Tumbling Dice

I like most things about France. But not all.

In Brockhall the birds are singing merrily in every tree and bush. Apparently not so on the far side of the Channel. A recent report expresses anxiety that there are far fewer trills and tweets in Tarbes or Troyes than once was the case. I'm not surprised. The citoyens will have shot them all.

No signs of trigger-happy bird-hunters as I walk up through the pretty fields towards Little Brington. This has been the best May I can remember...but I've probably said that in many previous years. Has it been God's consolation goal after such a lousy second half to the winter? Or will we suffer payback for this month's benignly beautiful weather in midsummer's return match? OK.  Enough strained football references already. Car roofs glint up on the low ridge which carries the sometime minor Roman road from Duston towards Bannaventa by Watling Street, where St. Patrick may have spent his youth (emphasis on the word may). A rather morose dog-walker passes me. 'It's getting hotter..' he intones, although I can't tell you whether this is a global assessment , or just a comment on the day's meterorology.

I take the small lane into Little Brington before doubling back on myself to visit the single spire which comprises the remains of St. John's, the village church. Crossing the road, I somehow manage to trip on a slightly raised piece of asphalt and, unbalanced by my rucksack, sprawl headlong into the roadside gravel, uttering ungodly words as I go. Raising myself painfully from the prone position my initial, stupid reaction is to look around nervously, anxious lest someone should have witnessed my undignified tumble from grace. They didn't. But my knees are as bloodied as they often used to be when I was a schoolboy, and so I spend ten minutes with water, tissues and Savlon cleaning up and staunching the trickle of blood. It spoils my appreciation of St. John's just a bit. The church was built in the mid-nineteenth century as a Chapel of Ease by the 4th Earl Spencer to be a memorial for his wife. Her family name was Poyntz. She now gets a substitute commemoration by way of having a road named after her (well more a cul-de-sac than a road) on the far side of the Spencer land in Dallington, Northampton. The rest of St. John's was demolished in 1947, but the spire survived as a landmark for the RAF, or so it's said, and the villagers of Nobottle and Little Brington have to make do, as they did in former times, with traipsing across to the mother church at Great Brington. Only now they go by car.

Only rarely in Northamptonshire is one so aware of the influence of the old aristocracy. Down the lane back into the village, I pass the legend over the door of a restored farmhouse: 'The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away...' - a reference to some fall in fortunes or family loss suffered by Lawrence Washington (not the most famous one) who may have been acting as land agent for the Spencers in the early seventeenth century. And just round the corner, I briefly amble down Carriage Drive past a monitory Althorp Estate notice before climbing a stile into the Earl's fields. The sheer scale of ownership puts a different spin on the notion that Diana Spencer was a 'commoner'. Not in the sense that you and I are commoners, she wasn't, however much they traded in stories about her dropping in on the Brington post office to buy a pint of winegums when she was a mere slip of a lass!

Field paths take me down to the barely detectable settlement of Nobottle, which Wikipedia would have us believe is one of the 'smallest hamlets' in the country. I don't know how they know that. From there yet more well marked and worn paths carry my bruised legs across the expanses of Spencer territory to Harlestone, Lower and Upper, where I can enjoy again the villages' wonderful collection of thatched cottages. If there's a better set in the county, I haven't seen it. Once in Harlestone an undulating tarmac path carries me round the back of the houses and up to St. Andrew's church, crossing one of the Northampton Golf Club's fairways as I go. It's rather unusual to find a church and a golf course in such contiguity. Here one could preach a sermon, pronounce a benediction and be out on the first tee in five minutes or so. I think this should be mentioned when the benefice looks for an incumbent in about two years time. But do vicars go much for golf as their sport? I notice that membership at the Club runs at £1120 annually to play seven days a week, plus a joining fee of £500 - although you'd find it hard to get in at the moment: they're oversubscribed. Compare and contrast. I wonder how St. Andrew's finances are doing?

Back down in the village I chat to Stephen who's repairing stonework in one of the cottages. He was apprenticed as a dental technician in Northampton nearly fifty years ago but didn't enjoy it and transferred his skill into the jewellery trade before seeing a better living in masonry. After all, there'll always be a need to replace and maintain the wealth of stone from which the county's houses, churches and walls are built. Stephen is rightly proud of what he does, even down to using delicate tools which he's made for himself. He calls to my notice the variety of stone in the house he's working on, the darker, harder material, and the honey coloured, flakier stuff which may have come straight out of the ground just round the corner, beautiful but not long-lasting ( in terms of centuries). Stephen tells me about working in a church at the Buckinghamshire Twyford: so much did he love the place, he ended up giving visitors guided tours in between cutting and filling, but he's an atheist he says, when I tell him about the blog. That's OK, I reply, there's lots of other stuff in among the holy bits. Which now includes a conversation with you, Stephen. I hope you approve!

                                                           
                                                                    Harlestone thatch

Stephen wishes me good luck with my pilgrimage, and passing the Dovecote Laundry, I go up the hill to find the wall defending the Althorp Estate proper. I follow it along the lane until I reach the permitted view of the Big House through its railings. Looking further up the road I can see the tower of Great Brington church on the sharp edge of the hill ( a farm on the brink?), and recall the stories that when Charles I was imprisoned by Cromwell at Holdenby Hall, he was allowed to ride down a couple of miles to play bowls at Althorp, and to take communion in St. Mary's with the Spencers. A couple pass me, walking their pooches, and we swap a greeting. But then I see there's a green path which would make a preferable route up to the village, and so I turn and catch them up, and then have to explain my war wounds, still technicolour gory and dripping. They are solicitous for my welfare, which is nice.

I have affection for Great Brington because I was commissioned to write and record a couple of 'library' albums for John Gale who once owned a house there. Remarkably the earlier album, recorded in 1984, still brings in the occasional royalty. A reggae track, South West Two seems to have been used in an Australian soap, who knows why, and a pretty generic 50's rock n'roll instrumental, Teddy's Delight, also turns up from time to time on Romanian pay-per-view or Canadian Cable. It's a funny old business, music.

St. Mary's church is a place for reflection. At first I'm peeved to find that access to the Spencer Chapel is prevented - as you can see from the opposite picture. But then I look in the visitors' book and see that people who come to Great Brington church are interested - of course they are - in Lady Diana, and I suppose a small proportion of those folk may be crazies who'll think she's buried there, and may hold all kinds of weird conspiracy theories about the government and Dodi Fayed and who knows what. So I suppose there's not much choice but to lock and alarm the Chapel. The rest of the church is open though, and a lovely place it is too. As well as thinking about those national tragedies, I'm remembering my uncle, Bernard, who died aged 86 last Sunday morning, the youngest and last of five brothers. He and Joyce had two daughters, Sue and Diane, who between them and their husbands Robin and Chris produced half a quiver of grandchildren. They will all be missing him greatly right now. In a quirk of birth and death only my stepmum and my Aunt Margery still bear the name Cross in that older generation (the joke among my dad and Bernard's teachers long ago was 'We all have our little Cross to bear...' ). I'm the only one to do so in the following generation, and only our son Matt in the one after that. The study of history leads me not to be greatly worried about such a thing (as if I could do anything about it!): families come and go; names are absorbed into the cosmos but the DNA line goes on. I'm far more anxious that a properly conservative view of society - 'a little change in a time of change' - continues to be allied to kindliness and inclusivity in a properly socialist British, Christian tradition. It's a tradition which arguably a lot of people broadly agree with (given discussion about the Christian bit, and the fact that some will choke on the word 'socialist') but it's a third way which is hard to articulate in a formal, PR-friendly soundbyte, and it's going, going, nearly gone. It was an intangible about British life which New Labour reified for a short while and has now become wispy and unreachable again. Tony Blair was at least right in identifying the death of Diana as a watershed. Coincidentally we were all in the process of losing something much larger at the same time. Kingdoms rise...and they fall. I think ours may have had it, and I mourn that too.

 As I walk from Great Brington along the narrow lane to Whilton and back to Brockhall, the cloud cover disappears, and I'm walking into the afternoon sun. Like the man said: 'It's getting hotter.' Or darker. Please supply your own weather metaphor.








                                                                                                 Whilton church plus guardian

Hitches on the britches:  22 km. 7 hrs. 23 deg C. Little breeze. Distinctly sultry around lunchtime. One deer: bouncing dangerously across Watling Street in front of the car. One rabbit: they're having a bad year or two with viruses. Two scarred knees. One poorly finger. (Have I milked this enough for now?) Eight stiles. Twenty-seven gates. One bridge.

Lord
This week
The suggestion was made
That politicians should be more joyful.
But I confess
That having read the News assiduously
I too am more than averagely
Eeyore right now.

Lord, run that idea of Free Will past me again?
How do we
How do you
allow people to make their mistakes
And therefore be truly human
While harming themselves
And the world in which we all live
And which you made?
When wilt Thou save the people?
Oh God of mercy, when?

Coda

p.s. Two reports to consider this week.

1) The National Housing Association. Wants to build 4 million homes in the UK by 2030. So do the math, people. How much land would this take, if you factor in the necessary infrastructure? You wanna live in a country like that?

2) The Church of England: 'Setting God's people free'. It's about empowering the laity, without disempowering the clergy. Or is it? How can a church reconcile having a bureaucracy? Particularly when in our case it's tied to the State?

More about both in due course perhaps. 'Oh no!' I hear you cry. 'Give us a break...'  And God said: 'This is a break...'