On the road again #2 *

Social distancing isn’t always so easy on the hoof. For example there’s the situation where you make a sharp turn round a dense privet hedge to find some steely-eyed individual bearing down on you along the pavement at Mr. Wilkins’ customary four miles an hour ( cf. Anthony Buckeridge’s ‘Jennings and Derbyshire’…) Or there's the leotarded occasional runner, gasping for breath and about to expire who’d run straight through you if you didn’t step into the gutter.  Or the bloke staring vacantly into space while yelling down his I-phone. Or the family with two kids and two dogs who occupy their own mobile, self-isolating space five metres by five metres, imposing their right of way by sheer force of numbers. The ratio of times I take avoiding action compared to the occasions other parties give way? Probably about four to one. It’d be different if I was six foot six and eighteen stone - which is why dictators are so often small of stature. They’re taking their revenge on society. Better keep tabs on that Michael Gove then…

Down near the mill I come across a woman I’ve seen before. Her exercising m.o. is to drive her toddler and his push chair forward at about a three hours thirty marathon pace. Amazingly she still has the puff to say hello. Her (their) regular morning run is six miles. Respect!

Today on my Covid-interim ‘spokes of the wheel’ phase of the Big Walk pilgrimage I'm travelling from my home in Weston Favell to Hardingstone. I cross the Nene at the lock gate. The Washlands reservoir stretches out to the west. It’s a sunny day, but even so the view from here always strikes me as rather bleak. It encourages maudlin thoughts, so the song which comes to me as I stand on the weir and watch the rushing water is David Crosby’s Lay me down:  ‘Lay me down in the river/And wash this place away/Break me down like sand from a stone/Maybe I’ll be whole again one day… ‘

The path above the reservoir describes a lazy semicircle towards the Bedford road out of Northampton. Then I move forward on a towpath past the Britannia pub, where the owner is using the closure as the opportunity for a spring clean and spruce up. In contrast, above the Rushmills lock there’s an untidy collection of decrepit narrow boats whose hippie-ish inhabitants have strewn the river banks with a decade’s worth of ordure and detritus. One of the boats is decorated with the words of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I harrumph to myself that if this local environment represents the Nirvana to which the boat-dwellers aspire, it’s a pretty poor outcome. ‘Imagine there’s no heaven…?’ Exactly!  Never liked the song, not one little bit.

A guy and a girl are exercising beside the path near the Rowing Club, laughing as they stretch and pull. The white water course is dry, the canoes safely tucked up in the boathouse. I turn about, and crossing a side channel to the river, see a young snowy-white egret, stealthy of tread, patrolling the water. I pass under the disused railway line which once would have taken business people and shoppers from the St. John’s Station (where the Morrison’s supermarket now is) via Olney to Bedford, and then I’m in the Brackmills Industrial Estate.  I pass the Wickes warehouse, and then the British Pepper and Spice factory, with the sixties-university like castle of Barclaycard away to my right. A few years back the Pepper and Spice place burned down, and great was the conflagration. Now all is made new, and as I walk past I'm taken on a rather extraordinary aromatic trip around the world. There’s pepper to be sure, but also cumin and tarragon and something more exotic still. I find Houghton Lane, more a cycle path than a road these days. It pulls up out of the valley and emerges at the corner of Hardingstone village by Back Lane. The views are a little obscured now but as at Gayton, there’s a sense here of where the money in Northampton ended up – gracious houses on a balcony overlooking Delapré Park. That’s not the whole story of this village though, because as the name perhaps suggests, the area was also a source of ironstone for building the expanding towns of the county, winched down to the Nene on a tramway by a fixed steam engine.

The church of St. Edmund is handsome. Beverley, the rural dean, lives in the relatively modern rectory off Back Lane. Her predecessors would have dwelt in the apparently Georgian pile at the rear of the churchyard back in the days when everyone was cold most of the time.

It takes a bit of mental effort to connect the idea of pilgrimage with this semi-urban stroll. Even now, as I write up this walk, with all its references to pop music and children’s literature, its recognition of history and sense of place, its acknowledgement of the people I've passed, I struggle to remind myself of the point of it all. I suppose I’m underscoring for myself firstly, and then for you as my reader- companion, that we owe everything to God, that despite the way I sometimes feel, everything is under his care. More than ever at this weird time, the words of Richard Gillard’s fine hymn ‘Brother, sister, let me serve you’ come to mind:  ‘We are pilgrims on a journey/And companions on the road/We are here to help each other/Walk the mile and bear the load.’

Today is St. George’s Day. The odd thing is that he wasn’t always England’s patron saint: his predecessor was St. Edmund (‘King and Martyr’). Edmund was deposed from his patronage role thanks to Richard I who felt that George had been of material assistance in the winning of a battle near Jerusalem (always a place to encourage strong inclinations and rash decision-making). There remains a body of opinion which would like to see Edmund reinstated even now, and after a petition the House of Commons was mandated to debate the notion as recently as 2016, though I must say that passed me by. If King Aelfred’s life is cloaked in myth and dense historical fog, it’s pretty transparent compared to E(a)dmund’s. It would seem he was a king of East Anglia, and was killed by the Danes. His reputation was such that coins were struck in his name long after his death, and even the Vikings came to honour him. Apart from that, there's next to nothing – slim stuff on which to build a national saint…so we’re stuck with the ubiquitous and not so very English George. But I guess more churches are dedicated to Edmund…

I drop back down the lane to walk home a different way by Great Houghton, through the surprise of Brackmills Country Park with its trees, lake and relatively lofty elevation, to the (in railway terms) steep incline of the Olney line’s trajectory away from Northampton. I pass four Eastern European factory workers, sharing a jovial and distinctly non socially-distanced lunch, and then two labourers sawing tree trunks within a hair’s breadth of each other. The next months are either going to be a chaotic, semi-managed passage into ‘herd immunity’ or to acceptance that we now live with a multi-variant, more virulent analogue of the common cold. Once again I'm brought to a sober assessment of my own mortality. And this too is what pilgrimage is about. It’s not all rollicking, bawdy tales on the way to Canterbury, you know. Or even being paid for filming a fortnight’s celebrity jaunt to Istanbul, very good and sometimes moving though the recent BBC2 programmes were…

A report from Alison Grantly, Assistant to the Stat-Man…

15 km. 4 hours. 1 stile. 18 gates 5 bridges. 19 degrees C. Fine and sunny. Exactly 100 people passed Mr. Cross on the way, cycling, walking or running, not counting those working in their gardens or place of business.  That means in raw statistics, there’s the likelihood he passed at least one person with the Virus.  But of course, nothing’s ever as straightforward as that…

Heavenly Father
I've been to enough funeral services
to understand
that 'in the midst of life
we are in death'.
You know
(because in Jesus your Son
you’ve been there)
how frightening this is
when it becomes personal:
I mean…that personal.

Help me to rejoice in each new day
and thank you for it,
and to deal with the unknown
with courage.
And help me rise above my own fears
to assist with the needs of others:
their distress:
their pain:
their failing of faith.
Amen. 

·       (re: ‘On the road again’:  there’s the eighties’ song by Willie Nelson, which in the version I know sounds like the studio was full of everyone in the world who Willie ever played with, bashing or strumming something. Personally I prefer the quite different sixties’ blues ditty recorded by Canned Heat and sung by their physically massive frontman Bob ‘the Bear’ Hite in a strange near-falsetto – quirky, oddly chilled, spliff music from a time when ‘psychedelia’ often depicted a more nightmarish inner world.)

And in the absence of collective worship try a little 'TEN ON SUNDAY'.
Please go to:  www.vincecross.co.uk  and click on the menu.

Solipsist

There’ve been travellers’ horses in the scrappy water meadow behind Northampton’s Riverside retail development for years, piebald, hairy, rustic and not at all phased by humans, because hundreds of people pass close to them daily. They’re grouped by the gate, chomping on the sparse pasture, and I have to be non-socially distanced from them as I make my way down to the Nene, pretty much elbowing them to one side. Are they wild? Does anyone own them? If so, who? They’re apparently not for anything, whether work or riding. They just are. Which isn’t an observation one would need to make of, say, blackbirds or squirrels.

This is a path, part of the Nene Way, to the east of one of Weston Favell’s old mills, which I’ve walked a lot, though not so much in recent years. I remember bunking off morning worship down here one Sunday in a huff about something churchy, and marching my frustrations into the misty air.  Near where it passes through a second gate into the Billing Aquadrome’s land, the high symmetrical mound of Clifford’s Hill is obvious on the far bank through the trees – which aren’t fully in leaf yet. There was a ford across the river here in medieval times, and something of a river cliff, hence the name. It was a militarily strategic motte castle keeping north-facing watch over the river valley. I love the fact that the summit of the mound saw more domesticated use as a bowling green when the game came into vogue in the seventeenth century.

It’s a beautifully warm day, with a haze lingering into the late morning. There are some other folk about as I traverse the suburban housing at the outset of the walk, but in the Aquadrome only a handful of residents from the fixed bungalow caravans wander around, watching the adagio progress of the river and the birdlife. The ground surface has thoroughly dried: the ‘lockdown’ has been made bearable by the consistently fine weather of the last three weeks. What’s striking is the vast expanse of empty open ground where the site’s casual caravan traffic would normally have taken up residence by now. There’s no one there at all – whether because the government’s message about unnecessary travel has been taken on board, or the Aquadrome has shut its doors to incomers.

                                             Billing Aquadrome: April 2020

The English summer carries a host of associations giving shape and colour to time, depending on who you are. For me as for many others, the natural focus is on sporting events, all now gone from this year’s calendar, although English cricket still hopes for a miracle which would allow some matches to be played. Not even in wartime was the national game completely squashed, but I can’t see any amateur or professional version being feasible. The Olympics would have been a personal highlight. Some find a summer without Wimbledon unthinkable. Non-sporting people might mark the Lord Mayor’s Show or the Trooping of the Colour. From a faith point of view, the long stretch of Trinity is broken in late June by our patronal festival. Holidays in July or August are a necessary relief from the routine of work. At present the government is advising against booking even these. For the Aquadrome it means that the annual car festivals won’t be taking place. There’ll be no Friday evening processions of ancient Land Rovers, Vauxhalls, or American sedans onto its grass, there to be lovingly polished and primped. How will the public cope with these privations? I do not mean to mock. It’s a real question, to be considered in the light of domestic abuse and anti-social behaviour. Talking cars for the moment, I’m already seeing too much dangerous, criminally fast driving born of displaced frustration. Where is the Church’s voice in this? I don’t hear it, either at a local or most importantly, a national level. Have we become too much in thrall to a ‘multi-faith culture’, and too scared of giving a moral lead as well as a Christian message of hope to a largely secular world? Come on Justin! Get in there!

I’m on my way to Cogenhoe, and then to Whiston. I’ll have said this when I first visited the former on pilgrimage four years ago, but ‘Cogenhoe’ is one of those places which like ‘Cholmondeley’ sell the foreign visitor a complete dummy pronunciation-wise. It’s certainly ‘Cook-noe’, and more likely in old Northampton dialect, ‘Cook-ner’ (with a hint of a country burr on the terminal ‘r’). The ‘hoe’ refers to a promontory on which the straggling village sits: its ancient centre just falling off the hill’s eastern end close to St. Peter’s church. If you look back through the Big Walk’s annals, you’ll see I’ve been to Farthinghoe , and in Hertfordshire there’s the splendid Sharpenhoe with its ‘Clappers’ iron-age fort.

The heritage of Cogenhoe is celebrated in Church Street by a series of green plaques. I notice one honouring the artist Chris Fiddes whose nice son I once taught, and another for Sir John Hobson, once a Tory Attorney General. A little nearer to St. Peter’s church is a nod to Frank Cheer who ran an ‘outdoor beer house’ from a cottage. A note on the Heritage Society’s website remarks: ‘the distinctive smell of the shop is still remembered by older residents…’  I find no commemoration of sixties’ era Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves who once lived in the Old Rectory. I wonder why…?

St. Peter’s is a be-flowered quiet celebration all of its own, sitting in two acres of churchyard, teetering on the edge of the hill. There are earthworks protecting the land above the valley, but nowhere can I find a suggestion that any early military structure once sat beside it. I sit and look, thinking on the industrial history of this village, now largely a dormitory for Northampton and Wellingborough. Ironstone was once quarried here, but now you’d have to have a keen eye to spot any remaining clues in the farmed and wooded landscape. Once upon a time one of the main jobs of the school was to teach its pupils lace-making. As in so many other Northamptonshire small towns and villages, shoes were a literal cottage industry before centripetal forces drew the workers into Northampton itself and away from the domestic hearth. And now in 2020, an opposite imperative takes commerce away from the corporate centres and back into the home. In the nineteenth century the issue was how entrepreneurs could best control their workforce. How will that play out over the next twelve months? Compare and contrast Cogenhoe and villages of its ilk with all their sophisticated social connections and a church at their heart with anonymous housing estates replete with fear, loathing, and envious competition over status and wealth. Pilgrimage can generate optimism and pessimism, sometimes almost simultaneously.

I have the beginnings of a blister and leave Whiston for another day.

Stato man is on furlough, and regrets that under current contractual terms he is unable to contribute information.

Great Father of us all
We thank and praise you for the gifts you have given us:
The sun:
The rain:
The changing seasons:
The extraordinary variety and creativity of your people:
A sense of the past:
A vision of the future:
A faith that you have all things in your care:
A hope that we may see a new earth and heaven,
United in love for you,
Redeemed by the work of your Son,
Inspired by your Holy Spirit.
Amen.

And why the title to this post?  As I always say…I know you know this but…

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that we can know only ourselves. It might derive for instance from Descartes' famous ‘cogito ergo sum’ ( to be distinguished from Cogenhoe ergo sum  which would have been quite a good joke if I’d thought of it earlier!) In other words, I can be sure of one thing at least – which is that I’m thinking now. Everything else is uncertain, unknowable, and maybe unreal. Everyone else may be a zombie. All that I experience may be a dream which as surrounded me all these apparent years (or just maybe a few seconds…) This interesting, sceptical idea has hung around for more than two millenia. It can’t be refuted – in Karl Popper’s terms it’s not falsifiable – but if there really are any hardcore solipsists out there, I don’t think that’s going to worry them a great deal. Metaphorically, the term has a secondary meaning. In common language it might embrace anyone who thinks only of themselves, not necessarily from philosophical principle, but from dedicated selfishness. Can this be distinguished from the individualism which has pervaded contemporary society?  And will the current crisis provoke an examination of this? Whatever, the process of self-isolating and social distancing enhances the illusion that, sorry and all that, John Donne, but we are islands entire of ourselves.  I think about this as I walk. By myself. Alone. And every philosophical problem seems to shade into all other philosophical problems.

A question of guilt

If I walk a hundred metres or so from our front door, I find myself at what is probably a very ancient crossroads where the ‘Three Horseshoes’ pub stood before it was pulled down. Running more or less northwards is Booth Lane, taking the present day walker past schools and colleges up to ‘Buttocks Booth’. This is the site of a Roman villa, which sat on a hillside with a once-visible cleft, such that it reminded the ancients of…well, you know what it reminded them of! The ‘booth’ may have been the extant remains of the villa or a subsequent house.

Running east-west from the crossroads is the old turnpike road from Northampton to Wellingborough, built in the 1770’s, a newcomer to the business of road-charging, filling in what must have been a noticeable gap in the turnpike grid, but arriving too late to make the big profits that would have been hoped for. What were these eighteenth century motorways like? Well, first of all they were obviously an improvement on what went before, or else people wouldn’t have paid for them, but looking at this road in particular, one suspects the width, location and novelty of the road was as significant as any improvement in the technology initially employed in constructing the road surface. A little later, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, John Loudon Macadam’s innovations in the use of crushed stone made a difference to horse-speed and the comfort of travellers. Between Weston Favell and the toll bar in Abington the road skirts the estate of the Big House, holding to the higher and drier ground above the villages along the spring line. Nevertheless, a couple of minor depressions in the current successor A4500 road show where more persistent streams would have crossed the thoroughfare, and I guess it would have been pretty sticky thereabouts outside the summer months without constant patching and reinforcement. The appliance of greater science was necessary and Macadam was the man, though whether Northampton ever consulted him I don’t know.

Today I stroll in towards the town, past St. John’s Care Home, a lovely place with a croquet lawn laid in front of the main house, which must be a great rarity for such an establishment. Opposite it is an Aldi, spoiling the possible view out over the Nene Valley - but then before the Aldi was built a few years ago, the site was occupied by a sprawling and even less lovely garage. I hope all the residents are safe: they’re fearsomely vulnerable to the infection. Buses pass me, mostly completely empty, because potential passengers are heeding the coronavirus lockdown advice, and folk have spotted that public transport is a danger – which doesn’t help the drivers much. In London a number have died, either contracting the virus through walk-up at their counters, or perhaps from association with colleagues who have it. But how would one know the exact method of transmission? For the record, there’s not enough testing, because we don’t have the kit, either in terms of reagents or laboratories.

To my left the houses become grander and then the view opens up as I arrive at Abington Park, the grass falling away to the duckponds, which once provided the Manor its Friday fish. The profusion of March daffodils is fading fast by the intersection where the toll stood. I cross at an angle under the trees and creep up on St. Peter and St. Paul’s church from behind. Without musicians the bandstand always looks a lonely place, as if the circus had just left town and abandoned some of its hardware. The aviary is closed because of Covid - to protect the birds or us?  In a 1980’s golden summer I wrote some incidental music for a production of The Merchant of Venice here. I manned the tape recorders for most of the performances, and the evening warmth, the soundscape, the scent of the flowers, and the vocal interruptions of the park’s peacocks float back to me in a synaesthesia - the rapture of youth. There’s a very local connection to the Bard. His grand-daughter Elizabeth Bernard lived in the Manor.

The current Rector of St. Peter and St. Paul’s, ‘the church in the park’ is the Rev. Byung Jun Kim, a relatively young man from South Korea. Some of us tutted when we saw the virus expand its grip in his home country so rapidly during late January because of a cluster of cases arising from the culpable negligence of a cult religious group ( a negligence which has shaped worldwide ecclesiastical policy).  Now the boot’s on the other foot, and Rev. Jun finds himself in a besieged Europe, while the careful monitoring of the situation in South Korea has apparently contained the virus to a remarkable degree. They did have the kit, and they tested relentlessly.

But this is no time to apportion blame, point fingers or find scapegoats. Very close by is the site of the Abington Gallows where those convicted in the 1612 Northampton witch trials were executed. One wonders what the posh people in the then newly constructed Manor house thought of such judicial murder carried out on their very doorstep. Some at least of those hanged had been subjected to trial by water. The theory was that if the authorities ducked the accused and they floated then they were guilty, because one of the properties of being a witch was unnatural lightness. If they sank, well then clearly they weren’t guilty after all. Opinions differ as to whether this was a true ‘Morton’s Fork’ to ensure that once indicted, the victim would inevitably die. Some say that if they sank, a rope would have been attached with which to extract them prior to drowning, others take a more cynical view. I’m inclined to think of the seventeenth century as a society not so very unlike ours. But these proceedings reveal thought processes which superficially are a million light years away from our own. It’s instructive to look them in the eye though, particularly if we have a Christian faith which may be about to face novel challenges and attacks.

On my way home across the park, I pass the scene of a cricket match which lingers in the memory. I was called to the colours suddenly because a friendly team for whom I was still registered were one short for an August game. I opened the batting, having not touched a bat for six months, and was up to the early twenties in no time with a series of nice boundaries, one dabbed through third man, another more assertively off the back foot past point, a third turned past square leg’s right hand, and a fourth struck firmly through mid-on. Then on my call my opening partner asked for an impossible single. The throw was annoyingly accurate. I returned crestfallen to the ring. I can’t complain: my running’s never been very reliable. Bill and I had put on more than a hundred together one sunny day the previous season. He’s proud to be a Kingston, whose family in the late nineteenth century formed the complete county team when the County Ground had just been built five minutes up the road. It’s a story without parallel in the English game, and it brings a smile to my lips as I think of it now. There was a clergyman amongst their number: cricket and the Church have usually been good companions to each other, the game providing a too easy metaphor for correct moral behaviour.

My Father God

It’s the Government!
It’s the Unions!
It’s the Vicar!
It’s the PCC!
It’s the bloke next door!
It’s my parents!
It’s Philip Larkin!
It’s…
It’s everyone but me
And I know even in that moment
The self-deception of which I’m capable…

Thank you for the cycle
Of recognition
And repentance
And absolution
And forgiveness
And picking myself up
And moving on.
One more step along the world I go.
Limping but still more or less mobile.
Amen.

Alive and kicking?

Here we are sitting on our ball of confusion. Welcome to Babel Land.  Mr. Gove thinks a walk of up to an hour is enough exercise for one day. He doesn’t strike me as a sporty type. The police may turn me back if I set the Audi on course for a neighbouring county. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The inhabitants of (variously) the Peak District, Wales, Cornwall and Scotland wish to repel all potentially Covid-19 bearing boarders, and who can blame them? If you’re on Kinder Scout at the wrong moment the rozzers may take a drone snapshot and stick it up on social media for the rest of the public to shame and abuse you.

Are we down-hearted? Well yes, we are rather. Is the advice offered consistent, or even well-argued? Well, maybe not, but the point is, consistent or even well-argued advice probably isn’t possible right now. We’re all improvising. Do we just give up, and wait to die? Well, of course not.

So if I can’t continue walking the labyrinth to Peterborough by ever more distant circles, the themes remain the same. We need each other more than ever. We have to explore and then reconcile our differences as Christians in a greater cause. We are the Body of Christ still, even in the face of the virus and closed churches. F.D.Maurice had the gist of it a hundred and seventy years ago. Who was F.D. Maurice? I’ll leave you to look him up, but he was quite a guy, for a theologian. He said his job was to dig, not build, which I rather like.

But I can still - for the moment - without using a car, walk the individual spokes of a wheel, out and back, from Weston Favell to neighbouring churches, and so today I go east towards Great Billing. My Big Walk first took me to St. Andrew’s church in May 2016. Great Billing like our own ‘village’ has an ancient centre surrounded by more modern housing. The walk is entirely suburban, but the church sits on a prominence with ‘Big House’ parkland falling away from it.

On the way there and back I’m passed by a hundred and one people (literally!) They are walking, cycling, jogging and in one case positively sprinting. Most are very well-behaved, apart from one morose geezer who can’t control his greyhound cross in the immediate vicinity of an understandably anxious woman with a baby in her arms. Then there are the kids splashing about noisily in Billing Brook, and four lads playing footie who don’t look particularly related to each other. Should I count as law-breakers the middle-class folk in a leafy close maintaining their two metres distance, but clearly having multi-neighboured social time? Probably. Calculating epidemiological risks is an imprecise science. We’re all taking our chances, more or less. I see more dogs in a limited time span than since last we were in Padstow and I encounter just two people wearing masks. On a Friday afternoon, it’s quieter than the most subdued Sunday, occasional distant blasts of Bhangra and Metal aside. The pathside woodland near St. Andrew’s has been coppiced. A contractor steadily mows the long stretches of grass by the church, blades sensibly high, in case of late frost or unexpected April heat. There are more people wandering the churchyard than I expect; parents doing some approximate home-schooling, looking at the inscriptions on the graves, enjoying the flowers and the quiet ambience. The notice affixed to St. Andrew’s door tells the world that the Church is alive and active, waving, not drowning. Are we?

Being a bloke, I’m only too aware that it’s men who are most susceptible to severe illness and death as a result of Covid. But I also notice in recent days that most if not all of those both taking risks with the virus and also projecting themselves in the faces of their fellow human beings e.g. by furious and noisy driving/biking - are also male. Is there a connection? Or is the presence of testosterone merely a spurious common factor between Covid mortality and manly strut?  And how do I read this in the context of men a) frequently wishing to dominate as ‘leaders’ in a religious context (as they also do in many other public contexts) and b) being absent from ground-level contemporary Christian religious observance, where that faithfulness isn’t expressed in more enthusiastic, extrovert forms? 

I stop by Billing’s cricket ground to mourn two amateur cricketers who this place conjures up. ‘Tot’ Manning was a sixth former when I was teaching at Northampton’s School for Boys in the seventies. He was generously built, and wielded (by the standards of those days) a heavy bat from which the ball was apt to depart with such rapidity that bowling slow-medium at him wasn’t a lot of fun. Tragically, ‘Tot’ died early in his college career, and ever since I hope he’s been terrifying close fielders on the heavenly cricket field. He was a protégé of Trevor Ford who captained the school’s staff cricket team back then, and whose funeral was conducted on-line this last week, as sadly many others will have been. Trevor was Yorkshire through and through, a purveyor of wily off breaks, delivered from almost a standstill because of arthritic knees. Both would have been surprised to find themselves mentioned in writings largely devoted to faith. Surprised, and in Trevor’s case at least, perhaps not entirely delighted.

Music and faith are intertwined at Billing. I may have previously mentioned that in 1577 Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, at that time riding high in Court circles, and having persuaded Elizabeth into granting them a monopoly on the printing of sheet music, also managed to obtain a lease on the Billing estate (and other land besides) for forty quid a year. It passed out of their hands not so long afterwards, but of course Tallis was dead by 1585, and Byrd was by then slipping out of favour for his Catholic inclinations. Elizabeth was not terribly amused by William’s churchmanship, but cut him more slack than she did for others.

Great Billing’s pub is the Elwes Arms, after the largely Catholic family who lived in the Hall. Gervase Elwes was a celebrated tenor at the turn of the nineteenth century, a mate of Percy Grainger, and a noted, pioneering exponent of Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’. He died in a terrible railway accident in Boston, Massachusetts. Elgar said shortly afterwards: ‘My personal loss is greater than I can bear to think upon, but this is nothing – or I must call it so – compared to the general artistic loss – a gap impossible to fill – in the musical world.’

I was brought up on ‘The Dream’, a work that’s absolutely without comparison as far as I can see, vividly imaginative and frighteningly emotional. I’ve found it difficult to listen to ever since my early teenage years, and despite its lovely colours and melodies which are both tender and plangent by turns, I’d find it impossible right now.

Stat Man:  Service temporarily suspended, but for the record:  13 deg C: sunny: 7 km.

With churches closed for the time being, many people are turning their minds to the maintenance of worship by other means. My small contribution to this is to provide a weekly ten minutes of audio – what we might have been doing/listening to in church on a particular Sunday if we’d been there. To find the various postings, please go to my website:

http://www. vincecross.co.uk

and click on the button ‘Ten on Sunday’ at the top of the site. This should take you straight to them. Alternatively, just scroll down until you see the pictures of a magnolia tree.