I do like to be beside the seaside

This is going to sour and mean. One of the carpet-chewing things about ‘lockdown’ (along with illegal raves and spitting at law enforcement agencies/service providers) has been the running story concerning citizens driving hundreds of irresponsible miles for the pleasure of an ice-cream on prom or pier, claiming that this is a vital, life-saving respite from Covid-blues. It seems we’re an island race still. Or just sugar addicts. Whatever, we’re mixed-up, aren’t we?

If you happen to live slap bang in the middle of England, Rutland Water’s a good substitute for Skeggy or Brighton beach, but thank goodness, not a roller-coaster or games arcade in sight. In the course of today’s walk I see a single ice-cream van, and one Best Western Hotel (not yet open for business, though perhaps next week…suitable PPE permitting)

I pull myself up the hill away from uber-neat Empingham and turn right following the signpost to Normanton. I’m writing a verse in my head, which could perhaps be put to use for this week’s ‘Ten On Sunday’. It’s St. Peter’s patronal festival weekend, and I want to give old Rocky a suitable puff, like he needs it from me. Two days ago I had a (40 watt i.e. not so very bright) lightbulb moment. Despite what I’ve heard preached in a gazillion sermons, does everyone necessarily identify with Peter’s spiritual experience? So I asked Sue, and she confirmed she felt little sense of identity with our church’s patron saint. I wonder how many other women (51% of the population, as we all know) agree? But then... firemen, police officers, prisoners, they all exert a certain attractive force. Why not a horny-handed fisherman with a dodgy temperament? These are murky waters – the confluence of the streams of identity, faith and sex appeal. Reversing genders, we need to account for the increasingly enhanced status of the Virgin during medieval times. Yeah Vince, go on, chuck in a bit of psychoanalytic theory for good measure…

Normanton is a strange phenomenon. There was a village once, but it was cleared to make way for the stately home and park of the Heathcote -Drummond-Willoughbys (two barrels doesn’t make you a proper toff!) and the population re-directed to Empingham, according to the time honoured and charming custom of the ruling classes (cf. Navajo Native Americans/South African ‘townships’). Kingdoms rise and fall, the HDWs had other, grander houses, and so eventually redundant, expensive Normanton Hall was delapidated in the 1920s. 

The church of St Matthew is marginally pre-Victorian and thus the HDWs (subsequently the Lords of Ancaster) would have known and supported its construction: for them as for many 19thC wealthy folk, philanthropy was fashionable until the money ran out amidst the post Great War depression. The church’s tower and portico were modelled on St. John’s Smith Square, proportionately reduced, but the balance of the stonework is Edwardian. 

Today Normanton is just a series of signs on the roadside: even St. Matthew’s was earmarked to disappear beneath the reservoir until it was saved by local outcry. What we enjoy now is the top half of the deconsecrated church, with what is effectively a mezzanine floor at the new post-inundation ground level. It looks like an elaborately eccentric and beautiful river steamer awaiting the embarkation of pleasure-seekers. On a hot day, it’s a wonderful place for a sarnie and a cup of tea, the sparkling water lapping at the surrounding stones, sail-boards skimming the lake surface, children giggling on the lawns.

There are a lot of people enjoying the waterside;  walkers, cyclists, photographers, twitchers, boaty folk, families with children. I follow the shoreline to the eastern dam from which one looks down on Empingham, wondering whether, if there were a breach, the village would swim with the fishes. (The answer is surely not: they must have designed out such a risk. Please tell me they did!) The village website for Empingham has a really good history section, showing how most periods of England’s national history are represented somewhere within the parish – just the right mix of juicy anecdote and serious comment. Gilbert seems to have been the HDW’s favourite given name. I taught with a Gilbert Heathcote, a kindly, humane, sadly disappointed man, whose nickname to staff and students alike was ‘Bunny’: I never knew why. His life didn’t end well. Decades later it still seems unfair that it didn’t.

 As sometimes happens, while I take a breather at the northern end of the dam, my phone spontaneously video-calls son Matt who’s beavering away on his computer in The Hague. Having established who’s phoned whom, I show him the water stretching away towards Oakham: as he says, I could be anywhere, but it doesn’t look particularly English. Shortly afterwards I find myself in true grockleland because of the thronging car parks, but then I’m off again on the path towards Whitwell, which rises to skirt a little bay where there’s a sailing centre. I pass two slightly noisy ladies with their kids and hear a snippet of conversation.

Woman 1:  Mind you, I’d sell my soul to the devil…

Woman 2:  Would you?

Woman 1:  I’ve got no qualms about going to hell…

What a strange thing to say!  At the moment there are various claims doing the rounds about an uptake of interest in Faith, often based on the number of hits church websites get for virtual services. During the last couple of days this even surfaced in the broadsheet press. Now it’s quite possible – even predictable - that this is true. People have been badly scared, and they’ve had time on their hands. If I think about it, I’ve probably prayed and read the Bible more consistently than at any time in my life, perhaps for both the above reasons, as well as from a need to create routine and personal discipline, and to differentiate one day from another (it’s good to be reminded at Morning Prayer that today’s an Ember Day and tomorrow we’re due to commemorate wily old Cyril of Alexandria).  I’ve already wondered out loud in these pages if ‘revival’ might be round the corner and if so whence it might come. However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shipmates. Evidence rendered from hits on websites needs to be treated with caution. Just because someone’s looked in your windows, doesn’t mean they’re coming to stay. And these church surfers could be residents of Terra del Fuego rather than Tooting for all you know. I passed a couple of big kids on bikes the other day, and one said to the other, ‘She thinks she’s something, but she’s only got 17k followers’.  17k! 

If it is true that folk are getting religion, what does ‘following Jesus’ mean these days? The expression has a whole new layer of meaning now that most of us ‘do’ social media. Commitment to theological precepts? Adoption of a critical and stringent moral code? Actual church attendance? (well, no, obviously not for the moment!) Financial contributions to the work of the Church as well as charities? Integration into a Christian community?  These days there’s a tendency to impose our own requirements of ‘faith’, in a way which is more palpable than in days gone by. Pick n’ mix is the thing, now we can’t be told what to believe. And, reading more of the Old Testament than I have for a while, I feel myself employing a bit of selective attention: there’s a whole bunch of difficult stuff in there, about which I don’t care to think too much.

Whitwell is a tiny village. In the 2001 census there were just 41 people living there. Which makes it a really good joke that in 1980, the regulars at the Noel Arms wrote to President Chirac requesting - nay more or less demanding - a twinning with Paris, insofar as their outgoing letter stated that if no reply was forthcoming within a certain period of time they’d deem their ‘offer’ accepted. Eventually, though it took a while,  a definitive and unsurprising ‘non’ found its way back to Whitwell.  Notwithstanding, and latterly with the amused connivance of Rutland County Council (to whom I increasingly warm), the proposed arrangement continues to be celebrated on the village road signs. I pause at St. Michael’s for a drink, and then cross the grounds of the Noel Arms to continue to Exton beside pleasant fields and through a carefully, diversely planted modern copse.

Exton’s a beaut. There’s a shady village green, surrounded by lots of period thatched charm. If it weren’t for the modern cars, you could easily imagine yourself back 50, 70, maybe a 100 years. The church of St. Peter and Paul is removed from the village, adjacent to the grandeur of the re-built Exton Hall, which has its own Catholic chapel (exquisite and available for weddings, according to their publicity). Exton Park has its own eccentricities, including ‘Fort Henry’, a lakeside folly from which the aristos and their guests once recreated the great naval battles. The OS shows bare areas to the north-east of the village on the fringes of the Park, where the landowners allowed exploitation of the ironstone during the mid-twentieth century, employing the massive ‘Sundew’ dragline - now to be seen part-preserved in Corby. It’s of astonishing size, a remarkable, awe-inspiring piece of industrial heritage, a testimony to man’s ambition to subdue the Earth.

I wish I could peek inside SS Peter & Paul, which has a wonderful tower and spire, impressive in size, adorned  with castellations. Simon Jenkins likes it: ‘At first view the tower seems telescopic, as if each component were waiting to be stretched from above’. Mind you, he likes Empingham’s ‘rocket’ steeple too, but gives that church one star as opposed to Exton’s three. It’s frustrating that I can’t get through the front door. As Jenkins says, Exton is mostly about its interior monuments, including a spectacular 1686 memorial to the 3^rd Viscount Campden. Monuments and marble aren’t my thing, but a measure of its quality and importance is that the great John Piper made a lithograph of it. A senior couple are wandering the perimeter of the church in woebegone fashion. Like me perhaps they’d wondered if in an out-of-the-way setting like this the church might be open. The Church Times had it right last week in pointing out that places of worship are mostly cleaned by the so-called ‘A’ generation of 70+ ladies - exactly the people who shouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting right now. Who will step up?

I see the senior couple again as I mooch through the village on my way back to the car.  Let’s come back to Exton again…

At the crossroads above the village, the signpost says Empingham is one mile distant. This is a lie. By the next crossroads, which still may or may not be one mile from Empingham (I’d guesstimate a mile and a half), some old-fashioned, brightly green and red painted travellers’ wagons sit on the verge. Lucky horseshoes are for sale, and there’s a sign advertising ‘Wilf’s Wonky Woodwork’. Well, of course I would, but a mile (!) is a long way to carry a garden gnome.

Cards on Mabel’s table:  20 km. 6 hrs. 23 deg C. Sunny throughout. 2 stiles. 13 gates. 3 bridges. Three churches. None open.

Father God
The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe
144,000
Get to share your glory.
(Or so I was once told)
But I don’t think you’re as mean as that.

Of course
Like I always do
I find it hard
To love those people down by the Lake;
The Polish guys
Not talking English
And laughing at me
(Or so I think)
The runners on the path
Always expecting me to give way
The yacking grockles
With their yappy dogs
And grizzling kids.

And then I catch myself falling.
Oh
They’re all your people
Struggling like me
Yearning like me
Blessed like me.
How could I forget?

Father, forgive me
And make me anew
To honour, love and cherish
And so bring us all together
Into your Kingdom
Where there is room enough
And to spare.
Even for me.
Amen.

Astraphobe

Is it a good or bad thing that weather forecasting remains a matter of probabilities rather than nailed-on certainty? I follow both the BBC’s daily predictions and the Met Office. They frequently disagree both about temperature and the likelihood of precipitation, at least until it’s too late. The Met allows access to radar which shows anticipated rainfall – but even then what’s forecast frequently fails to materialise, despite the lurid colours of the graphics. Major ‘rain events’ or ‘wind events’ tend to be accurately predicted, as are temperature spikes (there’ll be one this week coming), but year on year the English weather still retains its renowned quality of enigma.

And so it is this week. Each day somewhere will get a sousing and somewhere will stay dry. I’m watching the skies as I set out from Ketton. They’re nicely blued, but the atmosphere’s humid and sweaty. I pick my way through the houses, and find a field path which joins the rising track out of the village towards Empingham. I know this old road. It forms part of both the Macmillan Way (hello, long-neglected friend!) and the Hereward Way. It bisects the two halves of the massive quarries which supply the Ketton cement works (and provide a steady supply of sandstone for building, I presume). To both sides the land is deeply scoured and scarred, with impressive cliffs on some edges, and broad roadways where the heavy duty earthmovers can pass as they trundle their loads back to base camp for breaking and powdering. The site provides a fifth of the UK’s cement needs, but is also a wildlife haven, and a ready source of fossils for the intrepid trespasser. At one point on the track a bridge has been built over the chasm passageway from one side of the workings to the other. It provides a fine vantage point. Today there seems relatively little activity. There are no detonations. Few vehicles manouevre round the 115 hectare site. I suppose some of the staff may have been furloughed, though in such a vast quarry that seems counterintuitive. The village website tells me that amongst the fauna to be seen are marbled white, and grizzled and dingy skippers. I think to myself that I’ve met a few grizzled and dingy skippers in my lifetime, though these particular ones are butterflies.

After a while I climb gently to reach the quarry edge and from there a succession of field paths leads me to the lane which drops to Empingham close on the eastern extremity of Rutland Water, sometimes early in its existence referred to as ‘Empingham Reservoir’. On the way I pass a solitary escapee dog, and wonder for a moment whether it will lope across to join me as I walk (this has happened to me once before, when a lost pooch adopted me to the point I thought I’d have to take it home with me or drop it off at a cop shop). But this hound bounds across the fields, relishing its own freedom to excess and the crops’ detriment. My path is fringed with ground convolvulus, pretty in pink and white, the colour scheme picked up in the dog roses of the hedge line. This year they seem to be flowering in much greater profusion than normal.

As I come to the village the cloud is thickening, and the flies are more pesky. There’s a bit of Covid people confusion around ‘Barbara’s Stores’; cyclists and vans; people leaning against the closed gate of St. Peter’s church. I read the notices and adverts in the shop window.  A lot of them seem to be for pest control: moles, rodents, wasps. It could give one a skewed impression of life in Empingham. The general low-key hubbub continues. The cyclist leaning against the church gate is resolutely eating his sandwich, and on this occasion I don’t feel inclined to explain why I want to move him. I’m already imagining the conversation:

Me:  Excuse me, do you think I could just squeeze past?

Lycrabod: (not budging an inch, chomping on his cheese and pickle) It’s closed, mate. Didn’t you know?

Me:  Well, yes, actually. But I’d like to go in…

Lycrabod: I don’t think you’re allowed, fella. They’re shut, in’it?

Me: The church. Not the churchyard…

Lycrabod: You sure about that?

Me: I’m on a pilgrimage…

Lycrabod: You what? Oh! Right…I  went to Old Trafford once to see United…

I’d rather be a goalkeeper in the house of the Lord. Maybe it’s the humidity, but today I just don’t have the energy to crypto-evangelise. I retire to the bench on Empingham’s green and have a sandwich of my own. Cheese and corned beef, since you ask. I do my best to pray for the church and village, but my head’s a bit foggy and I don’t make a good fist of it. I look at my mobile and see that the probability of a storm has massively increased. According to the BBC there could be thunder and lightning at any moment. The Met confirms this. There’s a lot of red and yellow among the blue blobs on the radar. The sky over Empingham looks OK-ish, but my planned onward walk round the reservoir to Normanton seems a bad bet. The safer thing is a rapid retreat the way I’ve come, back to Ketton.

I do it. At pace. On the way the clouds lower for a while. The breeze comes and goes. But there’s no rending of the heavens, no life-threatening forks of electricity. On the drive back to Northampton about four spots of rain hit the fly-encrusted windscreen. While it was parked in Ketton, a crow, nay a likely gang of terrorist crows, have crapped all over the Audi. A good downpour would come in handy.

I think conservatism is a wise policy when it comes to electrical storms, and I recommend it to any readers. Better inconvenienced than dead.

Isobars on the chart:  10 km. 2.7 hrs. 23 deg. Humid and partly sunny. 3 stiles, 4 gates, 1 bridge (x 2 there and back). Butterflies (possibly a grizzled and dingy skipper included, for all I know…)

This is the day of the year on which the Church of England commemorates Richard of Chichester, who seems n.b. to have been a wise cleric and a nimble politician. Here’s his prayer, which you may remember from school, if you’re of a certain age:

Thanks be to you, our Lord Jesus Christ,
For all the benefits which you have given us;
For all the pains and insults which you have borne for us.
Most merciful Redeemer,
Friend and Brother,
May we know you more clearly,
Love you more dearly,
And follow you more nearly,
Day by day.
Amen.

Sore Knees

I park very carefully by the eastern section of pretty Barrowden’s village green, because there are notices saying such a privilege is reserved for residents, and my boot-tying is accordingly sheepish. However the cross-section of residents who pass while I’m strapping up smile benignly, so maybe they think I’m an incomer they’ve yet to meet, or I look like the kind of visitor Barrowden wants.

The grass in the home field is as high as a Great Dane’s eye. I cross the bumps and lumps of ancient habitation down to the Welland bridge which marks the county boundary, and am charmed by the little gargoyle which watches the water from one of the spans. There’s not a huge amount to see just now.

The path to Tixover follows the river, now June-overgrown, now broader and high on a flat bank in a sheepy field, then through some bosk, and finally along a broad track which takes me to the sign showing the way to the church of St. Luke. The backdrop to its comfortable, squat and square tower is the deep-green of the woodland at Wakerley. I walk around to St. Luke’s porch, and look at the gravestones, as one does, noting the nonagenarians, feeling the heart lurch at the loss of a youngish mum, probably like mine a victim of cancer.

St. Luke’s, Tixover makes it into Simon Jenkins’. He implies that something about its re-made medieval design and situation tells you this was a Cluniac foundation. The little church was once dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene, but perhaps the alleged reputation of the saint convinced a conservative congregation it needed a new heavenly patron, and perhaps they were encouraged in that thought by the Cromwellian vandals who in their reforming fervour broke some bits from the most important tomb to be found inside the church. There’s sixteenth century Swiss glass in some of the windows. I don’t know how rare this is, but it speaks of an interesting dialogue of faith.

Up the lane there’s an almighty commotion of sheep. A genial young farmer in a Land Rover is working the flock from one field to another with a pair of eager collies. He says how do as I lean on the fence and watch my own short edition of ‘One man and his dog(s)’, marvelling that farmers and animals have been doing this for centuries – though for most of that time without automotive assistance. A few yards further down the lane, but more than half a mile from St. Luke’s, there’s a sign on a lamp-post directing the visitor to the ‘Church Key’ -which won’t be hanging on its hook of convenience just now.

I’ve been to Loddington, Luddington and Lyddington. And I’ve been to Doddington and now I’m going to Duddington. I haven’t been to Diddington, which sounds like something from a Ken Dodd joke, but there is one – in Cambridgeshire, not far from the diocesan border. Duddington has a curving main street which would make a good film set, and then I come to St. Mary’s, which as one visitor has remarked is a frustrating place to photograph. The surrounding buildings crowd in on the church and render the angles awkward. For little ole’ pilgrim me there’s nothing to hang onto in Duddington today. There’s almost no one about apart from a parcels’ delivery man. I can’t draw inspiration from within St. Mary’s, because Virus Rules OK. Even beating the church boundary is quickly done, constrained by its narrow walls. The village mill is under re-construction, the water dank and un-moving in the pond. That’s the way of things, and I don’t hold it against a perfectly charming place to live. It’s me that’s dry, not the village. With nothing to detain me, I pick up the path walking north beside the river, crossing a field and a raised track, and emerging on a lane near Tixover Grange. This is now a care home, but formerly was a school for disabled children founded by the late Wilfred Pickles, whose Yorkshire tones I dimly remember from fifties’ radio. His wife was Mabel, hence the catchphrase ‘What’s on the table, Mabel?’ (there was a game-show element to the weekly programme). There’s now a furniture store near Bradford called ‘Mabel On the Table’, which will only make sense to a rather limited, elderly demographic or those with a Beryl Cook sense of humour. Still, it must work for them.

Shortly the superstructure of the Ketton cement works appears on the horizon for the first time, a jarring note in the rural symphony. A long straight track lies ahead, steadily rising, with the village of Collyweston on the opposite side of the shallow valley to my right. The path kinks left and right, and then I’m on one of those midgey ginnels which skirts the back gardens of Ketton’s dark star twin, Geeston. I loop round to enter Ketton proper by Aldgate. 

I’m surprised to learn that Ketton is the fourth largest settlement in Rutland after Oakham, Uppingham and Cottesmore, but as you’ve gathered, it acquires that size only by being a mash-up of three original villages. Wikipedia tells me that the current spelling is an adaptation of ‘Chetene’ which means ‘on the banks of the River Chater’, and the bridge spanning the stream (which separates Aldgate from Ketton) is handsome, though today I’m prevented from enjoying it to the full by two marauding teenage girls complete with teenage mobile phones and teenage verbal tics…’I’m like, and she’s like…so not…whatever…’ They’re probably super-intelligent, but just hiding it very well. Up at St. Mary the Virgin, I sit on a bench in the shadow of its soaring spire and eat lunch. Malcolm is walking his dog, and asks where I’ve been. He’s a walker too, but today he’s already played a round of golf, so he’s well ahead with his daily steps, I tell him. Malcolm hails from Windsor, and wanted a house he didn’t have to ‘do up’, but guess what fate had in store? He likes Ketton a lot, because of the variety of people – the wealthy and the ordinary, the agricultural and the industrial. We talk about walking solo. He used to enjoy the more remote long-distance paths, but we agree there’s a time of life at which doing those on one’s own becomes too risky. If I could go inside St. Mary’s there would be Gilbert Scott and Ninian Comper bits to admire. I’m intrigued by Simon Jenkins’ assertion that the angels on the hammer beams. ‘vividly repainted’ are ‘big enough to be ship’s figureheads’. The gravestones are a feature of the church surrounds, repositioned so as to be a tribute not only to the departed, but the skill of those who carved the lettering. It’s a thing well and fittingly done. What Jenkins says about the church as a whole is worth quoting:

            ‘English churches derive their character as much from their situation as their architecture. St. Mary’s sits high above a bend in the village street, where it slopes towards the stream. The contour of the street and churchyard wall thrusts the steeple upwards. Here is a church that truly crowns its settlement.’

Here’s a thing to make all you anti-Europeans foam at the mouth. Robert of Ketton, who was born sometime in the first half of the twelfth century, became Archdeacon of Pamplona, and was known and admired by the monastic foundation at Cluny. He was the first to render the Quran into Latin. You can’t escape geography. Our future, like our past, is tied to mainland Europe, not Australia or America or China – though it depends on those relationships as well.  The arrival of the Covid virus was at first touted as an import from China. Now we know it came to us via Italy, Spain and France – the three countries so familiar to Robert of Ketton.

And here’s something more for the Church to ponder. Cash-strapped as it is, many see Web Presence as the Church’s logical development. There’s a great deal to be written about this, but for the moment – just two things. The first is that it turns us all into potential ‘sheep-stealers’. We can go online to our local church, but if the church in Newmarket or Doncaster or Goodwood is making a better fist of virtual worship, aren’t you just as likely to tune into their Sunday morning offering? So, Mr and Mrs Vicars, you’d better get your programme-making chops together, if that’s where you see your parish focus as lying…you’re competing with professionals.

The second and connected thing (because viewing worship at a distance isn’t entirely new – cf. ‘The Hour of Power etc. etc. – I nearly wrote the ‘Tower of Power, but they’re a famous American rock horn section!) is that this may be the death knell of the local/parochial Church. Yet as Christians, don’t we above all value our group of people, the ones we live with day by day, struggling with the problems of our community, praying, laughing and crying together. And weren’t we slowly coming to the conclusion that one thing ailing contemporary society was the growing currency of on-line life at the expense of ‘normal’ human contact? And don’t you dare Hey Boomer me!

What we have now because of 24/7 virtual contact is a necessity, a tool, and not a desideratum, whether we’re talking Church or Business, and will you please say so to any over-zealous would-be Christian influencer, particularly anyone wearing a clerical collar. By going on-line the clergy/laity relationship and power balance has shifted rapidly to the benefit of clergy.

Democracy/consultation/participation by Zoom is difficult to achieve, whereas control of a group/congregation/PCC is relatively easy. This is very important, and not much discussed right now. Wycliffe would be turning in his grave. (Not the detective!)

The current activism of (particularly but not exclusively) young people in respect of e.g. ‘Black lives matter’ may be classic ‘displacement activity’ as a result of the restrictive social dynamics of an on-line life, post-Covid.

n.b. the cause in question is of course a very important one, though proscribing such phrases as ‘everyone’s life matters’ as racist/disgusting/filthy etc. etc. seems to me shocking, deplorable and probably counterproductive. And I don’t need to say this, do I?  Such proscription conflicts with core Christian values.

This seems a good moment to take a commercial break.

Have you tried your new Sunday Supplement yet?  Sit yourself down, have a coffee and listen to TEN ON SUNDAY. www.vincecross.co.uk A few minutes of heaven. Radio the way you want it to be, the moment you need it… (please supply your own jingle!)

Wow, we do get through some stuff.

The route back to Barrowden is a straight one, at first on a metalled surface, and then on a rough lane which may owe its continued breadth to the gas pipeline lying beside it. Near the summit, half a mile from the A47, there’s a tract of woodland and from a few hundred metres away I can hear them. Two cars are tucked into the scrub at the side of the track, low-slung, customed. Three individuals loll against them, two male and one female. They eye me up. They want some sport. I spot the red-rimmed eyes and lack of focus in the two blokes. They’re off their heads on something, and are swigging Red Bull as a recovery aid. They say something uncomplimentary which I don’t catch and then try me with ‘It’s Ray Mears in’it…’ I don’t rise to the bait, but smile and wish them a nice day. One of them reaches into a car and turns up the stereo to 11 for maximum offence. It’s beatbox stuff, shouty, sweary and over-compressed. And they’re too old for it, and really should have graduated to Classic FM by now.  For heaven’s sake, this is Rutland.

By Barrowden my knees are sore. And not from praying.  It’s just the banging of boots on tarmac.

Miles to go before I sleep… 17 km. 4.7 hrs. 15 deg C.  5 stiles. 12 gates. 3 bridges. The birds are very busy this year, apparently compensating with their music for a degree of human absence.

Father in heaven
As we think about opening our churches again,
Give to your people wisdom
And patience,
And then yet more wisdom,
And then yet more patience.

You are teaching us each day
About what we value.
May it be that we never again take lightly
The privilege of The Eucharist;
The blessing of The Peace;
The affirmation of shared Music;
The solidarity of a shared Amen.

So re-make your Church
In the shape you desire,
And as is good for your people.
We ask this in Jesus’ name,
Amen.

Horatio's burden

I’m out of practice with this driving lark. And so, it seems, is everyone else. Some car users are overly cautious, and perhaps I’m one of them. Others rush out of side roads, oblivious to oncoming traffic, and yet others flagrantly ignore speed limits. No half measures are apparent. I find concentrating rather difficult, or maybe I’m concentrating too much, gripping the steering wheel too tightly. It’s a good thing there are fewer cars and lorries on the roads than you’d expect, even now.

I’m going to North Luffenham in Rutland, close to where I left the Big Walk more than two months ago, before ‘lockdown’. First time out I won’t be very ambitious. This will be a short stroll to North Luffenham’s southerly twin village and back again. I’m carrying some emotional baggage as well as re-adjusting to the semi-normality of a thirty mile drive to a beauty spot (This is a cheap shot. In recent days, Boris Johnson’s guru, Dominic Cummings has been much in the headlines because in March he breached lockdown ‘rules’ by making a fifty mile round trip to visit Barnard Castle, described by news outlets as a ‘beauty spot. In the ‘couldn’t make it up’ category was the subsequent revelation that in North Eastern parlance to ‘do a Barney Castle’ is to do something as an excuse or on flimsy pretext. Mr. Cummings claimed that this journey, complete with child on back seat of car, was to test his eyesight post-Covid.)  

Back in February, charmed by the village of Preston, just a handful of miles from the Luffenhams, we made an offer on a charming cottage in its lovely Main Street. It was accepted too, but then came the Covid crisis. As the banks led by HSBC began to understand what was to come, they tightened the securities needed for a loan. This delayed the purchase, and just a few days ago we heard that the deal’s dead, apparently for good. Many, many people will have suffered far worse, but still, it takes some adjustment, and we feel a little bereavement: there’s a small tug at the heartstrings as I cross the Rutland border.

There’s something about the Luffenhams that reminds me of rural France in the way that each of the villages twists and turns on itself in unexpected ways. It’s a sunny, warm day, and the noon heat catches me out in the way it can at this time of the year, reflecting off the metalled surfaces of the lanes. This is the ‘track temperature’ phenomenon reported on the Formula 1 Grand prix telecasts we used to watch, where the discrepancy between tarmac and air temperature is frequently in double figures centigrade.

But first I linger in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist whose generous length and style so impressed me when I passed through in March. I can’t go in, of course, so I try to remember what I saw inside, and what I felt then, the tranquillity undercut by the weeping woman I’d seen at the church school gate. Then I heave my rucksack over my shoulder and drop down over the field towards the stream at its foot, a tributary of the River Chater, which itself feeds into the Welland. The ground is now rock hard. The unrelenting rain of the late winter is a distant memory: this will have been a record-breaking May for sunshine and lack of precipitation – virtually none. I cross the railway bridge and turn left along the lane to South Luffenham.

In the village I cross the stream again and pull up to the little green in front of St. Mary’s. Derek is tending his daughter’s garden in the house directly facing the church, and we talk. He asks where I’ve come from, and I explain what I’m doing. I don’t have the impression that Derek’s a regular churchgoer, but he takes an interest in the village’s place of worship. The story he tells me is both interesting and mind-boggling. He thinks it’s a shame the church hasn’t been kept open during the crisis, and so I give the party line – the problems of cleaning etc., though I happen to know that Rutland is one of the least virally affected places in England, and it also strikes me that in such villages there’s probably a willingness to clean relentlessly and repeatedly which may not be present in more urban settings. Nevertheless, if a building is open, one has no control over who comes in, does one?

When Derek talks about a princess being buried in the church, he assumes that I know what he’s talking about. But my mind is leaping to Althorp and the conspiracy theories about where Diana is or isn’t buried – in Great Brington church? – on an island in the Althorp grounds? etc. etc.. Then, as I quickly gather, this isn’t a discussion about conventional royalty. Derek is referring to Rose, the gypsy princess, who’s buried in St. Mary’s chancel. Her father was the ‘King of the Gypsies’, Edward Boswell. Rose died of consumption in February 1794, at just seventeen years of age. The affecting inscription on the tomb reads: ‘…what grief can vent this loss, or praises tell, how much, how good, how beautiful she fell.’

Derek’s story. He came across an Irish gypsy woman (this was how she referred to herself). She tried to sell him some linen, but he was reluctant to buy. As a traveller’s sweetener /commercial inducement she offered some unsolicited information about his family. She said a relation had just returned home from overseas (one of his children had just come back from Dubai), that his daughter was pregnant with a grandson (he didn’t know this but he rang the daughter and it was true) and that his wife was hiding a bottle of brandy from him somewhere in the house, and if it was OK with Derek she wouldn’t mind a snifter. Derek was sure his wife wasn’t – he drank only whisky – but on checking this also turned out to be true.

The pay-off line. The woman was looking for Rose Boswell’s tomb, but was puzzled that she and her partner couldn’t find it in North Luffenham church. Derek was able to tell her she would find it in St. Mary’s, South Luffenham, though the inscriptions on the marble are apparently worn smooth and not-so-readable. Thus the esoteric mysteries available from the one side were balanced by local knowledge on the other.

Derek had subsequently offered the church that he’d find a way to make the inscriptions pristine, and had both sourced a mason, and a means of finance, even ringing the Bishop to make it happen. He tried suggesting to the Bish that a Perspex cover might be a good idea, in view of the historical interest: this last was refused. (I explain about ‘faculties’ and so on, not knowing whether I’m telling Derek something he already knows…)

All of which leaves this pilgrim struggling for suitable response. I bring to this encounter my inheritance of supernatural stories from the salvation-history of the Bible, and have my own personal testimony. However, common courtesy means I now listen rather than speak, and when I do, say goodness gracious, how astonishing. I smile and nod my head appropriately, like Churchill the dog. I come away from the encounter knowing I’m in good company. South Luffenham is still a place of pilgrimage for ‘travellers’ to this day.

Beads on the rosary:  6 km. 2 hours. 22 deg C. 2 stiles. 8 gates 2 bridges.

Father
I wrote to Boris this week.
About his 'svengali'.
About arrogance.
About one rule for the generals
And another for the poor bloody infantry.

When should I challenge?
And how should I challenge?
The politicians
The clerical hierarchy
The fake news
The quackery
The misleading and the misled.
Give me by your Holy Spirit
As you promised
The words which speak truth
But do not belittle;
The words which show a willingness to listen
And learn
But are not just avoiding the issue;
The words which comfort
And illuminate
But do not patronise.
Amen.