Enough already?

The Audi is due a service. A technician greets me by name as I drive into the garage yard at precisely 8.40 (I've been schooled not to be late). I and the Audi are directed around the yard to an electric door which lifts upwards and allows us into a gleaming white interior where the keys are taken by a second acolyte. I walk into the showroom to do the paperwork. The car is presumably getting its pre-med. Car servicing and surgery are merging. How long before Audi offers facelifts and appendectomies?

Leaving the car to the ministrations of the doctors, I start to walk. Along the road at Upton, the old village has gone, and St. Michael's is under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. On a damply fertile Iris Murdoch sort of a morning, it sits prettily thirty metres from the busy A45 on the edge of the estate once owned by the rich Knightley family, now a private school. The paradox is that brand new housing crowds in on the old church, which might again attract worshippers if there was space for some parking. This will never happen, but one has to walk quite a way to find something that looks like an Anglican place of worship.

In this part of Northampton houses are going up everywhere. I find it difficult to square what developers and governments say about the numbers of houses being built with what seems to be the case on the ground. Duston Benefice has three active churches, one of which is tasked with looking after all these new builds. It will be a big job. I walk up to the location of Berrywood Church, which is close to if not inside the grounds of the original Berrywood Asylum, later St. Crispin's Hospital. The murky day adds to the loveliness of the misty view down towards Nether Heyford. Up here on a ridge which once commended itself to the Roman constructors of the south-east trending road towards Northampton from Nobottle, you can see why the Victorian asylum builders might have thought the fresh air of the elevated position would do the inmates good. St. Crispin's carries a powerful, uncomfortable memory from our early years of teaching. We used to visit a teenage pupil of Sue's here, worrying that ECT and other therapies were just making her problems worse. Without much effort of mind I can still smell the slightly sinister atmosphere and the overwarm, disinfected rooms. But there was a happy ending for her: a gradual recovery, a deepening faith and the eventual discovery of a calling.

In the stable block of the old hospital I stop for a coffee in the surprising 'retail village'which now occupies it. Just opposite is 'Jack Parnell Close', and I remember that Jack, son of Val, once recorded in our Milton Keynes studios, pausing briefly in a career which took in a variety of jazz and variety 
bands big and small as well as the musical direction of the Benny Hill Show and The Muppets. He was very unflashy: a less-is-more drummer. But why does he get a road named after him in Duston?

I now begin a roller-coaster urban stroll through various neighbourhoods, all with their own identity, some distinctly less genteel than others. St. Luke's, Duston is the ancient church in the benefice, set just beyond the slightly shifted centre of the old village. Standing outside the gate I sense the years roll away to reveal its original pastoral setting. St. Francis' is its sister church in the adjoining New Duston, where themed road plans (Cotswold Avenue...Mendip Road...Chiltern Avenue...ah! - perhaps there were other drummers hiding in the road names around St. Crispin's) attempt to break the anonymity of the housing projects. Some of the sixties' houses look in a dodgy state.

St. Francis' is a brick cube with a pointy glass steeple in its middle: a design from 1968 which continues to cause the parish grief because it lets the water in, but whose cheeky presence next to a parade of shops makes me at least laugh. Yes folks, these spires and towers say, here we Christians are, still among you, serving and suffering with you, doing our very best to bring Good News. This week I heard an atheist American scientist suggest on Radio 4 that Christians make a profession out of being morally superior to everyone else. Baloney! It's absolutely the reverse. Ain't we just the ones who 'acknowledge our faults and our sin is ever before us' (sic)? On this walk, beside the Anglican churches, I pass buildings belonging to the URC, the Methodists, the Elim Pentecostals, the Forefront Church, the Mormons and the Greek Orthodox. There's a nun at a Duston bus-stop, and JWs at a stall outside Northampton station. We're everywhere, and Lord knows this isn't triumphalism in secularised 2016. It's a Good Thing for the UK and the world, and shouldn't we be on the front foot about it?

Of all the encircled centuries-old villages in greater Northampton, Dallington is the smallest and most hemmed-in. There's a brook beside some cottages, the Wheatsheaf Inn, a gracious one-time manor house and St. Mary's church, and that's about it, but it's an extremely charming spot. St. Mary's like its companion a mile away, St. James, is partly clad in scaffolding: its preservation in working order is just one of the burdens the priest, Father Phill has to bear. From there I climb the slight hill into Kings Heath, once the most worrying sixties' generation housing estate in Northampton and still showing signs of real need. As I approach its central shopping area, I see it's flanked by two second hand shops, which tells you something. One of them is run by the local church - the 'Church on the Heath', a joint Baptist and Anglican venture, whose meeting place around the corner is humble and discreet. Away from the higher ground back towards the centre of town is the Spencer Estate. Time was that the two neighbourhoods were daggers drawn, Old Northampton v. The Incomers. Maybe that's all in the past now, but it's still possible to feel threat here. A late teenager on a BMX cycles fast towards and past me. He's wearing a mask, perhaps to ward off traffic fumes, perhaps to disguise his face. A few hundred metres later, I sense him coming up behind me again. I make sure he sees me grip my stick in anticipation of self-defence and he peels away at speed. I watch as he pedals furiously up a side road. He stops and turns to look at me defiantly.

Walking through Victoria Park alongside the railway and a tributary of the Nene, I obey The Rule which dictates that each walk must touch a previous walk at some point, so before turning towards St. James, I go to look through the railings at St. Peter's Marefair (27.04.16) and have a sandwich in the newish foyer of Northampton Station. It overlooks the site of the castle from which England was briefly ruled. Nothing of the castle survives bar the postern gate, not even the name in the station's title, although the town's walls are faintly traceable by the outline of the street plan.

The area of town to the west is known as 'Jimmy's End', and the Victorian St. James Church gave the famous town rugby club its nickname: 'The Saints'. I sometimes play the organ here, but the traditional two tone chant 'Come on you Saints!' hasn't so far featured in the liturgy. Ladders stretch up the St. James tower. On the opposite side of the road is one of Northampton's few surviving shoe businesses. The old bus depot used to be close by. The Express Lifts Tower, once amusingly characterised by the late Terry Wogan as 'Northampton's lighthouse' no longer tests lifts, but it's still there, one very big finger pointing towards heaven. Or so I like to think...

I return to collect the car. There have been complications, and although it won't be kept in overnight, prophylactic treatment has been required. Additionally the replacement of a single faulty sun visor will set me back £110. That'd buy a few dinners up on Kings Heath.

Stats man:  6 churches visited plus one redundant. 15 km. 13 degrees max on June 1st!! Drizzle most of the way. 3 postmen in shorts. One nun (in habit).

Lord
So, how much is enough?
I'm losing my bearings.
At my time of life I know I should resist an extra slice of pie but,
2.7 diesel or 1.0 petrol?
Cornwall or Cambodia?
Waitrose or Aldi?
Three loos or a single bathroom?
Just asking seems bourgeois and wrong.
Hubristic.
Especially when I see the pictures from Fallujah on TV.
Lord, please forgive me.
Please preserve my critical faculties, such as they are.
And teach me to be simple.
I find this all so very difficult.
Amen.