St John the Evangelist, Waterloo Rd

After what has felt like weeks and weeks of grey and rain, even before that the cold and snow, and everyday waking the boys for school on dark mornings trying to describe spring to them - today the sky is blue. Briefly, cycling past parliament on a Boris bike, I sit at traffic lights warm in sunshine. How lovely I think. Over Westminster Bridge, there is the big expanse of sky with London spread out, and the bagpipe man playing. It is the first time isictt has gone south of the river.

I meet ul sometimes on mondays. This monday I make him wait for me while my friend cries in my kitchen. Then rush to get the clearing up done, clean sheets on the beds, the floors washed, the tidal scurf of football cards, lego, books, and feathers tidied in the boys bedroom. I find it hard not to be the parent. Not to be thinking of them. But he waits for me. Watches my face as it softens, relaxes. Are you ok now? He says. Yes. You work very hard. He is patient for me and with me which I don't remember. It is lovely. I doubt what we are doing, that it is possible, advisable, that it can be true. Though we discuss pop music, the economy, what to feed children. But at each turn, and each hurdle I make he says, I have missed you for a long time, I don't want to lose you. As if has found the password. Which it appears he has. But, and I find it hard to forget. He is married. To an unfaithful wife. And strangely I feel guilty to exh. I feel we have all reached dry land together, a modern reclaimed version of a family and now suddenly it is me that is endangering it. Though I got us here. I am proud of the path from bog through soggy marshlands and this solid ground we now stand on. But really I want to accept this new happiness which is precious and deserved and not squander it with doubt.

Since the naked Rembrandt lady in the window across the way I have thought it would be possible to do paintings of things I have seen at these windows. A small girl opposite stood patiently and silently at an open window, arms outstretched, feeding pigeons on her arms. The night Michael Jackson died when people talked across the street, just as the news was breaking. If anyone was watching my windows this monday they would have seen me embrace my Indonesian friend, her perfect, metallic threaded headscarf and my own tumbling untidy hair together in a hug , only hours later at the same window I kiss ul in his pants. That afternoon after school I dance a tango with my youngest son, his feet off the floor

I feel like I am in a film, that this range of emotions is not possible in one day. Though in the evening at a hen do at Pizza Express for my editor I get the giggles so badly on low alcohol wine, that I cannot speak.

The church is huge, set back from the imax cinema roundabout, greek style pillars, big doors, one of those shiny coffee trucks outside. The door is open, and inside the small hall way is a carved stone plaque with an old text on it. I can't quite work out what it says. I don't know why but I don't copy it down, don't try and work it out. I think, oh I'll look that up later, but later I find very little information about the church, as if slightly uncared for, it isn't documented very well, each bit I discover takes a while to piece together. Pushing the door open, I can hear voices and in this huge room is an overhead projector with a picture of a leaf lit on a screen. A woman talking, students sat on chairs. There is too a guard at a desk, who I nod to, and he smiles at me. It doesn't seem to matter to him who is there, and I just stand and look around. Students move around the room talking and an old woman behind me shuffles out of the door smiling serenely.

Despite the screen, the tutor, the students, the security guard, a whole kitchen area with a table, and carpet, and a curtained off bit like a ward which is stacked with the silent sculptural forms of musical instruments in their cases the room still seems massive and airy. Huge high windows letting in the light of the blue sky. A white and gold pulpit like something from Barbie's bedroom or Gracelands is pushed to one side to make room for the rows of chairs, and here is the trick - it is on wheels. Another, also on wheels seems to be roughly in the right place on the other side, but there is something skewed about the arrangement. On the back wall a triptych of huge expressionistic paintings, then another smaller one at the altar. I am surprised by all these people, all this activity, these jarrring paintings, the students lounging, shiny hair and flirting and I don't spend long enough looking or thinking about anything much.

The church was built in the peace and prosperity after the Napoleonic wars on a marshy site of land in 1824, when parliament gave money to build churches for the expanding population south of the river. Four churches were built and named after the evangelists - Kennington 'St Mark's', Brixton St Matthew's and Norwood St Luke's and here on the approach to Waterloo bridge St John's. Waterloo bridge itself had only opened in 1817 designed before the battle of Waterloo and originally known at the Strand bridge. It was rebuilt in the early 1940s by an architect who had little idea of engineering, shortly afterwards bombed in WW2 then built again by a mainly female work force, still known by a few as the 'ladies bridge.' The church itself was bombed too. I find a picture of it with the roof blown out, the balcony that isn't there any more damaged, people wrapped in thick coats praying at pews that still stand in the rubble. Restored in the 1950s it became the parish church of the Festival of Britain.

As I have a little bit of time to spare before picking the boys up I ride the Boris Bike to Tate Britain. At the shop I buy my Dad 'Night Walks' by Charles Dickens for his birthday, a 70% off cut price ' Family at One End Street' to read to the boys. and 'Con men and Cutpurses - Scenes from Hogarthian Underworld for myself. I was given the exquisite Mapping London for christmas by ul. A man that once bought me a battery recharger as a christmas present bought me exactly, oh exactly, what I wanted. Though I felt a little bit guilty because I had written about it so precisely here - as if I had asked for it - set it as a test - demanded it.
I had just meant to write about money and about desire. Always wanting - a dress, a book, better quality butter - balancing what you can have. Ideally I would like to buy the best butter, to worry less, to have a small house with a garden but I don't actually want much, I have got used to relishing what I can have.

At the Tate I go to look for the proper painting of 'Christ in the House of his parents 1849-50' having seen the sketch the week before at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. The collection - which I know reasonably well is being re hung, put into categories - and I am annoyed because I don't understand it, don't have time to decode it and there seems to be modern paintings hung alongside old ones. But I keep going, finding the pre raphaelites and there, above eye level, slightly awkward for an intimate scene is the painting. I like it. Compared to the lurid technicolour of much pre raphaelite painting this seems subdued and simple. A family scene in a real place. The boy Jesus having hurt his hand on a nail in his father's workshop, the blood dripping onto his foot. His mother comforting him, his father inspecting the wound. I find out that Millais based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop in Oxford Street ( I feel my maps would come in handy to find this) and that he was viciously attacked by the press for showing the holy family as ‘ordinary’. Charles Dickens described Christ as ‘a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown.’ and Mary as an alcoholic '...so hideous in her ugliness that ... she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.'

Later I discover, piecing this together, (and it is a bit later, I don't know why this post seems to have taken me ages to write, and I worry that I have missed the moment, that there is more to say about all sorts of things but I have to finish this to say them about something else) but the painting above the altarpiece at St John' is a Nativity, painted in dull pastel colours by Hans Feibusch a jewish painter who escaped to England from the Third Reich. I find it a little bit mannered but the baby is beautiful, sat pert and inquisitive. When Hitler achieved power in January 1933, a new member joined Feibusch's art group in Frankfurt. At first he always had excuses for failing to produce any work. But as the new regime began to tighten its grip, this newcomer appeared in Nazi uniform. "You, you, you," he shouted, pointing his riding whip at the Jewish members of the group, "you can just go home and forget about art. You will never show anything again."
The Nazis' exhibition of Degenerate Art took place in 1937. "From now on," Hitler explained at the opening, "we are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegraton. From now on - you can be certain - all those mutually supporting cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated."
The exhibition was divided into various sections, including "Vilification of German Heroes of the World War", "Mockery of German Womanhood" and "Complete Madness". Feibusch qualified under "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul", with a canvas entitled Two Floating Figures. He was in good company: Chagall and Kokoschka also featured in the exhibition.

In my book of finely drawn maps, I find Waterloo in the 18th and 19th century. Amazingly the maps are on line, the detail of line and drawing and named wood yards amazing. And scrolling like walking.

http://www.oldlondonmaps.com/horwoodpages/horwoodthumb19.html
http://www.oldlondonmaps.com/greenwoodpages/greenwoodnorth12a.html

Now it is almost a week after the days I have described. I don't feel very well. Need to go to bed. I feel exhausted. But I can't quite work out how to finish this. Did I miss the moment? I am not sure. Just now time seems like doors I walk through, a narnian wardrobe of history, past, recent past, present and ideas of future all muddled together. Today, this real one, I give my counsellor a postcard with a Martin Creed illuminated sign on the exterior of the Tate Britain building saying 'Everything is going to be alright' as a thank you card for it is our last session. I am not sure she thought it was funny or apt. But I hope it is.