St Paul's Covent Garden

The day before it was announced the News of The World would close I had to leave work - the story gathering momentum on the overhead tv in the office - and rush rush rush to the Wigmore Hall in a lunch break I rarely take to see my son in a school choir sing a song composed at school with musicians from Wigmore Hall about being evacuated from London during World War II.

It was beautiful and moving to be there in the middle of my working day - to see bright faces and young voices on a stage singing about war. Though there were choirs of old people singing too - watching the children with stoic kindness and patience to the unfeasibly cheerful interpretations of terrifying events some of them had witnessed.

Back under the telly I am slightly breathless from squeezing an hour lunch break into the hour and a half rush it took and the NOTW story gathers momentum. Each news bulletin reports advertisers refusing to advertise with a newspaper that hacked the phones of young girls who had been murdered and soldiers that had been killed. Remember I work for a rival Sunday tabloid magazine with a tiny budget. I sit at the end of the newspapers news desk underneath the tv attached high up to the ceiling and if it fell it would land on my head. Often I hear stories as they come in before anyone else notices, though I rarely crick my neck to turn to see it because I am usually too busy. Though sometimes I have watched while journalists start to notice or gather around the tv up to 10 minutes later, heads tilted, mouths slightly slack or sometimes chewing.

The day it was announced the NOTW would close I notice the ticker tape underneath the picture of the tv screen saying the last edition of the News of the World would be this coming Sunday. My eyebrows are Gromit-like with shock. Then furrowed as the men gather opposite the screen shouting 'Fuck fuck fuck.' Over and over. I fiddle with my phone daring myself to take a picture of them but I don't. Someone is shouting 'Who is she fucking?' as the report of Rebecca Brooks breaking the news to the workforce of over 200 comes in. It really looks like she had been saved while others thrown overboard. Indeed even to this day it seems if she had gone they might might have saved something. A couple of journalists who had worked briefly for the NOTW caw caw with glee. It was never a nice place to work. Though no one was surprised by the hacking accusations. I think we had always known enough to know it was probably true. How did they get the stories otherwise?

I start writing this post just after the NOTW closure. It's going to be a good one I think. I am an eye witness I think. But my computer starts behaving badly and I can't seem to save onto the blog, and I haven't been to a church and then like a tidal wave the knock on effect reaches me. The small cheap but densely worked on magazine doubles overnight. We work flat out until 10pm. The staff of about 6 people. We congratulate ourselves as the bumper issue goes to press. Then a day later a completely new bumper glossy fat magazine is demanded and we worked until 2am as the mice scamper in the office. I cycle back that night on a Boris Bike but it is a beautiful straight line out from the City of London to Westminter passing church after church and Christopher Wren's St Paul's is like a ghostly white whale passed in a dark ocean and I think oh it is beautiful - and despite my tiredness - briefly feel somehow I am in the right place.

The following lunchtime we are told we have done the wrong sort of magazine and another is produced in 2 hours. Later when the Murdochs are challenged by custard and questions we work flat out to produce this new glossy celebrity magazine week after week still with a staff of 6. The question to be asked is why did you not wonder why your newspaper was so outrageously better than the competitors? I don't think it was asked or answered.

Standing manning a stall at the school bazaar to throw wet sponges at teachers poking their heads through a painted board I get texts saying the office has been raided by the police searching the computer of an ex NOTW journo who sits near my desk at the weekend. It seems ludicrous though I wish I hadn't missed 'the action'.

Timing has become a blur but in the middle of all this my Indonesian friend leaves her husband appearing at my door sobbing with her son and they sleep in my bed as I drink wine guiltily at my small computer desk trying to get this written. Though they have gone by the time we wake up the next morning.

By the time school breaks up 2 issues of the new magazine have been completed and I have been working until 9 or 10 everynight, doing extra days too. Exh has looked after the boys as I come home late but preparations and cleaning for the holidays are behind. We go camping in a friend's ( huge ) garden in Norfolk and I organise fashion shoots by mobile phone while my sons make amazing shelters by the side of a dank smelling stream. I am near exhaustion. But I have become a strangely welcome person at social events. A talking head, our man on the ground - my slightly strange and reviled world, like insects under a stone, suddenly revealed, examined and interesting.

Then it is the annual camp to Dorset and I still haven't been to a church. I am missing the moment I think ruefully as I pack sleeping bags and folding kitchen cupboards, consulting my camping checklist, ticking corkscrew, washing up liquid, matches, first aid kit. I am organised in a disorganised way and when I write this I am not sure which way round the sentence should go. By the coast in Dorset the children are allowed idyllic freedom to play in hay bales, explore, fish in rockpools, walk dogs and we sit at campfires every night. Text reports start coming in that London is burning. It seem overdramatic and unlikely. But suddenly everyone is texting the same thing and everyone is scared. My friend in Notting Hills says that a crowd is rampaging down her street with baseball bats, burning a motorbike and breaking windows, and that a black girl she talked to said - 'We all just hate Cameron.' The riot police collect in a church at the end of her street. From the distance of the warmth of a campfire in a field and with no images I imagine it to be organised and political, those spidery violent bloc kids banging their staves down wealthy streets, an organised mob realising numbers are on their side. I know if I was young I would find it exciting but I would want to know what I was aiming for - to tip the world so dangerously. But when I come back and look at news reports it just looks really nasty, a hooded mob flexing it's muscles and the desire for desirable things itself burning capitalism down. I like Pauline Pearce who stood in a rioting crowd in Hackney 'We're not gathering together to fight for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker...if we are fighting for a cause let's fight for a fucking cause. You lot piss me off.' I don't know. Some people do have a lot more than others. Though a lot of us have the same sort of things. It is opportunity that is missing. And this was an opportunity for some. And just excitement too. I think that property has made the haves and the have no hope of having more extreme though really it would be possible for everyone to easily have enough. People with nothing are working really hard and people with lots are too. Both eye other's lives angrily.

The boys give me a 'I heart LONDON' hoodie for my birthday. I have always wanted one. But the day I get it is ironic.

Back in London I am given a couple of hours to buy my son's birthday present. London is full of exhausted coppers from all across the country. I have a quick drink with UL and walk through the beautiful and sweet smelling rose garden into St Paul's Church in Covent Garden. In a big airy space there are singers practising for a concert. Pure voices singing Agnus Dei 'The Lamb of God.' Known as the Actor's Church there are tablets and inscriptions to many famous names. Just glancing around I see engraved plaques to Noel Coward and Vivian Leigh and then sit at a pew not thinking anything very much apart from it is nice just to sit and not rush, not wash up in a field, not be cross with children, not be cross, just not do anything. The church was designed by Inigo Jones as part of the development on the site of an old walled garden belonging to Westminster Abbey commisioned by Francis Russell 4th Earl of Bedford to build a square for the gentry. Inigo based his designs on what he had seen on his Italian travels and the vast square became a template for town planning. The first victim of the plague was buried here - Margaret Ponteous 1665 and J. M. W. Turner baptised here too.

I discover that Thomas Manton, the first minister was a puritan who had to leave under the Great Ejection of 1662 when 2.000 members of the clergy refused to sign the Act of Uniformity oath agreeing to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Only repreived in 1872 by the Act of Uniformity Amendment the efforts to outlaw non conformists left many clergy out of service and out of society. I want to cover this and read this. But I just don't have time.

http://www.archive.org/details/nonconformistsm00calagoog

Samuel Pepys notes the first 'Italian puppet play' seen under the portico of St Paul's on 9 May 1662 - the first recorded performance of 'Punch and Judy' commorated by the annual MayFayre service in May.

When I walk out of the church to the front of the portico there is a shouting escapologist in chains surrounded by a large cheering crowd.

My Indonesian friend shyly borrows the boy's disco light. Her husband wants to go clubbing with her like they used to do before they were married. It would mean she had to take the scarf from her hair and she is frightened. She thinks the disco light is a start. That evening I try to imagine their small flat with the coloured lights revolving, then hesitate from intruding on their lives. Though I do by writing about them.

Amen.