St Margarets of Antioch, Westminster

I went searching for this church with an ill remembered tip from Mystery Worshipper. I wasn't sure I could be right. That somehow, right next to Westminster Abbey there is another church? It didn't make sense.
Though I realise too, I am avoiding Westminster Abbey for various reasons. I might have to pay? There is just too much history for one trip and too much work for me to condense it in to one post? But also probably I should have started there. Somehow Westminster Abbey is central, the beginning - a monastery on an island, around which the land was reclaimed by the monks. But at the moment it feels like something unwieldy on the horizon that I will skirt around for as long as possible.

Unusually, I am working all week and the flat is already untidier and my patience less. But today I have sped up doing the washing up, hanging out the washing, making the beds, and have made half an hour between dropping the boys off to school and going to work to sit in the church. Walking into parliament square in this secret pouch of the day, I feel pleased with myself to have found it.

The peace camp is still there. A big banner says 'Capitalism isn't working. Another world is possible.' I try foolishly, vainly, hopefully to imagine it. Once I had a beautiful dream about love, and it was like a sort of heaven, with every bit of my body filled up, breathing fully, absolutely and utterly at peace in warm english countryside alongside someone who loved me. And when I woke I felt bereft that I couldn't be there, that I was missing out on a whole hidden dimension, like the only time I took magic mushrooms ( a long time ago, well before the children) and the magical animated kingdom with the crouched warm animals purring in the dark corner turned back into my living room with the neatly folded pile of towels on a chair.

MW is right though, surprisingly there is another church. In the skirts of Westminster Abbey, a smaller, delicate church with a sturdy tower. It is the parish church of the Houses of Commons. I don't think I have ever noticed it or if I have I just hadn't noticed they were separate. It isn't open yet, a notice says it will open at 9.30 though the queue into Westminster Abbey is just beginning to move. Tourists finger money belts ready to pay. I sit on the step of St Margarets of Antioch in the sunshine and when Big Ben strikes half past the wooden door is shouldered open from inside bolts.

The church was built initially in the 11th century, next to the Abbey because the monks needed to carry out 'God's Work' undisturbed and the local population kept coming to hear their mass being sung. St Margaret's was built as the public place to worship leaving the monks alone to their 'Divine Office'. Later it was rebuilt a few times, but essentially stayed the same since 1523, despite various restorations. The puritans adopting it as more suitable place for parliamentary worship than the fancier abbey.

The church smells strongly of church. A bit damp, a bit mouldy, with hints of polish, like the smell of shade and age and of never quite being warm. The walls are packed with memorial tablets, but a jumble of sizes and dates and styles. I am not sure if it is just my mood but the church doesn't come together for me. I am impatient with it and myself. Some of the windows are the most incredibly rich intense stained glass, but along the south side just grey washes and murky abstract windows. I guess they are by the artist John Piper just from the colours but in an I Spy way I am pleased to find out I am right. Though John Piper's windows put in 1966 to cover bomb damage from the war, are murky and depressing, only an estimation alongside the vivid jewel colours of the windows of flemish glass that commemorate the betrothal of Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur from 1509.

The guide says the replaced windows, a blackened memorial and pew 38 show signs of fire from the bombs of the blitz. I look carefully at the pew but can't see any damage. I am reading about the bombing in Westminster, and I am fascinated and horrified. The ordinairy, things I see everyday, under daily attack. A family living in the flat I live in, trooping down the slightly shallow step of the stairs we bump scooters down, out to their shelter, listening every day, every night to the sounds overhead. Their children so near to danger all the time. I want to know where they sheltered. I want to know who they were. Reading the reports of bombs going off or not going off, people dead or lucky escapes, a pattern is revealed and it is as simple as this, you were lucky or not lucky. Everybody was equal. I think of Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and how do they cope with the unrelenting expectation of threat.

Mud and clay, matter itself becoming disturbed, the dust, plaster, bricks, the earth, loam what people are dug from.

I do sit. But not for long. Briefly I feel very little, though almost happy for the absence of myself in this church, for the absence of self within my day.

When I walk outside to the tube, past the Houses of Parliament, past the peace camp again, I see a table set out in the centre of the tents on the grass with wonky chairs and all sorts of wonky people sat talking . I am not sure if it is breakfast or a meeting. A discussion of this other world. Though later that day at work searching picture libraries for photographs of celebrities: Abbey Clancy clutching the arm of Peter Crouch, Kylie Minogue dwarfed by her boyfriend, I see pictures of flat yellow grass marked in primary school patterns where some of the tents have been taken down and some of the protestors have left. They have lost their legal battle to be there.

Amen