St George's Hanover Square

I feel briefly that I am living in a black and white film.
At Christmas the boys received Laurel and Hardy and Marx brother dvds as well as pocket-sized sound effect machines as stocking fillers. Though they were reluctant at first to enter an old fashioned world of a fat man and his thin kick, and a man with a moustache and glasses that talked too much, the perfect physical timing and impetuous violence presented drew them in and caused them to rock with laughter and slap the floor with mirth.
Then my youngest son started tap dancing. Mainly because his new back-to-school trainers have heavy soles and he is fascinated by the sound they make. On the school run he stood and danced, listening to the thick tread make a rhythm as he kicked and flipped his feet. Later, on the way home he indicated he no longer wanted to talk. He found the sound machine - wah wah wah waaaaa ( bad news ) and a whiteboard and wipe pen - ding! ( good idea/light bulb) and made physical gestures and wrote messages, illuminated by sound effects.
He is of course ( my son!) physically perfect to me - but his little intense body making slapstick mime routines is mesmerizing. Though there is a slight dread that this seemingly amusing anecdote will become the new reality, and that in some recent future I will be in a quiet room discussing this with a box of tissues and a sound effect machine, a white board and a still silent son.

Walking to school the first day after the christmas holidays I notice glumly the boarded up buildings and closed down businesses - Horseferry Magistrates Court previously so busy with riot offenders has closed and it's windows are boarded up, and just around the corner a local pub that always seemed packed with after work drinkers is also closed and sealed. Perhaps the pub was dependent on the court I think. Though I can't believe the court has gone - there has always been a tv crew parked round the corner and a draggle of journalists or wellwishers outside and it was as overworked as I was in the late summer. I google to find it has been moved to Marylebone. Also I have noticed sadly The Westminster Bookshop, the lovely local bookshop and the London Map shop where UL bought me my mapping book have both closed. Though the first day back to school for the boys is also the first day of obvious unemployment for me and here I am walking through a plyboard lined landscape of economic gloom - and this after all is Westminster! I discovered recently that despite the repeated bombing of the Houses of Parliament during the Blitz, Winston Churchill ordered that broken glass in the windows should be replaced immediately. He understood the impact on morale would be severe if the seat of power was seen to be damaged and glaziers were kept in steady employment. It feels like the thing these Conservatives shake and shake and shake at - a sense of pride or buoyancy or putting on a good front.

With the children back to school I face the normal housework chores and time finally to feel whatever it is I should feel losing a job and the uncertaintity of my future. I e mail people I haven't seen for years asking about the possibilities of work and feel embarrassed by my neediness and brittle jovial tone. If people answer at all they say there isn't much around. Wa wa waaaha I think. But in the late afternoon the phone rings and I am asked to come in to an establishment broadsheet to talk. Like a flipped coin, I am excited and optimistic, shiny, high as a kite.

Funnily enough UL has had new work for a while. I can't believe I haven't mentioned it. It is so perfectly Jonathan Franzenean. He has become a part-time media monitor of Turkmenistan for a consultancy that reports to the gas industry - which he combines with being the carer for disabled children on a daycare bus. I suspect that our fascination with each other is our complicated minds or is it lives? Our slight outsider vantage points? Though it is a circus tent mirror at times distorting what is wrong and right between us.
Where? I said when he first got the job. And he sent me links, maps, a blog, youtube snippets of the crazy president. It has the fourth largest reserves of natural gas in the world though mainly the country is black sand desert. Until now I haven't really had time to look these things up or follow them, I just thought an almost unknown, ex soviet, repressive republic rich in natural resources - oh I will definitely be able to use that in my writing . When I finally open a map to find out where it is, I just feel worried. It is in the middle of everything I think. Slap bang in the middle of everything. Bordering Afghanistan and Iran and already supplying a huge percentage of China's gas with a direct pipe. Russia is a bossy elder sibling to its trade and America and Europe are now negotiating pipelines. The increments of shift and movement that UL tells me about seem to reflect the transition of the world and the adjustments of power taking place.

Over Christmas late night conversations turned to world politics and sometimes to war. Nursing that final glass of red wine with my elder brother as our families slept we touched on it briefly. He lives in Dubai and until recently worked in Damascus. I tell him that a muslim boy in the playground said 'when I grow up I am going to kill christians' and that a few of the mums (though not many) snub my smiles. Another time in a pub with an art school friend married to an American we had the same sort of hushed, fearful conversation. As we were talking I realised suddenly this is how things build - conversations after the children have gone to bed, hints and whispers in the corner of pubs, just a feeling things are brewing. This is what has always happened I think. Until the currents form whatever it is that is going to happen next there is just a sense that there is trouble on the horizon. When I was young and frightened ( walking home at night through the dark woods to our house for example ) - I learnt to dissapate fear with the idea it is very rare for bad things to happen but my fascination for history has meant I have lost this comfort for it seems more certain that bad things happen fairly regularly, even cyclically. The sense 'it would always be someone else, someone you didn't know' mantra also failed when a girl in the block of flats I lived in for years, went missing and was then discovered buried at the side of a road, murdered. This girl with her beautiful smile and a roguish cheerfulness not unlike my own - had been carried past my front door by a two timing boyfriend, her dead body wrapped in sheets and then hidden in bins by my kitchen while he hatched a plan to depose of the body. This is a long time ago now but it still makes me feel sad and shocked and angry.

I read too an interview in the Financial Times with american/polish political scientist Brzezinski 'Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global power.' Blimey! It is better than reading TOWIE girl interviews.
'The book offers a bracing portrait of a 'receding west' with one half, Europe turning into a 'comfortable retirement home', and the other, the US, beset by relative economic decline and a dsyfunctional politics. In this rapidly changing new world, America's growing 'strategic isolation' is matched only by China's 'strategic patience' in a challenge likely to strain the electoral horizons of US policymakers'
'We ( Americans) are too obsessed with today.' Brzezinski continues. 'If we slide into a pattern of just thinking about today, we'll end up reacting to yesterday instead of shaping something more constructive in the world' By contrast, he says, the Chinese are thinking decades ahead.
Brzezinski quotes a senior Chinese official who reportedly said of America: 'Please don't decline too quickly'.
I was also struck by how well informed the top Chinese leaders are about the world,' he says 'And then you watch one of our Republican presidential debates....' he trails away.

I get given quite a lot of work on the establishment broadsheet - on the Arts and Books pages. It feels like perfect work for me, like getting my life back on a ship I would like to be sailing on. My sails puffed up briefly with pride and contentment though the work doesn't start until February.

With time on my hands and still drumming up work I meet an editor friend who works in Soho. The picture editor that works with her comes to meet us too - a nice woman who tells me there is no work anywhere. We eat lavender and pear cake and order coffee that would put hairs on your chest, presented by a young man with a jesus beard and a holy expression of artistic endeavour as he proffers the cup. Everything seems to be closing apart from cake shops and sandwich bars and artisan food seems to be an economic almost political movement.
Afterwards I go and look at velvet for cushions in the beautiful shops on Berwick St. Oh I love these caves of bright fabric and people. Show girls draped in feathered-net stand sandwiched between rolls and rolls of material, assistants like starlings pecking and pulling the cloth around them admiringly. Peacock prints, shot silks, heavy brocades and velvet like peach plush flesh, in muted tones. But I don't buy anything. I need to check the measurements, check my sewing machine is working, plus I am in a cash limbo, not sure if I can use some of my redundancy to sort the flat out/ pay for the crown on my teeth, replace my glasses or if I just need to baton down and inch every penny.

I get on a bike back over Regent St and weave my way to find St George's - because I have been there before on Christmas Eve I think I know roughly what I will find. But I approach from a different direction and there is this church carved into the road, a short old pavement, a corner of London that looks secret, the back entrance to the church, much more ordinairy than the columns and steps of the grand entrance but somehow fascinating. The church is open and I park the bike by an old print shop that has beautiful old maps of London in the window.

Up the steps, into the plain but beautiful church, the names of church wardens, year on year since the opening of the church in 1725 surround the stalls on wooden plaques. Above, in this gallery is the whistle and chat of workmen and suddenly I notice that the upper stalls are packed with huge grey pipes, that the organ is being renovated. I wonder at the career route that means you become an organ renovater. The specialism this must involve especially as it becomes apparent that Handel worshipped and played here. He moved to nearby Brook Street in 1724, just as the church was nearing completion, and became involved in the affairs of the new parish. His opinion was sought on the suitability of the organ, and when candidates for the post of organist were being tested, he supplied a theme for extemporisation. From then onwards he had his pew in the church and was a regular worshipper.

St George's was built as result of the rapid growth of population in the prosperity of the late 17th Century. As the new and elegant 'suburbs' began to cover the open countryside Parliament passed the Queen Anne's Act in 1711 for the erection of fifty new churches in and about the Cities of London and Westminster.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=38871 ( if you have time - have a look - there are lovely details!)
Ten years later the building of St. George's was begun on a plot of ground given by General William Steuart. The architect chosen was John James, one of Sir Christopher Wren's assistants. The new Parish covered an area stretching from Regent Street (then called Swallow Street) westward to the Serpentine, and southward from Oxford Street to include the whole of what is now Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico. The countryside then came in close to the Church and in 1725 it was still possible to shoot woodcock in the Conduit Mead a few hundred yards from St. George Street and snipe at the western end of Brook Street.

By 1726 a workhouse was built too:
'The 2 first Churchwardens, being Persons of Distinction and Compassion took an early Care, with the Consent of the Vestry, to provide for the Poor; and in 1726, erected a large, plain, commodious Edifice in Mount-street near the Burying Ground, fit for the reception of several hundred Persons, which being on a Model worthy of the Imitation of other Places, a Plan of it was afterwards engraven on Copper, and printed for the Service of the Publick.'
'ALL that are able, both old and young, are employed in spinning Mop Yarn, or picking Ockam, and being helpful to each other under the Direction of the Steward and Matron; and the frugality of their Management, under the Honourable Persons, their present Churchwardens, and Overseers, is such, that at a Medium of their Expences for 1730, 154 Poor were lodged and dieted 4 Weeks at 55l. 1s. 7d. which is 1s. 9d. ½ a Week for each Person.'
By 1777 it was recorded that the St George Hanover Square workhouse could accommodate 700 people, making it one of the largest in the country.

I find too that the new organ was built in Chattanooga USA and that the work reconstructing it on site has only just began. I happened to visit just as the team began to put it together.
"No London church has ever purchased an organ from an American company. Never in history," said organ builder and company co-owner Ralph Richards.'
'Over the past 21 years Richards Fowkes and Company have built 17 pipe organs for churches and universities in the United States. With the completion of Opus 18, their most recent creation, they will become the first American organ builders to sell "the king of instruments" to a London church.

'They found a slightly more historical flavor to our organs. They wanted something 'interesting' and not generic," Richards said.

Richards and Fowkes' team of master pipe organ builders, cabinet makers, pipe builders, and wood carvers took approximately 30,000 man hours to build nearly every part and piece of the mechanical-action organ from scratch in their shop.
Up to 12,000 individual parts were made by hand by less than 10 craftsman, most of whom have been working for the company for nearly 20 years. Nearly every construction method used is an old-world technique.
The organ contains 2,851 hand-built metal and wooden pipes, and 174 hand-carved keys made from the shinbones of cows. All of the wood used to encase the swell boxes, make the mechanical trackers, and house the guts of the organ are made from raw milled lumber.
Custom alloys for pipes are made in the shop from tin and lead, which are cast into sheets on a stone table, then planed, soldered and rolled by hand.
From that point, Richards expects his team to be working at the church for up to 6 months putting it all back together and completing the sometimes very slow task of "voicing," or tuning, the nearly 3,000 pipes one by one.'

This is where I walked in. Though I wonder if it would be worth visting again in a few months and just sit and listen to the tuning process.

Though like towns in tv murder mystery series emotions must run high in such small worlds of extreme expertise for there is a bitchy remark on the site that I find all this information:
"Pity it's such a neoclassical instrument - an organ built in Chattanooga ought to have a Wurlitzer-style train effect labelled 'Choo Choo'

And an apology from the forum administrators:
'Whilst humour is an important spice of life and some bantering can always be a bit of fun even in a more serious context, this of AnOrganCornucopia's posts is of a quality of intellect demonstrative of being engaged at 4am at which the posting was timed.'


As I walk out of the street into the sunlight I see a familiar woman walking to me - pretty, beautifully dressed, with a slight hunch and droop as if her clothes are too heavy for her frame. It is Sam Cam but she stoops her gaze from mine.

Amen. I think. Amen.