Chapel Royal, St James's Palace

Sunday morning. It is Radio 2 love songs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle time and I am waiting for exh to come and look after the boys so I can go to church. He is late. I am disorganised. My hair is wet and I am trying to wrap christmas presents for my best friend who I haven't seen since just before christmas. How does that happen? We are going to hers for sunday lunch. I am starting to think I will have to miss the church, that I won't get there in time when exh bursts through the door panting and gasping. He just woke up he says.

I put lipstick on and dash for it. Out into the damp sunday morning and quiet streets. A gathering of men on a street corner looks like one of those history walks and I lean into to hear what they are saying. But then I see a dungeons and dragon style book clutched by one and realise it is a queue for some sort of convention in a pub. The men have the happy animated faces of being with their own kind, of being understood. I pass by onto St James Park where there are snowdrops and pink blossom in the mist. It feels lovely to be out. I would have been dreading going before, really dreading it but I realise the fear has gone, now it is just what I do. No one is going to hurt or mock me. I enjoy it.

Oh and I have been looking forward to going to the Chapel Royal. There seems such a mystery to it. Within the dark slightly foreboding thick walls of St James palace there is a chapel where the services are open to all. I wouldn't even know about it if I hadn't tried before to get into the Lady Chapel just around the corner. A notice there said that it was only open in the summer months but services went on within the palace all year. On Pall Mall I find the gateway flanked by empty sentry boxes and a policeman standing guard. Is it ok to go to the church service? I falter. He waves me in. I am only just in time and a robed 'greeter' in the thick old stone walls of the doorway ushers me through the door into the tiny narrow church, opening a small, high up, hinged door of a pew to squeeze me into a seat. I am next to a smart politician-like couple and a tweed man who smells of clean strong soap. The plush chapel, is soft-lit with desk style lamps, like an expensive but characterless hotel and it is packed. Instead of sitting looking forward towards the altar we are all sat either side of the nave staring at each other. I remember with embarrassment that my hair is still wet and that I must look rather dishevelled and unkempt. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I feel I have tumbled into another world.

Above the heads of the congregation the organ, pounds and soars joyfully.

Everyone rises as the choir enters. Small boys like white mice in extraordinary red jackets with gold braid and big gold buttons, red breeches and oliver cromwell shoes with buckles, the older choir flamingoes in white surplices with respectful bent necks and dipped heads, a man in crow robes, intricate ruffled sleeves and a black staff, some more men in surplices and the vicar all sailing in like swans. They process to the front of the church. Wow. I think. This goes on every sunday and who would know? This has happened every Sunday for hundreds of years.

We sit. Stand again and sing. Sit. The choir sings. There is a reading. Then another. The lord's prayer. Psalms from the St James prayer book. The tweed and soap man next to me relishes each word, really enjoys each one, as if reaching his tongue for an oyster, pulling and sucking the texture. It is almost embarrassing how much pleasure he is obtaining from speaking them aloud as if he is talking dirty alongside. I mumble along. Thinking I really don't believe what I'm saying but I think being here saying them is good. The kneelers are purple velvet. Very royal. Very posh hotel plush. And everyone kneels. In the parish church of my childhood there was a bit of laziness about kneeling - you could, but most people just put their hands together and crouched.

How funny - I find later, having written this that Samuel Pepys on the 10th May, 1663 'I walked to St. James's, and was there at masse, and was forced in the crowd to kneel down"

Observed by an elderly man on the opposite side I gaze around the room. The ceiling is panelled and intricately painted. Up high is the organ, tapestries hung high either side of the altar, a big quite modern looking stained glass window above the altar depicting a tree and at the back, just above me, a sort of royal box facing the altar. I imagine this is where the royal family worship if they come. It is completely hidden from view. Do you just not know if they are here I wonder? Are they here I think. The pews we are sat in have high walls as if we are fenced and stalled like animals. Or part of a lock-in with the Establishment.

The 'Chapel Royal' initially was not a place but a body of priests and singers who cared for the spiritual needs of the Sovereign and travelled with him. But Henry V111 took a fancy to the site of a female leper colony that had stood in this then remote corner since the saxon times. There was good hunting alongside and good access to the woods of Kensington and he comandeered the hospital, building a palace including the chapel as a home for the Chapel Royal. Like a fly digesting time in longer flashes, slowed down, opened up, it is impossible to understand that this place that is a brief stroll from my flat, from the Thames, from Whitehall could seem remote but perhaps the outskirts, the outside, the edge is always the furthest place away and therefore distant.

I read too that the chapel was considered the cradle of English church music - Tallis, Handel, and Henry Purcell were all organists or composers of the chapel and the poet Dryden escaped his many creditors by staying with Henry Purcell in a turret room of the composers apartments.

The vicar's sermon is of love. He talks well and passionately about showing up everyday to love, of being free from the limitations of romantic love to form a deeper and fundamental joy. He talks about faith and doubt. He is talking about God. But love is love I think. Mary I's heart is buried beneath the chapel. Charles I recieved the sacrament of Holy Communion prior to his execution here. Diana's body lay by the altar before her funeral. Victoria and Albert married here. Though I find all this out later. But it is me that is wracked by doubt. As if trust is something I haven't used for a while I keep opening the store cupboard door to find the basics, all the horded tins and packets look ok but are infact old, past their sell by date, no longer quite nice. Something has grown unknown and unexpected like mould or weevils in the everyday ingredients. I am horrified. I thought everything was just put away dry and stored. Here I say, and here, look at this, and this, showing ul what leaving did, what has been done. I have prided myself on my sanity and find now occasionally a raw madness in attempting to trust.

At the end of the service the white mice, the flamingoes, the black crow, all process out, the organ playing.

I shake hands with the vicar in the old walls of the palace as I leave but I notice that others keep his hand, holding it tight, maintaining steady eye contact. Not me. I flinch from the warmth and sincerity of the greeting. Bobbing my head in embarrassment. In the park though I feel fresh, restored. I need faith I think. I need to clean those cupboards and keep only the nourishment of good.