Better in Colour

Teigh is one of the ‘Thankful Villages’ identified by the writer Arthur Mee after the Great War. They lost no one who went to fight. There’s a memorial to those lucky men near the church. Teigh wasn’t a big place even then, and is smaller now, but even so, there were only fifty-two other villages in England and Wales who shared their good fortune. In Northamptonshire the only other examples are East Carlton and Woodend, also both tiny.

I leave the car by Holy Trinity and walk up the road to Edmondthorpe. To my great joy I find the church of St. Michael’s open: it’s in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Almost disbelievingly I move the door on its hinges and thank God out loud that I can step into a place of worship for the first time after four and a half months and bless the few people who live in the village. True, there’s red and white tape to stop me getting into the chancel, but that’s because damage was done during a winter storm: it’s still drying out. I wander around, looking at the graceful three-tiered monument to Sir Roger Smith and his family, wondering at its dating of 1655 – but maybe this was a remote place back then, and perhaps such elaborations went unremarked by Cromwell’s zealots. I look up at the armorial by the south door, which carries the legend ‘Resurgam’ (‘I will rise’), and allow myself some hope for the Church’s future.

 

St. Michael's Edmondthorpe

Any pilgrimage is unpredictable. You might find faith, or lose it. You may end up reaching the destination you imagined, or blisters may require an entirely different one. In 2016 I started with the premise that for Anglicans as with Britain we’d be ‘Better Together’, and I still think that’s true and advisable, but here we are four years on, and for me the emphasis is changing a little. To that original strapline I now add ‘Better in Colour’.

One can sense an argument brewing. There will be those who say with some justification that the heart of the Christian faith is the Word. Nothing else matters. If we can read the Bible, and pray, and be preached to, what more do we need? The new situation is a good thing: it’s taking us ‘back to basics’, isn’t it?

But by its nature prayer’s hard work for most of us, and the more inwardly focused and individual, the harder it is. Scripture is puzzling, and apparently contradictory: we all pick on the bits we like, and gloss the rest. And preaching is arguably an anachronistic medium, and there are few good exponents, and far fewer than many preachers think there are.

So the obvious solution now is to go – and remain - online, isn’t it?  Except that making good television is an art, and as I’ve said before, even to make brilliant lo-fi telly takes exceptional talent and a good eye, and a lot of on-line ‘influencers’ are just sad. Who wants to look up someone else’s nostrils as they mutter platitudes about faith or anything else?  Newcomer enthusiasts including Christians can be tempted to think that while the professionals wear nice clothes and make-up, they can get away with a scruffy jumper, old jeans, and a five o’clock shadow for their televisual input.  Any recorded medium shows up inadequacies which aren’t so obvious live. For example, the technology is there for musical artists to tour by YouTube. Simply hire a studio, target a particular town, and charge for the virtual experience. But it’ll only work if you can really  play or really sing, because your faults are going to show horribly in such an exposed environment. Goodness knows, not all Glastonbury ‘highlights’ of yesteryear stand up to scrutiny when re-shown.

We Anglicans are in danger of returning to a grey, controlled and controlling Calvinism, nothing to engage the senses, no art, no music, no humour, no participative liturgy, no eucharist, no feel for the beauty of language, no church building, no appropriate dress, because only ‘truth’ matters, and in the minds of some, no lens other than their own and certainly no metaphor, can convey that truth.

So, here’s my new pitch. God gave us so many marvellous gifts and talents, and Jesus spoke of life in abundance, so for me, not to use everything at our disposal to praise God, and to attempt to understand what we’re supposed to be doing down here on Earth, is missing the point. Just because we’re struggling to find ways to express our faith and love at the moment, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to slip into contempt for what we did before, or allow room for the insidious suggestion that the use of beautiful music or art as aids to worship was really just idolatry. These things can become so, but just because there’s a statue of the Virgin in your church, it doesn’t mean the congregation has taken its eyes off Jesus and is worshipping the statue instead. Not even Luther thought that, though Zwingli might have done.

The conversation should be about possibility and creativity, and not about technologically up to date ways of being dull.

Black and white photography was once all there was, and it did the job, sometimes brilliantly, until colour came along. Now there’s a choice, and if people with a great eye sometimes use b&w they do it for a reason or an effect, not because they have to. There’s nothing innately virtuous about the one thing rather than the other.

And let’s not kid ourselves that the new media may protect us from heresy, or somehow reset the dials on a faith that was in danger of going off the rails up until last New Year. American experience with faith mediated through television should alert us to the fact that exactly the opposite is true. The world on-line is wild and often wicked. Cultishness breeds there, and those viruses are no easier to eradicate than Covid. It is also by its nature excluding ( ‘I like my music…’: ‘See it your way’), whereas Anglicans and indeed all Christians are called to be inclusive and to draw attention to the universal. The medium is indeed the message, and so we have to learn to subvert the medium, or even avoid it, if it’s becoming counter-productive. Each parish has to find its own ways of maintaining its faith in the fresh air, while keeping a foot in the TV studio. Don’t let them tell you you’re a Luddite or a technophobe, Pike. It’s about asking the question: ‘What’s the appropriate technology here?’

I move on over the fields and further up the road to Wymondham, and I’m in Leicestershire now, but Rutland manners persist. At the little crossroads, the Rutland Flyer bus gives way to a family group of horse-riders who walk on over to the bridleway in stately fashion. Polite waves and declinations of the head all round. I follow the lane round to St. Peter’s church past a single pretty cow and its even more winsome (week old?) calf. As I sit in the porch I think with love and regret of a past Rector of our own church whose family life became complicated and was brought to the salivating attention of the national press, who then vastly compounded the distress and damage. As he moved away, there was a vacancy in the parish, the first of three I’ve lived through. They can be times of growth or enfeeblement, and the current environment will make life difficult for good decision-making and process.

You’d think Stilton Cheese originated in Stilton, wouldn’t you? But no, it started in Wymondham with a cheese-maker called Frances Pawlett in the eighteenth century and continued to be made here until the Second War. Frances sold her product on to a gent called Cooper Thornhill who kept an inn on the Great North Road at Stilton, and that’s how the cheese got its name. Frances became a wealthy woman from her endeavours.

I wander back to the other end of Edmondthorpe, beyond the Hall, and pick up a long south-easterly trending path which has the tower of SS Peter & Paul in Market Overton in its sights. From the name of the village I know it will be sizeable, or else it wouldn’t have had a market, and that it’ll be atop a hill (or it wouldn’t be ‘Over’).

If your search engine is anything like mine, it’ll show Market Overton’s  Free Church as the first reference if you put in the village name plus ‘church’. How do we feel about competition between churches? Jean Reid was a good colleague when I helped run a recording studio as part of a conglomerate of small media businesses. She once said to me (I was in a worried frame of mind…) that there was enough business to go round. All that was necessary was to do a good job, and the order books would look after themselves. I’ve returned to that advice frequently over the subsequent thirty-five years, but I still question how it looks to the wider world. Is it simply what the public expects – that there should be a plethora of churches to choose from? Or does it undermine our claims? In visiting Rock Hill in South Carolina a few years ago, I remember arriving at the Episcopal church early on a Sunday morning, to hear the worship band in the black Pentecostal church across the road thundering away. It felt competitive, but of course it also represented a societal racial divide with long historical roots in the South. There was ‘choice’, strictly speaking, but there was also peer group and community pressure.

 

Where?

I make two diversions. The first is a slog up a busy road to Thistleton, whose settlement is rather isolated as far as paths and tracks are concerned because of the sizeable gorilla presence of RAF Cottesmore. The church of St. Nicholas is swathed in scaffolding. I sit on a wall next to its stiffly constructed apse and ponder. The line of the road to the south, which actually is bisected by the one-time airfield, and its OS naming to the north as ‘Fosse Lane’ makes me think the Romans woz ‘ere. I pick up Fosse Lane heading for the ‘Thistleton Gap’ which pretty much marks the boundary between Rutland, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire (Thistleton and Market Overton are Rutland’s most northerly settlements). In 1811 a crowd of 20,000 turned up at the Thistleton Gap to see the national heavyweight title contested between Tom Cribb and American Tom Molineaux. According to Wikipedia the venue had the advantage of allowing the crowds to disperse quickly and easily in the event of the rozzers turning up – the fight was illegal. Cribb won.

Back in Market Overton after a long energy-sapping tramp over tufty grass along dangerously corrugated tracks – easy to break an ankle here, even with boots, I make a second deviation on my way back to Teigh via the hamlet of Barrow. You can guess how it got its name. The chapel of ease which once sat here is gone now, but it was built close to the site of the burial mound which must be there somewhere behind the farms, though I can’t see it. As always, I’m moved and comforted by the knowledge of faith’s continuity while there are people to have it. I can rant in these pages for all I’m worth, but whatever will be, will be, and doubtless those who come after us will pose the same questions we do, and will leave marks on the landscape to show their beliefs in ways similar to those we have left. Which doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to be the very best we can.

Pigs in a poke:  22 km. 6 hrs. 4 stiles. 12 gates. 7 bridges. Sun, occasional cloud, and a lively breeze.

Seen in St. Michael’s Edmondthorpe:

Defeated?

A sonnet to empty churches:

Come on. You lot have survived worse things;

Black Death, Plague and two World Wars

The Reformation (Cromwell clipped the wings

Of angels in the roof); and there are scars

On ancient faces, marble noses cropped

And poppy heads beheaded like the King;

And modern vandals too. But you’ve not stopped

Your ageless plain ability to sing

Of something quite indifferent to the now;

Built with a trusting love and potent faith

You stand there still in testament to how

Beauty is not a wafted, fleeting wraith,

A ghost which chance can whimsically destroy;

You can be filled, if not by faith, with joy.

                                    Anon.

                                    June 2020

Give us this day our daily pie...

I’m just eight miles from Melton Mowbray, which always makes me think of the BBC’s cricket correspondent and one-time England fast bowler, Jonathan Agnew, who’s always been an enthusiastic advocate for all things Leicestershire: he learnt his rather accomplished radio chops there. The town is of course most famous for its pies, which from Christmas will presumably be no longer subject to predations from European imitators. Or will it be more vulnerable?

Thatching in Langham

As I drive into Langham and park in a shady spot, I give way to a tanned, swarthy young man who’s leading a pretty grey pony up the street. While I’m booting up from the Audi’s tailgate, I hear soothing, cooing noises softly behind me, and there’s the Lawrentian lad again, pony in hand. “She’s only young,” he says, “And still a bit wary of the back of vehicles…” I say what a handsome animal the little horse is. He looks pleased. As far as I can see, his companion is perfectly calm.

I have difficulty deconstructing this. I suppose I’m thinking ‘Black Beauty’, inventing a narrative of abuse and misfortune. But I still can’t see why the rear of an Audi estate would cause difficulty, unless it’s just straightforward unfamiliarity or a dislike of the colour. Perhaps metallic blue just isn’t in the natural repertoire of a horse’s experience. As I’ve remarked before: there’s just so much one doesn’t know.

On the verge at Whissendine

I’m walking to Whissendine - an attractive name, conjuring images of a summer breeze susurrating through willows beside a dibble-dabbling brook etc. etc. To get there I walk beside arable fields onto a low airy ridge with views across to a traditional windmill, whose sails are turning in wind that’s a few notches up from susurrating. In fact the gusts are quite annoying, blowing the brim of my Goretex hat down across my eyes and spoiling the view. The Met said nothing about wind today. I guess the mill’s situated at the far end of Whissendine’s straggly settlement: the village is larger than I’d thought - over a thousand inhabitants. In Rutland terms ( ‘magnum in parvo’) that’s almost a city. At the time of writing I can’t find a derivation for the village name, but I can tell you it’s the title of a song by English ultra art-rock band Crippled Black Phoenix, the description of whose music and alumni reads like an out-take from Spinal Tap Revisited. The windmill is possibly the tallest stone windmill in the country.

Hurray!  The White Lion’s open again, so it’s Curry Nights and Quiz Evenings all round. Hurray! So’s the church, a couple of times a week. Boo! The Craft and Produce Show has had to be cancelled, but… Hurray! The bell-ringers are back in socially distanced business. And with the encouragement of Rev. Deborah, there’s going to be community bunting all over town. Whissendine sounds fun.

Off Station Road, I pick up the track which angles towards the hamlet of Teigh. Is this to be pronounced ‘Tie’ as it would be in Kent, or ‘Tea’ as in ‘Leigh on Sea (Essex)? Or even, just possibly, Tay?  A few hundred metres from Whissendine there are many lumps and bumps in the fields, including the remaining square earthworks of a sizeable moated manor house. At some gates, a fastidious homeowner requests that passing walkers disinfect the handles after closing, and then I come to a railway crossing on the diagonal just as an EWS freight train thunders through, looming above me while I wait, fingers in ears. It’s a striking feature of this particular railway line (Stamford to Oakham) that there are many unmanned ground-level crossings. I’m used to Northamptonshire ways, where such things are rare because the principal railways are high-speed and well-trafficked. The bridleway is summer-overgrown for a little while and then a path diverges through a hedge, cutting a clear swathe through a field of immature wheat towards the tower of Teigh’s church.

Holy Trinity Teigh’s past incumbents include some colourful figures. Going back to the fourteenth century, let’s consider Richard Folville, who with others of his family formed part of the ‘Folville Gang’. Depending on your point of view, the gang were either simply a bunch of murderous ruffians or Robin Hood-style vigilantes righting wrongs in a time of lawlessness and in the absence of any appropriate justice system. They were certainly participants in the endless political intrigue during Edward III’s reign, more generally against the King than on his side, and perhaps implicated in Isabella’s doomed attempt at invasion. Rev. Richard was cornered in All Saints by a King’s Peace in 1340/1 after a fight in which there’d been at least one fatality, and having been lured outside on some pretext of talks about talks or a pardon (the gang had been let off several times previously) he was summarily decapitated. As I eat my sarnies on a bench in front of a tranquil scene of perfect rurality, this gives pause for thought. Violence, like archaeology, is ubiquitous.

Then there’s the Rev. Henry Stanley Tibbs. In 1940 he was interned in Liverpool Prison because it was imaginatively alleged by a fellow-priest that he was a fascist who’d once hidden two members of the Gestapo in the rectory, and was preaching treachery to his congregation, lauding the virtues of the banished Edward VIII and the German war leadership, and decrying Churchill as a drug addict and dictator. Tibbs was part Irish, which in those fevered times might alone have encouraged suspicion among a rural community, and he was a little inclined to shoot his mouth off, but the truth seems to have been that this quirk had made enemies of some colleagues and local residents. In short, he was stitched up and although quite quickly exonerated, died in Teigh three years later, a broken man. In fairness, he did admit that he’d once been a member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists though only because he’d favoured their agricultural policies. Under the influence of a rather toff-ish chap called Jorian Jenks (sounds like an ultra art-rock band member to me!) these included some farming ideas whose time has now come, and some which might yet be fulfilled. There was a decent dose of ecological common sense, and also the notion that Britain should be agriculturally self-sufficient. Of course, Jenks being a Balliol man, this also included a misty-eyed nostalgia for the Roman poet Virgil’s jottings about the countryside.  

The interior of Holy Trinity now is apparently much as it was in Tibbs’ day, or indeed as it was in 1782, when the current edition was built. I wish I could get in to have a look, particularly because it contains a screen rescued from St. John’s College, Cambridge, where I spent my student days. It’s getting harder to ‘feel’ this pilgrimage without access to any of the churches I visit. As with the notion of sharing a eucharist, never were Joni Mitchell’s words more sadly true: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…’

I’m learning a little more about prayer; that shutting my eyes and folding my hands as I was taught to do in Sunday School isn’t really the point ( ‘And it’s taken you 69 years to work that out?’ ); that there can be a ‘thin-ness’ about all personal reflection if one works at it, and that the greater puzzle is why so often the veil comes down and God is shut out from one’s various everyday processes of thought. This is perhaps one way of looking at the idea of ‘original sin’.

I pick up the pace down the twisty and busy road towards Ashwell, frequently having to step onto the verge to accommodate the passing traffic. Some cars wave a thank you, some don’t. Some peer curiously at me, as they might an ornithological rarity. Cyclists are now legion, fashionably got up, and even if they’re behaving stupidly must be honoured and humoured (the other day I saw a lone bicycle struggling with a steep incline out of Uppingham towards the village of Preston and holding back a long queue of tankers, HGVs and cars. Beside him/her was an empty footpath which could have been used). Walkers of my sort are a peculiarity. We have no snazzy clothing. There’s no macho kudos for doing what we do. We’re an anachronism: too slow and unadventurous. Strictly Old Folks.

Road-walking, though requiring vigilance, is nevertheless a time to concentrate the mind on other stuff. I think about the next TEN ON SUNDAY (please find at www.vincecross.co.uk ). It’s going to be an excursion into the fatherhood of God, mediated through various iterations of the Lord’s Prayer. I’m midway through recording a five-part version by the Tudor composer John Sheppard, and finding it very difficult – a step up from some of the more familiar Tudor music, both in required singing technique, and concept. I’d never have attempted to work my way through it, were it not for the Virus, lockdown and all the rest.

Boris promises us ‘significant normality’ by November. I have no idea what this means. There isn’t much doubt in my mind that the Virus will re-surge in the later autumn, and in any case the number of cases (though not the mortality rate, which continues to fall) has flattened out in the UK as it has everywhere else. Even that has to be qualified: the infection rate in Spain is beginning to rise again quite rapidly, in a way which would alarm me if I were there. Even if Boris means that there can be no second ‘lockdown’ because the economic consequences are unthinkable, and therefore the pubs can stay lit all winter so that people can drink themselves silly, this will not be ‘significantly normal’. The cost will be a rise in cases similar to that being experienced in the US, the NHS will be under unprecedented strain, other sick people won’t get treated, millions of shut-in seniors will either be told to, or will themselves decide not to, venture out more than absolutely necessary, and our churches will either stay shut or offer something which only faintly resembles the worship we knew a year ago. And what will be the value of that?

Loaves and fishes:  15km. 4.5 hrs. Sun and cloud. 22 deg. C.  Two stiles. Eleven gates. Five bridges.  Three churches.  Five other walkers passed. A perfectly pleasant walk, but a trifle on the dull side to be honest – too much treading tarmac.

Father in heaven

I know about endurance on the roads;

How, with miles in the feet,

And ache in the legs

The mind becomes dull

The journey about putting down a single step

And then another

And then another

And counting off the objectives

One by one

While losing sight

Of beauty

Or lovely incident.

We are all tired now

Of enduring this trial

Grant us the gift

Of minds alert

To praise you

To rejoice

To celebrate your Lordship

Over all creation.

Virus n’all.

Amen.

Leader

Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is on the car stereo as I drive into Oakham on a Monday morning. He’s an old man now, but how does he still manage to sound so cool? This is Dylan as Tom Waits, that drawly voice, even more hoarse with age, picking out the merest outlines of melodies implied by the lo-fi-ish, bluesey backing. He’s so steeped in Americana he knows how little you have to do. My initial take on the album differs from some of the critics. This is a finally dark album, retrospective and name-droppy in an almost parodical way (Simon and Garfunkel skewered him about this tendency even in the 1960s: cf. ‘A simple desultory Philippic’ on ‘Parsley Sage etc.’) And this is Dylan not far from death – at least in his own mind. I hope he hangs on for a cantankerous decade or two yet, especially now he’s found a band who can keep time –  or a producer who’s persuaded him musical synchronicity isn’t necessarily bad. I can’t hear much about faith in these new lyrics, but maybe I’ll find it on the next listen or two. Is this a theme he’s left behind, or has he found a resting place on his journey?

Oakham castle walls

Rutland still seems comme çi comme ça  about re-opening post-Covid, at least this early in the week. A previous watering-hole of choice in an Uppingham garden centre is shut until tomorrow. The car park behind Oakham Museum isn’t sure if it’s free today, and the little café I liked so much a few months back is also closed. But opposite the market square, Stray’s is open for coffee and straight-out-of-the-freezer choccy cake. The customer goes in one way and out the other, but the loos are open, and the tables separated. The staff handle the flow of traffic nicely.

I’ve fallen over a few times on the Big Walk, but only on one other occasion with serious risk of permanent damage. By the level crossing next to Oakham station is an attractively old-fashioned footbridge in rhubarb and custard. I pause at the top to watch and photograph a southbound freight train thunder underneath me. As I extract camera from pocket a chap asks, ‘There’s not a steamer coming through is there?’ I bluster, trying to deflect the implication I might be someone who cares about locomotive numbers. Distracted, as I begin to descend the stairs on the far side, I mis-step on the third or fourth rung, and pitch forward, rolling another two or three steps, only preventing myself from falling the whole and literal nine yards by grabbing desperately at the metal below the handrail to my left. Seriously, this might have been a hospital job or worse, and no one wants to be in hospital right now. A guy with a Scottish accent who’s standing at the foot asks anxiously if I’m OK, commenting that the steps are dangerous, which is generous of him. I inspect my bloody knees, apply Savlon, and go back to see if they are, but they aren’t, not really. I was just stupidly careless, and really should know better.

I follow the main road up to Barleythorpe, and then turn left on Manor Lane which zig zags before climbing to a ridge near Mill Hill at about 180 metres - near top whack for Rutland. Some joggers pass me, and then there’s John hobbling towards me down the hill with his well-behaved trio of dogs. John’s probably the wrong side of eighty, but a doughty sort of chap, because he only walks about as well as me after my fall down the stairs, there’s a steep gradient to the lane, and he’s parked his car at the bottom when he could equally well have driven another quarter of a mile and enjoyed an easy stroll along the top. We talk about maps, and John marvels at the way early map makers managed to make sense of the landscape. He enthuses about an early cartographer called George Carey, and I don’t think to say: ‘that’s funny, same name as the Archbishop…’. It’s only when I’m at home later and look up this interesting coincidence that I discover it’s Matthew Carey who published his ‘general atlas’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But the point’s well made – how much skill and sheer hard graft went into producing those beautiful early editions, and what a debt we owe to William Roy and the Ordnance Survey: something that would certainly deserve a place in my ‘top hundred things about Britain’.  John also tells me about his church life in Leicester, first at St. George’s and then the Cathedral. He recommends the little conserved chapel at Withcote near Launde, which I failed to get to on a very muddy day last autumn.

 

The view from the ridge is wonderfully airy, and I bounce along until the path drops round a copse. The settlement of Langham comes into sight. It straggles a bit, does Langham, but is very pretty and homely nonetheless. It comes as a slight shock to see the signpost say Nottingham is just twenty-five miles away…nearer than Northampton…and I laugh at my rump of ‘southernist’ chauvinism: we’re very nearly oop north! Simon Jenkins talks approvingly of the ‘stage-set’ presentation of the south side of SS Peter and Paul’s church from Church Street, and it’s true: the longwise view through the immaculate churchyard to the handsome south transept is lovely. I’m looking for the memorial stone to Laurence Martyn, the father of a friend, and eventually realise it must be in the separate burial ground which lies a quarter of a mile distant beside the way to Ashwell. I follow the signs to the little cemetery, find the flat stone and spend a moment clearing aside some of the grass. One can be moved even by the demise of people one never knew, feeling grief vicariously for those left behind, partners, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

I’m not bound for Ashwell today, but am walking the long way round to Burley using bridle paths rather than yomping along the road. At a junction with a lane I see a young woman in a high-vis jacket putting up a sign, warning drivers of roadworks. I ask her if she’s digging a hole. She laughs and says no, she’s just cutting the grass between the bridle path and the highway. I say how impressed I am with the way Rutland maintains its verges: someone’s got their head screwed on properly in Oakham Town Hall. This pleases her, though she qualifies it by saying that some of the ‘ecology’ is from necessity, because of budget cuts. Her name’s Helen. She tells me they try very hard to work with anyone who has local knowledge in the service of preserving flora and fauna. For example, the books apparently say there are no dormice in Rutland, but the locals know there are. Metal on gates is an inhibitor to their passage, so Helen’s team try to put wrappings on the metal to encourage the mice to pass. I don’t say so, but find this extraordinarily affecting – an echo of the Biblical ‘sparrow’s fall’. 

As we chat, a weathered country person on a bike creaks past out of the bridleway from the direction I’m headed. Helen seems to know him. They swap nods. In a couple of hundred metres up the increasingly overgrown path, I come across a motley collection of caravans, some burned out or cannibalised, surrounded by a stretch of detritus.  A single cock crows from somewhere within the ramshackle agglomeration, but there’s no sign of human presence. Was the man on the bike the site’s sole resident? I think to myself that however appalled I am at the mess, surely no one would choose to live in such a rural slum, would they?

The Old Smithy: Burley

Burley House is the imposing pile I saw months ago across the valley from Ridlington, shining out to the south from its hill site. It has to be distinguished from ‘Burghley’ of course, where the horse trials take place, which is not so far away, and is even larger and more grand. I mooch up the tree-lined lane, past the re-purposed outbuildings and workers’ houses, now dwellings for an altogether richer clientele. Holy Cross church lies right beside the Big House, in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust since the late 1990s. A lady from one of the houses assures me I shall be able to get a key next week, and it’s worth a visit.

 

It’s a deep, enduring pleasure to walk the beautiful English countryside on a beautiful fresh, slightly autumnal July day: it makes the heart sing. But sometimes, standing in the middle of such privilege, old and new, the discrepancies between this and most people’s experience of life becomes overwhelming. There’s been much talk about ‘bubbles’ from the point of view of controlling the Virus. It’s a metaphor that works: we’re very comfortable living within our own frames of reference. And this is true for the Church too. I’m going to quote selectively from the Church Times leader for June 26^th. Its title was ‘What next’?

‘No Church true to the name was ever set up as a self-help club; but the travails of running an institution with staff and buildings seemed to be consuming most of the C of E’s energy before the pandemic…

‘The pandemic has acted on the Church like a disease, depriving it of the use of the faculty that had come to define it. But like a body forced to re-purpose itself after an amputation, it is discovering that other limbs, other brain cells, can do the same work, just in other ways…

‘Many clerics have discovered how hard it is to live without the status, visibility, and the trappings of leadership and/or service…

‘Lay people have shown themselves in many instances to be better equipped to do the work of the Church when reduced to one of its basics: supplying the needs of neighbours…

‘…it is in this sense that the Church must disappear. For too long it has restricted its idea of the work of God…to the activity of the self-confessed workers of God…the weight of these times is to be borne by all. The work of salvation can only be accomplished together.’

Dormice in Rutland:  17 km. 5hrs -ish. 20 deg C. Breezy and fresh feeling. Butterflies everywhere in the meadows, dancing.  2 stiles. 10 gates. 4 bridges.

Great Father of all

I fell over again today

And you saved me.

Your right hand lifted me up

Bruised and battered

And set me on a straight path.

You healed my wounds

And poured balm on my troubled soul.

I will tell of your goodness

To this new generation

That they may look beyond themselves

And trust in your unfailing love.

Amen.

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.