Re-entry

                                                    Georgian in Ecton
My metaphor for ‘lockdown’ has been a personal space-trip to Mars. Well, it seems as if we may now be into a ‘phased easing’ of the restrictions. From the days of early manned spaceflight I remember vividly the ground-breaking live television which accompanied the final hours of those missions, culminating in an ocean splashdown. The first generation tele-graphics made us all edge-of-the-seat aware that re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere was perhaps the most perilous moment for the astronauts. There was no room for error with the calculations.

Today I’m on what feels like a real pilgrimage. It’s a straight there, straight back, no frills walk from our front door to All Saints, Earls Barton on a route where the ground contours would certainly have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxon population, and perhaps to a Roman one too.

On my way through the green space in Weston Favell known as the Pyket Way Park, I pass an auburn-haired lass who lives round the corner, toddler trotting ahead, baby in buggy. She looks radiantly happy to be in the fresh air under a warm sun, and we share how good it is to be outside. We agree we’d go bonkers if cooped up for much longer. Further along, near Billing Brook, I meet Hilary and Doug Spenceley. Their son Haydon is the Rector at Emmanuel Church Northampton, which sits in the Shopping Centre most people think of as Weston Favell, even though it’s a mile from the village. Doug is a priest himself, and son and father now share work in a parish of considerable size and need. They don’t recognise me at first, because I’m wearing my scruffy hat. As every spy and n’er-do-well knows, you don’t need to change much for a disguise to be effective.

Up at Great Billing, I slow my step because fifteen metres ahead are two very fat people walking ponderously. They have a little girl with them. The woman coughs and staggers slightly and the man puts a steadying hand on her back. You can’t help wondering…

The Virus is raising some interesting questions about liberal values and truth-telling. Certain communities are clearly more vulnerable than others, and sometimes we’re able to say so openly. Sometimes however, societal mores still prevent us from candour. Obesity and addictions are factors which have actually endangered all of us. Cultural expectations may render some groups more susceptible to infection. Poverty amongst some may drag the many down. These issues shouldn’t cause either the political ‘right’ or ‘left’ to say ‘told you so!’ but they do suggest the work to which future society should turn its attention. For the people of the Church, it may suggest that neither a ‘social gospel’ or ‘evangelism’ is the answer alone: we need both. Did we ever really need to debate this?

The path winds on between houses, everything green and white with the cow parsley on the wayside. Beyond the dip to Ecton Brook and its scummy pond the fields begin, the broad, baked track rising until the tower of Ecton church appears suddenly large on the horizon. The view to the right over the Nene is expansive and shimmering. I have a theory, expounded earlier in the blog, that this was a Roman road, albeit a minor one. I based this on the alignment of the settlements on the spring-line, the location of Roman villas, and the fact that a known road peters out to the west at Duston just where it seems to be drawing a bead on the large Roman manufacturing plants at Irchester. Since then Ruth Downie, a friend with much greater knowledge of matters Roman, has pointed me towards the LIDAR ground radar surveys which include the fields to my immediate north. Sadly, no traces of any road seem to be visible on them.  

                                                 An ancient track...

Just short of the village of Ecton I drop to the bottom of another undulation, and climb through a collection of disdainful cows, much more interested in the lush grass than itinerants, to emerge on the pretty High Street. I beat the bounds of St. Mary’s churchyard, and then sit on a bench to snack. My eye lights on the graves of Edgar and Janet Dicks, neighbours of ours until their deaths two or more decades ago. Janet was the niece of W.J. Bassett Lowke, a famous name in early railway modelling and metal toys. Late in the first world war, Bassett Lowke commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintosh to design the interior of 78 Derngate in Northampton. This originally rather undistinguished town house has become a charming small-scale museum showing the full range of Mackintosh’s influential styling. His visual trademarks would make an interesting curatorial contrast with the De Stijl school whose striking, confrontational 3-D design can be seen in Dutch galleries alongside Piet Mondriaan’s more famous paintings. Janet played a large part in the preservation of 78 Derngate for the town and its visitors. Northampton doesn’t tend to do ‘chic’ or ‘on trend’, but there’s something timelessly attractive about Mackintosh’s work, though his black and white wall hangings in one of the bedrooms would give me a migraine.

The sheep mutter and coo to each other over the walls of Barton Fields where the clumps of nettles betray the sunken house platforms of the long-gone part of Ecton. This section of the path is new to me, and very lovely it is too, rising gently through fields and then dropping once more to a broad valley with stands of trees in the bottom, from which three gunshots ring out. I laugh because this reminds me of a famous line from the Jennings and Darbishire books: ‘Three shots rang out. Two of the detectives fell dead and one whistled through his hat…’

Now the sturdy mortared tower of All Saints appears behind the houses on top of the next ridge. I climb steeply but briefly, cross the road, and walk through the centuries of this ancient settlement to the entrance of the churchyard. It’s an awe-inspiring thought that the tower was probably constructed just a hundred years after Aelfred began to bring England together. There are puzzles galore about its origins. Behind the church is a castle mound and a deep ditch, unfeasibly close to the building as we see it today. Strip away everything except the tower, and it makes more sense as an element of the impossibly grandiose church of a rich manor. But then again, perhaps there was a monastic foundation here, pre-dating the arrival of a secular power which for a while had designs on demolishing the over-weening ecclesiastical presence. Pilgrimages are so frequently to the past, unless pilgrims are drawn for healing to the more immediately miraculous, as at Fatima or Lourdes. We need – I need – to be reminded of the generations who have trod the paths before me, and to bulwark my little faith with theirs. This is one of the hard things about ‘lockdown’: we begin to fight the battles with doubt on our own.

My mantra for the Church throughout this blog has been ‘better together’, but what I fear may be the case when we emerge from this contemporary nightmare is that we shall all be further apart, divided by poverty, age, ethnicity even more than we were before. And because we the Church have been largely silent and unavailable, I wonder if the ordinary people in Britain will forgive us. We are giving them an excuse to see us as deluded and irrelevant. I sit in the shadow of All Saints’ tower and think of the words of the hymn:

City of God, how broad and far
Outspread thy walls sublime!
The true thy chartered freemen are
Of every age and clime…

In vain the surge’s angry shock,
In vain the drifting sands:
Unharmed upon the eternal Rock
The eternal city stands’
            Samuel Johnson (1822-1882) *

But. We are not alone, and it isn’t just about us.

Will I resume the main part of my Big Walk next time, two feet back on terra firma?  I don’t know. I’m nervous how the heat shields are going to hold up…

·       No, not that Samuel Johnson…this one was an American clergyman, who sought the ‘religion behind all religions’, so you couldn’t say he was exactly mainstream. Our friend the late Michael Jones, a great student of hymnology, was apt to expostulate and rumble were this to be rostered for a church service near him (AMNS 173), on account of the writer’s heretical views, despite its ostensible Augustinian links.

Zoning out of Zoom? No like no lip sync?

Try ‘Ten On Sunday’ on www.vincecross.co.uk

It’s short. It’s free.  It’s just prayers, readings and music for each Sunday.

Life with the Glums

I don’t know about you, but these days I sometimes find it hard to get out of bed if there isn’t ‘something that must be done’, like for instance, putting out the refuse bins. N.B. Messrs. Veolia: it’s a real downer if, one of us having done that, at an exceptionally early time, you decide you’re not going to collect the food waste caddy this week because your dog’s had kittens. But I digress. The thing that usually gets us going is to say Morning Prayer together, but even then we often discover one or the other is struggling with the Lockdown Blues.  ‘Woke up this morning had me the lockdown blues/ Well, I woke up this morning had me the lockdown blues/Ain’t feeling too much better since I read me the BBC news…)’ There I go digressing again. Self-isolation doesn’t do much for the attention span.

Walking’s acknowledged as a remedy for mental health issues. Even twenty minutes can lower the blood pressure, and it can stimulate the creativity of poets and singers, sometimes at inconvenient moments. The invention of the mobile phone has been a great boon in this respect, allowing the owner to scribble the perfectly epigrammatic line or hum another killer hook into his/her little black vesta case while hanging by a fingernail off Striding Edge. Sue and I enjoy our daily permitted steps, which usually exorcise the demons of gloom and restore perspective. The longer the walk, the better, because a combination of endorphins and lactic acid gives one something else to think about, like how to conquer the world, or put one blistered foot in front of the other just one mo’ time.

Today I’m dispelling the Glums* by visiting the shades of the nuns at Delapré Abbey. As I pass our local, the owner’s emerging from the side door to exercise her dog. She lost her life partner not so long ago, and now the pub’s closed, and for all I know the beer’s going off down in the cellar. She’s worth an arrow prayer, I reckon, and gets one. That’s the thing about prayer – you don’t need anyone’s permission. On a narrow section of pathway, a bloke stands foursquare in its middle yacking down his phone, oblivious of my approach (see the previous posting!) I say ‘excuse me’ with as little attitude as I can manage, and turn my head to avoid any germs he may be directing towards me as I pass. I say a prayer for him too, less sympathetic, more pithy.

When I was a student an older friend who was going through a rough patch was walking around with a copy of Martyn Lloyd Jones’ ‘Spiritual Depression’ under his arm. I remarked that personally the sheer weight of the tome would leave me with the Black Dog. Reading one’s way out of despair wouldn’t work for me now, and hasn’t in the past.

The day is grey, but there’s that quality of light in the sky which lets you know the cloud is going to burn off: it’ll be lovely before long. I wish I could feel the same way about Covid-19 for all that the Tabloid Press intermittently promises the nation a release into the Sunny Uplands. As someone remarked this week, we keep hearing about ‘green shoots of recovery’, but there aren’t any signs of flowers yet… 

Down at Washlands they’re about to shear the sheep, and the flock has been penned right across the fieldpath towards Great Houghton. Strangely, I think the same thing happened here earlier in my Big Walk. I explain to the shearing team I need to use the ‘right of way’ and rather grudgingly one of them lets me through into the pen. I talk to the woollies soothingly as we all crowd together until I can slowly advance to the gate at the pen’s far end. It’s very jolly and cheering to be in such close proximity to so many gentle animals, the week after the Sunday Gospel would have been John’s account of Jesus’ likening himself to the ‘door’ of the sheepfold.

I pause in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Great Houghton, and look over the wall at the pluperfect lawns and fountain of the adjoining mansion. There are thirteen on the electoral roll of this desirable village which though situated so close to the centre of Northampton still retains its rural atmosphere. I love the area opposite the church with its beautiful ironstone houses and the ancient hollow way that drops down over the field towards the Nene. Everything about the place tells me there’s a great, thriving community here. So why do so few of them beat a path to the door of St. Mary’s, and will that change once we’re in the New Normal and have left the Before Time behind? And can we find some new ways of referring to these changing circumstances please?

I always thought I knew the green spaces of Northampton inside out, and am humbled and amazed to find that the Brackmills Country Park totally eluded me pre-Virus. Having enjoyed a taster of its delights on the previous walk, this time I’m going to try and follow it around the perimeter of the Industrial Area all the way to Hardingstone before making my way on to Delapré. I track the green ravine of the old railway from Great Houghton until I can turn into the Park, and then follow the tarmac up to the left in the area known (with some exaggeration) as ‘Little Norway’. A pair of red kites wheel overhead. They’ll be roosting on the roofs of the Guildhall soon. Shielded from the bruiting of the commercial area, the choir of humbler birdsong is loud in my ears, and then when I go ahead uphill, now on a grassy path, the scent of the may is really heavy on the quiet air. Friend Richard the drummer used to design industrial areas for the Development Corporation in the 70s, and in retrospect what a brilliant job they did. In effect I’m walking through an arboretum of thirty/forty year old trees all now in their prime: it’s a total delight. At the top of the hill there are occasional fine views across a hazy Northampton, the sun glinting off the white roofs of the warehousing, in one place giving the illusion of a lake. In the middle ground I can see the Express Lifts Tower, and beyond it the rise to Duston with the tower of the old St. Crispin’s hospital on its crest. There’s always a serpent in the garden, though. I try to stay high, but this turns out to be a mistake – the Country Park is really divided into two sections split by a feeder road, which means the walker needs to lose height before climbing again. My laziness brings me out to an area designated for future housing needs and currently surrounded by chain link fences. Three quarters of a mile of scrappy paths into Hardingstone is the consequence. Make the most of this woodland while it’s pristine. My experience along the paths of comparable areas around suburban London suggests its quality will rapidly degrade once the housing estates are contiguous.

                                                Cowslips at Brackmills                                  
I stop for running repairs and a sarnie on the stone seat of the village War Memorial, and in this weekof the commemoration of VE Day fall into conversation with a chap from Liverpool much the same age as me. He served in the Royal Engineers and so is passionate about all things military. He and his wife have the letters written to and by one of the WW2 dead celebrated on the Memorial – James Morris. This man was killed during the siege of Monte Cassino. My co-conversationalist himself lost a close friend at Goose Green during the Falklands conflict. We agree that few families avoided bereavement in the Second War. As I follow the path down under the dual carriageway and into the green spaces of Delapré, I remember the Battle of Northampton, fought close to here in 1460. The nuns tended the wounded and dying, quite possibly including Henry VI. It must have been a frightening chapter in the ministry of this Cluniac foundation, although a hundred years previously they confronted the terrors of the Black Death, which carried away one of their Mother Superiors. For me, it’s just another reminder of the long-standing cross-European links – Cluny is, what, six hundred miles from Northampton? But I mustn’t preach.

                                 Seen in the window of a Hardingstone house

I relish the graceful early summer parkland, the golf course naked of players, the careless remains of the nineteenth century landscaping, featuring the delicious lemony green of the parades of low spreading oak trees, and emerge into the housing sprawl of Far Cotton, with its massively spired church of St. Mary’s. I pause in the churchyard beside the apse and gaze up at its height, wondering how a church this size can ever come back into proportion with its ministry and congregation. Yet Sue tells me that when some friends of hers worshipped here in the early 70s it was a thriving Anglo-Catholic community.  The demographics have changed markedly since then.

Do we have to let whole portions of our personal church history go? Will we ever sing together the way we did before?  Well yes, perhaps -  in five or ten years’ time, but will we be able then to re-set to where we were? And is that even desirable? Some will have died. Some will have no inclination. Conceivably there’ll be new doctrines and attitudes. The old shibboleths may seem irrelevant. There’ve been times over the last two thousand years when the laity has been happy to maintain a representative priesthood, by which I mean that the clerical caste spoke to God for us, took communion for us, prayed on our behalf, while we the people kept the world turning by the sweat of our brows. Is that what’s happening in this (temporary?) situation? Do you like that idea? Do you have the spiritual resources to stay faithful without collective worship?

I walk home, following the river. The 60s modernistic bulk of Carlsberg hums, unattended. How long will it take to gear it up for production again? Becket’s park is almost empty, even on a warm sunny afternoon. The university is closed.  A solitary heron takes flight. A policeman on a bicycle passes me, says a wary hello. I’m not glum anymore, just in a state of passive acceptance. For the time being.

Lord Jesus Christ
You taught us to love our neighbour
and to care for those in need
as if we’re caring for you.
In this time of anxiety, give us strength
to comfort the fearful, to tend the sick
and to assure the isolated
of our love and your love.
For your name’s sake. Amen.

(From the church noticeboard: St. Mary’s, Far Cotton)

*for followers of Musical Theatre, ‘The Glums’ may reference the long running hit ‘Les Miserables’. Going back a little further, some of us remember the Glum family in Muir and Norden’s famous radio sitcom ‘Take it from here.’  Ron, the hapless and perpetually disappointed son was played by the evergreen Dick Bentley, his girlfriend by the lovely June Whitfield, who passed away only last year after a distinguished career in comedy which took her onwards to ‘Ab Fab’ and beyond. All of these are Glums to enjoy, if you can access them.

                                               The Church of St. Carlsberg...                     

On the road again #2 *

Social distancing isn’t always so easy on the hoof. For example there’s the situation where you make a sharp turn round a dense privet hedge to find some steely-eyed individual bearing down on you along the pavement at Mr. Wilkins’ customary four miles an hour ( cf. Anthony Buckeridge’s ‘Jennings and Derbyshire’…) Or there's the leotarded occasional runner, gasping for breath and about to expire who’d run straight through you if you didn’t step into the gutter.  Or the bloke staring vacantly into space while yelling down his I-phone. Or the family with two kids and two dogs who occupy their own mobile, self-isolating space five metres by five metres, imposing their right of way by sheer force of numbers. The ratio of times I take avoiding action compared to the occasions other parties give way? Probably about four to one. It’d be different if I was six foot six and eighteen stone - which is why dictators are so often small of stature. They’re taking their revenge on society. Better keep tabs on that Michael Gove then…

Down near the mill I come across a woman I’ve seen before. Her exercising m.o. is to drive her toddler and his push chair forward at about a three hours thirty marathon pace. Amazingly she still has the puff to say hello. Her (their) regular morning run is six miles. Respect!

Today on my Covid-interim ‘spokes of the wheel’ phase of the Big Walk pilgrimage I'm travelling from my home in Weston Favell to Hardingstone. I cross the Nene at the lock gate. The Washlands reservoir stretches out to the west. It’s a sunny day, but even so the view from here always strikes me as rather bleak. It encourages maudlin thoughts, so the song which comes to me as I stand on the weir and watch the rushing water is David Crosby’s Lay me down:  ‘Lay me down in the river/And wash this place away/Break me down like sand from a stone/Maybe I’ll be whole again one day… ‘

The path above the reservoir describes a lazy semicircle towards the Bedford road out of Northampton. Then I move forward on a towpath past the Britannia pub, where the owner is using the closure as the opportunity for a spring clean and spruce up. In contrast, above the Rushmills lock there’s an untidy collection of decrepit narrow boats whose hippie-ish inhabitants have strewn the river banks with a decade’s worth of ordure and detritus. One of the boats is decorated with the words of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I harrumph to myself that if this local environment represents the Nirvana to which the boat-dwellers aspire, it’s a pretty poor outcome. ‘Imagine there’s no heaven…?’ Exactly!  Never liked the song, not one little bit.

A guy and a girl are exercising beside the path near the Rowing Club, laughing as they stretch and pull. The white water course is dry, the canoes safely tucked up in the boathouse. I turn about, and crossing a side channel to the river, see a young snowy-white egret, stealthy of tread, patrolling the water. I pass under the disused railway line which once would have taken business people and shoppers from the St. John’s Station (where the Morrison’s supermarket now is) via Olney to Bedford, and then I’m in the Brackmills Industrial Estate.  I pass the Wickes warehouse, and then the British Pepper and Spice factory, with the sixties-university like castle of Barclaycard away to my right. A few years back the Pepper and Spice place burned down, and great was the conflagration. Now all is made new, and as I walk past I'm taken on a rather extraordinary aromatic trip around the world. There’s pepper to be sure, but also cumin and tarragon and something more exotic still. I find Houghton Lane, more a cycle path than a road these days. It pulls up out of the valley and emerges at the corner of Hardingstone village by Back Lane. The views are a little obscured now but as at Gayton, there’s a sense here of where the money in Northampton ended up – gracious houses on a balcony overlooking Delapré Park. That’s not the whole story of this village though, because as the name perhaps suggests, the area was also a source of ironstone for building the expanding towns of the county, winched down to the Nene on a tramway by a fixed steam engine.

The church of St. Edmund is handsome. Beverley, the rural dean, lives in the relatively modern rectory off Back Lane. Her predecessors would have dwelt in the apparently Georgian pile at the rear of the churchyard back in the days when everyone was cold most of the time.

It takes a bit of mental effort to connect the idea of pilgrimage with this semi-urban stroll. Even now, as I write up this walk, with all its references to pop music and children’s literature, its recognition of history and sense of place, its acknowledgement of the people I've passed, I struggle to remind myself of the point of it all. I suppose I’m underscoring for myself firstly, and then for you as my reader- companion, that we owe everything to God, that despite the way I sometimes feel, everything is under his care. More than ever at this weird time, the words of Richard Gillard’s fine hymn ‘Brother, sister, let me serve you’ come to mind:  ‘We are pilgrims on a journey/And companions on the road/We are here to help each other/Walk the mile and bear the load.’

Today is St. George’s Day. The odd thing is that he wasn’t always England’s patron saint: his predecessor was St. Edmund (‘King and Martyr’). Edmund was deposed from his patronage role thanks to Richard I who felt that George had been of material assistance in the winning of a battle near Jerusalem (always a place to encourage strong inclinations and rash decision-making). There remains a body of opinion which would like to see Edmund reinstated even now, and after a petition the House of Commons was mandated to debate the notion as recently as 2016, though I must say that passed me by. If King Aelfred’s life is cloaked in myth and dense historical fog, it’s pretty transparent compared to E(a)dmund’s. It would seem he was a king of East Anglia, and was killed by the Danes. His reputation was such that coins were struck in his name long after his death, and even the Vikings came to honour him. Apart from that, there's next to nothing – slim stuff on which to build a national saint…so we’re stuck with the ubiquitous and not so very English George. But I guess more churches are dedicated to Edmund…

I drop back down the lane to walk home a different way by Great Houghton, through the surprise of Brackmills Country Park with its trees, lake and relatively lofty elevation, to the (in railway terms) steep incline of the Olney line’s trajectory away from Northampton. I pass four Eastern European factory workers, sharing a jovial and distinctly non socially-distanced lunch, and then two labourers sawing tree trunks within a hair’s breadth of each other. The next months are either going to be a chaotic, semi-managed passage into ‘herd immunity’ or to acceptance that we now live with a multi-variant, more virulent analogue of the common cold. Once again I'm brought to a sober assessment of my own mortality. And this too is what pilgrimage is about. It’s not all rollicking, bawdy tales on the way to Canterbury, you know. Or even being paid for filming a fortnight’s celebrity jaunt to Istanbul, very good and sometimes moving though the recent BBC2 programmes were…

A report from Alison Grantly, Assistant to the Stat-Man…

15 km. 4 hours. 1 stile. 18 gates 5 bridges. 19 degrees C. Fine and sunny. Exactly 100 people passed Mr. Cross on the way, cycling, walking or running, not counting those working in their gardens or place of business.  That means in raw statistics, there’s the likelihood he passed at least one person with the Virus.  But of course, nothing’s ever as straightforward as that…

Heavenly Father
I've been to enough funeral services
to understand
that 'in the midst of life
we are in death'.
You know
(because in Jesus your Son
you’ve been there)
how frightening this is
when it becomes personal:
I mean…that personal.

Help me to rejoice in each new day
and thank you for it,
and to deal with the unknown
with courage.
And help me rise above my own fears
to assist with the needs of others:
their distress:
their pain:
their failing of faith.
Amen. 

·       (re: ‘On the road again’:  there’s the eighties’ song by Willie Nelson, which in the version I know sounds like the studio was full of everyone in the world who Willie ever played with, bashing or strumming something. Personally I prefer the quite different sixties’ blues ditty recorded by Canned Heat and sung by their physically massive frontman Bob ‘the Bear’ Hite in a strange near-falsetto – quirky, oddly chilled, spliff music from a time when ‘psychedelia’ often depicted a more nightmarish inner world.)

And in the absence of collective worship try a little 'TEN ON SUNDAY'.
Please go to:  www.vincecross.co.uk  and click on the menu.

Solipsist

There’ve been travellers’ horses in the scrappy water meadow behind Northampton’s Riverside retail development for years, piebald, hairy, rustic and not at all phased by humans, because hundreds of people pass close to them daily. They’re grouped by the gate, chomping on the sparse pasture, and I have to be non-socially distanced from them as I make my way down to the Nene, pretty much elbowing them to one side. Are they wild? Does anyone own them? If so, who? They’re apparently not for anything, whether work or riding. They just are. Which isn’t an observation one would need to make of, say, blackbirds or squirrels.

This is a path, part of the Nene Way, to the east of one of Weston Favell’s old mills, which I’ve walked a lot, though not so much in recent years. I remember bunking off morning worship down here one Sunday in a huff about something churchy, and marching my frustrations into the misty air.  Near where it passes through a second gate into the Billing Aquadrome’s land, the high symmetrical mound of Clifford’s Hill is obvious on the far bank through the trees – which aren’t fully in leaf yet. There was a ford across the river here in medieval times, and something of a river cliff, hence the name. It was a militarily strategic motte castle keeping north-facing watch over the river valley. I love the fact that the summit of the mound saw more domesticated use as a bowling green when the game came into vogue in the seventeenth century.

It’s a beautifully warm day, with a haze lingering into the late morning. There are some other folk about as I traverse the suburban housing at the outset of the walk, but in the Aquadrome only a handful of residents from the fixed bungalow caravans wander around, watching the adagio progress of the river and the birdlife. The ground surface has thoroughly dried: the ‘lockdown’ has been made bearable by the consistently fine weather of the last three weeks. What’s striking is the vast expanse of empty open ground where the site’s casual caravan traffic would normally have taken up residence by now. There’s no one there at all – whether because the government’s message about unnecessary travel has been taken on board, or the Aquadrome has shut its doors to incomers.

                                             Billing Aquadrome: April 2020

The English summer carries a host of associations giving shape and colour to time, depending on who you are. For me as for many others, the natural focus is on sporting events, all now gone from this year’s calendar, although English cricket still hopes for a miracle which would allow some matches to be played. Not even in wartime was the national game completely squashed, but I can’t see any amateur or professional version being feasible. The Olympics would have been a personal highlight. Some find a summer without Wimbledon unthinkable. Non-sporting people might mark the Lord Mayor’s Show or the Trooping of the Colour. From a faith point of view, the long stretch of Trinity is broken in late June by our patronal festival. Holidays in July or August are a necessary relief from the routine of work. At present the government is advising against booking even these. For the Aquadrome it means that the annual car festivals won’t be taking place. There’ll be no Friday evening processions of ancient Land Rovers, Vauxhalls, or American sedans onto its grass, there to be lovingly polished and primped. How will the public cope with these privations? I do not mean to mock. It’s a real question, to be considered in the light of domestic abuse and anti-social behaviour. Talking cars for the moment, I’m already seeing too much dangerous, criminally fast driving born of displaced frustration. Where is the Church’s voice in this? I don’t hear it, either at a local or most importantly, a national level. Have we become too much in thrall to a ‘multi-faith culture’, and too scared of giving a moral lead as well as a Christian message of hope to a largely secular world? Come on Justin! Get in there!

I’m on my way to Cogenhoe, and then to Whiston. I’ll have said this when I first visited the former on pilgrimage four years ago, but ‘Cogenhoe’ is one of those places which like ‘Cholmondeley’ sell the foreign visitor a complete dummy pronunciation-wise. It’s certainly ‘Cook-noe’, and more likely in old Northampton dialect, ‘Cook-ner’ (with a hint of a country burr on the terminal ‘r’). The ‘hoe’ refers to a promontory on which the straggling village sits: its ancient centre just falling off the hill’s eastern end close to St. Peter’s church. If you look back through the Big Walk’s annals, you’ll see I’ve been to Farthinghoe , and in Hertfordshire there’s the splendid Sharpenhoe with its ‘Clappers’ iron-age fort.

The heritage of Cogenhoe is celebrated in Church Street by a series of green plaques. I notice one honouring the artist Chris Fiddes whose nice son I once taught, and another for Sir John Hobson, once a Tory Attorney General. A little nearer to St. Peter’s church is a nod to Frank Cheer who ran an ‘outdoor beer house’ from a cottage. A note on the Heritage Society’s website remarks: ‘the distinctive smell of the shop is still remembered by older residents…’  I find no commemoration of sixties’ era Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves who once lived in the Old Rectory. I wonder why…?

St. Peter’s is a be-flowered quiet celebration all of its own, sitting in two acres of churchyard, teetering on the edge of the hill. There are earthworks protecting the land above the valley, but nowhere can I find a suggestion that any early military structure once sat beside it. I sit and look, thinking on the industrial history of this village, now largely a dormitory for Northampton and Wellingborough. Ironstone was once quarried here, but now you’d have to have a keen eye to spot any remaining clues in the farmed and wooded landscape. Once upon a time one of the main jobs of the school was to teach its pupils lace-making. As in so many other Northamptonshire small towns and villages, shoes were a literal cottage industry before centripetal forces drew the workers into Northampton itself and away from the domestic hearth. And now in 2020, an opposite imperative takes commerce away from the corporate centres and back into the home. In the nineteenth century the issue was how entrepreneurs could best control their workforce. How will that play out over the next twelve months? Compare and contrast Cogenhoe and villages of its ilk with all their sophisticated social connections and a church at their heart with anonymous housing estates replete with fear, loathing, and envious competition over status and wealth. Pilgrimage can generate optimism and pessimism, sometimes almost simultaneously.

I have the beginnings of a blister and leave Whiston for another day.

Stato man is on furlough, and regrets that under current contractual terms he is unable to contribute information.

Great Father of us all
We thank and praise you for the gifts you have given us:
The sun:
The rain:
The changing seasons:
The extraordinary variety and creativity of your people:
A sense of the past:
A vision of the future:
A faith that you have all things in your care:
A hope that we may see a new earth and heaven,
United in love for you,
Redeemed by the work of your Son,
Inspired by your Holy Spirit.
Amen.

And why the title to this post?  As I always say…I know you know this but…

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that we can know only ourselves. It might derive for instance from Descartes' famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ ( to be distinguished from Cogenhoe ergo sum  which would have been quite a good joke if I’d thought of it earlier!) In other words, I can be sure of one thing at least – which is that I’m thinking now. Everything else is uncertain, unknowable, and maybe unreal. Everyone else may be a zombie. All that I experience may be a dream which as surrounded me all these apparent years (or just maybe a few seconds…) This interesting, sceptical idea has hung around for more than two millenia. It can’t be refuted – in Karl Popper’s terms it’s not falsifiable – but if there really are any hardcore solipsists out there, I don’t think that’s going to worry them a great deal. Metaphorically, the term has a secondary meaning. In common language it might embrace anyone who thinks only of themselves, not necessarily from philosophical principle, but from dedicated selfishness. Can this be distinguished from the individualism which has pervaded contemporary society?  And will the current crisis provoke an examination of this? Whatever, the process of self-isolating and social distancing enhances the illusion that, sorry and all that, John Donne, but we are islands entire of ourselves.  I think about this as I walk. By myself. Alone. And every philosophical problem seems to shade into all other philosophical problems.

A question of guilt

If I walk a hundred metres or so from our front door, I find myself at what is probably a very ancient crossroads where the ‘Three Horseshoes’ pub stood before it was pulled down. Running more or less northwards is Booth Lane, taking the present day walker past schools and colleges up to ‘Buttocks Booth’. This is the site of a Roman villa, which sat on a hillside with a once-visible cleft, such that it reminded the ancients of…well, you know what it reminded them of! The ‘booth’ may have been the extant remains of the villa or a subsequent house.

Running east-west from the crossroads is the old turnpike road from Northampton to Wellingborough, built in the 1770’s, a newcomer to the business of road-charging, filling in what must have been a noticeable gap in the turnpike grid, but arriving too late to make the big profits that would have been hoped for. What were these eighteenth century motorways like? Well, first of all they were obviously an improvement on what went before, or else people wouldn’t have paid for them, but looking at this road in particular, one suspects the width, location and novelty of the road was as significant as any improvement in the technology initially employed in constructing the road surface. A little later, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, John Loudon Macadam’s innovations in the use of crushed stone made a difference to horse-speed and the comfort of travellers. Between Weston Favell and the toll bar in Abington the road skirts the estate of the Big House, holding to the higher and drier ground above the villages along the spring line. Nevertheless, a couple of minor depressions in the current successor A4500 road show where more persistent streams would have crossed the thoroughfare, and I guess it would have been pretty sticky thereabouts outside the summer months without constant patching and reinforcement. The appliance of greater science was necessary and Macadam was the man, though whether Northampton ever consulted him I don’t know.

Today I stroll in towards the town, past St. John’s Care Home, a lovely place with a croquet lawn laid in front of the main house, which must be a great rarity for such an establishment. Opposite it is an Aldi, spoiling the possible view out over the Nene Valley - but then before the Aldi was built a few years ago, the site was occupied by a sprawling and even less lovely garage. I hope all the residents are safe: they’re fearsomely vulnerable to the infection. Buses pass me, mostly completely empty, because potential passengers are heeding the coronavirus lockdown advice, and folk have spotted that public transport is a danger – which doesn’t help the drivers much. In London a number have died, either contracting the virus through walk-up at their counters, or perhaps from association with colleagues who have it. But how would one know the exact method of transmission? For the record, there’s not enough testing, because we don’t have the kit, either in terms of reagents or laboratories.

To my left the houses become grander and then the view opens up as I arrive at Abington Park, the grass falling away to the duckponds, which once provided the Manor its Friday fish. The profusion of March daffodils is fading fast by the intersection where the toll stood. I cross at an angle under the trees and creep up on St. Peter and St. Paul’s church from behind. Without musicians the bandstand always looks a lonely place, as if the circus had just left town and abandoned some of its hardware. The aviary is closed because of Covid - to protect the birds or us?  In a 1980’s golden summer I wrote some incidental music for a production of The Merchant of Venice here. I manned the tape recorders for most of the performances, and the evening warmth, the soundscape, the scent of the flowers, and the vocal interruptions of the park’s peacocks float back to me in a synaesthesia - the rapture of youth. There’s a very local connection to the Bard. His grand-daughter Elizabeth Bernard lived in the Manor.

The current Rector of St. Peter and St. Paul’s, ‘the church in the park’ is the Rev. Byung Jun Kim, a relatively young man from South Korea. Some of us tutted when we saw the virus expand its grip in his home country so rapidly during late January because of a cluster of cases arising from the culpable negligence of a cult religious group ( a negligence which has shaped worldwide ecclesiastical policy).  Now the boot’s on the other foot, and Rev. Jun finds himself in a besieged Europe, while the careful monitoring of the situation in South Korea has apparently contained the virus to a remarkable degree. They did have the kit, and they tested relentlessly.

But this is no time to apportion blame, point fingers or find scapegoats. Very close by is the site of the Abington Gallows where those convicted in the 1612 Northampton witch trials were executed. One wonders what the posh people in the then newly constructed Manor house thought of such judicial murder carried out on their very doorstep. Some at least of those hanged had been subjected to trial by water. The theory was that if the authorities ducked the accused and they floated then they were guilty, because one of the properties of being a witch was unnatural lightness. If they sank, well then clearly they weren’t guilty after all. Opinions differ as to whether this was a true ‘Morton’s Fork’ to ensure that once indicted, the victim would inevitably die. Some say that if they sank, a rope would have been attached with which to extract them prior to drowning, others take a more cynical view. I’m inclined to think of the seventeenth century as a society not so very unlike ours. But these proceedings reveal thought processes which superficially are a million light years away from our own. It’s instructive to look them in the eye though, particularly if we have a Christian faith which may be about to face novel challenges and attacks.

On my way home across the park, I pass the scene of a cricket match which lingers in the memory. I was called to the colours suddenly because a friendly team for whom I was still registered were one short for an August game. I opened the batting, having not touched a bat for six months, and was up to the early twenties in no time with a series of nice boundaries, one dabbed through third man, another more assertively off the back foot past point, a third turned past square leg’s right hand, and a fourth struck firmly through mid-on. Then on my call my opening partner asked for an impossible single. The throw was annoyingly accurate. I returned crestfallen to the ring. I can’t complain: my running’s never been very reliable. Bill and I had put on more than a hundred together one sunny day the previous season. He’s proud to be a Kingston, whose family in the late nineteenth century formed the complete county team when the County Ground had just been built five minutes up the road. It’s a story without parallel in the English game, and it brings a smile to my lips as I think of it now. There was a clergyman amongst their number: cricket and the Church have usually been good companions to each other, the game providing a too easy metaphor for correct moral behaviour.

My Father God

It’s the Government!
It’s the Unions!
It’s the Vicar!
It’s the PCC!
It’s the bloke next door!
It’s my parents!
It’s Philip Larkin!
It’s…
It’s everyone but me
And I know even in that moment
The self-deception of which I’m capable…

Thank you for the cycle
Of recognition
And repentance
And absolution
And forgiveness
And picking myself up
And moving on.
One more step along the world I go.
Limping but still more or less mobile.
Amen.

Alive and kicking?

Here we are sitting on our ball of confusion. Welcome to Babel Land.  Mr. Gove thinks a walk of up to an hour is enough exercise for one day. He doesn’t strike me as a sporty type. The police may turn me back if I set the Audi on course for a neighbouring county. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The inhabitants of (variously) the Peak District, Wales, Cornwall and Scotland wish to repel all potentially Covid-19 bearing boarders, and who can blame them? If you’re on Kinder Scout at the wrong moment the rozzers may take a drone snapshot and stick it up on social media for the rest of the public to shame and abuse you.

Are we down-hearted? Well yes, we are rather. Is the advice offered consistent, or even well-argued? Well, maybe not, but the point is, consistent or even well-argued advice probably isn’t possible right now. We’re all improvising. Do we just give up, and wait to die? Well, of course not.

So if I can’t continue walking the labyrinth to Peterborough by ever more distant circles, the themes remain the same. We need each other more than ever. We have to explore and then reconcile our differences as Christians in a greater cause. We are the Body of Christ still, even in the face of the virus and closed churches. F.D.Maurice had the gist of it a hundred and seventy years ago. Who was F.D. Maurice? I’ll leave you to look him up, but he was quite a guy, for a theologian. He said his job was to dig, not build, which I rather like.

But I can still - for the moment - without using a car, walk the individual spokes of a wheel, out and back, from Weston Favell to neighbouring churches, and so today I go east towards Great Billing. My Big Walk first took me to St. Andrew’s church in May 2016. Great Billing like our own ‘village’ has an ancient centre surrounded by more modern housing. The walk is entirely suburban, but the church sits on a prominence with ‘Big House’ parkland falling away from it.

On the way there and back I’m passed by a hundred and one people (literally!) They are walking, cycling, jogging and in one case positively sprinting. Most are very well-behaved, apart from one morose geezer who can’t control his greyhound cross in the immediate vicinity of an understandably anxious woman with a baby in her arms. Then there are the kids splashing about noisily in Billing Brook, and four lads playing footie who don’t look particularly related to each other. Should I count as law-breakers the middle-class folk in a leafy close maintaining their two metres distance, but clearly having multi-neighboured social time? Probably. Calculating epidemiological risks is an imprecise science. We’re all taking our chances, more or less. I see more dogs in a limited time span than since last we were in Padstow and I encounter just two people wearing masks. On a Friday afternoon, it’s quieter than the most subdued Sunday, occasional distant blasts of Bhangra and Metal aside. The pathside woodland near St. Andrew’s has been coppiced. A contractor steadily mows the long stretches of grass by the church, blades sensibly high, in case of late frost or unexpected April heat. There are more people wandering the churchyard than I expect; parents doing some approximate home-schooling, looking at the inscriptions on the graves, enjoying the flowers and the quiet ambience. The notice affixed to St. Andrew’s door tells the world that the Church is alive and active, waving, not drowning. Are we?

Being a bloke, I’m only too aware that it’s men who are most susceptible to severe illness and death as a result of Covid. But I also notice in recent days that most if not all of those both taking risks with the virus and also projecting themselves in the faces of their fellow human beings e.g. by furious and noisy driving/biking - are also male. Is there a connection? Or is the presence of testosterone merely a spurious common factor between Covid mortality and manly strut?  And how do I read this in the context of men a) frequently wishing to dominate as ‘leaders’ in a religious context (as they also do in many other public contexts) and b) being absent from ground-level contemporary Christian religious observance, where that faithfulness isn’t expressed in more enthusiastic, extrovert forms? 

I stop by Billing’s cricket ground to mourn two amateur cricketers who this place conjures up. ‘Tot’ Manning was a sixth former when I was teaching at Northampton’s School for Boys in the seventies. He was generously built, and wielded (by the standards of those days) a heavy bat from which the ball was apt to depart with such rapidity that bowling slow-medium at him wasn’t a lot of fun. Tragically, ‘Tot’ died early in his college career, and ever since I hope he’s been terrifying close fielders on the heavenly cricket field. He was a protégé of Trevor Ford who captained the school’s staff cricket team back then, and whose funeral was conducted on-line this last week, as sadly many others will have been. Trevor was Yorkshire through and through, a purveyor of wily off breaks, delivered from almost a standstill because of arthritic knees. Both would have been surprised to find themselves mentioned in writings largely devoted to faith. Surprised, and in Trevor’s case at least, perhaps not entirely delighted.

Music and faith are intertwined at Billing. I may have previously mentioned that in 1577 Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, at that time riding high in Court circles, and having persuaded Elizabeth into granting them a monopoly on the printing of sheet music, also managed to obtain a lease on the Billing estate (and other land besides) for forty quid a year. It passed out of their hands not so long afterwards, but of course Tallis was dead by 1585, and Byrd was by then slipping out of favour for his Catholic inclinations. Elizabeth was not terribly amused by William’s churchmanship, but cut him more slack than she did for others.

Great Billing’s pub is the Elwes Arms, after the largely Catholic family who lived in the Hall. Gervase Elwes was a celebrated tenor at the turn of the nineteenth century, a mate of Percy Grainger, and a noted, pioneering exponent of Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’. He died in a terrible railway accident in Boston, Massachusetts. Elgar said shortly afterwards: ‘My personal loss is greater than I can bear to think upon, but this is nothing – or I must call it so – compared to the general artistic loss – a gap impossible to fill – in the musical world.’

I was brought up on ‘The Dream’, a work that’s absolutely without comparison as far as I can see, vividly imaginative and frighteningly emotional. I’ve found it difficult to listen to ever since my early teenage years, and despite its lovely colours and melodies which are both tender and plangent by turns, I’d find it impossible right now.

Stat Man:  Service temporarily suspended, but for the record:  13 deg C: sunny: 7 km.

With churches closed for the time being, many people are turning their minds to the maintenance of worship by other means. My small contribution to this is to provide a weekly ten minutes of audio – what we might have been doing/listening to in church on a particular Sunday if we’d been there. To find the various postings, please go to my website:

http://www. vincecross.co.uk

and click on the button ‘Ten on Sunday’ at the top of the site. This should take you straight to them. Alternatively, just scroll down until you see the pictures of a magnolia tree.

We are Borg*

                                         Crownwell Farm Wing
I’m expecting calls today, so the phone is chirruping away in my pocket as I turn right from Wing’s Middle Street into the village’s Bottom Street. Of the two, where would you rather live? The one might suggest a lack in firmness of purpose, the other a scatological sense of humour (though these are not the only possibilities: other interpretations are available!) The call is from the estate agent handling the sale of the old family home in Kent. The number of people interested in viewing what should be a highly desirable house has declined. Should we reset the price? Well, of course - the property market is bound to reflect the economic uncertainty existing elsewhere, so yes, we must.

I slither and slip down a soaked field to Crownwell Farm where chickens and ducks range freely and contentedly under pretty pink-blossomed trees. The Rutland Flyer bus scoots past up the lane, and I relay the estate agent’s news by phone to Sue. Then as I heave myself up a muddy ginnel beside the site of the old Manton Junction station, I field a call from My Client enquiring about the viability of next week’s recording sessions in London. They’re going ahead, but with me producing from Northampton by Skype. I always said I’d give up recording if it was reduced to us all working in our own little boxes made out of ticky-tacky (cf. Pete Seeger), but that’s what there is for the moment, and for all I know it’s a situation that may become permanent.

We’re so very connected, which provided the Internet holds up under the pressure from gazillions of bored kids and their parents playing Super Mario, is going to make the coming weeks and months survivable, mentally speaking, but which is also pumping infomatic fear into our homes hour by hour. These days I’m turning the phone off every evening to avoid Night Terrors, but here I am, on a lovely but chilly day, wired into the world even as I ‘do pilgrimage’ around the Rutland countryside.

As the path emerges by back gardens into the edge of Manton, a refuse lorry emblazoned with Rutland Cares reverses down the rutted lane towards me. A white-bearded, weather-hardened bloke leaps down in sprightly fashion from the cab, Father Christmas collecting sacks rather than distributing from them. He buttonholes me – almost literally – there’s no regard for social distance: ‘Don’t mind me asking…’ he trumpets, no introduction, expelling spittle into the surrounding air, ‘But ‘ow old are you then, mate?’  I spot the direction in which we’re headed. The government has suggested the over-seventies should confine themselves to barracks for the next twelve weeks. I say I’m sixty-eight. ‘And you walkin’? ‘Ow far you goin’ today then?’ I guess at a dozen miles. ‘Exactly. That’s what I mean…’ he offers to the world at large. ‘My buddy, ‘e’s the wrong side of seventy, but ‘e’s as fit as a fiddle. Works out, runs, the lot. He’d go flippin’ barmy stuck inside all day. Government wants their head tested…’

It isn’t an argument I can successfully contest. Seventy’s an artificial limit, and later I hear politician David Blunkett and Christian Wolmar, the railway campaigner, make similar points on Radio 5, but the general principle is surely right: we have to separate to survive. And by the time I write up this walk, the advice/instruction has been generalised with increasing force to the whole population. But here in the UK we’re still more free than friends Dorothy and Malcolm in France, who with the whole of the public there are restricted to within 500 metres of their property unless they fill out a form and take it with them. I extract myself from my Caring Rutland encounter with as much respect and dignity as I can muster, and wander across to St. Mary’s church, musing on my new possible exposure to Covid-19, and how difficult it can be to politely observe a sensible distance (This has also become easier in the days since, as the message has been gradually absorbed.)

For any human being, but with added weight and affect if one is Christian, and perhaps a little more still if one is a huggy/kissy/mwah mwah semi-theatrical, this all goes against the grain. We’re meant to be together, to show love and solidarity in physical ways. The human touch makes us more mentally healthy and grounded. When will we be able to fully trust other people again, on the Tube, in our supermarkets, in our houses, in church?

I spend a few minutes in higgledy-piggledy St. Mary’s, a church without a tower, but with the remains of the medieval chantry within, to the side of the plain, well-scrubbed sanctuary. When I emerge Rutland Cares are now making their deliberate way round the village, causing a posse of leisure riders to wait and then wait some more the far side of the crossroads. I laugh, because I remember the dustmen leitmotif from the excellent 80’s telly series A Very Peculiar Practice. An ingenue doctor (Peter Davison) finds himself attached to a medical practice at the subtlely dystopian ‘Lowlands University’. Feral nuns of rather masculine disposition roam the deserted campus, and so do sinister white refuse trucks. We’re left to make up our own minds about what either are doing. I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere on Netflix or Amazon, a gentle, funny, respite from the blood and gore of Game of Thrones etc. .

The dustmen finally part company with me for good as I walk the path beside the road which follows the ridge, Rutland Water to my left. Eventually I can drop down on a track to be on the shore of Rutland’s own little Galilee. Walking, cycling or driving the perimeter of a lake – it’s all the same – getting where you think you’re going takes a great deal longer than you’ve bargained for. And in this case the rise and fall may only be ten metres at a time, but then again, there are an awful lot of ups and downs. Another phone call announces itself. This time I’m able to put to rest something which has been causing a great deal of anxiety, and so I pitch up beside the boat club at Edith Weston with lightened step.


The village is neat and the church likewise, but there’s trouble with the roof, as there also seemed to be in Manton: it may be that the Lead Thieves have been at it again. As everyone will tell you, the village takes its name from Edith, Queen of Wessex and England, officially crowned, sister of Harold Godwinson, and wife of Edward the Confessor. Thus she lost both husband and brother in the same famous year, 1066, and survived another nine years before she was buried beside her husband in Westminster Abbey at the direction of William the Conqueror, the new Norman king. She deserves greater recognition as one of the most significant women of British history.

I cross the top road beside what was formerly the site of RAF North Luffenham, but which has more latterly become St. George’s Barracks. In its RAF days, the station was tasked with an extraordinary range of activities. Thor nuclear missiles were based here during the early 1960s, but it also hosted electronic repair units, medical services and a language school, training people to monitor Eastern European transmissions during the Cold War. In its new guise as an Army establishment it maintains its medical tradition, but also hosts the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. There are apparently a lot of Working Dogs in the Army. And now I’m thinking Peter Sellers:  It’s been a hard day’s night/And I’ve been working like a dog/It’s been a hard day’s night/I should be sleeping like a log. Yes, yes, I know:  it was written by Lennon and McCartney. But for a full-fat sixties’ diet you really need to hear the Sellers’ version in tandem with the original.

North Luffenham church is outstanding, from the point of view of its context, its exterior and its interior. This is a country minster church which tells you much about the status of the village in medieval times, or the wealth of its patrons. It’s lovely. For once Simon Jenkins is rather mealy-mouthed – though he begrudgingly gives it one star. He writes:  

‘Away from the bleakness of Rutland Water and the tat of the local RAF (sic) station lies a gentle group of farm, manor, rectory and church on the slopes of a hill dropping down to the River Chater…the tower is of the ‘dunce’s cap’ type, made ponderous by a jutting stair turret and nave aisles that embrace its base…’

It must have been something he’d eaten.

I arrive as the children are ending school for the day. A young woman is standing hunched into the wall, a few metres from the school entrance, weeping into her mobile ‘phone. It’s hard not to read everything in the light of Covid-19. Has she had some bad news about a relative? Is she wondering how she’ll cope once the children are sent home from school? Is she just terrified about the general uncertainty?  It might of course be nothing of the sort: I may simply be projecting my own worries on to her.

I walk the lane which rises gently from the western edge of the village, and keeps climbing steadily to the hamlet of Lyndon, where St. Martin’s church sits on its picnic-friendly green by a gothic ruin and next to the evenly proportioned, chateau-like Hall.

Once upon an eighteenth-century time, the meteorologist Thomas Barker lived here. In 1749, he saw what was probably a tornado:

'A remarkable Meteor was seen in Rutland, which I suspect to have been of the same kind as Spouts at Sea…

It was a calm, warm and cloudy Day, with some Gleams and Showers; the Barometer low and falling, and the Wind South, and small. The Spout came between 5 and 6 in the evening; at 8 came a Thunder-Shower, and Storms of Wind, which did some Mischief in some places; and then it cleared up with a brisk N.W. Wind.

The earliest Account I have was from Seaton. A great Smoke rose over or near Gretton, in Northamptonshire, with the Likeness of Fire, either one single Flash, as the Miller said, or several bright Arrows darting to the Ground, and repeated for some Time, as others say. Yet some who saw it, did not think there was really any Fire in it, but that the bright Breaks in a black Cloud looked like it. However, the Whirling, Breaks, Roar, and Smoke frightened both Man and Beast. Coming down the Hill, it took up Water from the River Welland, and passing over Seaton Field, carried away several Shocks of Stubble; and crossing Glaiston, and Morcot Lordships, at Pilton Town's End tore off two Branches … I saw it pass from Pilton over Lyndon Lordship, like a black smoky Cloud, with bright Breaks; an odd whirling Motion, and a roaring Noise, like a distant Wind, or a great Flock of Sheep galloping along on hard Ground … As it went by a Quarter of a Mile East from me, I saw some Straws fall from it, and a Part, like an inverted Cone of Rain, reached down to the Ground. Some who were milking, said it came all round them like a thick Mist, whirling and parting, and, when that was past, a strong Wind for a very little while, though it was calm both before and after. It then passed off between Edithweston and Hambleton, but how much further I do not know.'

Isn’t that just absolutely fab!

Orders of the day:  21 km. 6 hours.  Bright and cheerful weather, with a chilly breeze. 11 deg. C.  Four churches: all open.  No stiles. Seven gates. No bridges (that I noticed).

Father
Here we are:
Your children -
A scattered family
Shouting from the balconies
To each other
And to you.
Hear our prayer
For deliverance from
Sickness, sorrow, loneliness and death.
We repent of our carelessness
With the gifts you have given us.
Reform us, even at this late time,
Into the creatures you intended us to be.
Grant us grace
To be wellsprings of love
Refreshing an exhausted and anxious humanity:
Pouring out a glittering witness
To your great glory.
We pray it through Jesus Christ
Your Son
Our Lord and Saviour,
Amen.

·        The Borg were a new and terrifying alien invention of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) which featured the mellifluous tones of Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard – for some of us the most interesting and complex character in all the various ST series. The Borg were a robot collective whose m.o. was the assimilation of civilisations they encountered, and whose catchphase was the immortal ‘Resistance is futile’ (American English ‘Fewtle’)  They stand as a metaphor for ultimate connectivity, beyond individual personality and emotion.