Missing the mark

                             It's been a very good autumn for funghi, but stay away from these...

Do I walk anti-clockwise more than I walk clockwise?  I think I do. And what should be read into this?

Today at any rate is an anti-clockwise day, beginning at Gretton and following the track south-east towards Kirby Hall. The early clouds have vanished: it’s a sparkling clear morning. A van splashes through the puddles behind me and I step onto the verge. The van veers from side to side of the lane ahead, avoiding a lorry tyre that’s been abandoned dead-centre. The van stops with a squeak, handbrake interruptus. I greet the dungareed farmer. His mood doesn’t exactly match the weather:

Me:  (sad shake of the head) ‘Pah. Have they left it for you to clear up then?’

Him:    (mumbling to himself…I don’t think he’s heard me: probably too much time too close to industrial machinery)  ‘Grmble, grmble, maudit gerbil…’

Me: (louder) ‘I said, they’ve left it for you to tidy…’

Him: (Not looking up. Shovelling muck into a pile I hadn’t seen by the hedge) ‘It ent my job. I dunno how the buggers got it ‘ere. They keep that gate back there shut nowadays. I give up…grmble grmble maudit…’

And indeed it isn’t his job, and it’s utterly mystifying why someone would drive a mile into the middle of the countryside to clutter up the lane. His job has probably been to dig out the ditches which line the track a little further on, painstaking but necessary work which reminds me how much patience is still required to keep animals safe and coax a living from the land. I couldn’t do it.

Eventually the track peters out, and its successor path climbs a little hill, skirts a copse and arrives at a stile from which there’s a great view of Kirby Hall. Though blind and derelict, it’s a fine, noble example of a ‘Prodigy House’ and its first owner was Sir Christopher Hatton. He also built the rather larger Holdenby Hall, thirty odd miles away. Prodigy Houses were a by-product of Queen Bess’s liking for making ‘progress’ around the Midlands, which I daresay was a mutually convenient way of keeping royal costs down and key individuals sweet. Who was sweeter on whom in this instance it’s hard to say. She liked his dancing (he apparently cut a mean galliard), and Hatton must have had a brain to match his shapes, since he became her mid-reign chancellor. He clearly valued her assets highly too, or was at least smart enough to pay them due homage: he gave her a ring which he claimed had ‘the virtue to expel infectious airs’. It was to be worn between Her Majesty’s ‘sweet duggs, the chaste nest of pure constancy’. Unsurprisingly there were rumours that they were lovers. Hatton’s lasting legacy is to have a school in Wellingborough named after him. Ah well!

A man short of stature, in clothes suggesting household repairs rather than rambling, and with no dog or walking paraphernalia, follows me purposefully from the surrounding fields into Kirby Hall’s drive. I say hello and he answers incomprehensibly. Was that Latvian or deep Northamptonshire dialect? Half a mile later he’s there close behind me again as I stand by a stile trying to make sense of a path diversion. Again, without offering any facial or bodily clue, he says something I can’t understand so I just smile encouragingly…but not too encouragingly. It’s a morning for mumbling. Perhaps I’m doing it myself. I choose the road, he the possibly-closed path. Then further on up, by a nice rule of three, he suddenly stumps out from the trees beside me. I move into a higher gear and leave him behind, speeding on to Deene with its chocolate box cottages, its stately home and high-spired St. Peter’s. Inside one immediately thinks what a big old pile this is for such a diminutive village. It’s now in the care of the Conservation Trust, whose work with smaller buildings is often so instructive, beneficial and worship-preserving, but they have a tough task here. Most of what one sees inside the building is already gothic-revival restoration, lovingly completed a hundred and fifty years ago at the instigation of the ‘Light Brigade’s Seventh Earl of Cardigan’s widow, a member of the local Brudenell family whose tombs are prominent in today’s church. Near the door I see a board which mentions a figure of £1.5 million to put things right. I think to myself that however beautiful the setting, we just can’t do this. Bar the discovery of a local saint and the founding of a celebratory cult here, few people will ever make a pilgrimage through the doors of St. Peter’s to find faith or even simply enjoy its lofty proportions.

The Greenbelt festival made its annual home at Deene for some years in the nineties, and then perhaps at least for one weekend a year St. Peter’s was full of people at prayer. Being here now causes me to reflect on my past as I awkwardly navigate around a herd of cows on the path to Bulwick.

WARNING: Old rocker’s reminiscences. Can cause drowsiness. Do not operate heavy machinery while reading…

We had various encounters with splendid Greenbelt throughout its earlier history. What a good job it’s done for making visible the fact that the Christian faith touches every area of life in ways that are surprising, radical, and un-churchy. In the absence of fifties-style Billy Graham evangelistic crusades, it and ‘Spring Harvest’ have been the poster events for The Church these past forty years. Greenbelt began in Odell on the Northants/Beds border. Bill Thorp’s lovely ‘Water into Wine Band’ sought relief from Bank Holiday soggy bottoms in our front room in August 1975, and I subsequently managed to park our Renault 6 on a festival site tree stump, wheels waving in the air, a feat apparently much more easily achieved than remedied. When the festival moved more or less down the road from us in Castle Ashby a few years later, Sue and I were part of a festival lunchtime radio roadshow with friend Myra Blyth and radio presenter Dilly Barlow, all jingles, interviews and panel discussions on abortion and South American politics. In 1987, I hit the mainstage, number two on the Saturday night bill behind Philip Bailey as one of the two keyboard players in Mark Williamson’s Bloodline. In fact the band had two of most things. Apart from me and six foot seven inches of Babe Ruth’s Dave Morris, there were two guitarists in the wonderful Robin Boult and international hit producer Alan Shacklock, two drummers including my mate Nigel Pegrum, and squadrons of backing singers, one of whose mics was turned off because he was singing so flat (though I think he may not have been entirely aware of this). There was so much on-stage smoke that the set became an exercise in solipsism. Not only could we not hear each other, the faithful reproduction of a 1953 pea-souper made it impossible to see each other too. I might use this as an excuse for my delivery of what on one of our more-bombastic-than-Muse numbers may have been the worst ever keyboard solo in rock n’roll history, or alternatively an inspired piece of dada-ist art, but it would be inauthentic of me to do so. There was a mixing-desk recording, but thankfully it never saw the light of day, and I ritually destroyed my cassette copy in red-faced disgust.

A couple of years later, the band I was then with, Beltane Fire, opened the whole weekend for die-hard, early adopters on a damp Thursday evening. We worked hard for meagre applause from punters who didn’t have a clue who we were, but at least I could see the drummer and bass player.

I never played at Deene Park.

                          Inside St. Peter's, Deene. (I had a go, but couldn't make it happen).

The nineteen eighties/nineties were a funny time. I was in my thirties and forties, a latecomer to the entertainment world, convincing myself that I wasn’t a failure for giving up on teaching after six years, striving desperately for recognition in an industry for which I wasn’t very well-equipped. I think now I lost my way, and compromised the ‘real me’, too desperate, too eager to please, too exploiting, too ridiculously obsessed with glamour and fame which never came. Perhaps we often feel that kind of thing about our pasts. Does it strike a chord with you in some way? Perhaps in twenty years I’ll feel comparable things about the me-that-is-now. All that blogging! What did he think he was playing at! The New Testament Greek word for ‘sin’ is ‘hamartia’, which famously comes from a family of words borrowed from the military or sporting worlds to do with ‘missing the mark’ (as perhaps in archery).  I missed the mark quite often, and of course I still do.

This seems like a cuddly, friendly way of thinking about ‘sin’, a long way removed from hell-fire preaching, or even the condemnation the apostle Paul hands out to the early Christian churches for their shortcomings. Some evangelical commentators seek to redress this by suggesting that implicit in the idea of ‘hamartia’ is that the person missing the target won’t ‘share in the prize’ (heaven?) or would be ‘letting the army down’, in a way that deserves punishment. Would it be fair to respond that not many archers deliberately try to ‘miss the mark’? Most of us are in it to win it. It’s just that all of us fail: our technique’s not good enough, the target’s too far away, our training wasn’t right. I prefer to think of God laughing at our foolishness and chiding us lovingly back to better ways. Elvis Costello sings: ‘Oh Alison…my aim is true…’  I don’t believe in a God who throws his creation away, who, in an old fashioned phrase, ‘sets it at nought’. And so on my more generous days I also think, notwithstanding confession and absolution, I should cut my sadder eighties’ self a bit of slack.

 But what about the real bad stuff, the meticulously planned fraud, the abuse of children, genocide?  I don’t know. I really don’t know…

Except that working these things through is also the stuff of pilgrimage.

 Bulwick was once on the main Stamford road, but was by-passed some years ago, and is a pretty, lively village with the Queen’s Head on my left and St. Nicholas’ church on the right. I’m served a restorative GB by the smartly dressed bar staff in the neat pub, and am amused to find that Bulwick’s local Big Family are the Tryons, which reminds me of the BBC execs’ difficulties when first introduced to The Goons – they read the groundbreaking comedy act as the Go-ons, which seemed to them far more in keeping with ‘variety’ theatre.  The inside of St. Nicholas tells me two things: that there are not huge numbers of worshippers, but that the people of the village care for each other and their church.

 The plight of their village shop underlines the fact. On February 22^nd a chimney fire caught the thatch and the whole of Camille and Andrew Ortega-Maclean’s business and domestic life went up in smoke. The Pickled Shop had both become loved as a local amenity and was establishing a reputation as a supplier of fine foods in the UK and Europe. The couple walked out of the ruins with what they wore and nothing else. Now the villagers are crowd-funding Pickled Shop rev. 2, and as I pass today the builders are whistling and hard at work. Good on yer, Bulwick.

 

                    A kneeler in St. Nicholas', Bulwick. Deenethorpe was the site of yet another
                                                  tragic World War 2 air crash.

Shots in the locker:  19.5 km. Just shy of six hours. 14 degrees C. Clear skies followed by some lunchtime cloud, dissipating towards dusk. 3 churches. 2 open (but not All Saints Laxton, whose building and churchyard lie at the end of a little Church Walk with a small field to one side, today containing two tiny, perfectly pretty calves and two understandably protective mums.) 9 stiles. 14 gates. 2 bridges. A black (?) squirrel near Kirby Hall – I’ve only ever seen one before and that was in Woburn, but this one looked pretty dark to me from a distance of 25 metres. The constant mewing of kites hunting near Laxton, singly and in pairs. And the verbed-up sound of a barn owl, taking over the night shift near Harringworth Lodge as I made my way back to Gretton.

Father
Forgive me my trespasses
And help me to forgive
Those who walk across my cucumber patch.
Grant me the capacity
So to learn from my past mistakes
That this day I better represent Christ
To those I meet
So that together
We bring about on our blue planet
Your kingdom of love, justice and equity.
Amen.