St Patrick's, Soho Square. The ( belated ) Christmas Special

Still writing this the day I snip the bare twigs off the Xmas tree - trying to fit the denuded trunk into a black bin liner and sweep panfuls of needles into the rubbish bag - the magic and petty concerns of Christmas are over. Though like concealing a dead body it takes ages to reduce the tree to a size that can be carried downstairs. So this - the isictt christmas special is out of date, almost redundant - though I hope like coconut Quality Street sweets and tiny cracker toys that sit in indecisive piles, it isn't just another unwanted leftover of Christmas for I did try for the back to back bonanza but just ran out of time.

The night before Christmas I walked out on everything I was meant to be doing. I had cooked and cleaned and wrapped and worried and yet nothing seemed cooked or cleaned or wrapped and I was still worried. I had cried the night before cooking a ham dinner. There are hundreds of mum's crying over a ham dinner the night before xmas eve I realise or hope, as exh and the boys lay curled up on the sofa watching telly. It is ludicrous what we invent for ourselves I think. Though when Exh remarks about the beautiful snowflake cookies that I have made with my eldest - you just try and do too much - I know he is right but I am furious. Can I say - you just try and do too little? Can I? I watch couples work alongside each other as teams and they are still sometimes tired or cross or infuriated and they are allowed to say it.

I walked out - knowing I would be up to the wee hours making stuffing and wrapping stocking fillers - got on a bb bike and cycled up to Mayfair. I just needed not to do all those things, just needed to have some space or a break. I worry that against this backdrop of anxiety at having lost my job and festive overwork I will end up in a ludicrously over the top lisping nativity with donkeys and heavenly choirs and that it will become like some Richard Curtis feelgood factor film moment when either I will have to believe something or I will shut my angry heart to a magical thing. But the wealthy church in Hanover Square that I imagine tempting me with all this on the late afternoon of christmas eve is dark and shut and not going to open it's doors again. Oh I think - I need a Catholic church now, they always provide a welcome. I wander over Regent Street, where everything is still bustling and shoppers are frantic and greedy like a Patricia Highsmith crowd lit in electric light. I know there is a church tucked away somewhere. I find it on dark side streets but the church is shut despite being Catholic. 'All the churches are shut on Christmas eve' I text UL. He is in a pub with a friend near the British Museum as I walk through Soho our paths getting nearer. 'I want to see you' he says. I try on a 'I heart xmas' red apron in an art upstairs/porn downstairs bookshop. Another one says 'ho bloody ho' and I wonder if I could alternate them throughout the day as an indication of how christmas is going but they are both too big. Shops are starting to shut now. I see a rail of sequin dresses being loaded into a van in a multi storey carpark. I see gay men packed into pubs. Walking past these bright lit windows with people jostling and laughing I feel lonely, nursing my petty but heartfelt grievances of too much to do and too much washing up and cleaning done. Then I head up grey streets to Soho Square where so much is shut it feels like even the street lights have been dimmed. I remember from my map that there is a church here but I have no recollection of ever seeing it. I used to work in restaurants in Soho when I first left college and can remember the sense of being on the edge of an adventure - that there were secrets all around - though really all that ever happened was being winked at by a popstar in the street or spotting a few famous drunks in pubs, or going to a few classy members clubs without membership and discovering delicious delis that sold great cheese and ham and pumpkin ravioli wrapped lovingly in cellophane and placed as gently as expensive and beautiful silk lingerie into boxes.

In the dark square a huge tower looms. If I could get this over with quickly I would just about have time to meet UL for a drink I think craning to see if the church is open. Golden light pours from an open door. It is a Catholic church. From the stone floored vestibule I can see that the church is empty apart from one man hunched kneeling and praying and a priest with a really genuine smile and a kind and good face descending the stairs from the tower. I think he is about to lock up. Is it ok to have a look - 'Of course' he says with a generous smile. 'Are you trying to close for the evening?' I ask. 'Oh you're fine - we have mass shortly' he says waving me inside. The church inside is clean and bright and really fresh. With that very brittle european catholic trapped air, as if sieved. In each niche at the sides of the long, narrow nave there are altars and statues and paintings - some of them really beautiful. Because it is Christmas, or because I want to feel something and no longer be cross I light a candle at a beautiful white statue of what I think to be the Virgin Mary though I discover later to be St Anne, her mother.

This church was built on the site of the town residence of Earl of Carisle - a grand house built in 1690. The square itself had first been developed in 1681 and was originally called King's Square after Charles II becoming one of London's most fashionable addresses. It later became Soho Square named after an ancient hunting cry akin to Tally Ho refering to the area's rural and hunting past. By the 18th century the square had become more a more 'colourful' area and a Mrs Cornelys rented the Earl of Carisle's town house in around 1760. And oh she was an adventuress - like a Jeanette Winterson heroine - born on the island of Venice - an opera singer and impresario - she had many lovers and husbands and children across Europe including a daughter from an affair with Casanova. At Carisle House she put on elaborate masked balls and concerts of great imagination, sumptious design, slightly dubious reputation and great popularity:
'It was at one of Mrs. Cornelys' masquerades that the beautiful daughter of a peer wore the costume of an Indian princess, three black girls bearing her train, a canopy held over her head by two negro boys, and her dress covered with jewels worth £100,000. It was at another that Adam, in fleshcoloured tights and an apron of fig-leaves, was to be seen in company with the Duchess of Bolton as Diana.'
These gatherings were so popular 'In February 1770, Parliament adjourned early to enable members to attend one of her masquerades.' Laurence Sterne called a visit to Mrs Cornelys' "the best assembly and the best concert I ever had the honour to be at." In Humphrey Clinker, published in 1771, Tobias Smollett writes of "Mrs. Cornelys' assembly, which for the rooms, the company, the dresses, and decorations, surpasses all description". In Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon the narrator recalls that "[a]ll the high and low demireps of the town gathered there". Dickens wrote in an article on Soho that "the world was dying to be on Mrs. Cornelys's list."
Though she was in and out of debtor's prison because she paid so much out for her ventures and by 1772 Carisle House was seized and it's contents auctioned off. Later out of prison she organised a Venetian regatta on the Thames and then returned to Carlisle House, this time as manager. She held two immensely successful seasons of 'rural masquerades', decorating the interiors of the reception rooms with fresh turf, hedges, exotic blooms, goldfish swimming in a fountain and pine trees in the concert room. However ( or because of ) she then slid back into bankruptcy and in 1779 was imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison. She escaped in June the next year when the prison was set on fire during the Gordon Riots, but was recaptured in Westminster in August.'
Again out of prison she renamed herself Mrs Smith selling asses milk in Knightsbridge and finally died in Newgate prison at the age of 74 apparently from breast cancer.

Though 18th century pleasure seems a fascinating and imaginative thing. Across the square at number 21 was a famous magic brothel, the White House - in which commercial sex was enhanced by dark, baroque special-effects and natural magic devices:
"The white house was a notorious place of ill fame," writes Mayhew in 1851 "Some of the apartments, it is said were funished in a style of costly luxury; while others were fitted up with springs, traps and other contrivances, so as to present no appearance other than that of an ordinary room, until the machinery was set in motion. In one room, into which some wretched girl might be introduced, on her drawing a curtain as she would be desired , a skeleton grinning horribly was precipitated forward and caught the terrified creature in his, to all appearence, bony arms. In another chamber the lights grew dim and then seemed gradually to go out. In some little time some candles, apparently self ingnited, revealed to a horror stricken woman, a black coffin on the lid of which might be seen in brass letters, Anne, or whatever name it had been ascertained the poor wretch was known by. A sofa, in another part of the mansion was made to descend into some place of utter darkness, or, it was alleged, into a room in which was store of soot or ashes."

I remember a friend telling me about a Japanese Love Hotel she took her girlfriend to in the 1980s and I text her for details. I walk to collect the children from school imagining beautiful, luxurious but erotic hotels. Mirrored mazes, silver swans, and silken rooms devoid of light. Peep holes, finger holes, flaming torches and showers of feathers. Tipping floors, tumbling tunnels, singing canaries and a brook bringing thimbles of dessert wine on trays. I couldn't afford what I would like, I think. And I am too shy anyhow, caught in the awkward bulk of self. She texts later to say there was a vibrating bed and you paid by the hour. Though another friend reported a scented bath on stilts.

Also in the square was a 'bazaar' set up in 1816 by John Trotter. A man who had ambitions to set up an universal language and had run the army stores for the Napoleonic wars he converted a warehouse in Soho Square no longer required for army provision as an encouragement for 'Female and Domesticity' being anxious to stop the country from pouring 'its happy and innocent virgins into the common sink of London'. The interior of the disused warehouse was laid out with stalls and counters arranged on two floors of the building in the manner of a closed market. The vendors hired their selling spaces by the day and there were stringent rules for the conduct of business, but everything was conducted on the 'fairest and most liberal plan'. The goods sold consisted chiefly of millinery, gloves, lace, jewellery and potted plants. Despite it's seemingly worthy beginning this fashionable and famous bazaar was copied across London, a precusor to the department stores of Oxford Street.

I dither about putting this in but the chance to write about sex AND shopping is too enticing. I have had my novel rejected a few times for just being too depressing so the chance to revel in the bones of the chick lit genre is just too much to miss.

The church was the first Catholic Church to be founded after the 1791 second Catholic Relief Act was passed by parliament. A group of eminent Irish Catholics formed the Confraternity of St. Patrick “to consider the most effectual means of establishing a chapel to be called St. Patrick’s, on a liberal and permanent foundation.” An ambition they achieved by taking a 62-year lease on Mrs. Cornelys’, by then vacant, Carlisle House. Nearby stretching from New Oxford St to Seven Dials was an area known as the Rookeries - where criminals, the drunken and destitute, and a large population of the Irish Catholic poor lived.
On this corner of Soho and Covent Garden it 'was somewhat like the wild west with the priests often rather sheriff-like as they tried to bring order to disorder, and establish Christian family values in the face of the evil elements that were destroying the dignity of the lower classes, namely alcohol, crime and exploitation.' And the priest Father Arthur O'Leary who raised the funds and drummed up support and directed the consecration of the chapel on September 29th 1792 continued his work for 10 years until as it says on his memorial stone in the porch of the church ‘he wore himself out by his labours’ in 1802.

Also celebrated in a plaque in the porch is the 1940 bomb that broke through the roof and embedded itself in the nave but did not go off.

While the entertainer Danny La Rue who was an altar server here for many years donated the two statues at the back of the church in the memory of his mother and aunt. And Tommy Steel was married here.

The church appears to have as an inspiring though as yet less careworn leader as it's founder. The Reverend Alexander Sherbrooke has overseen the recent 3.5 million renovation of the church and also the hosting of addiction counselling in it's crypt ( it is the only Catholic Church to do so). Each week under his lead St Patrick's with a team of volunteers feeds 80 to 90 local homeless people in conjunction with the Groucho club – a nearby private members' club - that supplys the puddings. He also runs an SOS prayer line manned by volunteers from 7pm to 11pm every night in the tower of the church. A light on at high window of the tower like a beacon to Soho proclaims the two telephone lines open and they take calls from across the world. I read that at the heart of his ministry is the new Evangelization in the Catholic Church and that he believes that beauty in a secular age is a privileged pathway to God making the Eucharist, the music and the church itself central to the worship.

Sherbrooke says: "You get a knock on the door and it can be someone who is successful in business, someone who wants a sandwich or someone caught up in the sex industry. We leave our SOS prayer line calling cards in telephone boxes – where you might see other services advertised.

I don't know - writing this blog I have witnessed how much good work is done by the London churches but this seems inspiring - his breadth of ambition and desire to help people in a simple but direct way. I pass him as I walk down the nave on my way out, the man who had welcomed me in, a man of obvious peace and energy. Unexpectedly behind him down the aisle comes a soppy eyed King Charles Spaniel, neat claws on the clean new marble, completely at home, obedient to his master. I think of a Christmas Day once when I went to a service with my Mum and Dad in my hometown and a butterfly flew in the church on the cold morning for it felt like a surprising gift of beauty.

As I leave the church, rushing now, for a quick guilty drink with UL before returning to my patched together family, a short man in a fawn anorak runs up the stairs. 'Is there someone, somewhere who will hear my confession now?' he pants. 'He is in there.' I say.

I think of the light on in the tower.