Divisa in partes tres (duo)

Part the first

The main street of Cottingham/Middleton meanders prettily towards the junction of the back roads to Great Easton and Rockingham. The entire population seems to be sprucing up their homes: there’s decorating and roofing action on all sides. I’m just about the only person not in dungarees. Homes Under The Hammer has a lot to answer for.  The local postie says a friendly, smiley hello. My day is cheered. I bid her the same as I park near the primary school and heave myself up the hill past the church, hoping there’ll be a footpath beside the B road out of town. There is…for a while…but when it disappears the verge is verdant and flat and largely minus beer cans, and there’s not a whole bunch of traffic. The view across the Welland valley gives me lovely glimpses of the hill village of Bringhurst on the far side. Wonder of wonders, it’s sunny and warm most of the way into Rockingham. The last week has seen some drenching downpours: we’ve had the heating on every evening at home.

 

 I cut across a field on the Jurassic Way for a couple of hundred metres  and emerge by Rockingham’s Sondes Arms, but sadly the village seems shut this Monday morning. I’d been hoping for coffee and cake at The Barn, but despite rumours to the contrary on its website there’s nothing doing. I thought I remembered a small gallery, but although I can see picture framing in progress through an open door, there’s no display of the Matisse prints of yesteryear. I puff up the hill, admiring as I’ve done for forty years the way the Oakham road twists down the scarp and then runs straight between the broadly spread cottages, as dramatic a view as any in Northamptonshire.  I hang a right into St. Leonard’s churchyard in the lee of the Castle: a muscle-strengthening climb for the peasants from their front yards: a gentle health-giving stroll for the gentry down out of their elegant drawing room. The view of the valley from the churchyard is mostly obscured, but a gap in the trees allows me to look across two county lines to my next destination at Caldecott.

Gaul, as you well know, was divided into three parts. Well, the East Midlands is divvied up more ways than that, but today is a three counties walk, though my decision to tack Caldecott onto the itinerary is a last minute whim, quickly regretted. The A6003 takes Route One over the valley floor, and for the section up to the Leicestershire border it’s fine: there’s a roadside path.

 

But the county of Jonathan Agnew and Richard III offers only thigh-high Arnco barriers to both sides for a while from this point, with narrow margins marked by white lines  - a hint to cyclists or a warning to incautious motorists they're in danger of denting their precious metal. Whatever, it’s an unfriendly environment for walkers, so my thought is to detour via the bridlepath of Long Lane and then bend back to Caldecott. This cunning plan is scuppered by the recent rain fuelled growth of vegetation. I don’t fancy fighting my way through thistles for a third of a mile, but neither do I want to risk nemesis from oncoming traffic. I utter a St. Christopher’s prayer and opt for the tarmac.

 

Where the defunct Rugby to Stamford railway line once crossed the main road, the noble county of Rutland restores a kerbed path. So what’s your beef with pedestrians, Leicestershire?  I say thank you and start enjoying Caldecott. St. John the Evangelist’s is open. Stepping inside, I read Psalm 80 out loud, with its litany: ‘Let thy face shine, that we may be saved’.  My head's full of Boris Johnson, so the psalmist's prayer strikes a chord. St. John’s is pleasant and well-cared for, but it’s not the most peaceful church. The Oakham road curls around its east side and the roar of traffic is more or less constant. If the organ’s particularly wheezy perhaps the frequencies might cancel each other out, but otherwise the parson’s preaching is always going to have urban overtones. There are Roman tiles in the church’s northern walls. It’s said a Roman temple may once have stood in St. John’s shoes.

 

 When I was small the county of Rutland seemed rather exotic. I remember being quite excited when Dad drove us through it on one of our holiday forays to Scotland. It was partly the curiosity value of its  being the smallest English county, but it also intrigued because of the ‘land’ suffix which otherwise only applied to certain remote northern-waste counties - Westmorland, Cumberland, Northumberland…Greenland. My arrival in it now marks a certain point in the Big Walk. The yet-to-be-explored diocese falls into three parts: firstly Rutland, secondly the flatter lands to the east of the county and north of Titchmarsh which also comprise the open territories of the former Rockingham forest, and thirdly the enclave around Peterborough itself. But not necessarily in that order!

 Outside in Caldecott’s churchyard there’s an array of similarly constructed, solid, stone cube-shaped tombs. One is the last resting place of ‘King Henry Stokes’, whose last Will and Testament is preserved in the National Archives at Kew. It describes him as a ‘Gentleman of Caldecott’, so there’s no pretension in his name beyond his parents’ wish for the success and character of their offspring. The Surrey and England cricketer Kenny Barrington greatly impressed people in the Caribbean by his humour and skill when he toured there in 1953. Two decades later I taught a Barrington Harrison down on Northampton's Billing Road. The Stokes family live still in the memory and imagination of local people in Caldecott. One was a teenage First World War hero, sunk and drowned, his brother killed at Ypres. A new housing project up the road is named after them all, presumably. Either that or Ben Stokes has fans locally.

 Overhead a buzzard is duking it out with two crows (only ever one winner!) as I walk the lane to charming but expensive Great Easton, which is close to being the perfect English village, everything commodious and easy on the eye. Notwithstanding, there’s always grit in the oyster: The Sun is being given a makeover. Let's hope it’s going to survive as a pub. A place like Great Easton deserves to have a landlord’s ( m. or f.) welcome at its heart. Up Church Bank, in what’s probably the most ancient part of the village, is fragrantly scented St. Andrew’s, lilies within, roses without. The artist Rupert Cordeux was here during the heavy rain last week, and notes his thanks in the visitors’ book. He’s known for his paintings of churches, and also apparently for cardboard model kits of cathedrals – if I’ve got the right bloke.

 

Time Team came to Great Easton for their first Big Dig in 2003, encouraging the villagers to dig test pits and share what they found with the nation on TV. Not a lot came out of the pits, but it seems typical of their community spirit that the citizens of Great Easton were willing to be guinea pigs. Looking in the church magazine, there’s a whole lot of community still going on: Grimsby fish to buy on Wednesdays, a ‘Summer Bonanza’ coming up, Good Companions for the older folk, a B&B, Tai Chi, Yoga, Singing with Sally. It would be nice to live here. Not far away, in Nevill Holt, there’s even Leicestershire’s annual equivalent of  Glyndebourne to enjoy each summer.

 The first fields on the other side of the village are sheepy and overgrown now, but when walking the Jurassic Way in the opposite direction here a decade ago, I was alarmed to find myself in the middle of an ‘incident’. A girl had fallen from a horse. She was badly hurt. There was nothing to be done - she was already being attended to by the medics and an air ambulance was clattering in. She was soon on her way to hospital.

 The hilltop village of Bringhurst is very ancient; an easily defended site. I wend the lane to St. Nicholas’ church, which is very plain inside and in the throes of decoration. On a chair near the bell tower there’s a notice giving thanks for assistance with the project - not to the diocese but to a waste management company. This makes me smile. To quote Daphne in Frasier, ‘I don’t know why’. Perhaps they’re putting in a loo, for the convenience of worshippers.

 Isn’t it strange how a stripped ancient church can still retain, even amplify, its holiness? I suppose the IKEA aesthetic is a useful contemporary reference, insofar as many of us quite like that white paint/fabric and wood/stone vibe, but that’s as a place to live in, not somewhere to find God. Many of us need our church (small ‘c’) to be something other. Many of the ‘shed’ free evangelical churches set up the place of worship as a theatre – and even some Anglican congregations see this as a way-to-go. Personally I’m not inclined to find raked seating plus a stage as a natural residence for the numinous, even though as a performer or as a member of an audience I’ve known special things to happen there, and sometimes those moments have had spiritual overtones.

 

 

 

                                                                 Bringhurst churchyard 

Two things. Firstly God can creep up on us unawares anywhere, any time. I suspect I mostly walk around with my eyes shut.  Secondly, people are drawn in to churches for any one of countless reasons. But maybe we aren’t relentless enough in finding our own church’s USP, and plugging it for all its worth. And I suppose that could even include looking like the Fabric Committee just popped into IKEA one afternoon.

 Hancock’s half-hour/Gove’s Gimbles* :  14.5 km. 4.25 hours. 20 degrees C.  Sun and cloud, and an intermittent, capricious, southerly breeze  Four churches. Three open. Nine stiles. Eight gates. Four bridges.

 *Matt Hancock and Michael Gove have been eliminated in the endless political accompaniment to the cricket World Cup. They will not be our Prime Minister. This time.

 

Part the second

I’ve been meaning for some time to ‘clean up’ an untidy detail from one of last winter’s walks. I should have included the outlying church at Weston-under-Welland when staggering on from Ashley to the pretty chapel of ease at Sutton Bassett, but my energy then was at a low ebb and my hips very sore. So now I park up at the end of Mill House’s farm track, and walk down the road into Weston before finding my way back to the car via a short section of the Macmillan Way. St. Mary’s church is shut, but I can see from the notice in the porch that there are nineteen souls on the electoral roll representing twelve families. Down in the valley, this seems a depressingly small remnant from which to build a Kingdom. From the highest point on the hill above the car, the view is beautiful and wide-ranging, and midway through a lovely afternoon the possibilities seem endless.

 Boris’s bits: 2.25 km. 40 minutes. No stiles. Six gates. No bridges. Hope in the heart.

 

 

 

Father
We can only begin
From where we are.
Give us the gift
Of working smart.
Open our eyes
Set us on our front foot
Stiffen our resolve
Help us find joy
So that we can better commend you
To all we meet
All with whom we work
All whom we love
Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

Steeltown

Here I stand with my own kin/At the end of everything/Finally the dream has gone/I’ve nothing left to hang upon/I came here with all my friends/Leaving behind the wait of years/Leaving alone in a flood of tears…

 (…from ‘Steeltown’ by the band Big Country: a song about the effects of the closure of the Stewart and Lloyds steel plant in Corby. It topped the UK charts in 1984.)

 

 

                                               Church of the Epiphany: Central Corby

There are lots of men in shorts on the end of dog leads by Great Oakley’s Village Hall, and it’s not particularly warm. But in June perhaps it just feels wrong to take the morning constitutional in trousers. There’s an unseasonal scent of woodsmoke in the air too, but the temperature’s good for a town stroll, warm but not oppressive. Not so many eggs frying on the pavements today.

 With Northampton, Wellingborough, and Kettering behind me on the Big Walk, once I’ve beaten Corby’s bounds, there’ll only be Peterborough to go in terms of major conurbations. I strike out on a cycle path beside the dual carriageway with the railway station in my sights. Corby owes a lot to William Holford and the work of its Development Corporation, back in the days when thought was given to the wider welfare of the citizenry beyond providing everyone with four bedrooms and a titchy back yard. The cycle path snakes between wide grass verges putting distance between itself and the traffic, although I see at least one cyclist perversely ploughing along against the wind, mixing it with the container lorries and petrol tankers. Rather her than me. There are about 60,000 inhabitants of the town, compared with the 1600 there were in the nineteen twenties, but walking around it, one gets a rather better idea of exactly how much land has to be flattened and tamed in order that a population of such a size can live comfortably. The answer is…a lot.

 I come to Corby with prejudices. When Sue and I first became Midlanders, the place had a tough reputation. Venturing the possibility that one might go and teach there drew an intake of breath and sucking of teeth from fellow teaching professionals. As a twenty-six year old I went for an interview at one of its comprehensive schools, supported for a prestigious post as Head of Boys Pastoral Care by one of the LEA advisers. The panel more or less offered me the job. I temporised. They appointed someone else, and the LEA adviser was far from amused. I’d panicked, you see, unsure I could cope in that environment, with unemployment and anger in the air. Maybe I was right not to dip a toe in the hot water. Sir Keith Joseph announced the closure of Stewart and Lloyd’s in 1979. It became an unhappy place.

 You know the story of how the Corby workforce was recruited from Scotland in the 1930s, and how haggis eating, Scottish country dancing, bagpipes, accordions and men called Jimmy became commonplace slap bang in the middle of Northamptonshire. I wonder, will I hear Scottish accents on the streets today? Nope. I’m listening carefully, but hear only conventional TV English, a smattering of Northamptonshire vernacular, quite a lot of Eastern European, but nothing to remind me of the Krankies, Billy Connolly or Nicola Sturgeon.

                                               Open for business in Corby village (and selfie)

 Just past the railway station by a roundabout on the edge of Corby village, and opposite a shed which offers live music and tattoos, sits ancient St. John’s Church, its exterior looking a little ravaged. I walk around it, and then see Paul Frost, the vicar, unloading cassock and surplice from his car. I say hello. Paul, tanned, fit and youthful looking, was once a youth worker at Moulton, but after some time in Kettering, he’s been the incumbent here for seven and a half years. There used to be a second church in the benefice, at the Church of the Epiphany in the ‘new’ town centre, but the congregation there was struggling, and Paul tells me it’s now been re-opened as a gym, with a chapel attached. He encourages me to go and have a look. I say I will. (Later on, I look up Paul’s name on the web and find an Anglia TV report from 2015 which runs the headline: ‘Cage fighting vicar hosts classes at former church…’  Well, as I say, Paul looks jolly fit – and I say this with respect from one former R.E. teacher to another – but the content of the report nowhere establishes that he actually does any cage-fighting himself on a regular basis. That’s the Press for you!)

 Corby has always had a rep as a rather physical place, from well before the arrival of the tartan army. Every twenty years there’s a tradition of holding a Pole Fair ( the next one is due in 2022). This once involved a lot of rumble-tumble misrule whereby pairs of marauding yokels trapped unsuspecting/naïve/ignorant inhabitants, then hoisted them up on a pole before dumping them in the stocks, to be freed on payment of a fine. So that’s a note to self: avoid Corby Village any time in 2022.

 The town centre is on a rise past Coronation Park from today’s angle of attack. My approach is disturbed by a gentleman with Tourette’s or some similar affliction who’s coming up rapidly behind me at the pace of an Olympic 20km race walker, yelling obscenities loudly and angrily, but alternating this with an impassioned request for help. I take cover by the corner of the Church of the Epiphany, and thinking of innocent bystanders stabbed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, let him pass.

 I explain myself to the chap on the front desk of the erstwhile church, and he leads me through the gym to the small chapel at its side. I pray, and look through the windows at what’s going on, amazed, and to be honest, aghast. I don’t do this stuff, never have, and even to be in the vicinity of that environment, I regress to the terrors of P.E. lessons in the gym at school. Press-ups? Can’t do those. Rope-climbing? Not a hope. Squat thrusts? You’ve got to be kidding me. At least everyone present today is obeying the notice on the walls which injuncts against toplessness. A splendid looking chap who looks as if he has his Harley parked outside is doing terrifying things to his chest with weights and pulleys. The sheer amount of tech inside the place is staggering, a vast array from the heavy metal design book dedicated to the tearing in half of dictionaries. Stop it, Vince.  Enough already of the purple, sub-Bill Bryson prose. This is an appropriate, clever initiative to show that Christians are concerned with the whole person, and that we’re there to meet people on their own patch, immersed in their own concerns, as Jesus would have done. Good stuff, a model, and food for thought.

 

Back outside I walk down to where I can see another church marked on the map. It’s a URC, and as I reach it the man with Tourette’s comes past me in the opposite direction, still effing and blinding. My heart is stirred. I wish I could reach out and heal him as if I was Jesus. But I’m not and I can’t. Who will help him?

 

The town centre in Corby is much, much smarter than I remember it. A couple of decades ago I stopped off to see what it was like, and came away saddened. Now, although some of the sixties’ shops are showing their age, the place is quite bright and perky. And for 20p the town centre toilets are the cleanest I’ve seen anywhere, full stop. Still no Scottish accents though. I think I notice that more people smoke in Corby than other places I go – casually on the street, outside banks, hanging out the doors of bars. I eat a sandwich in the sunshine and then move on up towards Occupation Road. There I find a Romanian deli and the Catholic church of Our Lady of Walsingham. I cross over past a water tower into an estate of workers’ houses from the thirties’ boomtown, brick built, careful and solid, reminding me of a mini Hampstead Garden Suburb. These were not erected, as one suspects a lot of comparable modern housing is, on a principle of ‘built-in obsolescence’: they were made to last.

 

 

 

 Further along I come to the copper-roofed church of St. Columba and the Northern Saints on Studfall Avenue, whose architect, it seems to me, was nodding at Sir Basil Spence’s design for Coventry Cathedral. St. John’s apart, many of the places of worship in Corby have something of a common style – and to my mind this is one of the more distinguished. The website looks promising too, showing apparent engagement in the Street Pastors scheme, as well as linking to the local food bank. It comes to me that for all their same-i-ness, at least the mid-20^th century developers allowed for churches in their plans. Fat chance these days.

 

                                                            Thoroughsale Wood

 

Over the road, the theme of today’s walk continues. The Development Corporation left Corby a legacy of good open spaces, and I enjoy the early summer greenery of Thoroughsale Wood very much. The path is beautifully maintained and buggyable, and even the undergrowth at its sides has been trimmed back and the grass cut, so that the walker feels safe in this remnant of ancient Rockingham Forest. Are those in charge of Corby simply better at running their town than, say Northampton’s leaders? Or do they have access to targeted regeneration funds? What has been the benefit to Corby to have been part of the EU, and, sobering thought, is it destined to return to decline over the next decade yet again, as presumably, we leave?

                                                       

                                                       St. Ninian's: Church of Scotland, Corby

On through the Beanfield area of town, past another Catholic church, some Baptists, another Wee Free hall, St Ninian’s Church of Scotland (Ah!) and St. Peter and St. Andrew’s C. of E.. St. Ninian’s gets the prize for the prettiest spire. The food bank is run from St. Peter and St. Andrew’s. I go round the back of the church hoping someone’s at home, so I can find out who uses their facilities, but I guess this is a programme which runs most sensibly in the mornings, so the door’s locked.

A little further on I take a breather on a pub bench. There’s a chap sitting on another seat ten metres away, leaning on a walking trolley. He hails me, and tells me that kitted out the way I am I shouldn’t be taking my ease: it’s not fair!  And lo and behold, he does this in an unmistakeably Scots accent. I laugh, and say I’ve been walking all day and he’s the first Scotsman I’ve met. Ay, he replies, a lot of people think that, but actually I come from Wales, near Merthyr Tydfil. This is Malcolm aka Budgie. His dad was a miner and as the coal industry declined – and perhaps for better wages and conditions – moved his family including the ten-year old Budgie to Corby. Budgie is 68 now. He has chronic asthma and his back is broken after life as a bin man. I guess he may have worked in steel in his early days. There have been other health problems along the way, but Budgie is determined to wring the most from every day. He is Corby personified, and I am moved.

Today and tomorrow they’re holding the 75^th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. It makes the tears flow to listen to some of the accounts of sacrifice made for the sake of freedom. Corby played an important part in the weeks after the initial invasion. The steel tubing produced here was crucial in allowing the rapid laying of communications under the Channel: the employment of what was at that time leading-edge technology in a moment of absolute crisis.

 How can it be that we are simultaneously celebrating this one-ness with Europe in being freed from the shackles of Fascism, while half our nation are gloating at the prospect of economic and political isolation? I despair. And if you are a Brexiteer, beg you to think again.

 

‘Here I stand with my own kin/At the end of everything/Finally the dream has gone/I’ve nothing left to hang upon…'

 Rory’s reasons* : 15.5 km. 4.25 hrs. 18 deg. Sun and cloud. No stiles, gates or bridges. Three C. of E. churches (four if you count Church of the Epiphany). Only the latter open. The genuine tartan-wearing, sporran-sporting Scotsperson elusive to the last.

 

·        Rory Stewart is an interesting oddball candidate for the Tory leadership: the only one to say the Emperor of No-deal Brexit has no clothes. I shouldn’t think he stands a cat in hell’s chance, but he almost makes me think I could vote Conservative…

 Father

I thank you again for the sacrifices
That have been made for me.
Help me never to undervalue
What it cost my parents
And grandparents
And those of their generation
Who died in the service of freedom.

I thank you for the times

When our country and peoples
Have acknowledged you
And striven to do your will
In public and private.
I pray that we
In our time
May find the courage and discernment
To promote your Kingdom
On our planet.
Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

Up, up and away

It’s fine and dandy for me to go scribbling away about love peace and how Anglicans should link hands and sing from the same hymn sheet - #bettertogether. But let’s get real. What happens when we consider a particular concrete issue. How well do we all, Evangelicals, Catholics and Liberals hang  together then? How far does someone have to go before a judgment is made that they’re outside the Anglican (the Christian) tent?  I know, I know, this is a heavy way to begin a post on a walking blog. Cut to the chase, if you've got a headache already.

 

Before I set off for Brigstock, Sue reminds me it’s Ascension Day. What do you reckon to Jesus’ Ascension? Or do you avoid thinking about it at all, which is what I suspect many clergy do, because I’ve heard very few sermons preached on the subject, though trainee layreader Sarah did a fine job on Sunday at our St. Peter’s. Perhaps, quite understandably, preachers  feel reluctant to share their own anxieties and doubts with their congregations. To be blunt, if Jesus died and rose again, his permanent presence on Earth in physical risen form would have made for an entirely different cosmology of faith, so his ascension is a Biblical and practical necessity, and is absolutely tied to the resurrection. On the other hand, (reverse-engineering our theology) …if there was no physical resurrection…what then? But, seriously, can we really swallow what most people think the gospel writer Luke is telling us at the outset of the Book of Acts, Jesus going heavenwards like a Saturn rocket?

 

Historiographically, some of what we read in the Gospels generally stands up very well against, for example, the writing of the near-contemporary historian Tacitus, whose support of presumed real events by miraculous occurrences is continual. But that isn’t history quite by the supposedly objective standards of the 20^th and 21^st century, even if we’re very used to interrogating the possible bias of today’s writers. The word ‘myth’, sometimes applied by theologians to New Testament writing, is perhaps more confusing than comforting and helpful. Reading Mark’s Gospel again recently, I’m struck by the insistent drum beat of its argument about who Jesus is. Events are only important for Mark in the context of his evangelism. But this we know. It’s a Gospel, stupid. The modern politician’s summary packaging of Christianity as a moral creed to which we all subscribe, churchgoers and non-churchgoers, is nowhere to be found. The Gospels (and the Book of Acts) always provoke, always challenge, are never comfortable.

 

The red kites watch and wheel in the skies over Brigstock. Spring colours and scents overflow from cottage gardens. I sneeze. By Wallis and Linnell’s imposing but empty, four-storey factory near New Town, I make a wrong turn into a gentleman’s front garden and am kindly but firmly re-directed. Wallis and Linnell were clothing maunfacturers, whose business made a mid-Victorian transition into bricks and mortar. It was at that nineteenth century time when entrepreneurs realised they could squeeze more from their employees if they stopped them doing piece-work in their cottages, and put them into factories. A first building was erected in Kettering, but W. & L. needed more workers, so second and third plants were added in Cottingham and Brigstock. This wasn’t capitalism without kindness. It seems Wallis in particular took great interest in his employees’ welfare and spiritual needs. One small testimony to this is said to be the windows arrayed along all four storeys in the Brigstock factory, letting light into the workers’ lives. Or was this simply to optimise the quality of the garments? The business finally shut its doors for good in 1979, unable, I suppose, to compete with the Far East, but Wallis and Linnell’s factory remains Brigstock’s most striking building, perhaps even including its distinguished church.

 

On the diagonal across a horsey field I come to a gate and enter the southernmost part of an extensive tract of woodland. It’s known as Old Dry Bushes. This is somewhat ironic because yesterday it rained (we need it!) and the bushes are anything but dry. Pushing through them on an initially wandery path I’m quickly soaked. I’ve imprudently donned Merrills for the day’s yomp, and as comedian Katie Brand found on Channel 4’s recent Pilgrimage, wet feet blister more easily than dry ones. By the end of today my right sole will be sore. I thought this CTVC (Christian Television Centre) offering a rather good second series. The first one aired last year and purported to take a handful of slightly ill-matched celebs to Santiago di Compostela along the camino. Well, a little bit of it. The narrative ended up rather whingey and unsatisfactory. The follow-up persuaded a more cohesive set of people, including actor Lesley Joseph, comedians Stephen K. Amos and Les Dennis and long-jump hero Greg Rutherford, to walk part of the pilgrim route across the Alps and down to Rome. No one’s converted, but spiritualities are explored and in some cases revived, and some memories are healed. The best thing is that through a reality TV format it did get to some of the reasons you might want to try a pilgrimage, and examine some of the emotions you might encounter while doing so. Astonishingly two of the protagonists found walking through woodland an utterly novel experience. So what had they (and their parents!) been doing all their lives? Duh!

 

The path opens onto a broad, straight north-bound track, and I stride along enjoying the full-on happy surround sound birdie chorus, which today includes that definitive note of summer, a cuckoo, suddenly but elusively very close to my left. As I exit the wood, there’s a thrum of jolly human conversation too, and I find twenty eight Kettering Ramblers taking a breather. I say hello, and of course the person who engages me in conversation is Canon Roger Knight who when he hears I’m from Weston Favell, asks me if I know Richard Pestell, layreader of this parish and one time Diocesan Secretary - which I do. Small world. Later, when I look him up on the Web, I learn that two years ago at this time of the year and on the first anniversary of his wife Ann’s passing, Canon Roger was prayer-walking in aid of MND charities.

 

I push on up a dusty track which brings me to the main road down to Weldon. I’m hoping for a path beside the tarmac, but am disappointed, and spend twenty minutes hopping up and down onto the verge avoiding cars and parcel vans. Thankfully the HGVs seem to have been re-routed. In the distance I can see the industrial plants which I suppose to be the inheritors of Corby’s defunct steel industry. New housing is pushing out from Corby here too, as in Great Oakley, as commuters eye up the trade-off between cheaper Northamptonshire accommodation and lengthier travel distances and times into London.

 

St Mary the Virgin, Weldon is along a suddenly pastoral lane away from the main road. I sit in its churchyard, and from nowhere, a gust of wind blows grit from a nearby mole-hill over my glasses and into my right eye. For the rest of the afternoon it’s very sore, exacerbated by the high pollen count. I find such trivial physical distractions make my pathetic attempts at concentrated prayer well-nigh impossible. It nags at me, this inability to transcend even the merest hint of suffering. What would I do, were I to find myself on, for example, the wrong end of MND? I suppose I’d have to cling on to a different understanding of the body of Christ, other members upholding me in infirmity, and just do my best.

 

Place names sometimes bring people’s names to mind, and I think of actor Jonny Weldon, who a decade ago was a young adolescent member of some of the numerous teams of talented child singers/performers sent by the Sylvia Young Theatre School to appear in our English Language Teaching audio programmes. Some of them go on to become e.g. accountants, hair-dressers, teachers (or even vicars for all I know), but a few take the risk, stay the distance and progress into adult show biz, as Jonny has done. It’s not the most straightforward or easy of careers, but on the Web there’s a nice snap of Jonny, looking fit and well and about to run the London Marathon. He was suddenly there on the stage of the Royal, a few Christmases ago, a main protagonist of one of those small-cast, happy, all-action children’s shows. Very good he was too.

 

Wikipedia is unusually discreet about all things Weldon i.e. there’s apparently not a lot to be said. However, the activities of the cricket club figure large, and much is made of a ‘famous’ William Hay as one of their number. Just in case, I check him out, but can now confirm this is not the Will Hay of ‘Oh, Mr. Porter’ fame, who’s described elsewhere on the Web as… ‘An English comedian, actor, author, film director and amateur astronomer…’. Nor is this the William Hay who turned out two or three times for the M.C.C. in the Victorian era. I can only assume he’s the current team’s star batsman – and possibly author of the Wikipedia entry. Or married to her.

 

I have to retrace my steps along the main road verges (grr!) and up the dusty track called Bears Lane to where I left the Kettering Ramblers, although they moved off towards a pub lunch an hour and a half ago. Walking the field edge track towards Cockendale Wood, I get thoroughly dazed and confused, and near Bocase Farm actually emulate Pooh and Piglet by walking in a complete circle only to find myself accidentally back where I started. Idiot!  I try the opposite side of a hedge the second time round and am eventually rewarded with a confirming bridleway sign, and distant glimpses of Lower Benefield’s high spire though it takes a long drag along the metalled surface of Causin Way to reach it.

 

St. Mary’s Benefield is described as a ‘Tractarian Church’, and some frills and furbilows of Ninian Comper are to be found inside and out, notably on the crucifixed war memorial. Benefield appears such a rural backwater, that on a sunny summer’s day it’s hard to square the ecclesiological hard-ball of ‘Branch Theory’ (trying to retrospectively justify Anglicanism as a legitimised third way of the True Church) with the surroundings. But maybe this is a twenty-first century city-centric perspective of mine. I still wonder, as I think I’ve done before, if revival could begin, not in our troubled, struggling inner city churches, but in rural locations like Benefield. Isn’t the real passion for Brexit, the unquiet heart of the Tory Party, most active in the countryside?

 

The most famous son of Benefield’s soil is Miles Berkeley, one of the founders of the science of plant pathology. He was an important academic but also a clergyman: vicar at nearby Apethorpe and then at Sibbertoft.  I’m intrigued to read that he was a cryptogamist, thinking for a moment this meant he was unusually secretive about his wives, and that I’d stumbled across a hitherto unsuspected tabloid quirk of Victorian clergy. Alas no, (or perhaps jolly good, no!) – it just means he was an expert on lichens.

 

It’s a long walk back to Fermyn Woods across the fields and along the lane known as Harley Way. There’s an airstrip just there, from which gliders are powered up into the sky, not by being towed behind a plane, but launched from a fixed cable.  I watch as one is reeled in along and then above the runway, climbing at a steep angle until it catches the thermals, at which point the glider detaches, and a parachute is deployed to drop the cable safely to the ground. I watch fascinated, as the chute gently descends, and then turn to see where the glider is. But the cloud’s lowering now, and it has simply vanished from my sight. In my end is my beginning.  ‘Brothers, this Lord Jesus/Shall return again/With his Father’s glory/With his angel train…’

 

McVey’s McNuggets*: 24 km. 6.8 hours. 22 degrees. Sun and cloud, and a burning breeze, as it turned out. 5 stiles. 4 gates.  2 bridges.  Quite a lot of road walking. The birdsong really was wonderful today.

 

·          It’s Tory Party election time - when their less-than-200,000 members determine who will be Prime Minister for the other 66 million of us. Esther McVey, Saints preserve us, seems to be the favourite female pick of the Daily Telegraph. Other candidates are available. And will be given their shout-out in these pages.

 

Father

When do I take
Reason and Logic
Out of their boxes
For proper employ in your service?
And when should I put them away
Close the lid
Mind my own business
And simply trust
That you have the answers?

 

Father
Expand my faith
And so increase my ability
To do that for which
You have made me.
Amen.