St John's Church

I think I may have to re name this - I don't get in the churches to think, or I try to sit in churches to think and am too chicken to get in them. Or in this case I try and sit in a church to think but it isn't a church anymore.

Wow!- though, this church that isn't a church anymore is beautiful. Like looking through the window of an expensive bakery at an elaborate tiered cake, the construction, how it stands, propped with pillars and fancy towers, slightly baffling.

Today it is very hot and the boys and I have worms. I am feeling mildly desperate about this, partly because it has made us all feel tired and weepy, but also because we have taken the tablets, I have washed all the towels and bedclothes again and again and we started feeling better and now they seem to have returned. I have spent another day cleaning and cleaning and washing and washing. Plus due to the weariness I went to bed at 11 o'clock last night - which I never do - and then woke to hear the phone ringing. I thought it was the early hours. I thought someone must have died. But exexDH ( have I explained this? ex drunk, ex husband) in his hostel room, down the street had put an ear plug in and somehow he said it had disappeared into his ear. At least it isn't an orange. I said. Could he come round and I tweezer it out? Bloody Hell I thought in the dark of the nighttime flat, the sound of the boys sleeping. Though sorry for him too, appearing scared, holding a pair of tweezers. Our not married life. Nothing I could do, he had to go to casualty. But I found it hard to go back to sleep and I am tired.

It is a complicated day too because one of my best mum friend's from the school, who lives one block down has asked if her and her son can come round this evening because her husband has five friends coming round and she doesn't want to be there when they come. She, her beautiful face, framed like the moon by shadow, in her headscarf is from Indonesia, her husband from Yemen. Me and her hang out quite a lot with the boys. She makes me laugh and is funny and kind, and we talk about politics and swop tips on two for one offers or cheap crumpets. I have never met him. Though I am now quite fascinated by the idea of him and his five friends in their small extraordinairly clean flat. Yes. I say. But I am worrying about the worms and also me and the boys and infact xxdh are all going to a friend's art school private view, and each bit makes the other more complicated. George Osbourne has been detailing his budget too on the radio as I clean and I feel what? anxious and frightened and then scared they are right, and then scared they are wrong. Though I think they are wrong. So perhaps just scared.

Anyhow, I think I will just run to St John's Smith Square Church on the way to pick the boys up from school. I have kept it as a bit of treat. A lift to the spirits. I felt certain I would be able to go in. I felt certain that it would be beautiful. I have occasionally looked up the music concerts on the weekends when the boys are away, but never been. It is a new thing, an age thing, hearing the beauty of classical music easily, like an aspiration of good, while some music I have always loved has gone powdery, to dust, like tinny transistor radio tunes in my ears. Walking down to the end of my street, past exexDH's hostel past the home office, then turning into this beautiful old street, a view of St John's Smith Square at the end. I have never been here before and houses I have never seen, but so near, are like a costume drama setting. Beautiful proportions, and a feeling of ease, of plushness, but more than that, sometimes old houses especially a whole street of them, have just that fortitude of time.

But here we go, possibly everyone knew this, it is now only a concert hall, not a church at all and there are notices on all the doors saying Private Property.

I actually think I won't write about St John's, I will have to go and sit in another church, but when I google it, I find out it was a church until the war, an English baroque masterpiece built by Thomas Archer 1713 - 28, Queen Anne likening it to a footstool because of it's tall corner towers, Charles Dickens describing it as 'resembling some petrified monster, frightful and gigantic, on its back with its legs in the air'. But it was really badly bombed in the blitz. Sold by the church and then restored to be a concert venue. Suddenly, oh suddenly, I realise here, these streets I walk everyday, were at the heart of incredible attack. I order a book on Amazon The Blitz, Westminster at War. It is like another lead, another layer, another fascination to this area.

Later, the out of control, tubby, muslim boy ( I think last time I mentioned him I said slightly out of control but it isn't true, I watch him and his brother and his mum and there is chaos there, I'm not sure what, though her boys flinch from her, and she is exhausted by whatever it is she can't control) escaped under the railings in the park, and danced with his pants down in a scrap of wilderness no one could get to, while the big kids roared with laughter and egged him on. I feel anxious to point out that it is rare to see an out of control muslim kid, mainly they are almost too beautifully behaved.
I got his mum, and then coaxed him squirming in the dust, his big beaming face appearing back under the fence.

I worry that I know about chaos, I recognise it.


Amen.