Heroes and Villains

We all have to be on the lookout for the Asian Hornet. Nasty critter. Apparently it hangs around bee-hives and kills unsuspecting honey bees as food for its grubs. Our European hornets are really nice in comparison. You can tell the Asian guys by their yellow legs, although in my limited experience of hornets they fly so fast you'd have difficulty knowing what colour their legs are (which is why the Americans designated their F-18 fighter-bomber the 'Hornet').

With Radio 4 'Today' stories crowding my brain (including the renewed problems with Novichok in Salisbury - 'Mr Trump sir, we've arranged a great day out for you in one of our magnificent cathedral cities...') I leave the car in Crick's 'Bury Dyke' and walk west out of the village on another hot morning. The last month's lack of rain is taking its toll: the grass is scorched, the ground rock hard. The village sign has been charmingly overwhelmed by a floral arrangement, so the traveller knows they're in a jolly place even if they don't know exactly what it is. A little green has been isolated by a ditch, to keep out Travellers' caravans. And gradually, as the road flattens out, the noise of the M1 rises, interrupted by the occasional sound of a locomotive horn, because here I am in Logistics Land. Just across the motorway is the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal. Be careful on the roundabouts hereabouts. From DIRFT the HGVs stream out to supply the country with goodies, north, south, east and west. The junction between the M1, the M6 and the A14 is close by.

  I false start looking for the lane which runs parallel to the motorway towards Lilbourne, and make an unscheduled inspection of the Holiday Inn's real estate instead. I suppose the Inn's mostly commercial visitors can play mind games and pretend they're on vacation, but it's not the place I'd choose. I backtrack and locate the lane which is cunningly hidden by a government traffic inspection facility, periodically searching for overweight wagons and illegals, though not today. From a little incline I can see the vast warehouses for Sainsbury, Tesco, the Royal Mail. White windmills stud the landscape. It's only when one stops and watches the M1 that the sheer volume of lorry traffic becomes evident. Somehow when you're driving the road you don't catch such a sense of that, until there's a problem and you end up in a queue, where the chain of high-sided vehicles becomes imposing. I pass Haythog Farm (love the name!) An expanse of farm buildings seems derelict, ripe for demolition, although cows were grazing in a field a little way back. At the top of the rise where the track turns west to bridge the motorway (one vehicle at a time, the sign warns) there's a moto-cross track whose churning of the ground adds to a feeling of topological dysmorphia. On the far side of the M1 the bridleway has been diverted around the perimeter of an early airfield which in 1926 became the Rugby radio station. Lilbourne's village website tells me that for decades the national time signal was transmitted from an aerial suspended between two of the 820 feet high masts. In this digital age the masts have all been dismantled. The extensive site now awaits the arrival of, yes, more warehousing...

                                                     Where the masts once were...


I find a few real fields clinging on beyond the concrete and brown wasteland and walk up to Lilbourne's village green, complete with bench, postbox, red telephone box and a helpful clock on the wall of one of the houses. All Saints church isn't here though. It's across a hayfield down towards the River Avon (I'm so nearly in Warwickshire). The village was moved centuries ago. Castle mounds as neglected and unremarkable as any old heap of rubble lie just across the road from the church. A few cows nudge and nurdle around their foot. Beyond the ridge and furrow the impressive motorway viaduct dominates the view. I can't get into the church, but from the porch I learn that the parish is keen on its churchyard conservation project: there are many details of the flora and fauna to be found there (two sorts of bat!) It would be easy to be snippy about this, and complain that this surely isn't central to a church's ministry, but hang on a mo, mate. Doesn't my faith start with an awareness of God's extraordinary diversity in creation. Cut them some slack, please.

 
 
 

                          Lilbourne's Old Rectory (as big as a Bishop's palace)...

                          and the peaceful churchyard...

A second mental rearrangement is waiting for me up the road at Clay Coton. I reach this hamlet by a road walk past the Greenhaven woodland burial ground, and then along a track where there's a waymark for the 'Shakespeare's Way', a conceptual long distance footpath originally designed as the route WS might have taken from Stratford to London's 'Globe Theatre'. I'm surprised to find it here, and conclude this may be an off-shoot branching up to the source of the Avon.

St. Andrew's church in Clay Coton always served a tiny community, and by the mid-twentieth century it was falling down. In 2000 a restoration began, but it's now a private house in the middle of a graveyard which can be, as I guess would have to be the case, accessed by anyone who wished. It's a rather odd experience to wander around, look through the windows, and see a kitchen where the altar once was. I have no idea of the faith perspective of the current owner, but what would it feel like to live in such a place? If it were me I'd feel, I don't know, overlooked? - all that close minute by minute encounter with the numinous - at least at first, until I began to habituate. I think a new-age mystic might feel the same, even without the trappings of Christian theology. But what if one were a thoroughgoing atheist? Would the building begin to work magic, per se?

I'm still pondering that question in Yelvertoft where the domestication of sacred space crops up again in a different way. It's now very definitely a day for sand and sunbathing. To add to the Californian vibe, a rock-musician type (male) with an expensively coiffured mane in ash-blond breezes past me steering a Haight-Ashbury multi-coloured swap-shop of a Beach Buggy. I remember with a smile that the only person I've ever known who had one of these was the late Duke D'mond (not his real name of course!) lead singer of the Barron Knights, with which group I made very occasional uncredited TV and recorded appearances in the 1980s. Name dropper. Who? (Your grandparents may remember.)

All Saints, Yelvertoft is at the end of the straggly village, up on a hill. Its west elevation is very striking, even rather grand. Inside it's perhaps not so impressive: the cream wall paint is in need of renovation and perhaps the colour doesn't do the building any favours. But there's clearly a congregation with a warm heart here, looking to engage with visitors, particularly children. A welcome notice tells me that I should feel free to help myself to tea, coffee or orange squash from the servery cleverly constructed in a side aisle. Outside the heat is considerable. The Knightley Arms, which I passed on my way to All Saints, and which has a certain curiosity value because friend Brendan and his wife Jo once took on the pub as a project, now looks a bit down-at-heel, so Yelvertoft's church is truly my sanctuary, and their orange squash is a God-send. It's a long time since I've drunk any. It seems more pungently orangey and attractively acidic than I remember, but the colour still shouts 'E-numbers'. The underlying taste profile carries me straight back sixty years to children's parties and church outings in Bexleyheath's Danson Park.

Anyway, the point is, there are some who would find the offer of refreshments and my acceptance of them, indeed the provision of any kind of non-eucharistic consumption within the church, a kind of sacrilege. I disagree. I think it's dodgy theology and bad history. The New Testament doesn't have a great deal to say about the 'consecration' of things as opposed to people, does it? Rules tend to be dispensed with in favour of 'Grace' - which is not to say we may not consider certain places special permanently or for a period of time.

One thing I often notice when I'm walking, and it strikes me here, is that when I'm tired it's difficult to pray with content, by which I mean framing my prayers in anything other than the most general terms. Underlying my introspection is a rather basic fear. In my last hours, in extremis, will I lose faith and the articulation of my hopes, fears and thankfulness? And does that even matter? Perhaps I just have to do the work now in sweated blood to the best of my ability, and trust God.

 
As I move on from Yelvertoft, I'm feeling ever so slightly smug. Without really thinking it through, I've contrived to spend the first part of the day shaded from the sun by high hedges to the east. And now, at the sun's height, I find the towpath of the Leicester Canal to be largely canopied, so providing respite from the fiercest heat. I think back through the week's events, notably England's win against Colombia in the football World Cup. I can't really be doing with week by week league football, but you don't spend as many teenage hours as I did kicking a ball, any ball, not to be interested in the game at some level. If it is the game I played, that is. The thing that's been most obvious to me has been the tendency, ably displayed by the Panamanians and Colombians, to introduce wrestling as a component of general play. Formerly the use of the 'smother tackle' was reserved for rugby. Despite the South Americans' constant and blatant fouls, Maradona thinks the Colombians were robbed. I think they should have been playing with about nine men from fifteen minutes into the match. The reasons I dislike football, or the stuff which hangs around it, are the jingoism, the tribal codes, the love me/hate me emotions engendered between teams and their fans. I do like the athleticism, the movement of the ball, the skills of rapid footwork and body feint.

However, lots of people follow football precisely because of that other stuff. They're happy to divide humanity into the Good and the Bad, the heroes and villains. This is paradoxical to me, because everything about my upbringing has induced in me a sense of our corporate and individual 'original sin'. I can't help it, but I know I'm bad and only through God's love can be made good, which makes it so much more difficult to write off others in Daily Mail style as 'pure evil'. Our young people are educated in a system which works tirelessly to convince them that 'I'm OK, you're OK'. Sometimes I think the surging sea of unconditional positive regard has resulted in an unthinking default selfishness which can only countenance 'badness' as something possessed by other people, never oneself. And this to me is the onset of a troubling blindness. Of course we Christians too often ignore the stuff about motes and beams. Instead we indulge in nit-picking inspection of the thoughts and words of fellow travellers. Are they truly with us or against us? My team or your team? Two legs bad, four legs good.

I follow a narrow boat down the canal. It's doing about one mile an hour more than I am, so is slowly receding into the distance. I think I'll walk the canal all the way into Crick, but then come across a path which leads me back into the village through the youthful Jubilee Wood. On the far side of the water is Crack's Hill, which has its own country park. It has a strikingly even profile from this angle, so until I can see how it fits into the overall topography, I start thinking of Silbury, and wondering if Crack's Hill could possibly be man-made (it couldn't!) I can imagine how to earlier peoples such a feature of the landscape could be believed to have religious or magical powers. No accident that Spielberg used similar iconography of landscape in 'Close Encounters' . In our modern wisdom we have deconsecrated what surrounds us until those rare, elusive occasions when something from an undetected dimension breaks through and we're caught up in God. We're, all of us, really living in a church.

                                                           Charity at Yelvertoft

Players on the field: 19 km. 5 hrs. 21 deg. C at 08.30 rising to 29 deg. at 14.00. A breeze at first, dying through the middle part of the day. 5 stiles. 10 gates. 5 bridges. A lot of road walking. Again... just a single rabbit. It must be following me around. Larks a-plenty. Ditto butterflies and dragonflies, especially along the canal. No hornets, Asian or otherwise.

Father God
You come and you go.
Sometimes I get a brief glimpse
And catch my breath
And then doubt that I did at all.
I have my Gerard Manley Hopkins highs
And my Richard Dawkins depressions
(though he seems rather too chipper about them).
Like a maths exam,
In the final reckoning
I hope you'll give credit
Where I show my workings.

Please don't give up on me, Father,
But honour my search,
My vagabond life,
My puny faith,
Through the grace of your Son
Our Saviour,
Jesus Christ
Amen.