The Collection

I'm just back from doing the Christian Aid collection with my pal Mrs Heathbank. Because we are relatively lithe and active (I know, but that's church for you...) we undertake an area with a hill in it. On the very outskirts of town. This year's collection included not only the hill, and its strangely bleak little community in a new development which is unfinished and half empty, but also some new houses on the shore that we'd never visited before, so the afternoon promised some variety and a bit of interest.

In the event, there was much with which we were all too familiar. The people who had no money (it's Sunday). The man who said "I'm afraid I'm the only one in," and shut the door. The people who had already been given an envelope by their own church (come on, chaps, they're for door-to-door collections, you know - not for an easy way out for all concerned). Less familiar were  the lovely people who gave us these envelopes for our bag notwithstanding, and the people who invited us in for a chat regardless of our hiking boots (you go prepared for anything in this part of the world). Most annoying moment of the afternoon was reserved for four persistent and  very rude small boys who dogged our way round one group of houses making such a racket that we were sure the forewarned denizens of the place lay low as one man. It's the difficulty of remembering that I'm a Christian Aid collector and therefore must bite my tongue that really gets to me in these moments.

And then there were the dogs. I don't care for dogs. Fortunately Mrs H does, and fielded most of them. I had one great success in ordering one beast back into his house; it went, and its owner offered to hire me to complete the animal's training. I declined.

All this time it rained. Most of the time it was a fine, wetting drizzle, with occasional outbursts of something more substantial. As we trailed up the half-made road to the last houses in our patch, we reflected on how different it is doing this sort of thing in a city. I once helped a friend in a residential area of the Edinburgh suburbs; she did one side of the road and I did the other and the whole operation took us half an hour and yielded a heavy haul of filled envelopes. Where we collect in Dunoon, we have to reckon on at least two hours to get round our allocated houses, and will be lucky to have half the amount of the city collection. But I'm not complaining - not really. Except about the churches who make our journey a waste of time.

And next year I'd like it to be warm and sunny. Please?

Climbing through the past

Familiar stair
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Well, that was fun. Two hours spent in a building that seemed (predictably) to have shrunk and (less predictably) to have become an unfamiliar maze reduced me to giggling exhaustion - though the giggles didn't come on till after this photo was taken, as I hadn't met someone I used to know by then. The stair I'm on here actually looks much as it always did - worn, glossy stone treads, tiled walls - though in the 50s the paintwork was cream and there were no pupils' paintings on the walls. But elsewhere, dreadful things have happened in the name of safety, and whole staircases have been dismantled and moved to places that don't fit at all with the architecture. It was, as I said in my last post, always a challenging place to find your way round the central stairwell, but now it's impossible.

Upwards was the clue. If we kept climbing, we arrived first at the top landing under the glass cupola, a space now sadly diminished by a new partition wall and the addition of fluorescent lights round the Parthenon frieze (replica). Beyond that, I knew, was The Attic, where I used to go for sewing classes between 3 - 4pm Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I saw a dingy stair heading up into the gloom and followed it - only to find that we seemed to be in a building site, linked to the rest of the school by a corrugated iron corridor with a wonky floor. We crept carefully along this, and emerged on the Attic landing: it was the fire escape. And of course we'd all have died hideously in the 50s if a fire had happened lower down in the school, as there was only the one exit, down the central stairwell. We never gave it a moment's thought - and neither, presumably, did our parents.

Because of the nature of Hillhead until the mid-70s, the returning FPs of my generation tended to share a pretty recognisable set of characteristics, including self-confidence and articulate self-expression. I was totally amused to meet up over a mass school photo with someone whom I remembered, with increasing clarity, from the 2nd violins of the school orchestra. She'd been in the year below me, along with Alison, and her hair had been very dark. I now realise I also knew her brother - even after we left school. Her pal I knew less well, but remembered her big sister - and their father had been a colleague of my own. She knew several people in my life, including one ABF who comments on this blog. It was all very incestuous and great fun.

I am grateful to the mother of a current pupil, who let me out into the shed apparently closed off because of an unsafe roof - her daughter assured me the pupils still go into it. And I was amused by the closed-in area under the school which used to be the boys' shed, open all down one side and used when it was just too wet for footie in the playground. I don't know how they got on playing footie round the pillars - I imagine it led to increased ball skills.

I was hugely impressed by the amount of work obviously done by the present teachers, and by the quality of the work on display. And I realised early on what a nightmare the building has become, with the cramped conditions imposed by the alterations and the leaking windows and unstable stonework in the attic. I had a vision of some of the classrooms as they had been - large, square, well-lit by tall windows, 40 pupils sitting in rows at desks with flap-down seats attached and the teacher at the front at the high desk - and realised I was in another world.

Take it for all in all, I think I prefer where we are now..

Note: I've had to repost this, as it vanished during Blogger's recent sickness. Hence the wrong date - it belongs, like myself, to yesterday.

Time travelling today ...

Today I'm going to visit the school this grinning child attended: Hillhead Primary School in Glasgow. (And if you follow me on Twitter you'll recognise the young Mrs Blethers - the photo was taken when I was about six, I think, or maybe seven. My pigtails vanished when I was ten.) At the time, the uniform was strictly adhered to; the school was one of Glasgow Corporation's grant-aided selective schools for which an entrance exam had to be sat, a consequence of which being that you could be asked to leave it you were deemed unsuitable in any way. So there I was, in my navy gym-slip with the box pleats and the badge; the cream blouse (never, ever white for the girls); the navy tie with the gold and brown narrow stripes. My hair ribbons were navy blue and my knee-high socks an unpleasant brown.

But I loved school; I loved it wholeheartedly and was as sad to leave at 18 as any heroine of a girls' school story. I never even noticed that the outdoors toilets were a barbaric and chilly idea - and they froze solid in a cold winter and we were all sent home - nor cared that the arrangement of stairs in the Primary School was such that some classrooms could only be reached from the left-hand stair. (I did, however, quail at the idea of asking the fierce teachers in the middle landing for passage through their classrooms if I got it wrong - I preferred to sprint downstairs and start again.) We played all the traditional games in their proper seasons - skipping, ball-games against the wall, scrap-swapping (a winter pursuit, carried out in the shed) - and wildly dangerous ones, like first dreeping off a ten-foot wall and then learning to jump off it without breaking anything. I still remember the concussion of landing on the concrete - and I was a skinny wee thing.

I shall doubtless return to this topic after this evening. The school is to be moved to another site, amalgamating with two others, and I have yet to discover the future of the building in Cecil Street. I shall take my camera, and there is a chance that the visit might destroy some memories. But I doubt it.

The Revolution: a traditional English teacher’s take.

It's that time of the year - exam time, when suddenly the seniors have vanished and the tired teacher has time to reflect but finds she is too jaded to string together new ideas, finds she is thinking of sunlit beaches and cool drinks instead of technology in the classroom. It's still "that time of the year" for me, but now, having retired from the classroom, I find myself thinking about the job I left - and the job I wish I could be doing. This post is the result of that reflection.


"Poetry, like all the arts, is useless."

Thus began an introductory note, written in the 1940s for Higher English students on the subject of poetry – a wonderful note which went on to demonstrate that although a knowledge of poetry would not clothe or put a roof over the heads of those who knew how to approach it, it was nevertheless one of the most fulfilling cultural activities for students of English.


The question for an English teacher who is sensitive to the need both for the cultural aspects of the subject and for the transactional writing that underpins half the subjects in the secondary curriculum is how to achieve a balance within a revolutionised school curriculum. This is one vision – the vision of an English teacher who has bridged the period between “Projects in Practice” and Higher Still, and who sees Curriculum for Excellence as a half-baked attempt to have a bloodless revolution.

1. Transactional English in immersion learning through a central topic:
If a whole school were immersed in a core topic such as Climate Change, dealing with everything from the Physics and Chemistry of the process through the social aspects and physical impact of change to the politics and journalism of dealing with it, then English writing and comprehension would be an integral part of the study. English specialists would have to be timetabled to be present in the area where such work was going on, to be a constant resource on the ground, to enable the best possible communication and expression of what was being done at all levels.


2. Expressive and cultural input – especially from S3 upwards – in English:
This is where the biggest change might be seen to take place. It would be perfectly possible to deliver the kind of lesson that has always brought, say, a poem to life to a much larger group than has been traditional since the days when partitioned classrooms used to be opened up to allow one teacher to take 60 pupils in time of absence of staff shortage. I’m thinking Big Lesson, followed by group work by pupils with teacher participation, followed by plenary feedback with some kind of projected backdrop showing the results of the discussions. This would free up timetable time to allow for more flexibility.
[It always seemed a waste to me to have a whole year timetabled to be doing the same course at the same time when some of the work was suitable for this kind of treatment. It also seemed a shame for some pupils to be stuck with the one teacher for the two years, say, of S grade, when they could easily have a shot of someone who inspired them. There were often instances of pupils of one teacher coming to another for advice which was lacking in the class they were in]


3. Technology as the glue as well as the instrument:
If pupils were not isolated in the womb-like classroom of individual teachers (I’ll speak for English classes now) for up to 6 hours a week, but could because of flexible working spaces have access to technology and subject specialists when they needed it, provision of an adequate number of computers should be less of a problem – and the maintenance of them might be made simpler if 20 computers were not buried in the room of a cack-handed technophobe who didn’t ensure they were properly functional. I think the formative assessment of students involved in both the cultural and the transactional stages of English could be transformed by their doing all their working-out online, so that both the process and the input of the teacher could be publicly visible (whether in the wider world or on a closed school site). This would save teacher-hours in repeating the same mantras (eg about the embedding of quotation in a Critical Essay for Higher English) and allow learning to take place through study of past materials (something I always did, but which was limited by having limited copies of exemplars). Incidentally, it would also facilitate staff CPD - for teachers are not equally skilled or indeed educated in their field, and the open nature of the work I advocate would allow for continuing but not overt acquisition of new skills. Final work could be submitted on paper if required, but I like the openness and accountability of the blog/ning model for ongoing assessment and appraisal. If twitter or other short-form communication were to be built in to the system, the resulting flexibility would expedite learning, mentoring, teaching, assessment and feedback – and none of these would be limited to the physical classroom or the 9-4 day.


4. The integration of the extra-curricular:
When I taught in Dunoon Grammar School, I ran a very successful magazine. Its operational heart was my classroom where the iMac lived, and almost all the work was done at lunchtimes, after school, and in evenings when we were often racing to escape from the building before it was locked up for the night. But before we were deemed sufficiently successful to purchase our own computer, we relied on the machines in the Business Studies department - a situation fraught with the potential for strife.  It strikes me that if something like The Pupils’ View had been a more collaborative activity, we would have had the Business Studies people onside teaching effective skills in typing and layout instead of fighting over when we could use their computers – and there was much useful learning going on with phone skills, advertising, layout & design, sweet-talking advertisers, selling papers. None of that was ever recognised.


Obviously timetabling and resources, school buildings and staffing are at the heart of this, but it seems to me a way of developing new ideas so that the interesting and purely cultural aspects of the subject are not subordinated. And I have taken no account whatsoever of the matter of discipline and the disaffected pupil.

In my experience, there is a great deal of slack time and wasted effort in teaching as it currently stands.

And now it's all over ...

SNP Manifesto at a glance
Originally uploaded by Ewan McIntosh.

Wow. In the rainy aftermath of the Scottish election there's time to think, to read the papers and the blogs, to realise how different life feels. I hope Ewan's cool with my use of his wordle, because it - and the manifesto it sums up - says it all: it's about Scotland, and it's all positive.

I love an election. I love it when the lampposts bloom with placards and you find George Galloway orating in the middle of Buchanan Street when really you're looking for your lunch. But this election did more, didn't it? And when Kelvin Mackenzie opined on last night's BBC News that the sooner we held a referendum - and let him and his fellow-English off the hook of having to prop us up - the better, I no longer felt the kind of impotent rage that the Thatcher years engendered. Suddenly the people running my country are recognisably the kind of people I know - and I like that feeling.

Things have been looking up for the past eleven years, and this election set the seal on it. Here's to the next five years, and to an exciting future.

Doomsday without spoilers

If I tell you that the copy of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book in the photo was one I actually ordered from the US because Amazon UK was no longer selling it at that time, and that I therefore paid more for the postage than for the book itself, you'll perhaps realise that I really, really wanted to have a copy. I'd actually read it once already, but in the school library, in a rush, when I should have been doing something else, like teaching/correcting/preparing ... anyway, I wanted to enjoy it in peace.

And now I've re-read it, wondering if it was as good as I had remembered. I guess it was, as I'm once more suffering that lost, bereaved feeling common to all who lose themselves in novels and don't want to return to their own life. Not that the life described in this story is an easy one - but it is convincing. Pay no attention to the absurd cover illustration on my copy - it bears no resemblance to what is within.

In mid-21st century Oxford University, a young historian - Kivrin - is sent back in time to the fourteenth century, despite the misgivings of her tutor who worried that the preparation for such a long "drop" - so far back in time - has been inadequate. We then follow the two parallel stories: Kivrin's experiences in an Oxfordshire village in the 1300s - interspersed with her first-hand description in the "corder" implanted in her wrist -  and Mr Dunworthy's struggles in 2050 as a crisis links the two time-zones and puts everyone in danger.

There. I'm not going to say any more, for one of the interesting things about a third read was that I realised exactly what was going on and the reasoning behind the suggestions that cropped up through the plot. No spoilers, eh? But what I am interested in this time is how science hasn't developed quite as Willis, writing in 1992, envisaged. In fact, much of the development has occurred since I first read the book, as I was hardly aware of the discrepancies first time round.

A major flaw is obvious in that people in 2050 don't have personal cell-phones. Indeed, many of Dunworthy's problems arise from his never being able to get hold of a phone, or contact vital people on the phone. It adds hugely to the tension, and I soon slipped into acceptance of this mode of thought, but it made me smile nonetheless. The phones, however, are cordless and have video. People don't seem to have personal computers - not portable ones anyway. Medical practice seems slick, with "temps" that give temperature readings when swallowed, though aspirin still seems to be a remedy of choice. And Kivrin's medical knowledge, such as it is, is of little help when she seems to be stranded in the past.

Of course, I was interested in the portrayal of religion - a huge part of 14th century life, but still very much a feature of 21st century Christmas. Willis is obviously keen to show the reality of faith in the past as well as its failings, and the way in which she does so is convincing and very moving. But above all, she creates a grim picture of life in a village of the time, with its filth, brutality and kindness, where people lived and died and loved their children.  She apparently spent five years on the writing of this book.

 I hope you lay your hands on a copy.*

*Of course, if more than one person reads this post, you'll need many copies. Good hunting!

One for the flight bag

I finished reading Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace just before the busyness of Holy Week began, and now wish I'd saved it for a holiday. Based on a true story, this book has all the ingredients that make for a joyful picking-up of the thread every time the reader has a moment, making for yet another bereavement when I finished it.

Grace is in a penitentiary in Canada. She is a notorious murderess - or is she? Her story is told partly in her own words, as well as through the third person experiences of Dr Jordan, who is allowed to interview her in an attempt to find out what exactly happened that dreadful day in 1840 when Nancy and Mr Kinnear were killed and Grace's mind went blank. Or did it?

And this is the interesting thing about the book. Despite learning of Grace's childhood in Ireland, the family's hellish journey to Canada, her becoming a servant and escaping her drunken father, despite a first-hand account of the day her employer and housekeeper died, I never felt sure of the extent of the narrator's guilt or innocence. Neither does Dr Jordan. The outcome is satisfying without being conclusive.

Atwood writes so wonderfully that I was immersed from the start. Brutality, cruelty, sexuality and murder are all dealt with in the same clear, consistent prose of what the Independent on Sunday called "a sensuous, perplexing book". If you haven't read it, take it in your flight bag.

Still singing after all these years ...

Are we all ready?
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Readers of this blog will know that I sing a bit. Yesterday the group with which I have done more singing than any other came to Dunoon to perform in Holy Trinity - my church. It is something that rarely happens - we do most of our performing in the Cathedral of The Isles - and it meant a great deal to me. To make "our" music in "our" place, at last, felt as if a story was being completed.

The story began 42 years ago - and that horrifies me, when I write it. In 1969 the St Maura Singers formed and sang Evensong, as I mentioned in my last post, and we've been at it ever since. Our soprano - wearing a purple jacket in the pic - moved away and mutated into an alto; her place was taken by a teenager just out of school (dark green jacket). Yesterday we were all together, along with another bass (white beard) and an instrumental ensemble, giving a re-run of our 40th birthday programme.

It was a lovely afternoon. The weather was perfect, the afternoon tea on the lawn unsurpassable, the audience a good size - and mostly drawn from outwith the HT congregation, which was healthy for the coffers. The church itself proved what we who worship there have always known: it has a superb acoustic and a wonderful atmosphere, peeling paintwork notwithstanding. It doesn't suffer from the curse of wealthier churches - thick pile carpeting and cushioned seats - and the hassocks had all been piled away to increase resonance.

Personally, I was soaring on adrenaline. A combination of singing first alto in "When David Heard" and making a decent job of John McIntosh's* settings of Dave Whyte songs left me wrung out after it was over - and starving. I was as high as the proverbial kite, and as always found myself wondering how long we'll be able to do this.

At 65, I realise it can't be much longer. Our soprano is the only one not in that age range. But what a privilege still to be performing like this - I only hope I'll know myself when it's time to give up!

*OK - he's Mr B. But he has another life ...

Grauniad alive and well and better online

I had the interesting experience yesterday - yes, I know there was a wedding going on, but there was life beyond that - of experiencing for myself the difficulties of writing for someone else. On Thursday, I saw a tweet from @commentisfree asking for someone to write, in a hurry, about the experience of being a grandparent. It was already 11am, and the deadline was 1pm. Great, I thought, I like a challenge - and I qualified on the grandparenting side. So after my coffee I set to, and duly dispatched the required 250 words. (I think I maybe wrote 252 words)

Back came a mail saying they'd use it. I'd seen the online tale about Gwyneth Paltrow badmouthing her grandma; I expected to see my stuff online. A phone call later in the afternoon, however, told me it'd be in the paper as well, so I duly bought one of Dunoon's limited stock of guardians the following morning.

To put it briefly, my piece was crap. It had been edited out of all recognition, into a jaggedly unimaginative lump devoid of paragraphs ( I know - space restrictions) with the sequencing altered and so drastically cut that it didn't actually make sense. They didn't even get my "comment is free" name right. Someone who knows me well said it didn't sound like me at all, and I was glad to hear this. I gave heartfelt thanks that usually I write only for myself, and that  our local paper treats what I write with respect. I know newspapers have to consider column inches and that once a paper's out that's it - it can't be changed - but I had never really considered the implications for print journalists.

Thing is, I'm not a print journalist. I'm not a journalist at all. Putting that castrated rubbish in the paper makes it look as if "amateurs" can't write to save themselves, and makes this "amateur" determined that she won't do anything so silly again. But if they're going to invite submissions, the Guardian needs to think about what they're doing.

To balance all this, I have to report that when the online version appeared - and you can read it here - it was more or less what I had written, and - better still - the mistakes I pointed out to @commentisfree Jessica were immediately remedied. Maybe this happens every time anyone writes for print media - and maybe that's why I'm becoming such a fan of online reporting.

But there's still something nice about seeing it in print ...

Of plain chant, coal heavers and feathers...

I've referred recently to singing plainsong - though the singing of the example on this Wiki page wouldn't encourage anyone, I fear - which possibly gives me more sense of completeness that any other music, at least in the church setting of much of my own singing. The accompanying illustration comes from the modern setting of Compline, and shows the traditional notation in a clear modern typeface.

I was first drawn to this music in my impressionable youth - before I had anything to do with church other than as a musician. In the late 60s, there was not much of it around, certainly not on the Third Programme, but when I turned up in the summer of 1969 to sing Evensong in The Cathedral of The Isles with the newly-formed St Maura Singers, we had to learn quickly - a new psalm or two, the Magnificat to Tonus Peregrinus - and I had my first go at deciphering neums and four-line staves.

All this was a long time ago, I remember ... anyway, I've sung the psalms and Compline to plain chant over the years since then, and have discovered a thing or two. The first was that I found it easy to read once I had the hang of it, and to work out where the semitones fell (always the pitfall if you don't) and the implications of the interesting groupings of notes (that last link, by the way, gives considerably more detail). But after that, the biggest discovery was the wonderful sense of control, of the line conveying the words without the need for any irritating "interpretation" on my part, of the flexibility when a trained group (or a solo cantor) is able to give slightly different emphasis to one word by lingering infinitesimally on it - all this seemed to me to allow for meditation actually to take place without getting in the way. The pause at the central colon in the psalms turned out to be just right for the breath required for the second half, and the antiphonal singing allowed for the smooth flow from one verse to the next, without worry, without the need for any mnemonic. It felt relaxed and prayerful.

It isn't always thus. People can sing this stuff without any feeling for it at all and ruin the effect. Sometimes I've heard plainchant that might as well be someone selling coal in the street (they don't, any more, but I recall the cry of "coaaaaaal briquettes" from my youth). However, the same goes for any music, and there are murderous performances to be heard on the internet any day of the week. But if you're lucky enough to find yourself in a position where you can enjoy the feather on the breath of God that is eloquent plain chant, or better still to take part in making it happen, you'll know what music you'll hear in at least one of the many mansions of heaven.

The Cross gets in the way ...

Paschal Candle in Holy Trinity by Sharon Barnard

Earlier today I found myself sitting at the computer in the quiet aftermath of an exuberant family Eucharist, trying to put on paper - for the local paper, in fact - what this last week has been about. I have, of course, failed. With three or four paragraphs at my disposal I knew it was doomed before I started, but as I finished I found myself Tweeting that resurrection is profoundly disturbing, and it was up and there before I even knew I'd posted it. Now, as I write, I can hear the choir of King's on the telly singing "Drop, drop slow tears" - and I'm back on Friday again, and that's disturbing too. How odd to revisit the Cross - but of course, that's it. We do it all the time, and this morning's exuberance and joy was in a sense "for the children".

Where am I going with this? Let me give another snapshot, this one of a moment as we were drifting to the door at the end of this morning's Eucharist. I overheard possibly the oldest member of the congregation declare to the person next to him that he didn't care for the big cross in the choir, and her reply that she liked it but it had got in the way, rather. It came to me that there was something to be said about that ordinary remark - because the Cross does "get in the way", keeps getting in the way, and  the significance of it can be a stronger influence on people than the day of Resurrection - the day in which we all suddenly become cheerful and joyous and tell each other that Christ has risen. I think it's the sudden cheer that leaves me reeling, not sure how to be, not sure how ...

I think I'm not far off what it must have been like, back then. I cannot see how the all-too-human followers of Jesus could feel anything but exhausted and incredulous at the news that his body was no longer there, and I imagine Mary Magdalene hardly daring to hope that what had happened to her wasn't a wishful dream. In a way it doesn't matter if that's how she and they reacted - what does matter is what happened as a result of this day. The long-term view, in a way.

I can still remember my first real Easter, the first time it had an effect on me. It was in 1973, and that's a lot of Easters ago. I think I'll perhaps post about that first Holy Saturday in the scented darkness of the Cathedral of The Isles (yes - there again) but not now. And I need to write about some of the other things I hold dear. But today - God showed us something, and we stand amazed. Exhausted, and amazed. And we don't really know what to do with our knowledge ... or at least, this writer doesn't.

Resurrection is profoundly disturbing, after all.

Birdsong in Gethsemane

In the darkling garden

a lone bird  drops

liquid notes like dark blood

beneath the quiet trees. And then

silence. And in the silence

the old struggle surges

as flesh and soul pull

apart. The body aches

to be the prayer, to feel

the God’s warmth

in the darkness. But

there is only stillness

and the blood’s song

and the everlasting longing

as somewhere far away

innocence sleeps.

C.M.M. 04/11

Holy Week observed

Lady Chapel after Mass
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

The picture here comes from the beginning of my personal Holy Week, when I spent three days at the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. I have done this for more years than I care to remember, and the effect is always to prepare me mentally for the Triduum - the experience of which would be difficult if approached from the business of my mind in the latter weeks of Lent.

So what is so special? Maybe a simple account will suffice. We arrived on Monday, worn out physically by a week of car journeys, singing, grandparenting and socialising - all good fun, but cumulatively exhausting. We were appalled to find, that morning, that our tenor was completely unable to sing because of a bug, and that one of our fellow-residents in the College was absolutely dripping with the cold and in fact grew more ill as the days passed. We carried hand gel everywhere and took to sniffing First Defence like addicts. We have, after all, two concerts coming up, one voice to a part. We could not catch a cold. We were not happy, and we wanted to go home.

However, we had a job to do - we had undertaken to sing Evensong for the three days; the Warden is a good tenor and loves to sing with us (he says, though he is not always serious ...); we had +Kevin to cheer us and Jonathan Cohen to play for us. And so we rehearsed, we sang plainsong, we made sure it was as perfect as we could make it. We attended Morning Prayer before breakfast, and Mass before lunch. The sun shone, we took walks by the sea and to the top of the island. And gradually the peace took a hold and we felt ourselves begin to relax.

The quiet rhythm of such a life is something hard to find when we're at home. At the Cathedral, we are free to concentrate on beauty, stillness and prayer. We were responsible only for our music-making; the organisation was in other hands. There was no cooking to do, no shopping, no phone ringing. There were interesting conversations, as well as utterly hilarious ones.

And now we are back in our home parish, and the experience goes on. We have responsibilities again, but personally I am better able to deal with them for having had none. And I am grateful, as always, for the opportunity to make music and worship in one of the most beautiful churches I can imagine.

I've sung in Cumbrae for 41 years. I fell off my metaphorical donkey in the same choir stalls as I now inhabit, and was confirmed there in September 1973. I used to pine every time I left, until I learned that I was able to return when I needed to. I have met and talked to some of the most significant people in my life there.

And it is there that I sing plainsong. I love plainsong. I'll be back ...

Episcopal hoolie on Cumbrae

Joyously random
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Well, that was another wonderful Argyll and The Isles hoolie. And Bishop Kevin has now been seated in his southern cathedra - in the Cathedral of The Isles, on the island of Cumbrae. The photo I've chosen for this post seems to me to sum up what I love about these events - and this is the kind of thing I first did in 1973, when I felt as if I'd been transported into a Fellini film.

The prayer over choir and clergy having been made with due solemnity, the thurifer, who was also MC for the day, led us out of the Lady Chapel door, round the outside loo, along the path past the annexe, down the stairs, across the lawn and up the stairs to the main door, on which Bishop Kevin would shortly thunder with his staff. But there is no way this assorted crew was going to make an orderly procession of it, as choristers who only sing together for special occasions hitched up their Whoopie Goldberg choir robes and ambled after the smoke, and it was of this I thought as Bishop Idris, the former Primus, used an idea given to him by the PB of the Episcopal Church in the USA.

This came in his sermon, in which he asked why the Bishop always came at the rear of the procession - like a Western shepherd rather than an Eastern one. The picture painted was of a circus procession, in which there was always someone bringing up the rear, armed with a bucket and shovel. We were not, exhorted +Idris, to leave our Bishop to clean up our mess.

The choir, as I said, had met that morning for what turned out to be rather less than two hours of rehearsal together, only half of which was actually in the church: the clergy choreography took up the first hour and even so didn't cater for the drama of the snapped thurible chain and the singed altar-cloth. But despite the potential for chaos (the words herding and hens come to mind) the service was actually lovely, and in places extremely moving. For me, the high point came during the Litany, when the bishop knelt in front of the altar and a stillness grew where before there had been movement and drama.

And I can't believe I've come so far without mentioning The Purvey. The lunch in the cloisters before the service, and the fantastic tea after it, were both miracles of catering and far too moreish for people who had work to do. The socialising was noisy to the point of riotous - who says the church is dying?

Of course I know that it's not like this every day. There are days when there is a handful of people at a service, and the organist has to preach as well as play. But what I will say is that I have been attending such services here for the past forty years, and renewal and excitement have been there throughout. I'd like to think, however, that it'll be a good few years before another bishop knocks on the door of the cathedral - maybe long enough for this alto to have hung up her red robe?

A plank of the past

I first read The Moving Toyshop in my teens. In fact, I may have been swotting for my Highers, or maybe the few O Grades I was compelled to sit in case I didn't make Higher (Science, Maths - that kind of thing). Be that as it may, I have a strong recollection of sitting in the small park in Marlborough Avenue, in the leafy environs of Glasgow's Broomhill, laughing aloud in the sunshine, to the distress  - and I think this is in itself a Crispinism - of all animate nature. And it was The Moving Toyshop that was so entertaining me that irregular French verbs didn't get a look in, though why I would be reading in the park instead of the garden I can't think - unless I knew I would be caught not swotting if I stayed at home.

I didn't read the book again - you tend to remember the plot of a 'tec if you re-read it too soon - and found that the intervening decades had in fact wiped all memory of plot clean from my slate, and left me with only the quotations that have become part of my daily discourse. I can only give a flavour here: this moment comes so near the beginning of the novel that my delight at having begun a re-read was unbounded. Cadogan, a poet, has missed the last train and hitched a late-night lift from a lorry driver. As he climbs into the cab of the lorry, this conversation ensues:

 "The Ancient Mariner did this better than me," said Cadogan cheerfully as they started off. "He at least managed to stop one of three."
"I read abaht 'im at school," the driver replied after a considerable pause for thought. "'A thahsand, thahsand slimy things lived on and so did I.' And they call that poetry." He spat deprecatingly out of the window.

I will leave the present reader to deduce what kind of life has allowed me to quote that bit of Ancient Mariner in that particular accent. Frequently.

Oh all right - I know it's a specialised sort of amusement, but it is so beautifully written - and I'd just love to replicate the moment when a bell-boy wanders through the bar of a hotel calling "telephone call for Mr T.S. Eliot" and Fen, the amateur sleuth who is also Oxford Professor of Eng. Lit., says "that's me" and leaves the room. (Oh all right again - I'd have to be Sylvia Plath or somesuch...). And it was in this very book, before I'd ever darkened the door of an Anglican church, that I learned that the Lord's Prayer at Evensong is curtailed before  "...for thine is the Kingdom..."

So there you have it. An education in itself, beautifully written, extremely silly, utterly dated - and completely hilarious. I'm going to go back to another Crispin soon ...

Riotous Science

Now what shall I do?
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

What a day! My first ever visit to the Science Centre in Glasgow took place today in full-on Grandma mode, and very interesting it was too. The photo here shows the young children's area before it became wildly busy, but already my granddaughter is a blur in the middle distance as she sprints from the crawling tunnel complex back to the hydraulic play area.

I suppose it was a similar moment that led, some forty minutes later, to our losing her for five minutes - a heart-stopping five minutes of pounding round a multitude of small bodies looking for the one that answered to "Catriona". She had simply wandered in the wrong direction while my attention was elsewhere. I have now recovered, though Mr B, having suffered a second disappearance when Cat vanished through a door in Wonderland that was too small for him to follow, may never be quite the same again.

However, sanity was restored by a quiet visit to the African giant snails. They are truly huge - about the size of my hand - and chomp lettuce leaves with an alarming intensity that makes the Very Hungry Caterpillar look like an amateur. We acted out a conversation with the chomping one in French, much to the consternation of another child who happened along.

The Centre is a riotous place on a school holiday, but there is a wonderfully diverse range of things to do and see. And for the record: I was much better at getting the bike wheels to turn than Annabel Goldie on the telly t'other day. I felt quite smug.

Now, however, I merely feel my age ...

Sin and self

Been thinking about sin. Or Sin, if you like. (It's Lent, after all.) In many ways it's an old-fashioned concept these days. It's also a word that is bandied about as an adjective in current thought, when applied to instances of badness - but that's a use which seems to let too many of us off, in a way.

After all, I haven't murdered anyone, nor have I cheated anyone out of their rights, or their money, or their partner. I tend not to lie, and I try to avoid fruit with a big food-miles tag. Most of the people I live among could say the same, I'm sure - especially, surely, all the good folk in church. And yet every week, or more often if we're particularly pious, we admit to having sinned in "thought, word and deed". What do we think we have done? Do we think at all? Do we just say these words because they're there?

I still have a long way to go in this line of thought. But I wonder if perhaps sin is rooted in self-absorption - from the inability to walk in someone else's shoes, or the refusal to do so. And if you're a religious person, you might recognise that as something that ensures that God doesn't get a look in. Not really. And then there will be a long string of consequences ...

Hmmm.

Annunciation and burial

Funeral on Lady Day

for Neil McKellar

A bird is singing

in the tall trees

over and over the same

liquid notes spilling over

the dug earth. A requiem,

perhaps, for the soul that is

gone into the sunlit morning.

Quiet words. Dust. The green

of the grass of this spring

surrounds the stones

as an old man is taken

home and the angel announces

to the startled girl

that a new life will come and be

God and the bird is joined

by all his fellows in a

sudden chorus of pure joy.

C.M.M. 25 March 2011

A country funeral

Musta been funny anyway!
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Yesterday, unbelievably when I look at this jolly photo from last June, we attended the funeral of Canon Roy Flatt, on the right of the pic. I've never been to a church service where more than half the congregation were outside the church: such was the crowd that turned up at Christ Church, Lochgilphead, that we stood in the grounds - some under awnings that (unnecessarily, as it turned out) sheltered the speakers that relayed the proceedings, some in the sun under the trees.

Roy had made up the order of service himself, and there was much poetry and good moments of silence in which we could hear the rooks in the tall trees of the churchyard. It felt very calm, and very natural. The coffin was carried past us at the end, to the strange combination of Nunc Dimittis and When the Saints go Marching in, and the burial took place opposite the church porch. Our feet sank in the moss, we moved from the chilly shade into the warm sun, and it was over.

This was the best kind of funeral: a day was full of calm and affirmation and warmth of greeting and friendship. The drive home was glorious, and the world felt peaceful.

RIP, Roy.

Spring contrasts

 This morning was swathed in fog, here on the Clyde coast. It was cold, damp, grey and depressing. It looked as if it might stay like that all day, might continue to be a dismal backdrop to a comfortable life.

Around 2pm , there was a sudden lightening of the sky. By three o'clock the sun was shining, and half an hour later I was in this sunlit wood where the daffodils that lurk untended in the rough grounds of Toward Castle were golden among the brown tussocks.

Later, I walked by the calm sea. Peewits called in their creaky voices as five of them at least wheeled and dived above the fields. The sun gleamed on the water.

I felt my spirits rise.

But in Kuji City, it looks as if Spring will never come again. I found the Kuji City blog, and on it this image, among many others. There are videos that show a desolate road winding among piles of rubble. No-one speaks.

The silence is broken by what sounds like crows calling. It looks cold, grey and sad. I cannot begin to imagine what it is like to have lost everything so suddenly and so completely. And now it seems as if there is further horror to come as control slips from those dealing - how heroically - with the threat of radiation from the damaged nuclear reactors.

And I was depressed?