141 seriously injured. Only the Bishop of Maidstone conducting the service was totally unhurt for the altar was covered by a portico (the one still in the church today,)and it had sheltered him from the blast. It was said that after the explosion the alter candles were still burning.

It took 2 days to dig the dead and injured out of the devastation. News of this awful tragedy was suppressed although rumours of the disaster soon spread across London.

I meant to write with grave concern about David Cameron, his cuts, the businesses already closing around here and the tense faces of the civil servants on their way to work but unexpectedly this, this terrible tale was provided, almost ready made.

Amen

Monday 18 October 2010

St Peter's Eaton Square

These are things I do to cheer myself up, to get back on track, to put the wind in my sails when all the puff has gone: I make fresh minestrone soup, bake bread and meditate. But I have done them all this evening and I'm only treading water. Sitting here, eating hot soup, cheese melting into the rich stock, I feel better but not good.

I am working all week and haven't been to a church yet, not even sure what my plan is. On an AZ I mark all the nearby churches. Then realise that I have reached the outskirts of 'just walking past'. As if the stone I threw tentatively when I started this project has just reached the second widening circle.

U,OL after the initial brief flurry of intense e mails has retreated to stories of his father's lawnmower and slight misunderstandings that feel almost like a bicker from e mail to e mail. Perhaps we have disappointed each other? Despite believing quite clearly at the time that I loved him but we had missed the boat, run out of time, I now feel cheated. I would like to see him and make him laugh. He should love me enough to want this too. Is that a reasonable demand? Off a married man? Though ( and I'm not sure I've mentioned this, he had already embarked on an extra curricular affair in answer to his wife's many infidelities.) I feel bleak writing all this. Like holding a new map. A map where the the x marks the spot treasure that was always believed to be very valuable but lost, out of reach, buried, is found, but dulled with time, not polished, a slightly different currency.

I went on a photo shoot for work. The magazine I work part time for has very little budget and a tiny amount of staff. We don't normally do shoots. We don't normally attend them if we do. Normally we send a photographer to squash a white back drop into the lounge of the person being photographed. But, the subject is an ex-celebrity-jungle, glamour girl (but not THAT one, not the most famous, not the one Martin Amis has written about) but she is represented by the ex agency of THAT one, the most famous one) I promise you I have very little interest in this stuff but I KNOW it, I know all of it. This agency are the most controlling, and once powerful machine, their power fading slightly since the departure of THAT one, making them more aggressive, more keen to hold onto what they have. They make you sign copy approval, photo approval, caption approval, they make deals with publications to get the placement they want. Their over air brushed celebrities beam glassily from magazines with an ! at the end. Anyhow, and I'm not sure if we think we have tricked them or they think that they have tricked us, but they allow us a shoot with this girl at their HQ.

The girl is a little tiny tinkerbell, fluffed hair, implacable blue eyes, massive, boob-job boobs, a footballer husband, a raucous voice and two young sons. I am a size 10 but she is half the size of me. I couldn't imagine where she fitted her actual organs into such a tiny space. I couldn't imagine how she had a baby only six months earlier. Occasionally for the camera she looks completely beautiful, more beautiful that then shows in the pictures, more Hollywood glow and glamour than expected.

When the fashion pictures we wanted to do are finished it appears after all it is they who have the upper hand, (how could I have thought otherwise?) because they draw the curtains of the 'games room' with pulled back shag pile carpet, and drop their voices in front of me to discuss the topless shots that will be taken for other magazines. I am trying to leave but as this girl poses she talks with love and care and sweetness of her sons. And the photographers assistant chips in with some tale of a small child melt down he had witnessed, and how he felt sorry for the mother who tried everything.

The thing is, she says, and her voice is certain, categorical, almost strident, 'That is just bad parenting. I have read all the parenting books there are and that is just bad parenting. If you cannot give a child safe boundaries to their rage it is bad parenting.' I am overwhelmed by her good sense and then by my own sadness for my eldest son and his terrible and violent outbursts. Once, with the lollipop lady watching from beady and slightly unforgiving eyes he swung the scooter over his head to hurt me in the street, then threw it, then picked it back up above his head. Though that morning I coolly and continually calmed him while the rage built and retreated, built and retreated and finally left. I believe I have been doing a good job in difficult circumstances ( and indeed he has been turning those rages round, we have worked together to turn those rages round) but somewhere along the line I helped cause them and so I think she is right but I also think, and it is a tiny voice, that I have not let myself use, 'it isn't fair.' I have worked and worked and cared and cared and loved and loved those children but I don't seem to have stopped the damage. Though perhaps I just didn't need a glamour model WAG to inadvertently point it out to me?

In a flurry this morning I decide to take a Boris bike after dropping the boys off at school up to St Peter's in Eaton Square. Parking the bike I feel a shift in my sense of scale. Everything is just a little bit bigger. The Boris Bikes are always big and make me feel small and slightly-doll like, but now the buildings are super sized too. Doors and steps are grand. Windows bigger. Buildings imposing. I try briefly to imagine what it must feel like to only know this world. I imagine that you would know so little. But maybe it isn't true, maybe you just know different things and are almost certainly tall.

The church too is huge - handsome and really beautifully proportioned from the outside, with huge ionic columns and portico and steps up. Though climbing the steps, I am unsure if I will be able to get in or not. But the Jack and the Beanstalk giant wooden doors are open, to the sight of modern etched glass doors that I imagine to be locked. However they too swing open. Inside the interior is light and airy but plush, with anonymously modern fittings like a really good quality but not over designed hotel. At the end, behind the altar piece is a beautiful shaped and smoothed gold mosaic apse, like a cutaway domed, recessed arch, that gives a lovely peace to the room, as if it is somehow a continuous, revealing space. The statues of Mary and Jesus at either side of the neutral nave and pews and the huge cross with Jesus in pain, hanging from the ceiling are super-sized- life-size, but with real human qualities and they look like they don't quite belong in the plush neutrals of this space, almost too kitsch, too emotional, too pious. Though these qualities are framed by the rest of the interior, as if the humanity is allowed to breathe.

The church, built initially in 1827 by Henry Hakewill was burnt down in 1987 by an anti catholic arsonist who mistook this church for a catholic one. I find this piece of history surprising. I was at art school around the corner by then and I don't remember anti papism as much of a movement in the 80s. But the beautiful Georgian facade survived and an architect husband and wife team who had lived nearby and watched the church burn, redesigned the structure and the interior of the church. I think they have been allowed to do something extraordinary - in the beauty of a georgian church to redesign the space of worship into a more modern world. But, and it may be a surprise after all that praise, for there is much to admire, I don't like it. Or don't like all of it. The plush is too wealthy, too comfortable, too devoid of history.

Coming away from the St Peter's, towards Victoria, I see a man sat against the railings, bike propped alongside, his calf exposed, his expression homeless. His leg has a terrible, liver-coloured, flat, open wound about the size of a bag of sugar but shaped like a kidney. I stop around the corner and search my bag for the antiseptic cream I always carry. ( a handy distraction to playground scratches.) I dither. Then go back and hand the man the cream. Only as I pass him the tube do I think, would you have done this without just having been to a church, wondering perhaps if I am stage managing a story for this blog? Though I believe my instinct is true, I would have done it anyhow, but I can't really know. The man who is sat resting, jumps to his feet with such violence and just for a minute I wonder if he is going to kiss or hit me. But he doesn't. He hurls the cream as high and as far as he can over the railings into the scrap of park behind him, next to Victoria station.
'It is just cream for your leg.' I point out, almost piously.
'I trust no one. No one.' Nothing. He says in a thick east european accent. Then approaching, 'Give me money.'
'But you just threw my cream over the railings.'
'Lady,' He says. 'I trust no one. You do not know what my mother did to me.'
'No. I don't.' I say finding a pound and giving it to him.
'Thank you. Thank you. I will get you your cream.' He leaps to the top of the sharp railings, a cloth bag dragging. I am terrified he will hurt himelf, impale himself, catch the bag on the sharp spikes and fall badly. Though in the exchange, we have moved slightly into the tight squeeze of the pavement, the railings and the commuters at the bus stop. I cannot see them but I know they are behind me. Watching. Perched at the top of the fence, like a large dirty and worn out bird, this big man, bright eyed, rants while he balances himself to jump down the other side. 'Trust no one. Not the government, not the people with money, most certainly not the people with the money.' He smiles inside his beard, drily. 'I could not trust my mother. Now I do not trust my own criminal mind' He smiles. Then jumps down.

When he return over the sharp fence with the tube of cream, he stops again at the top, his piercing intelligent eyes, briefly rational.
'Lady,' he says, 'Shall I keep it covered or free?'
'Let the air get to it first.' I say. 'Keep it dry and clean if you can.'
'I can only trust my body.' He says.
'Take the cream.' I say.
'I trust no one.'

'Get help from the churches.' I say.
Then he holds his arm with his fist above his head, like a learnt salute. 'I salute the terrorists.'

I retreat into the swarm of packed commuters.

Amen.