St Michael's Chester Square

We all went to the Stop The Cuts March! Almost everyone I have ever mentioned in this blog was there, somewhere. If this was Jane Austen it would be the Box Hill picnic though with a lot less dramatic impact and more people and more banners.
Me, the children, exh and the exd friend of exh set off. One son dressed in a storm trooper costume, another in a viking helmet and me in ( I didn't seem to have any marching shoes) wellington boots and a bowler hat. Though all of us being awful ( not the exd friend luckily - he behaved perfectly. ) The boys crying on our street corner because I wouldn't let them take guns. Exh disappearing. Me frazzled for we are meant to be meeting people and we are late. Exh reappearing. With a bubble machine that looks exactly like a gun I have just confiscated. Both boys want the bubble machine and both boys still want guns. I am rolling my eyes and sniping at exh though later I feel I lost track of humour because a bubble machine subverts a gun so well.

Joining the march at parliament square our spirits soar. We become part of something bigger than our leaky bickering boat, and are buoyed up, part of a current - nice nurses, beautiful handstitched TUC banners, good people blowing whistles. At Downing St we all boo. Everyone taking pictures or film. The children surprised by the childishness of adults. BOO!

We meet our friends on the corner of Piccadilly. “HEY HEY, HO HO, THE FUNDING CUTS HAVE GOT TO GO!' From near Green Park I see a church that I have wanted to visit tucked into a dark street like a scene from a period drama. 'STOP THE CUTS. STOP THE CUTS. STOP THE CUTS.' Later in Hyde Park we meet more friends and a message comes through on my phone from UL who had been marching with his son saying that banks are being trashed near Cambridge Circus and there is pandemonium. Police sirens scream around Hyde Park Corner and we, the three families coming back to the flat for tea, cut through the opulence of Belgravia to avoid it. Under the nose of policemen a young couple, like insects, black scarves over their faces and really enormous bags, like stretched skin, the shells of cockroachs slung on their backs, carry a crate of beer. Close up, we can see pale skin, and make out skinny youthful faces, a boy and a girl. It is like a black space when they walk past, as if breath is held. All the children are fascinated, open mouthed, their instinctive love of order threatened. What do they have in their bags? They want to know. Why have they got masks on? Why did the policemen not stop them?

Nearing Victoria I see another church. One I didn't know was there, one I must have missed. It is much nearer than some other churches I have already been to. There. I think. I'll do that next. Pleased to have made a discovery. Outside an exclusive Belgravia shop a man in plush corduroy and a blazer pauses, watches us trudging along with our weary children as if we are foot soldiers back from an old battle, as if we are a defeated enemy. Finally back at the flat, eating toasted sandwiches we watch Fortnum and Masons's taken over on the tv. 'Oh' I say. 'What a shame. I love Fortnum and Mason's it's so beautiful.' My more left wing but rich friends scowl at me.

UL tells me later he saw the bloc party kids - a big group of those insect-like, masked youth- move up and out of Trafalagar Square, menacing but choreographed, wearing black and red, banging sticks, marching in formation - intent on trouble. He said they were 'high' but he wasn't sure if it was just excitement and fear or drugs too.

UL and I haven't seen each other much. He was ill, then one of the boys was ill and Exh has been on a babysitting boycott for weeks. We squeeze in a cup of coffee at the British Library before I meet a friend who works there for lunch. Everything feels rather unsatisfactory for I just have too much to do, I don't really have time for either assignation - I haven't yet been to a church, I need to buy hamster bedding, should be working on my novel or editing a friend's photographs for money. We correspond continually - modern electronic love letters of beauty and mundane detail. Homework, meals made, misunderstandings, political debate, It is wonderful and exciting but sometimes I wonder if the gaps between what we write and who we are is too wide. The reality is we are a middle aged couple that repeat themselves, apologise for wearing glasses, and forget they have told each other something already. I know that love is there but it is hard to trust. I worry each sentence exchanged and see trapdoors in everything. I know I will ruin what there is if I keep going with my detective's eye and empty pockets of faith. But I can't seem to help myself.

I write this and then think does it sound too mean? I have become increasingly squashed now between hurting people in my life, telling a story and telling the truth. I discuss this with a writer friend. She suggests writing about it. Being honest about the difficulties. She suggests researching how Charles Dickens responded to opinions on his serialised novels.

'Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Nell and her grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: "You know you're going to have to kill her, don't you?" Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence "You think they're going to lose, you think they're going to lose, they win". In tragedy, it is: "You think they're going to win, you think they're going to win, they lose". The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Nell died.

He abides by plot which seems to be the sensible answer. But doesn't really help me. My plot was an accident. Unexpected. Muddled.

I race back from the British Library to the church I saw. Squeezing time before getting the boys from school The main door is shut, but I spot a back door, left slightly open. Pinned wonkily is a poster for a baby singing group. There are two women with smart buggies and cashmere dressed babies approaching and for a minute I think they are smiling at me, but of course it is at each other. 'Is it possible to get into the church this back way?' I ask. 'I just want to have a quick look.' Probably functioning on exhaustion and Munch mask screams behind the perfect make up they are helpful and usher me in. Only when we are all inside, past the kitchen, into the gloom of the vestry is there a sudden suspicious glance, an understandable holding tight of their babies. These are the first-to-arrive-mums, the organised ones but I am beyond their comprehension, a funny woman in patent platform court shoes rattling the bull ring of the locked wooden door into the actual church, then standing at the glass peering into view the interior. Which is almost square with a high ceiling. Stained glass, simple pews. A lot of space. I dare only a quick look before turning and bobbing and thanking my exit. Rushing to Sainsbury's and to get the boys from school.

I don't know I find these Pimlico/Belgravia churches hard to remember, hard to attach to. So difficult that when I went past St Saviour's the other day I couldn't really remember whether I had been inside or not. And when I read that St Michael's like St Paul's Wilton Place was designed by Thomas Cundy Jnr I know I have been to that church but can't quite remember which one it was. Most of the churches I have been to I remember vividly, but these few lack, lack what - a heart, a mystery, authenticity?

Initially a church was not planned in Chester Square ( built 1835) but squeezed into an awkward space meant for a mews when the nearby Chapel of the Lock and hospital was demolished in1842 leaving the new residents with no where to worship. Though it a surprise that the clientele of this 'the most retired and therefore the most satisfying of the Belgravia squares.' Nickolaus Pevsner - would be have been happy to worship in the Chapel of the Lock which had been alongside a leper hospital for women of dubious reputation.
'LOOK HOSPITAL, removed, from its old habitat in Grosvenor Place, to a more appropriate position in the Harrow Road, discharges the functions both of a hospital (established in 1746) and an asylum (dating from 1787) for penitent Magdalenes afflicted with disease, or sincerely desirous of abandoning the "primrose path that leads to the everlasting bonfire."

Cruchley's London in 1865 : A Handbook for Strangers, 1865

'Look or Lock' referring 'to the old French loques, rags, from the linen applied to sores; "but otherwise, and with more probability, from the Saxon loq, shut, closed, in reference to the necessary seclusion of the leper on account of the infectious nature of his disease." (Archer's Vestiges, Part I.)'

Finally ( and yes, I'm rushing ) I find these two things

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2011/02/yemeni-protest-chants.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/28/cuts-protest-uk-uncut-fortnum

I don't know. Our assumptions of safety get us into trouble sometimes.

Amen.