97. Taking a break

It’s Sunday and I should - as I have been for more than a year and a half - be adding thoughts another visit to this blog. Reluctantly though, I think I shall be taking a break. It’s an interruption to things partly due to the continued difficulties of finding places able to open their doors as normal, and partly (crucially) down to an enforced change in the technology.

The excellent Blogspot is changing its format and, try as I might, I think the new set-up will be beyond me and (more importantly) my computer. My laptop is already way beyond the obsolescence the makers had planned, and no attempts by me to just struggle through will probably work. Ah well, it comes to us all.

I have thoroughly enjoyed following the project I set myself to visit places I’d never been, seek out new lives and boldly go... Wait a moment. That’s Star Trek!

I shall keep visiting and keep opening doors whenever lockdown and social distancing allows the Lazy Pilgrim in. Hopefully I may be able to record my experiences in the way I have so far. Time will tell.

96. Approaches to Lockdown

With each passing week more churches are joining those opening their doors for services as well as for private prayer. It started out being something more atuned to the cathedrals and larger churches where such niceties as one-way systems, separate entrances and exits and socially distanced seating were relatively easily achieved. The ability to open in a curated way has reached parish churches and is gradually spreading downwards.

It’s not easy for some of course. There are plenty of places I’ve visited in the course of writing this blog where size and layout make suitably controlled opening impossible. Take away all but a third of the seats in some churches - a couple spring to mind - and you’d be down to a capacity of about a dozen. In some cases the problem would come from trying to space people sufficiently to meet the guidelines - any of the places I’ve attended for Friday prayers must be finding this a struggle at the moment and only the guilt of adding to that problem has prevented me from trying to take a look myself.

We shouldn’t forget too that reopening has, in some parts of the country, become re-closing as spikes in cases bring about a halt to progress and even perhaps a step backwards. Nobody is taking anything for granted at the moment.

Coming out of lockdown has given many churches the opportunity to reflect on what they managed to achieve during the restrictions and closures. It has been instructive to me to see how different church approaches have produced different responses. It hasn’t all been a uniform picture of pastoral help and remote prayer; there have been some truly praiseworthy efforts and, it has to be said, some disappointing absences.

One of the visits I posted last year concerned an online sermon about the three-dimensionality of a church’s function. Ideally, according to the very energetic person presenting the talk, a church would have a relationship with its congregation and with the powers above, but would also - crucially - have a strong connection with the wider (as yet non-churchgoing) community. I recall a two-dimensional cardboard Jesus coming in for a battering because of his failure to make a connection with the wider world.

Elements of that probably rather simple lesson have been abundantly on show over lockdown. Having signed up - intentionally or otherwise - to a number of mailing lists, I’ve been struck by the efforts put in by some and the apparent silence coming from others.

Collecting food, clothes and cash as well as making a point of checking up on the vulnerable members of society have all been strongly followed. The pressing need to support those grieving, those living in fear and those suffering the inevitable economic consequences of the last four months has been answered fully by most churches and places of worship.

Only this week I was sent a splendid communication from the Mosque in Leamington. In response to the problems of people experiencing hardship when it comes to putting food on the table, the Mosque has produced a downloadable booklet of recipes for curries and dhals to make at home providing good food with costs as low as 9p a serving. It’s a fine demonstration of reaching out regardless of faith and I’m certain there have been plenty such examples.

Where then have been the voices from many of the churches whose emailings have been constant in trying to get me to go along and join? The knock on the door approach may have been scuppered by lockdown but the sudden drying-up of emails came as a bit of a surprise. These, typically, are the more inward-looking congregations whose purpose seems to be to cement a place in heaven for the individual without really looking much further into the world beyond - the two-dimensional folk looking to themselves first.

Now that church doors are beginning to open more fully I expect they will be back offering me a path to the promised riches waiting for me. But the modern equivalent of the question ‘What did you do in the war?’ may mean I’m even more reluctant to share time with these churches than ever.

95. Coventry Cathedral opens (with restrictions)

Two steps forward, one step back seems to be the pattern at the moment. The trumpeting of things reopening or being eased are counterbalanced by announcements that others are having to be put back into ore strenuous measures. Those lucky enough to be among the  limited crowd at Friday’s world snooker should count themselves lucky. A few hours later a great swathe of northern England is put back into no-contact territory and the arena is empty again. It seems this ‘in and out of lockdown’ state of affairs could remain for some time.

It’s certainly one my mind as I plan a trip to Falmouth. At least that’s about as far away as one can get from northern England, but with headlines saying pubs may have to close in order to offset the rise in cases expected as schools open, you have to wonder if there’s a twist to come even as we’re heading down the M5.

So it’s with a real sense of caution that I make my first visit inside a church for a proper service since mid-March. This eucharist service is at Coventry Cathedral and is a perfect lesson in a lot of things I suspect we shall have to get used to.

Gone are the rows of hundreds of seats and the feeling of a space you can wander about in. Instead there is a one-way system and chairs placed two metres apart looking more like an art installation than a church. Everyone seems to be masked - this we’re told will become mandatory next week.

The service starts a little behind schedule as those operating the tech desk try to ensure all can be seen and heard not just inside the cathedral but for the many watching from home, perhaps still far too wary of the virus to venture out. What follows is a good five minutes or more of safety advice, rules we should know and urgings for us all to act responsibly. 

The hand sanitising stations are here and here, we are instructed, the video of us coming in and the contact details we must leave are for tracing purposes should that be needed, there will be no touching or singing and we should leave smartly at the end so our chairs can be instantly wiped and cleansed. Gluten-free wafers are available on request, he adds by way of an afterthought. It makes the whole welcome look like the sort of safety demonstration you get as your plane taxies for take-off. We didn’t get as far as exits but I would be disappointed if, given the gravity of things as they stand, there weren’t two - one heavenwards, one heading the other way.

Once normal service gets started there’s a strong sense of trying to make it business as usual. Or at least of standard as it can be when the faces of those presiding and the congregation around me are so thoroughly masked. Sitting on your own in such an enormous space is inevitably going to make you feel small and the greetings given as a sign of peace end up being distant and rather forlorn waves of recognition such as you’d get across a deep and dangerous glacial chasm. 

With all the singing recorded by an unseen choir and played over speakers and with so much of the building empty, there is a sense that this is a partial reconstruction of something we used to do back before the changes happened. A bit like yesterday’s Cup Final where my delight at the result couldn’t take away the sense that what I was watching wasn’t in any recognisable way the real thing.

But for all its oddities, it is comforting to stumble across some sort of familiarity and, I tell myself, a much better experience for being there rather than watching it all on the laptop for another week. 

It’s one small step - like the man said - and a very tentative one at that. But it’s one which will hopefully lead to more. That is if the government and its scientists don’t suddenly decide we all have to take hurried steps back in the other direction.

94. The Feast Day of Joachim and Anne, and Bartolomea Capitanio

Today is the feast day of two saints - well, three really given that one is an inseparable couple. I know this because I recently bought a second hand dictionary of saints and I can’t help dipping into the lives of the great and the good. There are some fine lives within the exhaustive alphabetical line-up - some familiar and some with names so wonderful and obscure I’m tempted to visit any church anywhere which is named after them.

Beatification is something conferred on those who have either led a blameless life, often in the teeth of extreme antagonism, while maintaining the teachings of Christianity and, more often than not, working tirelessly and without reward to further its spread and influence. There may be the odd miracle here and there (and more than a few martyrdoms) but a leisurely flick through any dictionary of saints reveals no end of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

And that’s not a bad basis for singling out those who go a bit further than others. There are doubtless a number of suspect cases in the full list; it’s hard to see unquestioned inclusion for the incredibly wealthy spending some of their cash on projects that ultimately will reflect well on themselves. 

But there’s an undeniable similarity between the honours given out to people dedicating themselves to helping the community and the inevitable knighthoods conferred on those whose rewards have already arrived in the shape of high-level appointments and fat cat salaries. How we choose to honour ourselves as individuals in a society has never been a transparent meritocracy. 

Within the Christian tradition most churches are dedicated in some way to the memory of a saint although I know of none venerating the names of today’s featured folk. Perhaps it’s a bit like pubs with twenty Red Lions or White Horses to every Case is Altered. There’s room enough for all and today’s recipients of our collective remembrance are indicative of the process as a whole.

Joachim and Anne were the parents of Mary. Their entire involvement in the stories of the scriptures is, to all intents and purposes, nil. We know nothing at all about them except for the fact they existed (not the most strenuous piece of inductive reasoning ever offered) and their names. Except that we don’t really know their names; these are names which have been ascribed to them many years after their far better-known grandson died on the cross. 

Attempts have been made to confer on them some sort of benign holiness, but this smacks of ‘they must have been good because good came of them’ - a kind of heirloom worthiness that doesn’t suit our modern psychology at all. More recently the remembrance of these distant figures has become a reason to celebrate the role of grandparents and an excuse to be sold cards and flowers in order to so do.

Bartolomea Capitanio was, by contrast to the undocumented grandparents, a very real figure with a very real life. Born in the early years of the nineteenth century she grew up among many siblings under the control of an alcoholic father. As a child she was sent away to a convent school and tried unsuccessfully to make a life for herself as a nun. Bartolomea channelled her energies into coaching girls to live lives free of sin. 

Having qualified as a teacher and, in partnership with Vincenza (the saint she is habitually paired with) she founded the Sisters of Charity to further religious teaching, support the vulnerable in the community and care for the sick. A life packed full of challenges an achievements made even more remarkable by the fact that she ignored any suggestion of letting up on the workload and died of tuberculosis at the age of 26.

So honours given to one case of a person putting the welfare and wellbeing of others above herself to the eventual cost of her life, and one case of just being the right sort of people by birth. Perhaps the mixture of approval and scorn with which the Queen’s twice-yearly honours handout is greeted is not a new thing at all. 

93. National Gallery, London

Each week (or every twenty minutes if you just listen to Boris) brings a slight change in the rules of lockdown and the guidelines which tell us what we can and can’t do. Club cricket is back, nail parlours are apparently available and there’s even talk of some theatre performances returning soon.

It’s a very complex balancing act obviously. Everyone wants their particular sphere of life to be returned to normal with immediate affect although nobody seems clear on what will now constitute normal. But nobody, it’s plain to say. wants to provoke a return to hundreds of deaths a day and a living hell in our hospitals.

So it’s all a bit step by step and, though there has been nothing specific for the church community for a few weeks, there’s been an announcement which has lifted my spirits quite a bit. The doors of or art galleries are being gradually opened and the treasures within made accessible once more.

Religion and art art closely linked, as are religion and music but the latter’s return in a performance context may take a few months yet. I have long been as much a devotee of wandering the galleries as I have of gazing in rapture at the inside of cathedrals. There’s a similarity in the two I understand, and I have missed both much more than I ever imagined I would while they’ve been off-limits.

The first real sign that Coronavirus and the lockdown were real came back at the start of the crisis when it became apparent that the ticket I’d bought to see the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery was not going to be used and I had to cross the long-awaited date from my diary. I did take up the offer of of the TV guided tour with the splendid Mary Beard, but, joyous though it was, it was not like actually being there in front of these masterworks.

The exhibition has now been extended but when you factor in using public transport, having to wear a mask for a prolonged period and being ushered round a one-way system to view the paintings it’s a long way from the leisurely hours of rapt contemplation I had planned for myself. 

Perhaps I shall wait until another few steps back toward less controlled normality have been taken. Then I’ll be able to stand for a long time, as I always do, in front of my favourite painting - Carlo Crivelli’s splendid depiction of the annunciation, the exact moment the Almighty changed forever the life of ordinary housewife Mary.

I love it for its style and detail and the fact that it’s a riot of colour, but I always pick on two things that grab me most. 

One is the fabulous bolt of pure gold coming out of the clouds, sneaking through the tiniest aperture in the outer wall of Mary’s room before smacking the (un)fortunate woman straight on the head. For those of us who spent our younger years drawing football pictures or reading football comics, it’s the long-range shot to cap them all. Nowadays it would be a wonder even in the pinpoint world of Hawkeye.

The second noteworthy element of Crivelli’s canvas is the fact that this inspired bolt from the blue is witnessed by two people - one a man shielding his eyes from the brilliance, the other a young girl who just happened to be there. As someone who has served 32 years in local newspapers, I can’t help but ponder the eye-witness interviews I could have scooped to go with on-the-spot reports (we would have had to wait a lot longer that 32 years for the paint to dry on the picture obviously).

The days of being at liberty to gaze on pictures or wonder at the construction of galleries and cathedrals still seem a way off. But each small step taken brings them a tiny bit closer and that is sometimes enough to keep us going.

92. Warwick University Nature Reserve

Speaking with a friendly vicar this week it seems the pressure to reopen churches and start having services of some sorts is coming, in part, from the many who have lost loved ones and are keen to establish some kind of memorial to them. It’s going to be a busy time on that front when you consider the sheer number of people who have died in this pandemic and the restrictions on what could be done to commemorate them during the lockdown months.

Memorials are important to those left behind. They act as a focal point for remembering, they perform a function in us publicly marking someone’s death and they raise the hope and expectation that we ourselves will be similarly commemorated when the time comes.

Churches, having been the purveyors of all things after-life for so long, are the obvious favourites for somewhere to place a token of someone’s time on this earth. They offer the sense of having gone somewhere better as well as protection of the soul and a decent shot at permanence. For those not really dedicated to church life, there are alternatives of course. Football grounds, pub gardens, beauty spots and so on are all decent resting places for someone’s ashes. They’ll all mean something to somebody.

Choosing a place to become a memorial usually means picking somewhere which you shared with the person you are attempting to commemorate. A shared house, a school, a place of work or just somewhere you both loved. It has to be somewhere you can come back to year after year. 

But the march of progress seems to render permanence a rare quality these days. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a permanent memorial inside another permanent memorial - a flagstone inside Westminster Abbey for example - you’re always going to be at the mercy of life just moving on.

So it was with my sister. The lovely cottage maternity unit in which we were born in Weston-super-Mare is no longer there. Our mutual primary school in Bristol is currently being renamed thanks to its associations with the wealth and wishes of the slave trader Edward Colston - no bad change at all but not exactly what you’d look for in a place of tranquil rest. A similar change of name appears to have hit the comprehensive school we shared, this time entirely due to its failing performance statistics and the fact that huge tracts of its playing fields are now given over to housing. 

We were not great churchgoers but we did like music. My sister and I both sang in the closest church to our first home in Bristol. Last time I walked past the church of St Saviours, it had become some sort of designer office space. 

There was a second church we liked, the school’s official church just down the road. St Mary’s in Henbury was well-known locally and further afield as being the resting place of one Scipio Africanus whose double headstone (or probably more accurately its terrible message of gratitude for being made a Christian) has in the last week or so been smashed in the row and counter-row over Bristol’s deeply-embedded slave trade past. I’m glad I didn’t choose there then.

In the end we chose a place where she’d probably been happiest - Warwick University - and a specific spot unlikely to be built on despite the university’s seemingly insatiable appetite for new blocks. She rests on the bottom of the nature reserve lake having been launched from a spot on the bank I can usually find as I walk past. 

It’s a bit of a challenge to get through the nettles at the moment but it’s always good to spend a few moments thinking about the daftness of trying to say something to someone who’s no longer there. This time around she’d have been 60. Perhaps, then, the purpose of memorials is to make those of us left behind uncomfortably aware of the fact that, even in times of repose and  contemplation, time marches on.

91. Leicester Cathedral online

I have, for a long time, had a soft spot for Leicester. Its proximity up the M69 and its splendid park and ride system means, with good fortune, I can be in the city centre in about half-an-hour. More recently I’ve taken to parking in a side street near the National Gas Museum (I kid you not) so I can take a stroll past the enormous bulk of Welford Road stadium before joining New Walk and the excellent art gallery of the same name.

I like the tight web of small shopping streets, the spread and noise of the market and the joy of being called ‘me duck’ almost everywhere.

Today Leicester is quiet - I know that even though I am not there. Alone among towns and cities in England it has been hit by an extension in lockdown measures. When everyone else is celebrating what the perennially credulous are calling Super Saturday and the return of, inter alia, pubs and hairdressers, Leicester has yet to be moved off the post-lockdown starting line.

It’s incredibly dispiriting I should imagine. Shops and cafes have recalled staff, re-planned their premises to observe social distancing and prepared themselves for the welcome return of revenue only to be told it’s not happening. Not yet anyway.  

Leicester Cathedral is tucked away in the middle of the city’s busy centre. It’s not the biggest or grandest admittedly, but it has a charm and a welcome and, for those who like their history, houses the mortal remains of Richard III since they came to light in a nearby car park.

This morning’s service is another indication of how good the church has become at producing programmes. There are five different contributors in five locations, musical inserts, illustrative shots from inside the cathedral and even a decent cartoon version of the beatitudes. 

This being the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the NHS (apparently) there are thanks offered to those in the modern organisation whose efforts are appreciated daily. The prayers and readings are accompanied by a splendid montage of archive shots from the city’s own infirmary down the years. 

There are prayers too for the city itself. The cathedral’s plan to reopen to worshippers has been halted by the lockdown extension and the cathedral’s thoughts are with all those in the city who have had to slam the brakes on any chance of immediate moves toward normality. Services, says the Dean, may return in September, but that seems a long way off and the road between now and then filled with obstacles.

On my many country walks I often find myself conscious of time as a measure. I know when I started out, I know roughly how long it will take and I’m always aware of how much further I have before I reach the finish. It doesn’t matter how many twists and turns the path takes, I can be confident that I’ll find myself back at the car at the allotted time. To live in Leicester at the moment must be like returning to find someone has dug up the car park in search of a stray dead monarch and moved your car to a location an unknown distance away. Probably best not to dwell on things too long but keep walking.