On the verge

Having walked across the fields near here, I'm now more aware of the rise of the A43 as I drive out of Towcester. The expansively curving highway climbs steadily, and although the maximum is only at about 160 metres, the traveller feels they're gaining much more height than is actually the case. I remember that, coming back from Oxford on winter occasions, snow has been lying in Hazelborough Forest while there's been none in Towcester. The lane from the dual carriageway to Radstone is little more than a cart-track. In the hamlet I park on a broad grass verge and get dressed for rambling.

It's bright but blustery. I walk westwards into the buffeting gale. Here and there sections of trees have pulled away from their main trunks and straddle the bridle path, the legacy of Storm Doris which passed through violently the previous Thursday. This year the names given to the winter storms accommodate both British and Irish tastes, though I should think the number of parents in either country donating the handle 'Doris' to a new daughter must be vanishingly small. For a while the path funnels into a green lane towards Halse, with a ditch clearly visible to one side. This is an old east-west route now of no importance, but perhaps it was once an alternative to the 'Welsh Road' for driving sheep to market. It would be interesting to put a metal detector on that ditch!

Halse is a settlement on a straight 'B' road running south towards Brackley. Along both sides are prosperous detached houses, and where I turn right, there's an old wooden mission church now a Village Hall, either itself once a 'Chapel of Ease' or on the site of an older building. I didn't know, so perhaps you don't either, that 'Chapels of Ease' were sometimes built within large parishes where the distance to the main parish church was too great for comfort, and indeed the hike into either Radstone or Brackley would always have been an inconvenience, unless you were uber-dedicated or felt particularly burdened by sin. I walk paths across undulating farm land in the rough direction of the bigger town. Two very friendly sheep, probably not far off delivering their spring lambs, rush across the field towards me, and look reproachful when I tell them I have no food unless they're partial to Waitrose sandwiches. A couple of stiles further on, I hear a farmer's shout, and looking back see the sheep cantering in his direction. There's a whole flock in another adjoining field, so I wonder what makes these two animals so special?

Soon I'm in the environs of another farm where old machinery seems to have come to die. I see it's a problem, getting rid of old trailers, harrows and horse boxes, but someone, some time, is going to have to clear up the mess. Significantly perhaps, the nice stiles and waymarks closer to Halse have now disappeared, and it's only when I finally successfully identify which piece of scrappy woodland is 'Fox Covert Wood' that I'm sure I'm on the right track. My compass has de-magged again. My fault, for leaving it too near the mobile phone in my rucksack. The speaker inside it is probably responsible for the reversal of polarity. Mental note to self to always wear compasses geekily round my neck from now on.

There are lots of 'Fox Coverts'. Would it be wrong of me to suggest that hunting types have always actively colluded in providing fox sanctuaries, so that at the chosen moment these supposed scourges of the countryside (I mean the foxes!) can be driven out for the pleasure of the Hunt? I've never really bought into the argument that it's all about protecting the chickens.

Brackley is bigger than Towcester, although with the infills of new housing in both places it's hard to be sure by how much. The field paths deposit me in a housing estate, and I pick my way down to the Banbury Road to enter the town. It's fun to look at the successively older houses as one approaches the centre. First are the very recent builds, then comes the seventies' stuff, then a few representatives of the nineteen-thirties, then some small Victorian semis, then grander villas of the same age, and finally the stone cottages and town houses of greater antiquity. The Georgian Town Hall is swathed in plastic, having a facial. Opposite me is the 'Green Room' café, to which I go for a tea and cake session. At an adjacent table are some lunchtime refugees, who from their conversation and demeanour perhaps work for Brackley's most famous commercial enterprise, the Mercedes motor-racing team. No, Lewis Hamilton is not among their number.

Wikipedia points out that Brackley is built around two centres, and this turns out to be palpably true on foot, although I'd never noticed it when driving through, not that one does these days, not now there's a by-pass. The High Street is handsomely broad, and along one side is the old bit of Magdalen College School, the home of the establishment's sixth-form, with its ancient Chapel, reputedly the oldest building in use in any British school. I imagine this is a hotly disputed factoid. Many universities claim to be 'the oldest', and it partly depends on what you mean. In this case the Chapel of St. James might contain stones which are really old, but does that do it for you? The High Street rises as I go east, and then flattens out at the top of the hill where I notice a small park to my right which is in the care of the National Trust for reasons not immediately obvious. The settlement thins out. And then, when the ground begins to fall away again, down near the Great Ouse is 'Old Town' with its large church of St. Peter. At one point here, the curve of a high wall suggests the kind of protection I've more often encountered in French towns and villages, although I remember a similar example up in Kirkby Stephen. There's a funeral in the church so I can't go in. The hearse (a Mercedes, naturally!) is open, waiting to receive the coffin in a few moments' time. The funeral directors look very smart. It's an upscale affair, which is kind of what I'd expect just here.

   By the bridge under the A43 at Brackley near the site of the old station on the Great Central.

Depending on whom you read the River Great Ouse rises in Syresham or Whitfield. It forms the county boundary on the eastern side of Brackley. I cross into Buckinghamshire like it's a foreign country and walk on into pretty, civilised Turweston. The electoral roll of the The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Turweston is quite small. On entering the beautiful little church with its Burne Jones-like stained glass, the senses are filled with that characteristic musky smell-mix of cold and damp which almost defines the ancient numinous. For Lent the Buckingham Deanery has a series of Evensongs: 'Lessons on renewing the church - Nehemiah style'. I quote: 'In our Lent sermons we will look at the methods Nehemiah learnt and successfully used as he led the demoralised Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem'.

Well, firstly, wow, this is great, some serious thinking's going on here, and congratulations, whoever thought this up has remembered that as Christians we've inherited the Old Testament too. But then slightly more disconcerted thoughts arise. Someone has decided what the lessons to be drawn are, have they, and they're going to tell the people of Turweston and elsewhere what they should do? I suppose I've got used to the idea that during Lent we should sit together and share perspectives on the Christian life in an attentive, listening mode. What do we make of the notion of 'authority' as applied to the Anglican Church in 2017. Does it have a right to any? How is it derived? How mediated? In the particular, what kind of Temple might we be rebuilding, and to whose specifications?

The wind has moderated a great deal, and it's now a rather glorious walk under sunny skies on to Whitfield. A hawk hovers over the river, happy dog-lovers exercise their canine friends, the occasional light plane takes off from Turweston airfield, the ground is drying remarkable quickly. The farm in Whitfield (the Northants side of the Great Ouse and therefore back in Peterborough diocese!) is a puzzle. There are scores of horse boxes in the yards, and a rough notice outside advertises the next 'race meeting'. I don't remember Whitfield cropping up in the racing results. The church of St. John the Evangelist is opposite a sometime pub. On this day, this doesn't feel an altogether happy place. I can't give you a reason: the village just has an aura of anxiety about it. The literature in the church largely features The Farming Community Network, which aims to give support to farming folk in trouble. The litany of likely difficulties reads: tiredness, overwork, inheritance, loneliness, isolation, depression, form-filling, regulations, debt, pollution, environment, bereavement.  Rural poverty and distress is real. How will Brexit affect it - for good or ill?

The small organ in St. John's isn't locked, and the switches to turn it on are obvious. Unsure of the etiquette, I don't usually do this, but to cheer myself and the building up and let God know I'm there, I start up the blower and improvise for ten minutes, exploring the few stops on the single manual. It mostly works OK. I wonder when it was last played and by whom.

I'd been expecting trouble crossing back over the A43 (the OS map was unclear if it was possible) but in the event it's a breeze and via the lumps and bumps of the disappeared Nether Radstone I make my way back to the Audi. As I approach, I see a sign I'd missed. 'Private verge!' it reads, 'Do not park here'. Or words to that effect, polite but definite. Stroppy old me of course wants to know who the verge belongs to? And do they get a lot of nuisance parking here? Really? Why?

On the way back home, I have to go to Brackley on the slightly better made, more westerly road. Very soon I hit a succession of new roundabouts that mark the housing estates being built on the northern side of town. The project is to be called 'Radstone Fields' and rightly so. This is how I think things will work. HS2 will be built in a sweeping arc about a mile away, and then just as is happening now between Brackley and its by-pass, all the land up to the rail line will be consumed by housing and warehousing. No one has let on that this will be so, but I believe the tacit government view is that the land in a broad swathe between say, Cambridge and Oxford, Wellingborough and Coventry should be swallowed by development over the next twenty-five to fifty years. All of it. It's simply expendable to those living in the south. It's what you pass through on the way from Manchester to London. I hope that in some dusty archive, virtual or hard copy this rambling (lol)document will survive, my version of Cobbett's 'Rural Rides', an elegy for forgotten, quiet rural beauty, so that when next such a thing is proposed elsewhere, say between Bristol and Exeter, it can be reviewed as one tiny contribution to the ensuing debate.

Stats man:  17k. 5 hrs. 11C. Blusterous at first, gusting to 40 mph, moderating later, tho' always breezy. 12 stiles, 13 gates, 6 bridges. One solitary bee, a risk taker in urban Brackley after lunch. The two friendly sheep. One large slice of orange polenta cake (thank you, the nice ladies of 'The Green Room').

Father God

I'm torn.

I mean it when I sing
'We thank thee that thy Church unsleeping,
'While earth rolls onward into light,
'Through all the world her watch is keeping
'And rests not now by day or night'.

This great hymn always makes me cry.
The fellowship of the Church is a wonder,
Stretching backwards and forwards through time,
Girdling the earth with faith.

But I spend a heck of a lot of time
Moaning and griping
About the Church's inadequacies:
Its leadership;
Its muddle;
Its lack of rigour;
Or commonsense
As I see it.

Father
Of course it's imperfect
As I too am imperfect.
By your grace
May we all work towards
The perfection we glimpse
In Jesus Christ your son
Through whom we pray.
Amen.  

Citius, altius, fortius

It's an equestrian life, Henry. Or at least it is west of Towcester on a February Saturday morning. My drive along the back road to Wappenham is funereally slow. I sit behind a horsebox which apologises to me every metre during our sluggish progress. But hey, relax, there's no hurry. What's an extra minute or two?

In the field beyond the church I can see an agglomeration of horsey clutter. I assume there's a point-to-point in progress. And shortly after the beginning of my walk a smart young woman nurses her bay past me up out of a muddy little ravine near the fishponds, smiling beatifically. A lot of the route today is along bridle paths. As a result the walking is slightly awkward because of the shared space. But that's OK, providing everyone's considerate. I still like Sassoon's 'Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man' a lot, even though it was an 'O' level set text. It encouraged a teenage predisposition to be warm towards equestrian society, even though my one young experience of actually sitting on a horse was alarming. My mount that day was large, grumpy and recalcitrant. Shortly afterwards I endured a frightening episode on a remote Yorkshire path with a hungry animal curious about the contents of my rucksack. And I was several times annoyed by the high-handedness of hunting people in their seventies pomp around the Northamptonshire lanes. They seemed to me to be toff-ish, privileged vandals whose anti-social behaviour was actively condoned by the great and good, in contrast to the urban kids I was teaching whose equally obnoxious activities were roundly condemned by press and population. But that was then. It's different now, I think. And I was much moved the other evening while watching Madam Secretary when Tea Leoni had to say goodbye to her much loved steed, now racked with cancer.

More worryingly, a mile or so along the path, near the farms at Astwell Park, another young woman, more informally dressed, has difficulty controlling her pony as they pass me. I stand very still and utter soothing words, but even so she has a job staying aboard. It's one of those moments that gives pause for thought, and consideration of whether a first-aid course might be a good idea. A few years back I actually came across the aftermath of an equestrian fall in a field to the north of the county, where a rider and her companions were waiting anxiously for the chopper ambulance to arrive. There was nothing to be done that day, but my mobile phone apart, I'd have little to contribute now if confronting an accident.

Meteorologically it's rather a cheerless morning, and it feels like a long haul over the neglected fieldpaths to Syresham. Once upon a time this was very much a forest village. The church of St. James the Great is a little isolated from the main part of the settlement, and unusually distant from the pub, the King's Head. I imagine that with time and the establishment of the turnpike from Northampton to Brackley the village straggled out towards the road away from Church End. The inside of St. James is very welcoming, and I sit and rest my feet prayerfully for a while, before retiring to the King's Head for a ginger beer and a natter with Henry, whose chatting-up of the barmaid I probably interrupted. Henry works on local farms. We talk about the local byways and the churn from incomer, recreational 4x4s, and how he's been involved in making good some of the routes. I do not overstay my welcome, hating to be an impediment to courtship.

The shape of Syresham is intriguing - a bit more than a simple two street scheme, and also comprises a short, broad High Street - paradoxically wider than the adjoining Broad Street. I misread the map and wander down to the stream passing a house which has a justifiably outraged notice at the end of its drive complaining about the dumping of multiple plastic bags of canine excrement on their property. If this is a random act, it's of course an astonishingly horrible thing to do. Well, even if there's some unknown vendetta going on, it's still horrible! But on my way back up the street, I notice that horses have passed this way recently, leaving their mark on the road. Is dog poo in principle or practice worse than horse poo? Or does the tolerance of the latter render the former somehow more acceptable in the blinkered eyes of some dog-owners?

My onward route skirts the football field, and takes me west towards Pimlico, where I have to traverse a 'bio-secure' battery farm without spotting the facility I'm assured has been provided to wash my boots clean. Shortly afterwards I find myself in a large farm garden with an extensive (and expensive!) model train network running hither and thither through the grounds. I guess the RMT or ASLEF must have got to the workforce. No trains running today. Or maybe it's a case of  'leaves on the line'. Or a winter timetable. Pity!

Radstone was once a two-fold village. There was Nether Radstone and Upper Radstone. Since a couple of hundred years Nether Radstone is no more: just a memory under the fields, courtesy of an aristocratic clearance. There's something left of Upper Radstone on the far side of a noble bridge which carries me over the defunct Great Central Railway. Once upon a time the Great Central did what it said on the tin, providing a third alternative to the routes from the North to London. It was carefully engineered to allow fast running, but even so, as an idea it never really caught on and became a principal casualty of Beeching, leaving Marylebone Station as a Monopoly venue and a trainspotting and travelling afterthought (unless you live in the Chilterns!)

I'm caught unawares by St. Lawrence's church. The approach is along a shady path of leaf mould, and it's clear 'summat's oop' by the state of the two lamp stands which should light the way for night-time visitors. They're yellowed and uncared for. Although the church is open, a sad notice on the door tells me that entrance would be injurious to my health because of bat droppings and urine. I push the door ajar. Inside the pews are covered in plastic and although the church furniture looks OK, it's clear long term work is being undertaken (the web later informs me this is a problem going back some years). I don't understand. I've now visited so many churches I'd like to have been able to access but couldn't. Here's one I can easily get inside, but whose doors should probably be firmly locked shut.

Admiring the splendid purple brickwork which lines its route, I cross under the Great Central (why has no one reclaimed them?) and press on to the hamlet of Falcutt and then to the outskirts of Helmdon. St. Mary Magdalene's, Helmdon is also set apart, up on the rise, hedging its bets as to whether it serves the big house at Falcutt or the people of the village. Although none of the supposed medieval decorations survive, the sanctuary with its stained glass and flowers is an enlivening, colourful focus for worship. Don't we need our churches to be a stimulus to all the senses, sonic, visual and olfactory, to the greatest degree possible? Surely anything else is a covert denial of God's creative power? Miserabilists please note, it cannot be Lent all the year round. Helmdon was Northamptonshire's best village in 2016, but I'm running out of daylight and puff, so can't go to check the centre of town for evidence.

I decide to take the easier option back to Wappenham, and choose what claims to be a gated road towards Astwell, although in fact there's not a gate to be seen along its length. I'm glad I do this because the track hugs the slightly higher ground to the south and gives me lovely prolonged views out over the upper Tove valley. Eventually it brings me down to Astwell, the house and hamlet from which the benefice comprising the local churches takes its name. There are two things about Astwell, The first is the remains of the castle: the tower is very obvious, standing above the house and farm complex, looking younger than its real age. The second is the tragic and mysterious story of the WW2 plane crash which killed ten USAF personnel at 8.19 a.m. on November 30th 1943. It could have been even worse. As the B-17 bomber came down in flames, with pretty much a full complement of bombs apart from the one which had apparently exploded mid-air, it narrowly avoided the farm cottages. What I can't quite understand is what it was doing there. It had taken off from RAF Podington on the Bedfordshire border (now the Santa Pod raceway) to bomb targets in Germany. The weather had forced the mission to be aborted. But what were the planes doing so far to the west, thirty miles away?

A coda to the Radstone visit. I hadn't realised exactly where the proposed route of HS2 lies. I suppose I'd always thought it would fall somewhere to the west of Brackley. Not so. The line will pass within 250 metres of Radstone, and so of course has been the subject of challenge, alarm and despondency among residents. I shouldn't be surprised. There was a logic to the route chosen by the Great Central back in the nineteenth century. As it happens I'm not personally in favour of HS2. It's extremely expensive. It's meeting a 'need' which is unproven. It's a Trojan horse for development along its length, because the government will be able to change the criteria for building on adjacent green fields. Of course, it meets the government's largely unchallenged belief that we can build our way out of economic difficulty. Whereas I think that we're merely feeding obesity, and that better answers lie in eating (consuming) less. Gaining half an hour on a journey from Manchester or Leeds to London (or vice-versa: which is the desideratum?) is no more sensible than some idiot in a BMW risking his life and mine by overtaking inappropriately for the sake of a few minutes extra in a meeting or the pub.  And anyway the cost of a seat on the train will probably be extortionate. This will not be travel for the people, who will still sit in queues on the M1 at Luton going doo-lally while the motorway is upgraded to ten, twelve, fourteen, lanes.

However, from a brief perusal of the objections submitted by Radstone locals, it would appear that the preservation of the Natterer's bats in St. Lawrence's church has been included as an argument. How exactly high speed trains and bat colonies interact with each other seems baffling to me, but as a microcosm of 21st century Britain, it seems somehow significant, viewed from a faith perspective. The church it seems, has its uses, but not as a place of worship, only as a refuge for an allegedly endangered species. Very Franciscan.

Stats man:  21k: 6 hours: 10 degrees C. Initially cloudy, but some occasional afternoon sun. Slight westerly breeze. 11 stiles: 19 gates: (the gates often stiff, sometimes locked, thus requiring gymnastic ability, the stiles often rather high -ouch! - for a bloke of my stature!) Two riders. No apocalypse. One aggressive farm dog, satisfyingly cowed by my loud pack-leader's rebuke.


Father God

I know I'm a Big Consumer.
I have had a large appetite.
Too much petrol and diesel.
Too many cakes and biscuits
(as Doctor Tiffany would tell me, if I let on).
Too much plastic.
Too many painkillers.
At one time, too much alcohol.

It's not as though I haven't been told.
I used to recommend Bishop John Taylor's
'Enough is Enough' to students.

I can diagnose the problem in others.
I seem to be unable to do much about myself.
Lord, save me from weakness of will.
Help me to do better.

And not just so that I
Can preach about it

Amen.

What a whoppa

Lowering clouds, a very damp atmosphere and an uncertain forecast, but that's January for you. I set off due south from Abthorpe towards Bucknell Wood, and join a byway that skirts the forest. It's difficult walking. The broad path, which in theory could host riders and road traffic as well as foot-soldiers like me, is churned, rutted and very wet indeed. It rained most of the second half of yesterday, and now in places the track is like a no-man's land and almost impassable. It's four by flippin' fours which have caused the problem, and after a mile, having been puzzled by a firmly padlocked five-bar across the way, I see a sign (facing the other direction) which declares that as of August 25th last year the track is forbidden to everyone, pedestrians included, for a period of six months. Oh, and hard cheese, there's no alternative route, so sod off back to where you came from, it gleefully observes. The suggestion is that this is all in the interests of public health and safety, although it doesn't qualify that statement. This is very peculiar. Firstly, were things already so bad back in the summer (not a particularly wet one) that Something Had To Be Done? Secondly, why weren't there any notices saying the same thing a few kilometres ago at the Abthorpe end? Thirdly, wouldn't it be possible just to forbid and prevent yuppity owners of Jeeps and Landcruisers (I heard some yummy mummy describe them on the radio yesterday as a 'sort of Kingston upon Thames thing'!) from spoiling everyone else's enjoyment of the countryside. And if they insist on disobedience and continue to pollute the environment, let's take their Chelsea (Kingston) Toy Tractors away and crush them.  Of course it's possible I missed the most important clause in the notice and the government has been conducting chemical warfare experiments in Bucknell Wood.

If the reason for the prohibition is simply to allow time for the track to recover, I guess this is OK although I don't quite see why walkers like me are the problem here (as opposed to somewhere like Kinder Scout, where clearly we are), but my paranoia runs at such a level these days, I'm always looking for sinister motives. It doesn't help to read Matt Ridley ( Viscount Ridley!) in today's Times ('Brexit will boost our green and pleasant land') trumpeting that leaving the EU means a golden opportunity for the countryside, but only by paving over swathes of it. He quotes/claims an extraordinary stat I've never seen before, which is that less than 2.5% of England is built upon. I'm fairly sure these are weasel words: it could be that this is the figure for the square meterage of actual buildings, and it may be that gardens, yards and car parks etc.  aren't included. I always understood the proportion of built environment to be about 10%. But then, in this week when 'fake news' is the news, who exactly do you believe?  Urban wildlife, says Mr. Ridley, is thriving. 'Towns and cities are now exporting surplus peregrine falcons (my italics), hedgehogs and foxes to the countryside...'

This is pure spin. It's true that peregrines have been encouraged at least into Manchester City Centre by the RSPB, although I can't offer an opinion as to whether it was a balanced or helpful idea to do so. Foxes, yes, can be a source of anxiety to some town folk, particularly when there's a hysterical reaction in the press (compare attacks by domestic dogs, to the occasional isolated incident with aggressive or hungry foxes), but have always found ways of making a quiet living in cities. From observation and anecdote, hedgehogs are everywhere in decline at present, though this may be only a cyclical change.

Turning right where I think the path should go (although there's no sign to say so, and here the ground is relatively dry, well-drained and undamaged), the tower of Wappenham church is absolutely straight in front of me about a mile away. Such is the logic of country paths, now disguised by the changed needs of the local population - but once upon a time a number of folk regularly needed to get from here to there, if only to bring kindling for the fire.

The other side of a minor road I cross a clayey field and pass some old fishponds to come up alongside the Victorian school building into the village. In Saxon times it was 'Wappa's place'. Perhaps he got his name because he was a big man, or told fibs (Whopper?)  or because he habitually administered a clip round the ear to small boys, ne'er do wells and newspaper columnists. Wap! Take that, Ridley! And here's one for you, Rees-Mogg! And you Farage!

My old friend and colleague Nigel Pegrum lived in a beautiful and ancient Wappenham cottage when I first knew him. It was an exciting, pioneering time for us in a regional recording studio that was trying to be professional in its attitudes and achievements. The project was very much Nigel's. When I first came upon him he was helping an urbane chap called Oliver, a craftsman chippie, to construct the studio's interior. I brought in an idea for an album, it was one of the first things recorded there in Neath Hill, and I gradually made myself useful at a time when Nigel's previous keyboard player Andy Richards was making waves elsewhere. Andy was an early adopter of the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument and went on to success with Frankie Goes To Hollywood and The Pet Shop Boys. Meanwhile Nigel and I had a lot fun in Milton Keynes for a decade doing just about everything you can with recorded sound until Nigel's band Steeleye Span hit a bad patch and he glimpsed a future in Australia with Carmel, his new wife. If by any remote chance you live in Queensland and need to make an album, Nigel's the man to sort it out for you. But those early days at the beginning of the eighties were very precious. As with childhood, and it was a sort of second childhood, I can easily recapture the sights, sounds and smells of the time, and Wappenham's right there in the mix. Except now I can't remember where Nigel's house was. Was it this one? Or that one?

The church, St. Mary's, is open and I take off my mud-caked boots to peek inside. Very plain and with a broad white-washed little sanctuary, the visitor moves from darkness to light as he/she moves up the aisle. I light a candle for Nigel and his family, for the parish and their priest Carole Peters, and then after ten minutes snuff it out again, because I'm slightly candle-phobic and don't like leaving naked flames even in a safe place like this.  Carole bravely makes reference to the Vicar of Dibley in a nice piece on the village website, but suggests that in appearance she looks more like Alice than Geraldine. And how are you with jokes, Carole?

It's very gloomy today, and there's no one about except a self-conscious power-walker who thrusts wordlessly past me as I turn off down the field to the engorged stream which will later become the River Tove, and say hello to the old Stratford railway line again. From there the ground rises stickily until I find firmer footing on the drive which leads in the direction of the nice farm spread at Green's Park. Despite the notice, it's the wrong time of year for there to be a bull in their nearer field, and soon I'm on a broad upward track to Slapton Hill before dropping down to the village of Bradden. You could take the mud straight off to a pottery for working at this point and every hundred yards or so I have to stop to remove pounds of clay from my boots and stick. A man is having a good bonfire just by the road, and if I'd been bold enough I could have taken a great picture of a 'burning bush' for the archive, but he clearly doesn't want to talk, and I don't want to have to explain my thought process. (...well, you see, I'm on a sort of pilgrimage, and whenever I see something that might have religious significance or some future use, you know, for Messy Church or something, well I try to get a snap of it...You don't like having your picture taken?  Oh, you're a Muslim convert! Sorry, it's just that I wasn't expecting...Well you have a nice day now...) 

I am an alien in Bradden. According to the estate agent, it's only 9.8 miles from Northampton (convenient that, it being just the tad under ten miles, although I reckon it would take forty minutes if you were dropping off little Emma-Louise at Northampton High School during the rush hour!) but I don't believe I've ever been here. It's immediately obvious that there are a number of old, very high status houses here, more than a tiny village would usually have, so there's a story to be told. The church of St. Michael's is low slung and quite dark inside. But the one-manual organ is a reasonably recent restoration with pretty pipes. St. Michael's is one of Ben Phillip's churches (Towcester): the last in the benefice for me to visit.

The buildings of Manor Farm have been developed. One of the properties is up for sale. It would be a lovely place to live, and the village website is comprehensive to say the least, so even in the absence of a village pub, life here could be involving and full.  I nearly wrote 'lovely safe place to live', but one of Northamptonshire's most notorious murders involved a victim now buried in the churchyard here, although the crime occurred in Wood Burcote, five or so miles away. It was a mid-Victorian event, and the details were grisly, and all the more shocking because there may have been a random element about them. Of course, in those days, a capital punishment was incurred. The perpetrator went to the gallows unrepentantly, even cheerfully so. Rural crime isn't a new phenomenon.

It's a short road walk to Slapton. On the way I encounter my second dog-walker of the day, and this one is ready to forgive my tramp-like state and greet me hey-fellow-well-met-style. Tiny St. Botolph's church is locked, but I'm going to have to come back when I look more normal. There are wall-paintings inside which were merely washed over in the 17thC.  I'm speculating of course, but perhaps someone at the Manor took precautions and did it themselves before crueller, more enthusiastic hands could get at them. Now they're restored, but in my grimy condition and at the end of a trudge, I didn't feel like disturbing the keeper of the keys at the farm.

The walk back to Abthorpe past the Mill takes one through small, intimate fields, the remains of an ancient landscape, where the sheep look curiously at the visitor as if assessing him for suitability. I feel strangely at home between the close walls. I don't know whether Matt Ridley would approve, but I like it a lot.

Stats man.  14k. 4 hours. 7 degreesC. 21 stiles. 18 gates. 6 bridges.  One young man going door to door with leaflets, possibly a window cleaner: ignored me in Bradden: acknowledged me in Slapton: might have bought me a drink in Abthorpe, if I'd found the pub.

Father
This experience of being a stranger...
I see it can be a privilege;
To be welcomed to someone's hearth;
To feel the interest and enquiry;
About how one looks;
About how one talks;
To be able to explain
Where one came from;
Who one's parents were;
What one does;
What one believes;
All very affirming.

But there's another side, don't you think?
The suspicious looks;
The conversations behind hands;
A reticence;
At worst, a turned back
Or a locked gate;
And then loneliness.
Isolation.

I'm just as bad
When a visitor, an alien,
Pitches up on my doorstep.
I too feel the fear.

So is this now a lost tradition:
Welcoming foreigners?
Is it a crazy thing to do,
As some people claim?
OK, let's name the elephant in the room.
I mean Trump
And his many followers.

Forty years ago
A friend once sang
Of being a stranger in the world.
I understand better now what this means
And haven't the foggiest
What to do about it.
Please help me, Lord.
Be my friend and companion.
Share your fireside with me
And let's talk about it.
Amen.

The Fog of War/One step enough for me

                                                      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.

A passing guest

It's Inauguration Day in Washington, and though the clouds may be gathering over there, it's cloudlessly sunny in Northamptonshire. The 'Today' programme tells me Donald and Melania's first dance at the Ball of Doom will be to the strains of 'My Way': 'And now, the end is near/And so I face the final curtain...'

You couldn't make it up, could you! Whose end? Whose final curtain?

The frost has been very heavy, and as I leave it in the direction of Grafton Regis, Alderton looks a picture. The tree surgeons are working around the churchyard. I have the first of several nice conversations with passers-by today: the weather's making everyone cheerful. But as sometimes happens, after the initial pleasantries, when I mention the purpose of my walk, there's a wariness in the eyes. The chap's wondering if I'm a religious nutter and considering if he may need to take sudden and decisive evasive action. I blame Midsomer Murders. But sometimes I ask myself the same question.

It's a blessing, the ground being so hard from the frost. Otherwise the first mile might have been a real pain today through the prevailing squelchy mud, but as it is I ride crisply over the top, noting the large number of mole-hills hereabouts. Does anyone know the likely population of moles in the UK? I shall Google it. Be back to you in a mo...

Answer: there are estimated to be 35 to 40 million moles in the UK (but not in GCHQ). Gosh, one between two, roughly speaking. You can have half of your own personal mole.

It's a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage, returning to Grafton Regis. Fifteen years ago I created a boy character called Thomas Adamson who supposedly lived his first years in the Manor House at Grafton, until a skirmish between the two sides in the English Civil War saw it razed to the ground (this much at least is true!) I had Thomas become a companion of King Charles and a keeper of the King's pictures, a device to allow me to follow the progress of the War up to the point of the regicide. I rather liked the book, published by the excellent Scholastic, but it didn't catch the imagination of the readership (or the Civil War was dismissed from the Primary history syllabuses!) and it was sadly deleted, perhaps before its deserving time. With the wisdom of hindsight, my writing wasn't necessarily stellar, but the ideas were good (very filmic, for any aspiring directors out there!) So here I am again, sitting outside the church of St. Mary the Virgin, imagining where the battle took place, recreating in my mind the terror of the villagers as they escaped along the ridge with their dwellings, humble and more gracious, in flames. Grafton is rightly and proudly aware of its history: they're making a special thing of it during 2017.

It's a short way to the Grand Junction Canal, where I turn right, and begin a longish walk to Cosgrove along the towpath. There's no McBoaty traffic, and there's a crazy paving of ice along the whole length of the water. The twittering birds and I have it to ourselves. Although the ground temperature is way down, the sun feels quite warm. The birds think spring is already on the way. I know we've at least got to deal with February first. A handsome bridge announces that I'm on the edge of Cosgrove village, and I turn up towards the church - a S.S. Peter & Paul. It's a charming building. An entrance through the tower takes one into a nave which is offset from the chancel by several feet, and the altar is very slightly lower than the entrance, giving a natural rake to the seating. I sit and read Psalm 39, and am struck by a couple of verses towards its close. (One of this psalm's themes is the transitory nature of existence - this is the one with the verse which asks of God: 'Lord, let me know my end...let me know how fleeting my life is'.) In its final verses the psalmist says: 'For I am thy passing guest, a sojourner, like all my fathers.'  Yes, I'm a 'passing guest' in all these lovely ancient places of worship, and it really is a privilege.

I cross the A508 and take a little lane I've often looked at but never explored, signposted to Furtho. The name means 'the ford by the ridge', and all I know is that it's the site of a 'lost' medieval village. What remains is the church, St, Bartholomew's. I didn't expect to find that the manorial farm has been quite extensively developed. There's now a little contemporary 'village' of businesses in the outbuildings which lie in front of the B&B: a sort of unconscious replacement of the original, though of course this is largely a nine-to-five community, with the limits which that imposes on the interaction between its members. It shouldn't mean there's no need of a church, but of course in practice it does: the building is in the safe hands of the Conservation Trust, and must look wonderful when candlelit for the occasional service or event. Oh, and Furtho's ancient dovecote also survives, looked after by the Council - interesting to visit if you've never been inside one before, but slightly random, taken out of context.

             (Photographic serendipity - my shadow superimposed on the sign to the church;
                                    Hat, stick, legs...all present and correct...more or less!)


Potterspury is a short walk across the fields. I hadn't twigged, when visiting Pury End and Paulerspury, that these are all references to pears, and presumably the making (and I hope the drinking!) of 'perry'. Potterspury still has a 'Pury Feast' which sounds nicely indulgent, and every year on their Patron Saint's Day (St. Nicholas), they make a girl or boy bishop. Echoes of Benjamin Britten come back to me from long ago. St. Nicholas' is in the same benefice as Cosgrove. It too is open, and is equally lovely inside, as broad as Cosgrove is narrow. While I'm admiring it, Ann(e) comes in to clean and we chat briefly. I ask about the music, because I'm thinking, hmm, nice looking revamped organ, welcoming warm church, comfy seats, obviously very loved and cared for, feasts, perry, what's not to like? The answer is that organists come and go to support the church on a rota basis and there are half a dozen or so loyal singers. Good. Would I want to add my name to the list?

It gets me thinking about the nature of parish life; that it's all very well to be a  peripatetic musician, dropping into other people's lives, and if you do a decent job, receiving their grateful thanks on a regular basis for the favours you've done them by giving your Widor or Bach or classily reharmonised last verse to O worship the King. But if you don't live where the music is, then you're a foreigner, a mercenary or a missionary, and too much of either of those occupations leads to spiritual imbalance. But just now, we need those mercenaries and missionaries until either a) we sort a new administrative structure for the Church or b) there's a sudden and unexpected revival of talented music-making among the young for the benefit of their communities (as opposed to their own personal fame and fortune). So, if I was ever asked, Potterspury maybe...

On the way to Yardley Gobion, I have a friendly chat with a Geordie in green wellies walking his Jack Russell, and am then surprised to find the village has a proper housing estate, with cars illegally parked on the verges and pairs of trainers thrown high over telephone cables. The only part of YG I ever see is the pretty bit along the High Street when I occasionally divert from the main Stony Stratford to Northampton road because of traffic difficulties. Near St. Leonard's church is the solid and superior Victorian villa of Prospect House. Once upon a time the view over the Tove valley and away to the Greensand Ridge at Bow Brickhill would indeed have been very splendid, but now it's blocked by modern housing.

St. Leonard's is a quiet chapel-like edifice dating from mid-Victorian times. Mr B. Pittam has traced a magnificent letter to The Times, printed on Friday September 21st 1860, in which a 'Yardley Gobionite' petitions for a re-balancing between the easy living offered by Furtho (four houses and sixteen individuals at that point) and YG (population 700 and no church). The letter ends: 'It is absurd to speak of ours as a national church so long as any of its revenues are used for making or keeping up snug sinecures, while at the same time large populations are crying out for ministers and churches.'  But I suppose it's worth reminding ourselves that this is the ecclesiastical counterpart of the abolition of rotten boroughs between 1832 and 1867.  It begs the question why originally there was no church in YG. Did a chapel in the now lost castle at the north end serve the spiritual needs of the village? Anyway, thanks largely to the Duke of Grafton (yes, there is one, although the family pushed off to Suffolk some time ago!) the Yardley Gobionite got his way just a few years later.

My route back to Alderton takes me via the 'Queen's Oak', in legend (and probable history) the trysting place of Elizabeth Woodville (of Grafton) and the future Edward IV, near a little ravine on a branch of the Tove. I had hopes of a lingeringly romantic spot still, but no chance, the vegetation is tangled and scrappy with the traditional countryside adornments of old tyres, discarded plastic piping etc., and the person who owns the fields above the river towards Alderton (perhaps the same one as has the solar farm mentioned a few walks ago) has been quarrying stone from the hillside leaving a right midden to be negotiated.  Bah! Humbug! Where's the Northamptonshire Tourist Board when you need them?

Stats man: 20 km. 6 hours. 3 degrees (Centigrade, not Prince Charles' favourite Soul Divas).
The lightest of breezes. Two marinas on the canal. One flock of Canada Geese. Magpies, jays, crows, and many LBJs, though my discrimination of these is pretty hopeless. 12 stiles. 11 gates.

Lord
Even in the depths of winter
I am continually astonished by the beauty that is all around us.
Move the hearts of people
Across the whole world
That together we may be good stewards
Of your marvellous creation.
Amen.

To Boldly Go...

Stardate 2017.  Through the medium of this blog, will you this year be my Will Riker, my Deanna Troi, my Worf, my Data, my Doctor Beverley Crusher, all beloved of memory? Will you accompany me virtually as I pursue my mission to seek out new worlds of Anglicanism in distant parts of the galaxy, to thoughtfully ramble around the diocese as the Spirit leads?

To recap. I've set myself the challenge of walking to every church in Peterborough Diocese by a series of circular, connected routes. Between April and December last year I visited ninety out of a total of about four hundred so there are still many miles to go before I sleep. The motives are curiosity and fitness, to explore how we can be members of one another within the eccentric, usually lovable conglomerate we call the Church of England, and to write a bit about the things that tickle my fancy as I walk.

I pick up the post-Christmas pieces in Pury End, following the Grafton Way a little way south east before veering due south towards Lillingstone Lovell. And yes, here I go breaking my 'rules' as soon as the new year begins, because LL is in Buckinghamshire, and until 1844 was actually an enclave of Oxfordshire: its church is still in the diocese of Oxford. But if I want a nice circular walk today, and I do, it fits the bill as my first point of call in 2017.

What difference does it make, worshipping in a particular diocese as opposed to any other? Having lived all my Anglican life in a single one, and experiencing the others only on holiday or in casual visits, I haven't a clue: you may know more than I. What I think I do know is that not much can ever be taken for granted. Things that seem obvious to one congregation or community can be seen as rocket science or abject nonsense in another. Expect the unexpected. And this may be a good thing. Let a thousand flowers bloom, perhaps. Resist conformity or uniformity, maybe. The Bishop of Peterborough has just released the 'charge' of his visitation to the Cathedral. I've read it, and some comments about it, and am still pondering its significance. There seems to be an agenda about promoting good governance throughout the C.of E., as well as in Peterborough, and possibly about a shift of power away from the Deans and Chapters of cathedrals: a challenge to their independence? And how does this sit with cathedrals as potential powerhouses of the Faith, with their attractive umbrella mix of solemnity and colourful celebration? And in this new and slightly scary era of politics, how does our renewing understanding of democracy interact with our Church?

More than twenty years ago a friend invited me to Geneva to help make a short film about one aspect of the work of the World Council of Churches. There was a steep learning curve as I encountered world Christianity, and over a few days a lot of my assumptions were turned upside down. I couldn't readily understand much of what I heard, and that was the stuff in English! Seeing the potentates of the churches worldwide all in one room together, dressed in their sometimes outrageously dandified finery, I was reminded at the time of the intergalactic gatherings which occasionally feature in Star Trek episodes. Like Socrates then, often best to consider yourself truly wise because you know nothing.

The fields are properly mucky now, and as I make my way on past Buckingham Thick Copse, each of my boots attracts several extra pounds of sticky clay, which is then washed off in the squelchy grass, a process that is repeated many times during the day. By the time I reach Lillingstone Lovell the sun's out. I stop and eat a sandwich on the Jubilee Bench outside the Church of the Assumption, which like our own St. Peter's sits atop a little bury. Whatever the first building here, quite a lot of earth was moved before its construction.

Down the road comes Philip Green pushing his trolley. Philip has Parkinson's. It's a trial. The tablets sometimes control the symptoms well, but then the effects suddenly wear off, and he has to rest when he'd rather not. Philip used to enjoy walking too, and on Exmoor, near where they lived back then, he and his wife would put in twenty miles a day. Oh, that's too much for me, I protest. Well, it was a score or so years ago, Philip admits. We talk a bit about the disease and the hopes for a cure, and then bid each other a cheery farewell. There's an ultra-physical word that's used in the Gospels for the emotion Jesus feels when an individual's plight moves him: it often precedes a healing intervention. I can identify a similar gut reaction, but of course have no means beyond tender prayer to do anything about it.

I turn north-west with Silverstone in my sights. The other side of the A413, the paths become vague again, so I zig-zag along the field margins to avoid dragging myself across tracts of tilth where the path should be. At the crest of a low ridge a grassy track takes me up between two strips of woodland until the stands of the Silverstone track at Becketts Corner come into view. A pair of red kites follow me for half a mile or so, swooping down overhead to within fifteen feet: I presume they've learned that humans will sometimes feed them, or perhaps they're hoping that I will die conveniently at their feet and they can pick me clean.. Their interconnected flight reminds me of the Falklands War when pairs of  USAF A-10 'Tankbuster' bombers would criss-cross each other in the Northamptonshire skies, diving and climbing, diving and climbing, confusing incoming fire, perfecting their deadly skill.

Silverstone was a Second War airbase, training the crews of Wellingtons for night bombing sorties. A memorial to the flyers stands at the entrance to the village. Of course, the protection of the view into today's motor-racing circuit is total, but for a couple of miles I follow its perimeter. In contrast to the previous pre-Christmas walk there's very little noise: just the occasional rasp of what might be a touring car. I've only ever actually watched one afternoon's racing at Silverstone, but there were a few years when I occasionally played at post-meeting parties in the workshop of the Eddie Jordan team, then bossing the world of Formula 3. These were Tom Sharpe-like episodes of raging testosterone excess (not mine!) I remember bodily sheltering my keyboard rig from showers of water and beer, some of it directed from the audience at the band, and, to be fair, some of it headed outward from the band towards the punters. 'Route 66' was always a point of danger, as lead singer Brendan would include heroic, rabble-rousing excerpts from Henry V at its climactic moment: 'Or close the wall up with our English dead etc.' A condition of employment was that Eddie should play drums on a couple of numbers: a southpaw. He could hold a tempo, usually frantic, more or less. But then, I shouldn't think he's ever contemplated giving up his day job!

At the top of the descent into Silverstone village I pass 'Graham Hill' and 'Brabham Close', and I spare a thought for my erstwhile classmate Tony Brise, killed in the aircrash that also saw the tragic death of Hill, a driver whose demeanour was so apparently in keeping with the fighter aces of WW2, moustachio-ed, debonair, gallant and modest. Tony was a karting champion, just beginning to make his mark on the world of Formula 1. At school he took little part in organised games because he was a chronic asthmatic, but none of us were in his league for sporting achievement. But for the accident, he too might now be regarded as one of the greats of British motor-racing.

A funeral is taking place at St. Michael's, Silverstone. From the church come the strains of 'Praise my soul, the King of Heaven'. (A friend has jovially taken me to task for referring to 'an organ playing', in a previous post. He properly reminds me that organs are generally - although not exclusively these days - played by humans, and I'm letting down the fellowship of organists by implying otherwise!) Outside St. Michael's the undertakers loiter in the street, discussing the route onwards. One of them crosses to the pub for a pee. His comrades banter that he'll be in trouble with the boss for drinking on duty. As I've said before, funny job: exact time-keeping, and the intensity of stage-acting combined with occasional flurries of disc-slipping physical activity and considerable periods of boredom. Wouldn't suit me.

The light is good, but fading. I take the simple option and walk the road to Whittlebury, rather than retracing my steps and using the fieldpaths. It's a longer pull up to the village than I'd reckoned and my quads are complaining as I turn into the path behind the church. St. Mary's is locked, so I look out over the churchyard and read a psalm. Whittlewood Forest (lovely, evocative name!) was once a great expanse of hunting woodland. The O.S. map shows some of the extent of the original, either side of the Silverstone complex. I'm sure there are good topographical or land-owning reasons why some parts remain and others have gone under the plough, but I'd need a geographer to tell me. A gentle, mostly downward path returns me to Pury End as the light ebbs away under clouding skies just before four o'clock. The day should have started and finished earlier. A man was killed in mysterious circumstances on the M1 during the small hours, and all the surrounding roads were in gridlock throughout the morning. An immigrant? A robbery with violence gone wrong? Alcohol? Whatever, a very sad, rather Midlands story...

Stats man:  18km. 5 hours. 10 degrees C. 10 stiles, 13 gates, 2 bridges. One goat-like hop over a brook. Robins, blackbirds, and more kites than the books say should be in Whittlewood. Two random walkers, one of them particularly disorganised and lost. One charming young woman on a handsome horse.

Lord
A sense of New Year disorientation,
A need to find my wobbly feet again,
A fear that I've lost my touch,
A concern that the light won't hold.
And oh, that flimsy, friable, fragility of life!
The gift that could in an instant be snatched away.
And what then?

I come back to You.
I rest in Your presence.
I ask that You will provide what I need;
That You will shelter me from the storms;
That You will give me the strength to endure;
That you will grant me the creativity to realise
Joy in my heart and
Celebration in our community
As I understand again
The nurturing love You hold for everything You have made,
Including me.
I ask it in Jesus' name,
Amen.

Winter Break

                                                        By Weston Favell church 2011

Regular followers may have spotted that I've not been stomping around the diocese recently. I'm missing it! Normal service should be resumed in January. I'm doing what Premier League footballers are all lobbying for - which is to have a winter break. In their case this seems to be because their poor little knees get an itsy bit cold in the nasty weather, tho' personally I think that if they're being paid gazillions of quid each year it's the very least they deserve. (I hope I'm not giving a hostage to fortune here and bringing on us all a 1962/3 style winter wonderland which will have me trudging through foot high snow until Easter!)

If you'd like to see what we've been doing this December, and don't know already, please have a look at http://www.adventstpetersdailyupdate.blogspot.com which will tell you far more than you probably want to know.

And if I don't catch you beforehand, have a lovely,joyful, peaceful Christmas and New Year!

Check in with me again somewhere around January 12th!