The River Ouse near Passenham
I park the car on Cosgrove's 'ornamental bridge' and move off south along the canal towpath. Soon the Grand Junction is sitting in an embankment above the fields, and then the two spans of the 'Iron Trunk' aqueduct take it high over the Great Ouse. Originally this broad river valley required the canal users to negotiate two inconvenient and time consuming sets of locks until the early nineteenth century engineers copied the system recently pioneered by Thomas Telford at Llangollen to provide one consistent level. There were a few teething troubles but ever since the barges have been able to keep moving thanks to the iron tray beneath them. I climb down the path on the far side, and stoop to cross under the canal through a narrow tunnel (and I'm only 5'7"!) Half a mile up the Ouse is picturesque Wolverton Mill where friends Ann and Margaret live. We know a couple of Knights of the Realm, but no Dames. Ann's our only hope for the future, and a sound bet for such honour. The mist is thick this morning, and I take a few atmospheric photographs of the water and trees along the attractive Ouse Valley Park. Where the A5 dual carriageway confronts me, I go left and fetch up opposite the George pub in Stony Stratford.
This town of ancient tradition, an important coaching stop on Watling Street, will always be George's place, after 'Big George' Webley, whose funeral I attended a few years back, watching from the pavement with a cast of several hundred others as his carriage passed the 'Cock' pub. If your telly-watching includes 'Have I Got News For You' you'll be familiar with its noisy, cheeky theme tune, which to this day is still credited to him. Well done, HIGNFY. Big George lived life with considerable gusto and wit, sometimes rather too close to the edge for propriety and good sense. For a while he directed the band, 'Saturday Night Live'-style, for a daily Sky magazine programme fronted by Derek Jameson, with whom George shared a certain London sensibility. Probably just to keep Terry Disley, the resident keyboard player on his toes, George once invited me down to the show, ostensibly as a possible dep (or replacement!) As has happened a few times in my career, I was thoroughly spooked by the dangerous ambience, and even if I didn't actually say so must have shown by my demeanour that this would never be a gig I'd have the chutzpah to fulfil. George was a bass player by original trade, a protégé, or so he claimed, of the late Herbie Flowers. His playing was a bit, hmm, basic for me, but on one occasion I invited him to sing a cover version of The Kinks 'Dedicated Follower of Fashion' . In order to get the right vibe, this apparently required the removal of his trousers in order to deliver the vocal. The underwear was garish: more suited to Whitehall Farce a la Brian Rix than Carnaby Street.
Stony Stratford not only has a 'Cock'. It has a 'Bull' too, hence the one-time popular local group, 'The Cock and Bull Band', which featured Breton Pipe player Jean-Pierre Rasle, a rarity on the English folk scene. After a Costa coffee halfway between the two establishments, I circle the church of St. Mary and St. Giles by the Market Square before continuing my route towards Passenham. It's a 'Forward in Faith' church under the control of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet (always makes me think of Trollope this - there's something a bit hokey about the name, don't you think? - the other associations of Ebbsfleet being a station on the Eurostar line, and a large statue of the mythical Kentish white horse, Invicta...) St. Mary and St. Giles is also situated geographically outside the Peterborough diocesan boundary, so I pause only to include them in my prayers, reminding myself that the message of this project is that we are all one Anglican church despite our differences, and that building bridges is more important than emphasising chasms or voids.
I do a lot (too much?) of thinking while I walk. So a diversion, or perhaps a musical/political interlude. Bear with me a moment or two through muso stuff...
Part of the soundtrack to my life has been the Stephen Stills/Buffalo Springfield song 'For what it's worth'. You may know the lines with which it begins: 'There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear...' As I sometimes do, I had a little splurge of CD purchasing before Christmas which took in Eric Clapton's 2016 album 'I still do', and the Stones 'Blue and Lonesome' released in November. Both are new blues records looking back to the 1960s and before. Some of the Clapton tracks are perfect in the phrasing of his guitar, outshining most of the great black blues guitar players of the previous generation, and his vocals are sometimes pretty authentic too. The Stones' album shows off Mick's harp playing to good effect, but personally I think it all sounds rather cluttered, nasty and harsh. At the same time I bought the new-ish CD by American alt-folk act Bon Iver. The soundscapes are fascinating and challengingly contemporary, the songs fragmentary. It's very hard to know what they're about, if anything at all, and the contrast between them and the 'old man's music' of Clapton, Jagger and Richards couldn't be more stark. But of the three albums, this is the one I may keep coming back to.
Thomas L. Friedman's new book, 'Thank you for being late...' has as its thesis the idea that 2007 was a pivotal year - that the technology coming on line at that time changed the world irrevocably in a way that Caxton's printing press did. So in a way all I think Friedman's doing is actualising McLuhan's ideas from fifty years ago with up-to-date examples. And yet, culturally and politically it's hard not to agree that ten years later chickens are coming home to roost. The mash-up of Brave New World-ism with nostalgia is palpable on all fronts. The centre has lost ground, and given that the church is always slow to react to cultural change, one must assume that similar polarising trends will continue to dominate it through the next decade or two. When I listened to 'For what it's worth' immediately post-1967, it was with heady anticipation of change for the better. The lyric's still relevant (and CSN still sing it when they perform!) but now for me, it merely carries worry and threat in its wake. The same thing happens when I hear Dylan's 'The times they are a-changin'': it's that single line: 'Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command' Once it would have thrilled rather than chilled.
But the scene as I walk over the mist-swathed fields to St. Guthlac's church in Passenham might not have changed at all in a few hundred years, give or take a telegraph pole or two. St Guthlac, says Wikipedia, is particularly venerated in the Fens. You've heard of the Desert Fathers, well, Guthlac was a sort of Marsh Father, whose hermitage was near Crowland, the other side of Peterborough. I suppose it may be significant that Passenham is very low-lying and was probably pretty boggy in former times. Guthlac apparently suffered from ague and marsh fever. Possibly a few of the local parishioners here did too. All this I might have learned from literature inside the church, but alas, the door is locked.
Up the road is Deanshanger to which I come via a curving concrete bridge over the A422, ignoring the opportunity to walk through a recently manured field. There are nice country smells and nasty ones, and ones which like a ripe cheese hover on the cusp. This one isn't at all pleasant, and the ordure is still steaming as the mist at last begins to burn off around mid-day. I find that what used to be Kingsbrook school is now, like the comprehensive at Roade, also named after Elizabeth Woodville (see the previous post). The nexus of relationships between these two schools, Sponne in Towcester and numerous feeder primary schools is now past understanding by someone as off-the-pace as me educationally speaking but clearly there are administrative ties. I wonder to what percentage of those actually working in schools as staff or governors are these kinds of details opaque? Is everyone clear about where the responsibilities will lie or the blame will fall when the chips are down/the balloon goes up/choose your own cliché ?
I stop at The Beehive pub, and have a natter to Lorraine the owner. It's remarkable the ground you can cover in 15 minutes about the village, the local church, our respective families, our fears for the world and so on. Thanks, Lorraine for a jolly lunchtime drink. If you want to look it up, Wikipedia has some amusing stuff about Deanshanger, Thomas a Becket and Wayne. No, I'm sorry, I do not believe the bit about Wayne. I think someone is having us on here.
When one used to pass by Deanshanger (and let me tell you, one did pass it by - and ignore blandishments to take up employment as a teacher in its school), it was shrouded in a pall of polluting smoke from the now defunct Iron Oxide plant, which at the time tinted a lot of the buildings red. The bad news: there's now less employment locally. The good news: the pollution has vanished now the plant's closed. The uncertain news: the new housing estates were built on the site of the old works, after long and difficult land reclamation. Personally of course I support the use of 'brown field' locations for housing projects, but it's not unproblematic, and would I choose to live there? I definitely would not.
Holy Trinity, Deanshanger is situated on the very edge of the village, apparently trying to escape. I can't get a sense of it from the outside, and I can't get in. Later I look it up on the web, and am interested in an item on the menu entitled 'About You', which is entitled 'Heaven: why some good people will not go...' As I said earlier, this blog is about drawing people together under the umbrella of the love of God. How should I feel about this sheep and goats rhetoric? Matthew 25. It's all there. But still I'd rather say: 'There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear...', and hope that my brothers and sisters in Deanshanger and Stony Stratford will rejoice in each other - and me. And if they start reading what I'm writing, will continue to do so...
Not far away is Wicken. These parishes, tucked away in the far south-eastern corner of the diocese, feel as if they don't really belong, even to Northamptonshire. In part it's Watling Street that does it, and the proximity of Milton Keynes. St. John the Evangelist's is a grand building with a massive tower and what looks like a priest's room over the porch: I'm sorry not to be able to investigate further, but I'm running out of light, and so I keep going over the sticky bridle paths back towards Old Stratford, where unlike at Yardley Gobion, appeals for the building of a church went unheeded in the nineteenth century. Less political clout. I pick my way through the housing and find the bridge over the A5 which lands me in the fields beyond. Across the Dogsmouth Brook, the land rises slightly to the cut of the old canal to Buckingham, at this point dry, disused and built over for a few miles to the west until it re-emerges closer to its destination. Nearer Cosgrove, there's reclamation work being done, and as dusk descends and the mist returns, I look beyond the remains of Cosgrove Hall's ice house to the outline of the old manor, burnt out after a fire last October.
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on.
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on.
Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene;
One step enough for me.
Cardinal J.H.Newman
Stats man: 19k. 6 hrs. 4 degrees C. Fog/mist/sun/mist. No breeze. 14 stiles. 14 gates. 6 bridges (including the lock at Cosgrove junction on my return, where I wiped my boots carefully before crossing, and didn't look down ). 2 tunnels. Disturbed: one peeved heron: one colony of bunnies.
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