BLOWING IN THE WIND

You know how it is. A scent on the air from a hedgerow bush, a particular kind of weather day, the DJ plays an old song, and, well, it isn’t déjà vu, but you’re cast back in time, searching for a place where the whole of life was before you, and the world was pure excitement and wonder. It seems to happen to me more and more as I get older. You make me feel so young…

This morning, stepping out from Newborough on a bright, breezy day, something triggers Free’s ‘All Right Now’ and I’m grasping for the tantalising Spirit of ’69. I hear it clearly in my head. Paul Rodger’s accurately gruff rock n’roll voice, Andy Fraser’s groundbreaking grumbly bass, Paul Kossoff on guitar. Can he really be the son of dear old cuddly David, who told us nice Bible stories on the wireless? But in the age of the first mini-skirts, ‘generation gaps’ are a commonplace. We’re about to learn something of fathers and sons, drug addiction, pain and death: the end of a hippie dream… 

All of this before I’m out of Newborough’s 30 limit. I give the cars extra width as I walk the long straight lane southwards – almost two miles of it. Normally that would mean vehicles zipping past at 70 or more, but the wise drivers know – fenland roads are uncertain, especially on a windy day. The tarmac bends up and down, side to side, and it makes for a bouncy suspension-twisting ride. I turn onto Bridgehill Road, and pass a collection of old Fords on a farmer’s forecourt, waiting to be broken for spares. There’s an unusual 1970 stretched Zodiac limo (perfectly matched to Free), a three litre Capri which might have been driven by Bodie and Doyle, and a Mark 2 Cortina of the kind which used to be legion on our motorways, invariably driven by nylon suited mid-range company execs and sales personnel. This isn’t helping my nostalgia vibe. On another right angle, Gunthorpe Road is definitely single-lane-with-passing-places, but it must be a well-known local rat-run because I’m constantly dodging traffic. Arriving at the Cherry Barn Garden Centre, I detour in search of a cup of coffee and cake, but what’s on offer doesn’t appeal so I overtake the tutting and mumbling exit queue, and use the ‘Dodds cyclepath’ to penetrate Peterborough near a roundabout, an entrance to the city different but indistinguishable from last week’s. Maybe I was lucky to emerge from ‘Cherry Barn’ unscathed. During this weeks petrol crisis, videos have gone viral which show drivers (male) brawling by the pumps over alleged queue-jumping.

Hazards of the Fens - check out the verticals

On the subject of flat lands, I was amused by a recent tale from acquaintance Marilyn in Morcott.  Apparently Rutland County Council had outsourced the cutting of our village verges to their Lincolnshire counterparts. When their team arrived, it was unable to proceed, because the village is on a slight slope, as are some of the verges. Lincolnshire’s ‘environmental husbandry’ works only on the plain and level. Up on the Wolds, at Louth for instance, the grass presumably remains unkempt and the bunny rabbits are happy…

I make my way to Paston and its All Saints church. After many years of living in Northampton, I know the demographics of that town’s various suburbs only too well – where the liminal spaces are – how the social housing sits – the turf wars between estates.  In Peterborough I can’t read what I see. I’m passing through a jumble of different kinds of housing – well-tended modern villas here, social housing there, new build, thirties’ construction…

 I also realise I’m still really bad at reading the age of churches from their exteriors. Even after five years’ writing this blog, I’m still remarkably unobservant. I look at All Saints, and think it might be Victorian, but it isn’t – it’s an ancient place, known as the ‘church in the fields’ until the nineteen-thirties. Later, gazing across the street at Eye’s St. Matthew’s I initially interpret it as medieval, whereas in fact it’s Gothic revival. 

I’m feeling footsore from treading tarmac as I pass through All Saints’ war memorial gate hoping the church is open or there’ll be a welcoming churchyard bench. But it’s not, and there isn’t one. I perch uncomfortably on an angled stone under the gate to drink tea and eat a Waitrose chicken and sweetcorn. The board opposite me records the death of a gentleman by the name of Vergette. It wasn’t a name I’d ever come across until recent walks, but there are Vergettes all over the place around Peterborough. The word has a heraldic meaning but can also denote a rod or clothes-brush, so maybe the Vergettes were once tailors.

A year or two ago, there was a run of apparently insensitive clergy comments chiding the laity for being one-day-a-week Christians. If you’re the priest of a congregation whose church is as firmly closed as this, it could be tempting to think your people only turn their eyes on God when they pitch up at Sunday morning worship.

In fact of course, we very often don’t know who does what during the six other days, either in private devotion or public witness to family, friends and colleagues.  But a church which is so dark at mid-day on Wednesday, and with no facility even to sit outside and chew a reviving sarnie, isn’t a good advertisement, particularly when it presents to the world on a prominent corner. Dear clergy and people of All Saints, I don’t mean to give offence by singling you out. This is a national difficulty for the C of E, particularly in urban areas where churches have to be defended from vandalism/desecration. I think back to a visit I once made to a museum of folk instruments during a spare hour in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas. The place was deserted (in fact I had the impression that no one had been inside for years) but its two black-skirted, elderly guardians made me very welcome, despite an utter and complete language gap, and with great attention to detail showed me many, many accordions. And many, many balalaikas. And quite a lot of wooden flutes. See what I’m saying?

I yomp through more housing estates passing all sorts and conditions of people. I dodge double buggies. I say hello to senior citizens. I cast a stern eye over primary-age ne’er-do’wells. On a bridge over the thrumming four-lane Parkway I steer round two blokes sitting on the concrete sharing spliffs whose fragrance follows me on the breeze for another hundred metres. Like garlic-lovers, their olfactory sense now screens out their personal odour. 

An unexpected shower blows in rapidly from the west, and I get rather wet as I skirt the Little Wood Nature reserve, before turning down into the village of Eye, where funeral homes seem to be a big thing, and traditional thatch and timber mixes it with new wave retail and service facilities. St. Matthew’s too is closed, but its non-original saddleback tower is a striking presence on the main street – actually very close to the road itself. Thereafter it’s long horizons and an almost four mile walk back to Newborough for me, frequently making those ninety-degree turns. I think there will be some awkwardness with crossing the major roads, but there isn’t, because Peterborough has a very good system of bike routes called Green Wheel. I encounter no bicycles at all on my way back to the car, but I’m very glad of the safety provision made for them so that I don’t have to play chicken with HGVs or souped-up Beemers. Instead I cross high above or duck under the seamless lines of drive-time traffic.

A companion through much of my Big Walk has been Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity. It’s a book I can’t recommend enough, a staggering achievement in the distillation of amazing academic grasp into a cordial within quaffable reach of the average reader (providing the average reader has staying power – the Penguin paperback runs to 1016 pages before references). He’s particularly good (pp. 968 ff.) about Pope John XXIII’s Vatican 2 Council. In the early sixties Pope John swam against the tide of Catholic orthodoxy, but saw clearly where change was necessary if the Church was to survive. He had his critics, and to some extent in Popes John-Paul II  and Benedict XVI those critics pushed back against his vision.

In a very different but equally revolutionary age, the Church of England (but arguably the Catholic Church also) faces a massive challenge. We change or we perish. It’s as simple as that – but the change may be more in attitude rather than practice – because a lot of change in practice has already occurred and it isn’t improving the situation. Mostly we just have to be better at who we are and what we do. I love the titles of the two main documents which dropped into Catholic in-trays as a result of the second Vatican Council. The first was Lumen Gentium (‘the light of the peoples’) which suggested a different future ordering of the Church, although in terms of papal infallibility for instance, it didn’t necessarily correct the likely errors of the past. The second, addressing the Church’s role in the world, was called Gaudium et Spes (‘joy and hope’).

How we need to radiate joy and hope to a desperate world and mediate light to each other!

One more river to cross…

Millimetres of tread:  19.5 km. Five hours. Sun, then cloud and rain, then sun again. 14 deg. C. A blusterous wind, which made the last miles hard work. Two churches, both shut. No stiles, no gates, two bridges. A sparrowhawk hovering above me near Newborough. 

Lord

Today at Morning Prayer

St. Mark the Lion

Rolling us on towards the crucifixion.

At the end of September?

Give me a break!

I find the story hard enough in Holy Week.

But now, with autumn closing upon us

And burgeoning darkness

And a pandemic

And petrol shortages

A cruel wind

Of human frailty everywhere?

 

Yet I know

We have to carry with us always

Incarnation

And salvation.

Help us to maintain

Joy and Hope

For all we meet

Through the grace of Him

Who is the Light of the Peoples

For ever and ever

Amen.

 

FLAT

There’s a long hold at the level crossing just beyond Helpston. An inter-city passes, then another, and finally a local train chugs by on its way to Stamford. (Do diesel trains ‘chug’?  This one does! Perhaps it’s poorly.) Finally I cross, and drive on to Glinton, parking by the church, marvelling again at that wonderful needle spire which so preaches a sermon in stone about the eternal sublime.

The weather forecast couldn’t make up its mind this morning – nothing dire, just a question of cloud or not, but right now it’s excitingly bright and breezy. There are often uncertainties on the map too, particularly when approaching conurbations. Will that path require the hazardous crossing of a dual carriageway? Indeed, will it still exist at all? Will the right-of- way which seems to fizzle out mid-field actually continue unimpeded into the track which apparently lies beyond it? A day’s walking is elevated by the knowledge there are obstacles to overcome. Yeah, right.

Out on North Fen Road, I turn right on the pleasant path which heads east towards Peakirk, musing on the experience of the last eighteen months. I’m shocked to read the Northampton Chronicle and Echo’s weekend court report detailing the indictments against numerous individuals in respect of Covid violations – for ‘being out of their house without reasonable excuse’. Even at this short distance in time, what we went through then seems an appalling curtailment of liberty, though of course there was a law, and if some chose to ignore it, then ‘law-abiding’ society has a right to see them brought to justice. However, I notice that the list of accused is largely male, young and with immigrant history. What conclusions if any should we draw from that about bias in the justice system or the tendencies of some population subsets towards rule-breaking? (It seems to me these are questions for the Church to consider too, in the light of patterns of church-going and our mission to the world.) 

I still hear references in Church circles to the current health crisis ‘being over’. It isn’t, not worldwide, not even in the UK (in fact, compared with the rest of Europe, particularly not in the UK, for reasons which still remain unclear). Gordon Brown has been a prophetic voice about the issue of vaccine-waste, and our need to be pro-active in providing aid to Africa if we’re to avoid a continuing world-wide Covid-disaster. Otherwise, as he says, we’re encouraging a factory for new Covid mutations.

Beside Peakirk’s village green, I and my jumbled head re-adjust to a very different world, because this low building is St. Pega’s church, the only one in the UK dedicated to St. Guthlac’s sister. I encountered him at the far end of the Diocese near Stony Stratford in Passenham, although locally it seems Market Deeping also does him honour. We’re deep in seventh-century Christian history and myth here - the kingdom of Mercia where Pega and Guthlac were nobility. After a soldier’s life, Guthlac renounced the world and fetched up not far away in Crowland, where he built himself a hermitage from an ancient burial mound. People came to see him for healing and advice, and after his death that holy place eventually became Crowland Abbey.  When Guthlac died, Pega left her own hermitage at Peakirk to tend the body and ensure his decent burial. She subsequently made a pilgrimage to Rome where she too passed away. Legend has it her remains were in turn brought back here to her East Anglian home.  People go bonkers about Arthurian stuff, but it seems to me this is a story that’s equally compelling and suggestive. All it needs is a Holy Grail.

Peakirk’s village green looks tranquil and – flat – but it wasn’t always that way. Geophysical research has confirmed the hunch and tradition that ‘Car(r) Dyke’ once passed through it. The Dyke is presumed to have been a waterway, about eighty miles long, constructed in early Roman times to transport grain south to north – but there are some puzzles. Some of the workings of the drains survive in banks and real water, but the gradients go up and down over low ridges, while generally following the edge of the obvious fens, and in places there are causeways across the Dyke’s course which are permanent undisturbed features. Perhaps they marked regional distribution points, and maybe it wasn’t only corn which was carried up and down. Later it seems that the Dyke may have become a territorial demarcation – though I wonder if this default explanation isn’t too easy – the same thing is said of the ‘Grimsdykes’ which can be found north west and south east of London. An unfeasible amount of labour must have gone into such earthworks if they were simply to indicate to A that they were crossing onto B’s land and might get their head chopped off.

In St. Pega’s churchyard, it’s chastening to see how many of the graves mark individuals who were the same age as me or even younger when they passed on. Heartbreaking too, to see the resting places of child siblings, or people in the prime of young life. Jimmy Greaves died last weekend, and although he was a decade older than me, he was the poster-boy for popular sport during my childhood. His ability to be in the right place at the right time as he scored his many goals for Chelsea, Spurs and England gave encouragement to those of us who played footie without the advantages of speed or size. He showed it was possible to compete by sheer wit, intelligence and anticipation. I’m getting to that point in life, where almost every day there’s news of the death of near contemporaries.

I cross the Folly Bank bridge, and to avoid walking along the very straight and potentially fast ‘B’ road to Newborough, zigzag along the lanes to enter the village by the back door. I pass Rattlerow Farm where there’s a very sinister sounding ‘Gene Distribution Centre’ (actually promoting better pig-breeding) and then the one-time hamlet of Milking Nook, which deserves a mention for its name alone. The door of a bungalow is open. I say hello to a lady who’s manoeuvring a wheelchair around her hall. My instant reaction as I walk on is to say a prayer for her, and then ask myself the question whether prayers as well as promises can be cheap. I think I’m right to be sceptical of my preference for the easy and holy option rather than giving costly, practical help where I ought properly to do so. However, calling down blessings on someone is good New Testament practice, and it does the person who prays good too.

This isn’t exciting walking, but there’s always something to see and enjoy. The practice of the last few decades has been to leave the stubble rather than burn it, and on a day like today, the brown and gold striations which result are beautiful in their own right. A hawk flutters over the road in front of me. Pigeons scatter. A late butterfly dances across a hedgerow. Newborough is harder to love. The land is now only about two or three metres above sea-level. Habitations tend to sprawl around the grid pattern of the village roads. There’s some new housing. I wince as I pass the recently built ‘Waterfall Gardens’, thinking that if the flood defences fail, this could be an ironic naming. St. Bartholomew’s church is at a crossroads near the centre of Newborough, a Gothic revival in yellow brick. As at Peakirk the church is closed, which is a shame because I should like to see the builders’ vision for its interior. At first, I have St. Bart’s down as a twentieth century building, and am surprised to see it actually dates to 1830, when it must have seen strikingly original, not from its design concept, but by its colour.

From Newborough onwards there’s more straight-line walking along lanes which give access to paddocks both tidy and untidy, caravan parks, and fields which don’t look their best at the back end of summer, until I cross the Werrington Bridge (or its modern road equivalent) and find myself back in Peterborough. For the moment the A15 is the city’s north-western boundary. Will housing and industry spill over towards Newborough in time? The scruffiness of the landscape between the two doesn’t bode well.

I walk around the pretty ‘Cuckoo’s Hollow’ lake and parkland, and home in on well-to-do Werrington, where the old village, like Longthorpe, has been incorporated into the urban mass. The very first thing I see is a banner which encourages the passer-by to ‘try praying’. This has the joyful ambiguity of being a proper Christian injunction, and a wry comment on the world and Werrington’s current plight. St. John’s church is locked, but what might apply in the wilds of Rutland doesn’t here: churches can only be left unsupervised at the parish’s peril. Next door is the ‘At Last’ tea room, which makes me giggle, thinking of Douglas Adams’ ‘The restaurant at the end of the universe’. Were this eschatological café open, which it isn’t on a Monday, I could just do with a cup of tea and slice of lemon drizzle. It doubles as a night spot, when cocktails replace Victoria Sandwich, and who knows what merriment ensues.

From Werrington’s village heart, Hall Lane becomes Fox Covert Road, which lines up the return route to Glinton. It passes beside an upper school where the kids are emerging at the end of their day, chaperoned by a formidable squadron of staff. The organisation required of teachers today is awesome. Forty-five years ago we had freedom to teach creatively within a much looser administration. A now widened National Curriculum, the transfer of responsibility from wider society onto teaching staff for the acquisition of knowledge, social skills and morality, plus Covid have narrowed the parameters of that freedom.

Crossing the green diagonally and doubling back on myself, I find Emmanuel church, which is the daughter of St. John’s. Its front door is about twenty-five metres from the entrance to the William Law Primary School, whose children are also bubbling out in time for their tea. They seem energised and lovely, so I’m guessing their staff are too (or maybe needing a nice long lie down!) What a great thing, that a church and school should be joined at the hip in this fashion. Earlier on in Werrington I passed ‘The Way’, which describes itself as a ‘family church’. I worry about this ‘negative space’ description. Does it imply that there are churches around which aren’t family churches, perhaps because they offer what some think of as outdated liturgy or practice? We should all be family churches, but every member of a family needs its own privacy and age-appropriate activity, as well as eating together every day and making whoopee once in a while. Don’t you think?

These days it’s hard not to think of ourselves as working for an ecclesiastical supermarket, constantly looking for our USP, branding ourselves for all it’s worth once we think we’ve identified it.

Swallows in a summer:  18 km. Five hours. Nineteen degrees C. Sun, then cloud, then sun again with a cooling intermittent breeze. No stiles. Five gates. Were there bridges? There must have been bridges. Four churches, all shut. Some cyclists, a couple of walkers.  No one to talk to today, and pigeons only offer dumb insolence. Finding one’s way around Peterborough is challenging.

 Lord

I hated Scripture Exams

When I was a kid

Actually, was terrified

That I’d let my parents down

By not scoring ninety per cent or more

In my knowledge of the Gospels.

But children these days…

Where would they get their bible knowledge?

Because without that stuff

So often rehearsed as a child

I’d be nowhere.

Do we all love learning

Less than we did?

And how much does that matter?

 

As so often, Lord

So many questions

And so few answers.

Amen

WOBBLE AND HOBBLE

 

Driving back along the Stamford road with provisions for a day’s walking, I’m dodging lycra-bound cyclists, racing or time-trialling or whatever – hundreds of them, all male, all earnest, mostly bearded, and grimacing. Nearing Morcott, I’m astonished to see a drone flying towards me following the pedallers, maybe only fifteen feet above the road surface. I think to myself ‘I’m not having that!’ and phone the rozzers, much good that it’ll do on a Saturday morning.

As you may guess, the members of this hip, self-regarding would-be-elite (no, not the police!) aren’t taking part in today’s ‘Ride and Stride’ which raises money for the Churches’ Conservation Trust, with half of it going to the individual parishes from which the walkers and cyclists come. No drones for us to make video records of our glorious progress from church to church, or analyse our style and gait so that we go farther and faster next year. This blog will have to serve.

My ‘Walking to Peterborough’ is really just an elongated version of ‘Ride and Stride’, except I’m not raising money by sponsorship. That good and practical purpose of today’s activity is a necessary part of helping the CCT survive to maintain its excellent work. More than that, today’s a countrywide occasion for bringing Christians together in awareness of our heritage, of the help-towards-the numinous which our lovely churches afford. Maybe stories will be exchanged, differences forgotten, new understanding forged, a sense of unity glimpsed. As always, Better Together, and on a lovely September day, Better in Colour. Hurray! Let a thousand anoraks bloom.

My spin on the day is to walk to each of the churches in our Benefice, and play some of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues on their organs or keyboards. I begin at home, and stroll down to St. Mary’s Morcott…

                        ‘The tower’s mortar doesn’t lie

                        It speaks of practical common sense

                        A trinity of candles on the floor

                        A past a present and a future tense.

There are wrong notes and infelicities

No matter… 

where I’ve placed Book One on the organ’s music stand. I play the C major and C Minor. Yes, those ‘wrong notes’... My fingers haven’t woken up, and aren’t used to the sticky manuals, so there’s a whole bunch of ‘infelicities’.  I say goodbye to Tricia who’s on duty counting callers. Her husband John - who could lend me the odd year - is a doughty walker and is up at Oakham, crossing churches off his list.  He’ll be raising hundreds of pounds for the cause today. Then it’s back to Mill House to pick up a light pack and off I go, across the clovered field to the A47, and down the hill towards Barrowden. Gerry passes me in the Armstrong’s Volvo and gives me a cheery wave. 

                        ‘Tixover and Luffenham

                        Duddington and Barrowden

                        Each a wonder and a solace

                        Casting blessings from a high place

                        On the river as it flows…

St. Peter's Barrowden from Morcott Road

Richard is minding St. Peter’s until noon, and welcomes me. The church is set up for Sunday’s ‘café-style’ worship which will be followed by Harvest Lunch. I eschew the Makins organ, and play the G major prelude from Bach’s second set on the piano – it’s the one which might remind you of ‘Ski Sunday’, then follow it with the A Major pastorale, topped off with the Sicilienne-like E flat major and its solid fugue. Halfway through John Comber arrives. I think he may have come to play the Makins, but graciously says he hasn’t, and remarks that he didn’t know I was a musician. I remind him that I’ve sung to his accompaniment a few times now, and quip that of course this still may not qualify me.

The 48 Preludes and Fugues are a marvel: it’s no wonder so many keyboard players worship at their altar. They span so many styles, and are capable of being rendered in so many ways,  each one contributing new insights. If you’ve never come across it, try to find Anne Dudley’s version of the B flat minor prelude from the first 24, as Good Friday a piece of music as Bach ever wrote. Ace bass player Tim Harries, himself no slouch on the keyboards, once said to me ‘such difficult music!’, and the older I get, the more I agree. You can get away with playing a lot of music approximately, but not Bach. The impossibly intricate detail of the composition demands total accuracy and attention. Nothing can be out of place in the performance because nothing is out of place in the composition. The second set of 24 were composed twenty years after the first set and a lot of personal water had flowed under JSB’s bridge. I puzzle why he returned to the idea of composing a prelude and fugue for every key (hence the 24) when the first set had been such a tour-de-force. To my ear the second set is more complex and dense. They carry a sense of a life lived, have more weight, less obvious joy, though the C major fugue is pretty sunny. Nowhere will you find the utter carefree, sublime happiness of the C sharp major fugue in the first 24 (which I can’t get near playing, and probably never will, unless I take a year’s sabbatical from the world).

Through Barrowden’s beautiful village. There are Kevin and Alison standing in front of their gate. Here are some more affable people to say hello to. Then it’s down Mill Lane and across what are some of the few genuine water meadows still to be found – that’s to say they will flood during winter – and up into Wakerley. Last time I came this way on my Big Walk the ground was saturated, and the ancient track impassable. At Wakerley-among-the-quarries, St. John’s is open, but only a few people have visited so far. St. John’s is our CCT church, a grand building for what is now a very small community on the Welland’s south side, but Simon has opened it up for the day. Here I can only pay lip service to my promise to play. The organ is hand-pumped, the handle resting on a propped-up chair. I release it, and heave up and down for a few moments, then rush round to slide onto the stool to see how much I can play before the air runs out. The answer is about eight and a half bars, but in the process I’ve invented a new Olympic sport in the tradition of the triathlon. I suppose the extra elements might entail rushing down to the Welland bridge and swimming a hundred metres, before scrambling back up to the church on a mountain bike.

As I replace the pump handle, I read the graffiti carved in the wood above it: ‘This church is Norman and erly (sic) English. Sunday 1953.’ There are a few names, presumably choristers of the time, earning their stripes while an organist better than me bashed out some Widor or Mendelsshohn. Maybe even some Bach.

Visiting this church, quite proximate to the old railway whose low viaduct is still very visible (and walkable) back towards Barrowden, I’m reminded of Flanders and Swann’s ‘Slow Train’ written in the aftermath of the 60s’ Beeching cuts. Will we find ourselves writing in similar elegiac vein about our lost churches in twenty years’ time? Write your own ecclesiastical version of the following:

                        ‘No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe

                        On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road

                        No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat

                        At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester le Street…’ 

The Welland near Barrowden

On and on, following the north bank of the river where the meander leaves quite a steep drop down to the water by a grassy field, through a patch of woodland, and then eventually up to Percy Gilman’s fields, where a straw-stack the size of a major condominium awaits transfer to fuel a power station. The track down to lovely St. Luke’s is announced by a sign directed at walkers like me: ‘To the church’!

                        ‘A friend who is Reformed

                        Writes in admonition.

                        Candles may obscure, he thinks.

                        I say that where we’ll be tonight

                        There is no choice.

                        It’s that or nowt.

                        There is no cabling to St. Luke’s…’

 David is at the church door. He’s been waiting for visitors who’ve largely not come, St. Luke’s being out on a limb at the far end of the hamlet of Tixover, which is itself a single street stretching off the A47. Candles are indeed the only lighting here, and the organ has to be foot-pumped harmonium-style. I haven’t done this for years, but wheeze my way through a couple of jolly numbers, testing out what works and what doesn’t. David tells me that the bellows were fixed a couple of years ago after predations from local mice and temporary solutions courtesy of Mr Gaffer and his tape, but it sounds to me as if it’s going to be a job of work and some expense to keep the instrument going much longer. I wish I were a millionaire who could ride in and solve the problem: a nice little baroque job would look and sound appropriate here.

Up the lane to the A47, and along beside the Hall until the roadside path ducks to one side, briefly revealing the previous, more winding tarmac, then down across Duddington’s lovely bridge past the mill and up to St. Mary’s. Church warden Sandie is on her way, dressed up ready for a nice lunch, after a morning stint with the biscuits and lemonade. Here too, not many have passed by. At Tixover David had asked me where I was going next and when I said ‘Duddington’ he pretended to be momentarily perplexed: ‘But that’s not in the county…’   

 It’s true.  ‘Ride and Stride’ is organised on a county basis, but our Welland Fosse Benefice is divided between Rutland and Northants. Duddington (and Wakerley) are about as far out in the sticks as you can be in Northamptonshire, albeit the former sits beside a major road junction. So perhaps not many Northamptonshire walkers and riders make it this far, and Rutlanders eschew it as not part of the Shire .

I try out the little organ which Harry made sound nice last Sunday, and find the noises I’m producing are a little less musical, though I don’t know why. This instrument too seems to be missing a lot of notes where you’d want them. I wonder when a manufacturer will wake up and start making a sampled organ which is cheap, sounds good and really caters for the needs of non-organists in small churches. A simple, single manual with optional pedals?  No bangs and whistles, just £5000 of someone’s good money to make a congregation happy, and don’t worry about the fancy woodwork. Right now a pop keyboardist can buy an awful lot of synthesiser for five grand. To my mind there’s too much fuss and blag about electronic organ-building.  Duddington could perhaps do with a Clavinova as an organ alternative. Dear old Syd’s ‘One more step along the road’, will always have a touch of vaudeville about it, but played on a pipe organ it too easily reminds one of the fairground.

This walk reveals an odd thing about our Benefice. Our name is ‘Welland Fosse’, which refers to the ditch (!) or trench of the Welland, in which four of the churches sit. However, Morcott and South Luffenham are on the far side of the ridge, and there’s a peculiarity insofar as one can’t walk directly from Duddington to South Luffenham, though a series of zigzags will do it if the walker risks a perilous few hundred metres along the narrow verge of the fast and furious A47. I won’t, so retrace my steps to Barrowden, planning to walk the lane over the hill from there to South Luffenham. However, by the time I reach the beginning of the ascent I realise I’m out of puff. Twenty one or twenty two kilometres is my limit these days, and if I complete my walk the way I want to, it’ll be twenty six or twenty seven by the time I’m finished.  I accept my frailties and alter course for home.

I don’t want to push the comparison too far, but the Church too is having to learn the meaning of ‘a bridge too far’. As our son Matt would say, ‘Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good’. This sometimes goes against the grain for those of us (him and me) who were told, ‘Only your best is good enough…’  We have too much plant and too few people. Too much heritage and too little money. This is painful for a historian. We have a conundrum. We need a miracle or two. 

                        ‘Shall we run whooping from Morcott to Barrowden

                        Flaming out along our own Santa Pod?

                        Shall ‘The Street’ in Luffenham resound

                        With Swahili and Spanish thanks to God?

                        Shall sermons spill out from the Duddington stone?

                        Shall Tixover sheep dream a Lamb on the throne?

                        Expect the new in a heavenly shower

                        Hope for a thousand gifts to flower

                        The Fosse transformed by Holy Wind power

                        Praise him!’

The Pounds in your Pocket:  21.5 km. 6.5 hrs.  23 deg C.  No stiles.  Eleven gates.  Four bridges. One tractor a-ploughing. Pigeons everywhere. A flock of sparrows on Percy’s farm. Fewer Runners and Riders than one might have wished for.

 

With the exception of the extract from ‘Slow Train’, all other quotations in the above are from ‘Candles’ written for the octave of prayer for Christian Unity © Vince Cross 2021

 Postscript

The following day we hear the farewell sermon of Sarah Brown, Canon Missioner at Peterborough Cathedral. She’s leaving after nearly four years to become Dean at Hereford, a poacher turned gamekeeper. It’s a wonderful occasion and Sarah preaches memorably, challenging herself and her congregations with Mark’s account of the Transfiguration. The gist of her message is this. We Christians are first and foremost tasked with revealing God, and nothing else is of much account unless it works in that direction – not glorious churches and cathedrals, not extraordinary music, not elaborate worship and liturgy. Our concerns for these other things must be held in tension with Christ’s commission to his followers.

Her words make me feel like the rich young ruler (or in my case a moderately wealthy old codger…) The job seems impossible. The demands too great. How then can I enter the Kingdom of Heaven?

In memory of John White who Rode and Strode over many years, and went about doing good for his family, his clients, his parish and the diocese.

 

FOUR FROM HOME

 

There are now just four more small circles to be described on the landscape of the Diocese before this Big Walk is complete. I suppose under any circumstances it’s hard for the pilgrim not to associate the ending of the pilgrimage with arrival at the Heavenly City, or to put it in a blank and humanistic way, with Death. All the more difficult in Covid Times, and particularly when a friend is bravely planning her own imminent and untimely end to earthly life. And for me personally, autumn, rather than winter has always had that overtone – the bringing in of the harvest, the obvious decay of flower and leaf, the drawing in of the darkness.

Walking up from Castor though, away from the river, and onto the low plateau above the village, as flat as the fens but at about a hundred rather than zero feet, the harvest is still to be gathered – or at least the late-sown wheat is. I’m on the ancient, straight track known as Cow Lane, probably for the most obvious of reasons. There are odd kerbstones in places, traces of a now lost importance. Perhaps there was a villa set back here in Roman times. The top half of St. Kyneburga’s spire is clearly visible where the track right-angles, so the top half of the Praetorian Palace would have been too. On the way I have to cross the dualled A47. It’s not the best of crossings, nor the worst, but fellow-walkers please beware. The traffic is fast, and one has to dodge between bits of Armco and guess at the opening for the path on the road’s far side, all of which can be a bit stressful.

A mile further on, before I gain first sight of St. Mary’s Marholm, I’m wincing from an incipient blister on the back of my right heel, despite the strapping I always apply when I’m wearing boots. This has caught me out: it’s a few weeks since I’ve worn my Berghaus. Maybe they’ve stiffened up, or my feet have broadened a little. The ground is very dry at present and the field paths are quite corrugated, so perhaps my feet have been pivoting and rotating more than they would on flat surfaces. Ouch, there’s the rub.

There are cars parked all over the field in front of St. Mary’s: there’s a wedding in progress, and it’s good to see the church being used for a proper purpose. Everyone else is inside but a suitably and smartly dressed young gent, probably an usher, is entertaining a small boy on the church path. As I open the gate, heading towards the bench on the far side of the churchyard, I detect the slight reservation in his eyes. He’s thinking ‘What’s this old tramp doing? Is he a gatecrasher? Will I have to intervene?’ I say a sotto voce how-do in my best RP to allay his fears. At least he now knows the tramp is posh. Up in Marholm village I enjoy a restorative ginger beer in the Fitzwilliam Arms, then retrace my steps across the church field to go Torpeling in the direction of Peterborough. The field is rufty tufty. It’s been the scene of animal husbandry for some while, but in its middle is twenty two yards of concrete underlay for an artificial cricket pitch, awaiting a resurrection in some future decade, when/if eleven men or women can be mustered from the village’s a hundred and fifty souls. The outfield will need a bit of attention though…cow pats at ‘cow corner’ aka mid wicket.

Marholm is such a Danish name. Or Norwegian? (I’m thinking of Norway’s extraordinary four hundred metre hurdler Karsten Warholm!) Whatever its origins, for centuries Marholm has been a village under the patronage of the Fitzwilliam family, as the pub name implies, and the sixteenth century’s Sir William Fitzwilliam is still writ large in the fabric of St. Mary’s by the splendid Perpendicular of the chancel, which balances the strong, squat tower at the far end of the building’s exterior.  

I follow one of Peterborough’s ‘Green wheel’ waymarkers along a broad track towards the suburb of Bretton. While things are still rural, I meet Irmintas taking a walk with his pretty-as-a-picture giggling daughter Melita. They’re obviously hugely enjoying each other’s company. Irmintas is wearing bright green shorts, and has a strong eastern European accent (Latvian?) As I walk on, I can’t see any sign of a motor vehicle or house, so who knows where they came from.

 It’s been a long time since I walked in an urban environment – was Corby the previous one? – and I’ve forgotten how much extra heat is engendered by the hard surfaces on only a moderately warm day, and how easily one can be confused about road lay-outs when one isn’t familiar with the ‘hood. I know the Church of the Holy Spirit is somewhere in the Cresset complex (theatre/shopping centre/library/etc.) but after the nice big road signs telling me the general direction, it takes a bit of wandering about before I find the entrance, tucked away just past the Fayre Spot pub. In some ways the church is a clone of Emmanuel Church, Weston Favell, but slightly neater and more well-formed. Inside I find Jenny who’s flower arranging and Pete who’s the churchwarden. We talk with pleasure of the gradual opening up of churches, and about Helena the vicar and former curate.

These kinds of churches are gifts to the wider Church. They’re where the people are, but like the modern chapels in hospitals and airports (which have the additional problem that they’re sometimes shared between two or three religions) they can be mundane places, emphasising that people of faith are just like everyone else really, rather than stressing that God is totally ‘other’. Both truths of course, but which would be the most attractive to people of no faith – a place you might find someone to listen to you or give you food, or somewhere you could weep in the presence of an almighty God? And must these things be mutually exclusive?  But hey, back in the early seventies, when both the Church of the Holy Spirit and Emmanuel were built, at least allowance was made by the developers for their necessity. Nowadays, they’d be seen as an unprofitable luxury, so all that’s left to us is to be ‘street church’. In all senses of the word, there’s still a feeling of ‘sanctuary’ at Holy Spirit in front of the altar and the appealing statuary.

Outside again, I try to orientate myself and then tread the mean streets of the city in the direction of Longthorpe, repeatedly selecting wrong options and having to double back, because my city map is decades out of date in random ways (It still has an extra ‘e’ attached to Marholm’s village name).  At the Copeland Local Centre, I’m struck by its familiarity to anyone who worked in the peripheral parts of Milton Keynes. When our recording studio there was relocated to a purpose built environment in Willen at the end of the eighties, the stipulated style of architecture was ‘pavilion’ and here it is again at Copeland’s pub - ‘Cooper’s’ Its broad eaves, and smaller first floor suggest Japanese culture or Adamski-era forties’ flying saucers, depending on your interpretive frameworks. In Neath Hill, Milton Keynes, where our first studio was, the pub in the square opposite was called ‘The Eager Poet’ (a not-so-subtle joke…Milton…Keynes…geddit?) Which makes Peterborough’s ‘The Fayre Spot’ seem not such a bad moniker.

Longthorpe is an ancient village on the city edge, cut off from the Nene and greenery by the Ring Road. A medieval tower stands behind St. Botolph’s church, managed by English Heritage who would charge me a fiver for entry, which at first I think a bit steep, until I read that on its rather special domestic wall paintings I could spot ‘kings, musicians, saints and animals…including a mythological beast armed with projectile flaming excrement (sic)’. 

However my blister is now really hurting, so from the outside I admire the re-ordering of St. Botolph’s, and undertake running repairs, re-strapping the ankle and removing one of my two socks. For a moment or two, knowing it’s maybe two and a half miles back to the car, I wonder how I’m going to manage this.

The flyer for the St. Botolph’s financial appeal has as its strapline, ‘Honouring our past: looking to our future’ – which seems pretty good to me. The bullet points are worth recording in full: 

·       To undertake urgent renovations to preserve significant historical features… 

·       Allow for more inclusive and flexible worship

·       Become an intimate venue for musical events and concerts and support the development of young musicians from the area (smiley face from VC!!)

·       Grow our role as a health and well-being hub for the parish and extended community

·       Celebrate our history, educate visitors and tell the stories of local families past and present

·       Improve the parish church layout for key life events of our villagers and enable access for all.

I have to dig in for those last two or three miles. I struggle, limping, past Thorpe Wood, over the Ring Road, and search for access to the river, which necessitates an annoying half a mile back-pedal towards the City Centre. I’m pleasantly distracted by the joys of Bluebell Wood and Nene Park, where on this warm Saturday afternoon people of all ethnicities are cycling, walking and bathing. Then there’s a long slog up the car park past the Milton ferry to the old road back to Castor and the top of Love’s Hill. Above the river there are a number of gracious properties, whose beautifully kept gardens engender a mix of emotions. Who are these people? Where/how did they make their dosh? Inherited or earned? By fair means or foul? With or without exploitation? And are they just successors of the Romano-British middle class, who probably also enjoyed their long views over the wide river valley where the peasants subsistence-farmed and smelted?  I gaze over a field to the north where unattributed by the OS map, lies what looks like a burial mound. It could of course just be a spoil heap from road building. At any rate it’ll do as a memento mori on this early autumn day. One fence negotiated, three to jump…

Giraffe in grounds of care home: Longthorpe

Horses in the race:  20.5 km. 6 hours. 23 degrees C. Two stiles. Six gates. Two bridges. Three churches, two of them open.

 Father God

Free will and determinism.

I’m still struggling with this one

After all these years.

 

I get the endless questing

Boundless improvising

Restless enterprising

Drive of humans

And praise you

That you made us that way

And in the words of Otway

‘Cor baby, that’s really free’.

 

And then I see us stuck

In old habits

Addicted

To money

Consumption

Drugs

And inanity

And that looks anything but really free.

 

Can I be both?

Am I destined to be redeemed

Or condemned to nothingness?

It’s a real worry Lord.

Not something that ought to be pushed

To the back of the mind.

But to function, I have to.

Have mercy on me, O Lord.

Amen.

AFGHANISTAN

 

It was completely unexpected of course, but by accident this journal has charted a strange passage of British and world history through the last five years.

 Last week, for the first time in eighteen months Sue and I ventured into a more or less crowded public space by visiting the Tate Modern gallery. It was an enjoyable but nerve-jangling afternoon. Maybe you identify with this mixture of emotions?  We’d come to see art, but our gaze was as much on our fellow-travellers. (Even for this routine scan of the regular exhibition the tickets were timed, and we had to follow a pre-determined route through the rooms, masked throughout). My thoughts went to that Gospel story where Jesus restores the sight of a blind man who then in amazement describes the people he now sees as tall trees – ‘but they’re walking around!’  Many of us are learning public life all over again. For a while at least, new meanings attach to everything we encounter.

There were three works of art which caught my eye. The most monumental and memorable was a piece by Cildo Meireles called ‘Babel’. It’s a tower of hundreds and hundreds of pre-digital radios in varying shapes and sizes, rising ten metres above the viewer as she walks around it. It occupies a room of its own. A randomised soundtrack plays simultaneously as if from a thousand speakers, music pop and classical, speech English and not, animated and calming. It’s both funny and provoking – and easily interpreted by someone with the slightest Bible knowledge. Even so, I wonder how many visitors to the Tate ‘get it’.

Away from Helpston, on what will inevitably be something of a John Clare Crawl, I cross the various railways at the Maxey crossing, where no less than six tracks must be traversed at one go, and the red lights frequently flash to halt drivers, cyclists and pedestrians as the LNER express trains whoosh past. St. Peter’s Maxey is a little way from its village, set on a shallow bump which is noticeable mostly because the surrounding countryside is much flatter now. The grass is mown, the churchyard tidy, but the church and even the loo in the churchyard’s far corner are firmly shut.  The name ‘Maxey’ is familiar to me, and for a moment I can’t think why. Later I remember. Looking up the name in the index of archaeologist Francis Pryor’s comprehensive book, ‘Britain BC’, the reader sees:  ‘cursus pp. 183-5; Great Henge pp 184-6; ritual landscape, 207, 305; barrows 344’. I’m going to quote Francis Pryor at unusual length:

           ‘Over the years, I’ve been excavating parts of a long (2.5 km) cursus near Maxey…(it) cuts a diagonal swathe across a low gravel ‘island’ in the heart of the floodplain of the river Welland. Near the centre of the island it passes beneath a huge ceremonial site, known as the Maxey Great Henge. In fact it isn’t a henge in the strict meaning of the word, because it’s rather too early in date (about 3500 BC), but we do know that it was constructed when the cursus ditches were still open….At Maxey the alignment of the cursus takes you from one of the lowest spots in the landscape (where we find Etton:  ed. the neighbouring village) to one of the highest (the site of the Great Henge, and near to the church). It ends at another low spot on the north-west ‘shore’ of the island. We know that conditions at Etton were becoming progressively wetter, and I wonder whether the cursus was constructed to conduct the magic and mystery of that special place to a new ceremonial centre, the Great Henge, on higher and dryer ground… I would imagine that such a place would involve many communities, and would have been very time-consuming…’

 On the OS, just to the east of a diagonal footpath, it simply says ‘settlement’.

I find the above extraordinarily moving and humbling. Think about it. More than three millennia before Jesus, near enough on the same ground where St. Peter’s now stands, crowds of people with hand tools laboured tirelessly together through their presumably short lives over many generations in a way that bound faith and community together. As a worshipping Christian with a pre-made church building, written scriptures and all the blessings of contemporary life I am in awe, and have as much difficulty in reconciling their experience with our account of salvation history, as if I were confronting little grey men stepping from a flying saucer.

I walk through Maxey, past the quarry entrance, dodging up onto the kerb at frequent intervals to avoid the HGVs, cross the busy A15, and enter Northborough, which seems a workaday sort of place. I’m only a mile or so from Market Deeping in South Kesteven. Mindlessly, I turn right into Lincoln road, thinking about Abraham Lincoln or my friends in the Lincoln family from Northampton, or I don’t know what. It’s only later in the day, when I briefly walk back along a more southerly stretch of the same road that I twig. It’s not any old Lincoln road, it’s the Lincoln Road, at least just here – the road to Lincoln. Northborough may seem workaday, but like so many villages, at the core of the quotidian expansion, there’s loveliness. On the corner, where I turn towards the church, is the dignified gatehouse of Northborough Manor House, where Oliver Cromwell’s wife ended her days. St. Andrew’s church looks fascinating in its own right, with an intriguing collection of angles presenting to the worshipper arriving at its north door, but I’m out of luck today. It too is locked. The road which passes the church betrays its age by the amount it twists and turns (this is a reliable guide to medieval origins even in London – contrast Marylebone High Street with its more linear neighbours). In a little while I turn right onto Paradise Lane, which passes beside Paradise Cottage. The description is slightly hyperbolic, but it’s still a pretty nice place to live…

The track crosses the Maxey Cut, and I’m aware that I’m on the very edge of true fenland country for the first time, before ever I see that I’m emerging on ‘North Fen Road’ into Glinton. I cross an unremarkable bridge across a drain where the needle spire of St.Benedict’s rises dramatically from the trees. At this bridge it’s said that John Clare and his possibly unrequited love Mary Joyce were wont to stop and talk. They never married. She died a spinster at 41, and is buried in Glinton’s churchyard. Clare wrote of the church:

 Glinton! Thy taper spire predominates

Over the level landscape, and the mind

Musing the pleasing picture contemplates

What elegance of beauty, much refined

By taste, effects. It almost elevates

One’s admiration: making common things

Around it glow with beauties not their own.

Thus in this landscape, earth superior springs;

Those straggling trees, though lonely, seem not lone

But in thy presence wear a conscious power,

Even these tombs of melancholy stone

Gleaning cold memories round Oblivion’s bower

Types of eternity appear, and hire

A lease from Fame by thy enchanting spire.

Oh dear. Am I getting old? I’m acquiring a taste for Clare… I wish people wouldn’t call him ‘The peasant poet’. Nothing peasant about those lines.

In Glinton and Northborough one can sense the closeness of Peterborough. Allegedly there are three thousand people living in Glinton, though on this acquaintance I can’t say where. But there are kids on the grassy corner by the pub, opposite the church, gratuitously blasting rap from their ghetto rig, hoping I’ll complain, and the traffic is moving just that little faster. Places to go, people to see.

I cross a field to Etton and its church of St. Stephen, which is more shut than most, and then walk the long way back to Helpston. Overhead the RAF or some other foreign power plays war games with Wittering in their sights. At Woodcroft I cross the mainline with the help of a youngish woman in a safety vest whose job is to manually open and close the gates on what must therefore be the most dangerous level crossing in the UK – it’s years since I’ve seen this necessity – and never where there are six sets of rails and trains doing a ton or more. When I arrive back in Helpston, I hope for tea and cake in the John Clare Centre, but they’re closing. I’m Hooked on Clareics now. I’ll definitely be back.

Towers of Babel? Afghanistan?  Oh, all of us with any kind of conscience are this week perplexed by the events in that country, and those who reckon it the most shameful moment in foreign policy since Suez in my view have it absolutely right. The MP Tom Tugendhat made the most remarkable speech in the House, encapsulating from an informed personal perspective what a lot of us feel who’ve been lucky enough to live at a safe distance from any real engagement with the issues morally or militarily.

We feel, many of us, that something has gone badly wrong, that our country at the instigation of the US has done something badly wrong (and though Tugendhat didn’t spell it out, as a result of Brexit, we’re now left with no real influence among any of our former allies, transatlantic or European, whatever the Johnsonian bluster may be). But we don’t know what could have been done to avoid this tragedy, and above the chorus of competing voices, heard only partially, none of them truly comprehending or listening to what anyone else is saying, we can’t make any sense of any of it. Our moral compass is deranged.

This is partly because of the incessant media chatter – which I take to be the point of Meireles’ ‘Babel’ sculpture – there’s simply too much noise. And even in Church matters, this is true. We can read the Church Times, and even through that single source of information, have the greatest difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. Who are all these people, and what right do they have to their opinions?  What axes are they grinding? What do the words they use mean, and what are they signalling to those better in the know? Is our Church in dire trouble, as many of us suspect? And where is God in this? - the same God possibly, who was in the minds of those shoving earth and gravel around at Maxey fen so long ago. Though with the curtains of history in the way, we won’t get a perspective on that until the surprises of heaven.

Flies in the ointment:  16.5 km. 5.5 hrs. 21 deg. C. Mostly sunny but moments of cloud and breeze: promised later showers never materialising. 1 stile. 5 gates. 6 bridges. Numerous drains and water courses. Four churches. One open (St.Benedict’s). The offer of a ploughman’s lunch the following day care of Gill, Jane and Polly in Church St. Northborough. The harvest in progress – wheat still to be cut, everything else down to stubble. Snooty pigeons everywhere.

 Heavenly Father

Lord God of St Benedict

And Joe Biden

St. Paul

And Vlad Putin

Mary Joyce and John Clare

Maxey fen and Mini beasts

We stretch our hands to you

And implore you

To come to our aid.

We know we are feeble and frail

But sense your greatness within us.

Help us be the best we can

Wherever we are

With whomever we meet.

And never to give up on the struggle.

Amen.