I just about remember a stricter Sunday observance, or the last traces of it, from a 50s childhood. Some Sundays were chock full of church even in the mid-1960s. It was still possible for Dad as 'Sunday School Superintendent' (there's a title you don't hear anymore) to arrive in Northumberland Heath at 10 o'clock to prepare for 'Junior Church' and for us to be back home at 12.45. Lunch would be leaping out of the oven on return and would be served, eaten and washed up by just after two so there was time to drive the four miles back to church to set up for the Sunday School teachers' training session which would last until four. Tea would be taken at home and a further journey made to Erith for the 6.30 evening service which would generally finish by 7.30 unless there was Holy Communion. But the cracks had begun to show. No one really wanted to show up for the afternoon sessions, and soon no one wanted to be at both the morning and afternoon services either. Televised cricket crept into the Sunday afternoon schedules (Let's hear it for 'The International Cavaliers'!). Down our way, if people couldn't actually afford to go off to the coast, they would drive up to Dartford Heath of a summer Sunday afternoon to watch other folks on their way there or back. Dad permitted himself a little light gardening if he wasn't required on duty (mowing the lawns = OK: laying paving stones = not OK). We listened to 'Round the Horne' on the Light Programme as we ate our lunchtime braised steak and rice pudding (though I'm sure my mum didn't get the Julian and Sandy jokes!). And soon it was time for Mary Whitehouse and 'The Permissive Society'.
Later on, when Sue and I fetched up in Northampton, an enthusiastic URC minister suggested to his congregation, including us, that it would be marvellous if we could spend all Sunday worshipping the Lord together. Well, as a fully paid-up introvert, not so much! Was there a confusion of quality with quantity here - as well as a lack of understanding about personality types? And if the answer is that such a thing may prefigure our future in heaven, well I respectfully hope there's something perfectedly practical for me to do when and if I get there, referencing the stuff I've been happily engaged on down here. With perhaps the occasional game of cricket thrown in...
I only mention this because Sunday observance now has a different context to that of 1960, let alone 1860 or 60 A.D.. And landing it on Anglican clergy the length of the land to preach about the issues that surround Sabbath-keeping in the height of an English summer when everyone seems to have gone to the moon is weird. But lest I forget, one of the ways in which our society's divided is between those who have tons of discretionary time, like me, and those who have none at all, who don't like what they have to do to earn their daily bread, and whose employers would be glad to take from them even the little discretion they have, cf. zero hours contracts.
Although there seems to be a lot of traffic wending its way through the narrow streets of the 'green-hilled village' of Grendon, there's no one about in the countryside at 10 in the morning. It's still and dull, making the newly haircut fields look spectacularly golden in the way that the sand does at Padstow on a gloomy day. On the path to Bozeat though, I have some animal company. I perforce have to make friends with a horse whose field I'm invading: she's curious about the contents of my backpack. And apart from the usual sheep and cattle, there are some alpacas, which raise their snooty heads briefly before deciding grass is more interesting than me.
I call the village 'Booze-i-ert', but no one's very sure where the name comes from. Perhaps it's a variation on the 'bosky' woodland thing, perhaps a reference to the local springs (beau-jet!). It was a shoe town in the nineteenth century, and a seat in the churchyard is dedicated to a member of the Drage family: an important name in local shoe-making. If you bought 'Gola' trainers in the 1970s they were probably made here. I remember briefly working with a bass guitarist who was a 'clicker' in the Bozeat factory. The sound of his bass was pretty clicky too, but it was all the rage then, that Mark King slapping stuff. St. Mary's church is part of the Wollaston benefice: Alpha courses and Bear Grylls to the fore, this year's Christian celebrity of choice. Pray for him. It's a difficult path to tread. I note with approval that the vicarage, which is right by the church gate, has an absolute pile of garden furniture: this is a clergy house which clearly works hard at being for the benefit of the parish. But does the curate who lives there ever get any peace? What about his/her Sabbath rest of Galilee?
The sun comes out. Just across the fields on my way out of town I cross a road where a Subaru estate has come to a dusty halt. In the front are two dodgy blokes, and in the back some lads and more dogs than are feasible for the confined space. I look at them. They look at me, and then roar off, perhaps worried that I've rumbled the nefarious purposes to which they were about to devote their Bank Holiday. Hare coursing? I don't know, but as Laurie Lee once remarked, where the roads are bad all kinds of strange things happen in the deep country.
The fields climb gently away to a barely discernible ridge which is marked by the route of the Three Shires Way and the county boundary with Bedfordshire. A couple of right-angle turns later and I'm following the line of the Roman road which heads south-north towards Irchester. For a mile or two it's a very superior green lane. Traffic isn't permitted between October and April and unlike some byways of its ilk, the path is quite unchurned and puddle-free, sometimes standing a little above the fields - so I presume that somewhere underneath it there remains a foundation of Roman hardcore. It's an evocative walk in imaginative company with the Roman squaddies who once made their way towards the comparative luxury of whatever Irchester was called in those days, backs sore and lower limbs aching, anticipating a nice bath and a scrape with a strigil.
I make an exception to My Rule and turn off into Bedfordshire to the hamlet of Farndish, the fern covered pasture. There are some nice ancient houses here, and a small church dedicated to St. Michael, now in the care of the Conservation Trust, but unlike Preston Deanery which it resembles in size, sadly it's not open. I eat a sandwich sitting on a low tombstone, and for my impiety am bitten on the lower lip by an ant. For twenty minutes or so it's surprisingly painful. Bear Grylls would have shrugged it off. Walking back through the village I pass some farm buildings which host a few small businesses, amongst them 'Muddy Matches' which as I guess, turns out to be a dating agency for farmers. Its website boasts of a number of happily consummated relationships, but all the quotes are from women...
The walk up to Wollaston is beside a grass airstrip. A light plane has just landed, and has taxi-ed over to the farm buildings. It's a Jodel D117, which of course I didn't know until I looked it up, and it turns out to have had a chequered history. On one occasion the owner managed to run it into the hedge by the road on the far side. Whether he was or wasn't inside it I'm unclear. Some nonsense about hand-turning the propeller while the engine was fired up. He seems to have tried a sort of Le Mans style getaway which didn't quite come off. Another time G-ATIZ hit a Piper Cherokee when landing in Leicester. Is this amount of excitement common for your average single-seat plane? Only asking, but maybe think twice if you get offered a quick lift out of Wollaston any time soon.
Wollaston sits on a south-west facing slope attractive enough to the Romans that they planted vineyards here. It was a shoe town too, though not back then, home to the world-famous Doc Martens brand until manufacturing costs took Mr. Griggs off to China. But there's still an outlet shop, and the name Airware is plastered across various billboards. If Doc Martens has gone, the factory of Scott Bader is still a major presence in the small town - an interesting company whose business is chemicals but whose governance is founded around a Commonwealth. St. Mary's, the imposing church is shut, the pub opposite is shut, the museum is shut, but the pocket park is open and I sit for a few minutes, hot and increasingly thirsty. I had a cold virus last week, and all walkers please note, like all athletes expect that in these circumstances your endurance is likely to be factored down by, say, 25%? I'm struggling today.
I wander down to the attractive cricket ground by the A509, but am annoyed that it takes me a while to find my way out over the road and up the hill to Strixton, a single dead-end street mini-village with the lovely little church of St. Rumwald on guard at its entrance. Usually saints with out-of-the-ordinary names come from Bithynia or Dagestan but Rumwald is almost home-grown: allegedly he's buried in Buckingham. He's also quite annoying and improbable: straight from his mother's womb he was preaching sermons of staggering right-on-ness, and having preached them, he promptly went straight to heaven without passing go. In the nineteenth post-Darwinian century an attempt was made to change the dedication of the Strixton church to St. John the Baptist. As one authority says 'the cult of St. Rumwald has been remarkably persistent'. But let's not be too snippy. We could do worse than dedicate our church to a baby, couldn't we, for who hasn't been inspired by the innocence and trust of new human life?
Stats man: 19 km. 5.5 hours. 22 degrees C, but feeling hotter. Four churches (one out-of-diocese). Twelve alpacas in two groups. Butterflies (mostly white or tortoiseshell): quantity. Only one pair of other walkers! One light aeroplane, slightly dented.
Father God
I'm so good at taking holidays.
As hard as I try to practise Your presence;
to tune in to the beat of Your overshadowing wings,
the world's churn and chatter cancels their rule and rhythm.
Days pass, and I realise
I've known only my own will,
my own thoughts,
my own desires.
While I work, and enjoy my leisure,
in day and night dreams,
through pain and pleasure,
I turn to You again
and praise Your name.
Semper peccator.
Semper penitens.
Semper iustus.
You are my saviour
and I praise Your name.
Amen.
