Sunny Barcelona!

Sunny Barcelona!
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

This is where I've been for the past week - not stuck on the beach, natch, but indulging in various cultural pursuits and some less so, in the company of 52 other people. Think a school trip for adults and you'll get the flavour: a holiday where the individual participant only has to worry about being in the right place at the right time to catch the bus. You can find further information on the concept of the Fahrt (for this, Best Beloved, is its name) on Rev Ruth's blog, along with the actual diary of what we did; rather than reduplicate her work I shall allow myself the luxury of random comment.

There was something surreal in our swift transition from the rain and the dark of Linlithgow at 5am (for Fahrts are based in that august town), via the instant porridge that I ate at Prestwick Airport, to the warm sun and superb beach at Barcelona. I'd seen the forecast and was determined to swim in the sea - not something I've done so far this summer - and did just that, returning up the road to the hotel with the unmistakable holiday feeling of sand between the toes and salty skin.

Out hotel, the Villa Olympic, was one built for the Barcelona Olympics; Bruce our Obersturmbannführer (love the wee dots; not so sure about the spelling) told us to expect quite a swish hotel in an area reminiscent of Leith before gentrification set in. It was noteable chiefly for the interesting layout of the rooms - the first thing you saw when you opened the door was the bath, and there was a great deal of glass, strategically frosted - and the unpredictability of the lifts. It was not uncommon to find frustrated Fahrters soaring from ground floor to sixth and back again when they really wanted floor 2, and you had to use your key to activate it unless you were going straight down and hadn't fouled everything up so that it ground to a halt. This was especially entertaining on the night of The Flood, when a sudden burst pipe in one of the group's rooms dripped down two floors into the foyer and along the corridor. Fiona was in the middle of a hysterical ride when I joined her in the lift and promptly jiggered it; I had a vision of us having to break out through the roof but survived.

By the time we went to bed on the first night a night club was throbbing incessantly a couple of streets away, and the second day saw most of us who had rear-facing rooms switching to the front of the hotel. It also saw us visit La Sagrada Familia - but that's another story for another day. The flooded Fahrters, by the way, were rehoused. In a suite. It's tough being a Fahrter.

Offblog

I'm heading off for a few days - think a bit of sun, about 10º increase in temperature, a few friends - so won't be moderating any comments till I get back. If I find time/energy/a signal I may post the odd thing, but my phone's been acting strangely. I shall, however, be able to read any comment you care to leave ...

Where were you when ...

I've been watching some of the TV programmes marking the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, including what seemed to me a well-made film about the passengers who foiled the fourth attack by re-taking their hijacked plane. But inside my head I was re-running the film of my own experience of that day nine years ago.

I was just outside my classroom door after the lunch break when my mobile phone rang. While my class filed in and settled themselves, I took the call. It was Number One son, in the Guardian offices in London. He sounded incredulous, interested, sharing a story with me. There had been a freak accident - a small plane had flown into the World Trade Centre. Ignoramus that I was, I had to ask where exactly this was, had to be told that it consisted of two massive towers. Strange now, to think that I didn't know. As we spoke, he suddenly broke off. He was watching the live monitors in the newsroom, and there was another plane - surely not - yes, it too had flown into the second tower. I felt as if I was witnessing it myself, as I became aware that the second year pupils in front of me had stopped chatting, that the room had become silent, that they were all staring at me. I think my mouth was open in horror, and I don't think I was making much sense.

I can recall now how frustratingly hard it was to find out what exactly was happening; I took my class to the library for their scheduled book-changing/research period and told them to search, to see if they could find anything online about this unfolding horror. Meanwhile, I told the technician whose lair was close to my room to put on his television - one of the few in the school connected to an outside aerial. The pupils were finding out plenty about the WTC, but so far there was no real news - and they were as frustrated as I was.

By the time I reached the last period of the afternoon - a non-contact one for me - the technician's room was full of off-duty staff, all glued to the screen, all silent except for the odd gasp or oath. We saw the first tower fall, and then the second - in the wrong order, it seemed. Fear began to grow - would there be a war? A big one, involving everyone? Anything seemed possible.

I'm of an age to remember what I was doing when I heard Kennedy had been shot; this year is the first I have realised that that strangely live participation across half a world, a newsroom screen and a mobile phone is becoming similarly vivid. And these 13 year old kids who were in my room at the time it happened felt that they too had a tiny share in "being there" - it was one of the things several recalled when we've met since.

I would like not to be part of any more horror, no matter how distantly. Please?

Sanity vs the bams

Glad to see our wee church stepping up to the mark with this statement about the absurd threats by that American pastor who wanted to burn copies of the Koran. The Primus said:

The burning of holy books is one of the most extreme manifestations of religious intolerance. It dishonours and devalues the faith of those who hold these texts as sacred. I unreservedly condemn the actions of those who plan to attack the Islamic community by desecrating their scriptures. Those who threaten to do this should be aware that, in today’s world, this will be seen also as a cultural and political provocation and may put at risk the lives of innocent people.

It would be good if the popular media would publicise this calm voice of sanity as widely as the threats of what in these parts the kids would call a bam. Wouldn't it?

Submission

Followers on Twitter will know that I've just spent a foul morning (weather, state of mind and activity all qualify) doing my online Tax Return. And followers of my life to date will realise that the last time I'd to fill in a tax return is lost in the mists of history - probably before I returned to work after giving birth to two sons to whom tax returns are probably as familiar as writing poetry is to me. But poetry they are not.

As an accountant friend pointed out on Facebook, my travails are why people employ accountants. It's just that I can't bring myself to think that my simple one-off job last year merited such an extravagance - nor to believe that I can be as stupid as I currently feel. Why, after all, would someone ever employ a thicko who couldn't fill in a tax return?

And of course, it's not really that at all. It's lack of familiarity with the jargon. The professional me knows that jargon's often at the heart of most incomprehension. When I returned to teaching in the early '80s, they'd introduced Standard Grade. I became instantly depressed at my first DM by talk about GRC and folios, about summative and formative assessment. Apparently I'd been accustomed to normative assessment and never known it. Obviously I had much to learn.

It's the same with money matters. Once you get the handle on what the tax people call things, it becomes slightly more accessible; you then have to realise what their forms won't tolerate (use the 'return' key at your peril and forget your antiquated notation that puts commas to indicate thousands). But don't ever think that help is only a phonecall away. Once you've littered your screen with help notes and pdf files, you can try phoning, and eventually, after several terse 'thanks for waiting's and reruns of a dire jingle, you will get a person to speak kindly to you and return re-invigorated to your screen only to find that the session has closed down because you spent too long away from it. And then, of course, you get the crash of the site when you're 75% finished and when you get back in you have to retrace your steps through several screens in a panic lest you have to do any more sums - or even look up more bits of paper.

Ok, I admit it. I'm not interested in money and keeping track of bits of paper. My files are stuffed to overflowing with statements I never look at. I am interested in poetry and literature and language and the problems of religious faith - and these don't seem to equip me for life in the financial world at all. But when I pop my clogs - it's all there, kids: you'll just have to look for it.

Climbing, catastrophe, and a poem

I've been writing about the climb I did on Thursday - a poem seemed an appropriate vehicle for what I'd been thinking about on the top, and you can read it here. But the extraordinary thing for me on the summit ridge of Ben Donich was that I was alone. Ok, it was only for 30 minutes or so, but in 58 years of climbing in Scotland I've never been alone and it was an exciting experience. A forgotten crag not far below the summit had meant that Mr B declined to accompany me - it's a rock scramble that you have to descend before the last easy climb - and as I knew I'd done it before, I decided to go for it.

That solitary moment or so as I took photos and looked at the blue hills around me gave me time to reflect on the time when I won't be able to do this any more. I'm happy to say, however, that the catastrophe of a sprained ankle waited until I was down the hill - I fell off the back garden path when we arrived home. Should'a kept the boots on ...

Blue remembered hills?

High enough to rise above the noise

of cars and lorries on the road below

high enough to feel the cool wind blow

to raise the hair and chill the sweating back

high enough to see the buzzard swoop

above the trees but far below my feet

high enough to see the rock break through

and shed the layer of turf and gleaming mud -

yes. Here was where this day had to be spent.

High enough, just high enough.

©C.M.M.

.

Poem for the day

It's Cowal Games time. I am sitting with the study window closed against the sound of pipes drifting down from the park; it's been three years or more since the bands stopped marching up Argyll Street in full blast and the relative peace is welcome, living where I do in earshot of the road. The promenade parking, I can see, is already a solid line of camper vans and buses. But last night, well after midnight, I saw some (presumably) young people walk past our house - one on its own, and three on the other side of the road, laughing. The solitary one, however, had a phone, working - I could see the green glow from the screen - and it struck me how the use of a phone is the new cover for solitude. Like Ophelia's book - remember? Colouring her alone-ness.

Anyway, feeling just a little like Edwin Morgan's "accursed observer", I wrote a poem. You can read it here.

Edwin Morgan: a farewell

Edwin Morgan: last rites
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

The Bute Hall, Glasgow University. I haven't been in this place since the late '60s, but it looks unchanged. I'm here for the funeral of Edwin Morgan, whose photo hangs above the plain coffin on the dais - a coffin on which lies a single thistle. The face in the photo is the one I saw when I was a student - the big, black-framed specs, the thick hair, the unmistakable smile. It doesn't seem real, somehow, that he is dead - but the blue ranks of seats are filled with people come to say goodbye to the man and to say his words and remember.

It's an entirely secular funeral, and as others I've been to seems longer than the average church ceremony. Maybe there is felt a need to say more, to let everyone contribute in the absence of set ritual; most of the contributions are more wordy than the poet would allow in his work. The best moments glow - David Kinloch reading Strawberries; Tommy Smith's keening saxophone and sudden wolf-howl in front of the coffin; John Butt's organ playing Maxwell Davies' Farewell to Stromness. I sit on the hard seat, and think of the lightness and unassuming grace of the man we're remembering, and some of the Chapel Choir sing A Man's a Man and I long for a less pedestrian setting.

We're all invited to take a dram and a bit of shortbread in the University Chapel. There are also hot drinks, but I stick with the whisky and sip it as I suddenly realise that's Bernard McLaverty over there, and see Alex Salmond and Jack McConnell - and George Reid who was Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament and who spoke at length ...

There are folk, mostly men, who look as if they should be important, in a literary sort of a way, and there are the quietly ordinary ones who turn out to be seriously important but don't seem to have realised it. Sir Kenneth Calman, the Chancellor, has mislaid Liz Lochhead, and Jackie Kay passes and smiles. I realise I've still not had any lunch - a cereal bar eaten in the sunny Arts Quad before the ceremony doesn't really count - and feel it's time to leave. I walk down the chapel steps to the Professors' Quadrangle for the first time since my wedding day forty years ago, into the warm sun that never seemed to shine in term-time. I think of being young, and uncertain, and of how the wind whistled round the quadrangles as we queued for classes, and how unreal university felt, that first year in 1964.

Life is very short, really - even for a 90 year old. Thank God for the poetry.

Janice Galloway at the Book Festival

The tent is packed. It's a big enough space for you to forget it's a tent, except that the walls wave gently as doors are opened, and there are tiered seats rising into the gloom and faces occupying almost all of them already, for the bus up Leith Walk took for ever and we are late. Another five minutes and we'd not have been allowed in ... but here we are. Two seats, not too far back, not too much off centre - lucky. We peel off jackets, subside gratefully. It is very warm. This is Edinburgh, for Pete's sake - feels more like Rome.

The lights dim, a spotlight picks out two white plastic chairs. Two women appear and sit on them. One of them, in a longish, blackish dress and a fawn cardigan, is Janice Galloway, the writer; the other, in trousers and a red top, Ruth Wishart, the journalist. Ruth Wishart speaks first - such a familiar voice, though I don't know that I've ever seen her. The first five minutes are taken up with banter about ice - someone has blundered, there is no ice to put into various orifices, to throw down the writer's cleavage - and it's hot. Galloway joins in. "Hello, Edinburgh." She begins quietly - will we have to strain through the traffic noise that deeves at these events? But no. The ice duly arrives, the talk loosens, we can hear just fine.

Thank God for that. Galloway begins by reading from one of her most physical of short stories, Blood. I know it well, wonder how far she'll read, how Mr B'll react if she goes right to the end. But she contents herself with the awfulness of the dental extraction - the sucking sensation, the black wiry hairs on the dentist's fingers, his callous jocularity. I love how she reads. She has a way of stressing words with just the right dry emphasis to make sure of their impact, and her body language is that of the born comedian. Her specs come off, go on again, are waved for emphasis. She reads, she talks about her writing, about teaching, about the kind of teacher who shouldn't, like herself when she asked a pupil: who do you think you are? And I wish all teachers had that degree of self-awareness, only our schools would be sadly undermanned.

In the gap before audience questions, I realise that the tent is flapping. Alarmingly. Great scooshes of wind drive a patter of rain over the heaving dark blue above our heads, and I picture the whole caboodle falling in, the huge gantries of lights crashing down on us, and I wonder if there'd be time to get under the tiny seats. You can tell I've spent a week in a San Francisco hotel. But the professionals under the spotlight don't falter. Galloway doesn't falter when the first question - from a teacher, of course - turns out to be banal and leads nowhere. She barely answers it, but leads us off on another ramble through psychology and parenting and life - and then there are other questions and before we know it the session is about to end. There will be a final reading.

But it doesn't end with more of Galloway's writing. It ends rather with her reading one of Edwin Morgan's poems - Edwin Morgan who has died 26 hours earlier. She reads it as beautifully as she does her own work. And then, urging us all to go to a book-signing, she leaves.

And we leave. It takes ages. And I'm so glad the roof didn't fall in.

Edwin Morgan: taking it personally

The death of a famous person snags the consciousness, be they movie star, writer or monarch. But when that famous person is someone you've known, the news of their death is a moment of bereavement. And now Edwin Morgan has died, and the memories surface.

My first memory is one shared by hundreds of undergraduates at Glasgow University. I was a student in the huge Ordinary English class of 64-65, daunted by lectures on Extraneous Factors in Literary Criticism (what do you write down during such a lecture?), ignorant of anything beyond the school syllabus, in which we had studied nothing written after the 1920s. Edwin Morgan was the youngest figure to lecture to us, on 20th century poetry. His slightly breathless, undeniably Scottish voice was encouraging; I found something to write down. A friend produced a poem: look - he wrote this! And things began to join up.

Fast forward to the late '90s. I am no longer ignorant about 20th century poetry and have Morgan's collected poems as well as a slim volume or two. I have taught generations of children First Men on Mercury and In Central Station along with other gems, and they have loved them. Morgan comes to the school to talk to the seniors, and I am detailed to look after him - because you knew him. I am in awe - more than when I was 20 - and delighted. He wears a yellow jacket and reads his poems and the voice is still there, quieter but recognisable, and we can't get the kids to leave him alone at the end because it is obvious they love him as they loved his poems. He tells me he'll probably not make it to Dunoon again as he comes by public transport and the stairs on the ferry are getting to be too much for him. When he leaves, I write a poem about the visit. Later, I realise the librarian has sent it to him, for he sends a postcard in thanks.

In the years that follow, I presume upon my renewed contact with Morgan to send him poems - not just my own, about which he is encouraging, offers constructive advice, but also poems written by pupils. The best moments are landmarks for them: the very mixed bunch of S2 boys who write their own poems based on the form of Off Course and laboriously compose the accompanying letter which they dictate to the most literate of their number; the S3 girl who makes a speech about Strawberries for her Solo Talk assessment and sends him the script. Nothing goes unacknowledged, and each is the recipient of a personal reply - photocopied 27 times in the case of the boys.

My final memory, however, is mine alone. Morgan, by now already living in one nursing home because of illness, has to transfer to a second on the closure of the first, and comes to inhabit a room on the floor below the one in which my mother has lived for the previous 6 months following a stroke. Despite the stroke-induced problems with speech, my mother tells me that he has been visiting her on "her" floor, having been told that there's a lady who loves poetry there. He reads to her, and brings a new interest into her last months. The day before she dies, I take a breather from sitting in her room, ask a nurse if Professor Morgan is able to see a visitor. She doubts it, as he has been in pain that day, but checks - and swiftly comes back with an invitation. He is sitting at a desk in a room identical to my mother's, but lined with books. He is wearing a rust-coloured needlecord shirt. I thank him for what he has done for my mother, and tell him her end is near. He holds my hand, tells me I shall write about this experience some day, but not yet. I tell him there is one poem already, about nasturtiums. I love nasturtiums, he says.

I read the poem at the funeral the next week.

More forties

Choir stalls
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Another of those days when there seems to be a kink in time. I have sat in these choir stalls, in the Cathedral of The Holy Spirit, Cumbrae, more times than I can count - rehearsing, participating in services, waiting to be confirmed - or as today, listening to the music of my fellow-musicians in a concert.

Today saw the culmination of 41 years of singing with the St Maura Singers - we had intended it as a 40th anniversary concert, but illness meant cancellation last Autumn and today we resurrected that programme, having managed to reassemble with the two extra singers required by some of the music. During those 41 years of singing together, the quartet has frequently performed the early Scottish music arranged by Kenneth Elliott, who is now 81 but was 40 when we were discovering this music. So it was forty years that vanished into the fold of memory as I listened to the string ensemble play, and to the ravishing Lamento della Ninfa of Monteverdi, and I was at once young again and wondering how many more times I would be able to experience this particular joy.

Most of the music this afternoon came from the 16th century, but two notable exceptions were the very new arrangements by John McIntosh (aka Mr B) of folk songs - The Broken Brook and Nancy - originally commissioned by Cappella Nova. The shifting, folk-based syncopations of Nancy had caused our augmented group more problems than we might care to admit, and we were thrilled that it actually came together - proof of which was that wonderful sigh from the audience in the moment before the applause began.

The other high point for me was that at last we got to perform the Tomkins When David Heard. I've gone on about this before on the blog; this afternoon's performance became somehow electric so that we balanced on a fine wire between emotion and perfection and ended in a silence that seemed eternal.

If this afternoon's performance were to turn out to be the last time the voice held out, the last time I would have the privilege of singing this stuff, I would be content. Not so content, however, that I don't hope we can do it again ...

Transfiguration prayer

Like being airborne
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

God of the mountain-top,
God of the shining clouds
May the wind of your spirit
Blow afresh in our lives
Renew our love
Strengthen our witness
And send us from the heights of your presence
Transfigured by the radiance of our meeting
with Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord.
AMEN

Pandaemonium

Not only do I forget to blog - or even to think - during the holiday period; I also give myself permission to read "holiday books", whether I'm in a foreign place or snatching some sunlounger moments in the back garden. This, chums, is such a book - and boy, did I enjoy it. Christopher Brookmyre writes the kind of stuff that I used to suggest to non-reading chaps in S5, and the author apparently once chastised my no. 1 son for letting his mother read his first oeuvre. But I have to confess to the inner tomboy, the one that climbed trees and ran wild all summer, and she (the I.T.) loved Pandaemonium in the way I remember from my childhood: carrying the book around with me, reading it on the ferry and in the hairdresser's, putting it reluctantly aside at 1am in the knowledge that I was about to read myself out of any desire to sleep.

It's a crazy story, of course, with supernatural elements juxtaposed with the more usual Brookmyre fare of stroppy Glasgow kids and a challenging environment, in this case somewhere beyond Inveraray. There's a horrific incident involving a burning bus, a crash, and a deer on the roof - but that's just to introduce the various kids as they head for a weekend of bonding and debriefing after a fatal stabbing in their school. The real horror comes from a parallel tale of an underground facility and a top-secret military experiment, long since out of control - and in the same area as the base for the bonding weekend.

The language is foul, the descriptions gory, and the discussions among the staff about the nature of belief surprisingly serious and interesting. The tension builds beautifully - perhaps hideously might be a better word - and the climax is unexpected. I didn't expect it anyway. I just enjoyed it.

At this rate I'll never read a serious book again.

Grandparents in charge

Sampling the sea
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Strange, isn't it? I've been out of teaching for five years and I still slide into school holiday mode as far as any kind of regular activity goes. Blogging is one of them - though I have noticed a distinct downturn in others' productivity as well. But this last week I've had a cast iron excuse: a three-year-old. Catriona came to stay on her own for the first time in her 2 years 11 months and Mr B and I realised why we didn't compose symphonies or write the novel when we were younger.

It wasn't just that she was sleeping in the study where all work gets done. I can quite easily use the laptop elsewhere. It was rather the constant need to be there, interacting or simply vigilant, for 12 hours a day, at the end of which we were too exhausted to do anything other than stare slack-jawed at an hour or so of telly and then slope off to bed. And the responsibility of watching over someone else's child struck me with even greater force than I remember from these first weeks on my own with my firstborn.

Part of it is the very fact of being older - not just in terms of stamina, for sometimes I think I have more of that, but in the knowledge of what can go wrong (you've been there), in the inability to carry said child for more than a minute or two without collapsing. There is, however, an interesting new dimension. You see, grandparents exist to be jolly, imperturbable, accommodating and indulgent. If you're in sole charge over four days you can't be that way all the time because you have to do the annoying things:

No, Annabelle can't come out on the scooter. (Annabelle is an unreasonably solid doll which weighs the same as a real baby. I conceived an intense dislike for her after having her in church with us)
No, you can't watch another episode of Peppa Pig. It's dinnertime.
No, you can't stay on the beach for another hour - it'll get dark if we're not careful.

But the best moment, one which had us both in tucks, came when I was lifting her into her booster seat at the table. Just as I reached the point of greatest tension - arms at shoulder-height to get her feet under the table, muscles trembling with the effort - Catriona wanted Annabelle. Again. And I heard myself say, in tones of intense irritation: "Ewan!"

Now, if you'd asked me if I had problems bringing up my children I'd probably - at this safe distance - have said "Oh, no - they were lovely - no bother really after the teething and so on." It wouldn't be fear of the consequences either. I seem to have airbrushed the memory, that's all. But at that moment it all flooded back. The arguments, the reasoning required before doing something mundane, the sudden imperative about a stone or a handful of cut grass ... It was all there. And suddenly I wasn't Grandma any more, as a kink in time brought the years together.

By the end of the visit, I'd called Catriona "Ewan" twice, and Mr B did it on the prom while wrestling with the scooter. (Its back wheels need slackening, Ewan!) But it was great fun. To see a tiny child heaving her body-weight in stones into the sea, to have her draw "spotty faces" (she's seen someone with freckles), to sit on the beach pretending to eat shell-and-sand-and-seaweed pies while the waves lapped gently and everyone else went home - this was wonderful. Interestingly, she spoke French only once in the whole visit, and then translated for me - though we marvelled at the way she pronounced "crème fraîche" when she wanted more. (We gave her it. I can't do that French "r" to save myself, and she does it so wonderfully.)

And when she made her cheeky face and grinned at me, it was like looking at myself. Oh dear.

I've been struggling to add a grave accent to the "e" in crème. I'm grateful to @bagpie and @spodzone for their assistance.

Singing grief

I was involved in one of our all-too-infrequent rehearsals with the St Maura Singers yesterday - an expanded SMS, with two extra singers to make it possible to sing some new music. It was salutary that we had to spend an hour on a new piece that lasts all of 3.50 minutes - the slightly jazzy, displaced rhythms of Mr B's beautiful setting of Nancy had experienced musicians fumbling for the groove (so to speak, in my jazzy sort of mood ...)

But what struck me yet again was the incomparable beauty of Tomkins' When David Heard. I sing first alto in this, and found myself, on the first run-through, almost unable to continue. David's reaction to the news of Absalom's death goes from from the heart-broken repetitions of Absalom my son, over and over, over and over, to the words every parent can recognise: would God I had died for thee. It starts simply, bleakly almost, but then becomes more insistent - and then we're back with Absalom, my son, quietly, dying into the final cadence, as if David has no more energy to express the grief that has overcome him.

As I grow older - or simply old - I find this harder and harder to sing with the detachment I was able to enjoy when I first encountered the piece in my 20s. And yet the music is ruined by gusty, emotional lines or operatic emoting - for it is the music itself that paints the words, and the music needs every ounce of concentration to let it speak. By the end of a performance I am exhausted, and yet it lasts only five minutes.

The performance I've linked to is a tad slow for my taste - just a fraction - but lets the music work. If you've never heard it, go and listen.

The Journey

Of course there was no serpent.

The tree's fruit was a mirror,

its temptation reflection.

R.S.Thomas wrote these words sometime around 1990, three years after I discovered his genius for the first time, three years after I wrote what I confessed was no more than a fan letter and was amazed and touched to receive a reply, weeks later. Having sent the letter c/o his publisher, I was thrilled by the extreme Welshness of his address: Sarn-y-Plas, yRhiw, Pwllheli, Gwynedd ... It seemed so remote, so other - and yet here was a poet whose writing had become, as I told him, like a liturgy to me. The poem of which the opening is a part comes from the collection Counterpoint, and I bought a copy in the church in the photo, R.S.'s last charge, in Aberdaron, right at the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula. The sea thundered on the beach outside, the wind whistled round the twin aisles, and I had arrived at the end of my journey.

That journey has brought me through collected poems, slim volumes, biographies, autobiography, film and audio - brought me to a road on which I visited two of his parishes and met two people who had known R.S. One, the kind man who hurried his lunch to open up the church at Eglwys Fach, had gone birdwatching with him. "He was a different man then, quite humorous, but in the pulpit - oh dear! If you went wanting to hear there was no hope, then that's what you heard." And he smiled gently. You could see that he'd been fond of him, this "typical English vicar" who followed "his own interests" and who had hidden so many bits of church furnishing in the boiler room - brass candle stands among them. He'd also painted the woodwork - all of it - matt black, disliking the shiny varnished yellow pine. The matt black remains, and looks wonderful, though it must've given his flock a fright. But the large black electric candelabra remain, put there by R.S. - maybe he thought the candle stands would have been superfluous.

The candelabra reappear in Aberdaron, in Eglwys Hywyn Sant, perched precariously on the edge of the beach, surrounded by a great tumble of tombstones. In this light, airy church I met one of the wardens, a woman who thirty years ago had been married by R.S. I asked what he'd been like - had she found him forbidding? "I get cross at people saying that" she replied. "He wasn't like that at all." She'd liked him, and people found him kind and attentive. Aberdaron felt very far from everywhere, there on the very tip of Wales, with the gales whipping up the Irish sea, and it was there that R.S. found his journey's end, a journey into the West.

But the inner journey went on. Counterpoint is opening new doors for me, as I ration myself to two poems a day - and yet these doors open and I find myself in familiar territory. R.S. famously got into bothers with his description of theology as metaphor, and yet what else can I think? What are we pretending, when we preach or try to share our Good News with one another? What the journey leads to is a greater insight, a greater awareness - of what is now, not of what once was - and whatever we call the greater good that illuminates that journey, surely that is the end to which we aspire?

There is no Trinity

in a glass. The self looks at the self

only and tenders its tribute.

(R.S. Thomas, Counterpoint.)

I shall return to Aberdaron, for there is still much to see, and to the journey ...

Poetic pilgrimage

I'm off again tomorrow - a trip culminating in a pilgrimage to the last parish of the poet/priest R.S. Thomas, in Aberdaron. Thomas spent his life trying to return to the places he felt represented the real Wales, where the Welsh language was still in use and where the influence of the English was less apparent - but he also had this ongoing homesickness for the sea beside which he had grown up, and for the hills. No wonder I feel an empathy - even before I take into consideration his poetry. He himself felt it a great sadness that he was unable to write poetry in Welsh, but as an adult learner he never felt sufficiently at home in the language that in old age he spoke and wrote his prose autobiographies in.

Had he written in Welsh, however, I would never have encountered him, never discovered those telling lines and penetrating insights that have been such an influence on my own development as a writer. Now I'm going to see what inspired some of my favourite literature. I can hardly wait.

July 8 1970 - July 8 2010

Ruby Balloons
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

It's our 40th wedding anniversary today. It may be a cliché to say so, but I can hardly believe that 40 years ago from now I was telling my father that no, I couldn't eat anything more substantial and that I was going to go and put my face on. It was a warm, still day that deteriorated in the late evening to the thunder and rain that had all the men clutching large umbrellas throughout the afternoon, and the yards of white wedding-dress (yes, I was very traditional) seemed ... hot, actually. We were married in the Memorial Chapel of Glasgow University, by the chaplain of the day, the Revd David Millar, who kindly overlooked the fact that I was a heathen at the time and provided a service that kept the piskies (like Mr B) happy as well as my side of the family (a right old mix, but nae piskies among them)

It's only when I look at my children, far older now than I was when I was married, probably far more adult than I shall ever be, that I think yes - the intervening years have occurred, and I'm not the child my father thought me on my wedding day. I thought this morning of a poem by R. S. Thomas -

She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.

I'm not providing a link to the poem, but you can find it if you're sufficiently curious; it's called "A Marriage".

But then we ate Loch Fyne kippers for a late breakfast, and I've thrown the clock (metaphorically) out of the window. We shall eat bagels and maybe a boiled egg (we have new eggcups to christen) and go for a walk in the fitful sun. Later we shall return to Chatters for dinner with a friend who couldn't make it on Saturday. Tomorrow I shall think again about time, and tasks, and what to cook for dinner.

And then we shall embark on another mile along the road. Here's to the gold at the next halt!

Offspring of a poem

The poem that grew out of writing the previous one is now here on frankenstina.

New poem explained

There's a new poem over at frankenstina. I wrote it this morning, after a brief foray to hang out the washing before the next batch of rain arrived (it came on time too). In case anyone is interested/critical/thinks I haven't noticed, I feel the need to explain what I was trying to do - though in fact that's not entirely true: I wrote it, then read it over and recognised what I had done more or less unconsciously as I strove to convey what I had seen and heard - and felt.

The first stanza is deliberately irregular, with erratic enjambement and random rhythms to echo the strangeness of a garden that in the recent warm and sunny weather had blossomed prodigiously and grown calm and lush. This morning it looked decidedly ruffled and awkward - hence the structure. The repetition of "light" and "lights" not an oversight, but is a deliberate play on the different meanings of the word. The reversion to a four-beat regular metre seems to reflect both the calm of other climes and the acceptance of the weather that is more common for us - and came, I suspect, as a by-product of that acceptance.

Must be the real deal then...

Ruby Do in Dunoon

Surfacing slowly after a weekend of celebration, I begin this look back at our Ruby Wedding celebrations with an apology to Andrew: Sorry, Best Man - my brain doesn't function too well after a surfeit of bubbly, and I wasn't about to commit myself to the caches of the faithful without my wits!

Firstly, of course, we weren't married on the third of July all these years ago: teachers need time to recover from the end of term and we gave ourselves a week. But we celebrated in style on Saturday so that we could catch most of the friends - and all the rellies - before they disappeared on holiday/back to the World Cup final. And as I did four years ago with Ewan's wedding I feel a dramatic present narrative coming on ...

The morning is a relief. The sun is shining and though there is a brisk wind it has not assumed the ferry-inhibiting speed I had feared. Best of all, it is not raining. (In the event, it transpires that all my siblings and their spice have stayed overnight scattered around Dunoon and Cowal; the few who still have to make the journey are in fact accustomed to the ways of Clyde ferries). But I digress. An uncanny peace has descended on chez Tosh, and the bride of 40 years ago is wondering if she'll actually feel up to this in a couple of hours. (Don't ask. It was ever thus.) But somehow the glad rags are donned and a strangely well-dressed couple totter down the road to Chatters, the only venue I would trust with this occasion.

And it is lovely. No sooner are we inside than I'm sampling the Kir Royale for strength and beginning to feel more lively. We stand at the door, a couple of bouncers, ready to greet guests and repel the general public. One or two appear, then a crowd who have shared a ferry-ride, and before I know it my whole life is represented in this room: the cousins I only usually see at funerals, the friends from the pre-wedding period, the friends who constitute our present-day life-support system - and our closest families, our generation, our children, our children's children, right down to James who only arrived at the end of May. I am euphoric. I don't know that I ever really believed it would happen, and here they all are.

(The keen-eyed will note that much of this is written in the 1st person singular. 'How did Mr B survive the 40 years?' they are asking. But this is my blog - and I long ago gave up speaking for Mr B...)

We drink toasts (and simply drink), eat strawberries, enjoy marvellous food, sing (The St Maura singers, a quartet even older than our marriage), and replicate some of the photos from the wedding day (I must scan in the originals) and our childhood (Sheila's grand idea, to have a cousins' group which requires my youngest cousin to sag at the knees instead of being five years old). I make the speech convention denied me in 1970, and Mr B raises the biggest laugh of the day with his. No. 1 son improvises a welcome that would have made his grandfather proud, and No. 2 son takes a simply great set of photos. The small cousins, our grandchildren Alan and Catriona, take notice of each other for the first time in their short lives, and are soon disappearing to the garden behind the restaurant to pick up gravel and attempt communication. Tiny James sleeps and sleeps in the corner as the noise level rises and tables begin to disperse and regroup.

But two remarks really sum up what I feel about it all. One comes when Andy, John's best man, asks why we don't keep up with each other more regularly because we have such a good time when we do; the other comes later when a friend remarks 'What a lovely crowd of people!' As they all head back to ferries, hotels or - in the case of nine of them - our house - I feel a plan growing, but suppress it for now. There is a mountain of presents to open, and people are talking about cups of tea. The day has far exceeded my expectations, and I don't want it to end.

Next year in ...?

Artichokes and attitudes

Market, Mayenne, Monday
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

I suppose the notion of a bustling, sunny market brimming with vegetables and redolent of cheese springs most readily to mind of the average non-French person if they think about France. And the atmosphere was certainly present when we attended the Monday market in Mayenne, in pays de la Loire, last week (was it only last week?). The sun was hot, our friend Claudine had shopping to do, and I bought a pair of trousers - something I would have been reluctant to embark on without a pal. The stalls were piled high with glistening tomatoes, artichokes (always a snare and a delusion, IMO) and onions, and the cheeses were immense. Men in a variety of headgear sat around in cafés as their wives shopped - they were, apparently, obviously in from the surrounding countryside. The hats gave them away.

Maybe that last piece of information is the key to what feels so different. I actually feel much more at home among French language and French food than I used to; it doesn't feel nearly as foreign as I remember from that first visit to Paris almost exactly half a century ago. But this familiarity is, I think, deceptive. Visiting small towns, where any foreign tourist might be considered well and truly lost, gives me the sense of the real difference. Everyone is charming - so polite with their greetings when you enter the bakery, so delighted because this obvious foreigner can understand them and speak back (mistakes and all) - but conversation reveals the kind of attitudes I'd associate with the Outer Hebrides of the '50s, the serious take on what constitutes a decent life, the prejudice against attitudes that most of us in my own environment take for granted.

I'm the last person to be happy at the rise in public drunken-ness and the debauchery of youthful attitudes, but I think I'd rather have the relaxation of censure and the open-mindedness that comes with it than the instant condemnation of the unco guid. (My French friends and relations are not, I hasten to add, unco guid at all. Whew!)

Funny thing is - decline in public morality is often linked to the decline in religious belief, but contemporary France as I experience it has to feel one of the least religious societies I have encountered. Maybe I don't mix with the right people ...

Dancing - with midges*

I'm back. I've been wandering in London and rural France, but right now I need to talk about ... dancing. Perhaps it's the tender toes and the fact that I slept till 9am for the first time in years that press me to this, but I shall return to considering life in France and even the matter of dull Synod procedures, I promise.

But dancing. I don't do much of it these days, not since I jiggered knees and toe joints in an ill-advised adventure with tap-dancing about ten years ago. Last night, however, I was at a fund-raising ceilidh-dance (the things I do for the church!) in the Uig Hall - and had a ball. First, a little scene-setting. The Uig Hall is a remarkably well-equipped little hall beside the River Echaig, surrounded by trees, below the hills that flank Loch Eck. It is a charming setting, and it is plagued by midges on warm summer evenings. Yesterday, under a wonderful yellow moon, there were millions of them. And in the heat of the evening, several windows were opened ...

The band was just right. The Old Bores, including my old ami JK, use minimal amplification for their mandolins and guitars, and one can still talk while they play. Much of the time, however, I was dancing, as memories of how to do Barn Dances and St Bernard's Waltzes crept back and I shoved a French friend through the intricacies of the Dashing White Sergeant. And when it was all over, and I found myself drying glasses (on paper towels!) in the kitchen, one of the country dance people said to me "You've danced before".

I don't think of myself as a dancer, yet I was sent to Eurythmics at the age of three and a dancing class that involved the rudiments of ballet at the age of five - quite apart from the ballroom dancing classes at Roger McEwan's in my teens where dancing and getting off with boys vied for one's attention but where I did learn a nifty quickstep. We also had to learn country dances at school, in preparation for Christmas dances and the mass performances in the playground at the school fete - oh, the horrors of dancing on concrete. I guess it was just part of growing up.

But it was later on in life that I realised that not everyone does this. Not everyone who takes to the dance floor automatically moves in time with the music, feels the first beat of the bar, finds their weight rising onto toes as they move, like a rider rising to the trot (no - I don't ride). And it is this, I think, that makes the difference, more than remembered moves or intricate steps. My father could dance an elegant foxtrot without really moving at all in his later years, and bore no resemblance at all to people who can move round the floor without apparently hearing the music.

Go and watch. Look at a film where there is dancing as a backdrop to some action. See if you notice anyone moving in time, and observe the strange rhythmless gait of the others. I've always noticed this, right from the first time a seven-year-old boy put his sweaty paw on my pink taffeta. So I guess she was right, that lady. I have danced before.

Sorry, Andrew - it's too good not to use!

Synod - a personal take

Bishop Katherine addresses Synod
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

I spent the end of the week at the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church. You can read all about it here, where you can also listen to the speech from the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA (pictured, rather distantly, with my phone), and you can pick up more personal takes on blogs like Kenny's. I didn't take my laptop - too heavy, too uncomfortable to sit in the pews at the side where the bloggers lurk, and to be honest, too tempting to sit surfing in moments of tedium.

And there were such moments. It is my contention that no-one aspiring to address a hall full of people should be allowed to be boring, no matter what they're talking about. Balance-sheets, maybe - but there are interesting nuggets hidden away in there, like the average giving of each communicant in the church (quite shockingly low), or the discrepancy between numbers on rolls and actual bums on seats on the Sunday next before Advent. But I'm pushing a point here. I know there has to be a business-like approach to pensions and quota and all the stuff I find personally so daunting. However, we are all sent the papers in ample time to read them from cover to cover - and yes, we can all read. So why, in the name of charity, do speakers insist on putting up Powerpoint slides and then reading them out aloud? Or explaining maps that we're quite capable of interpreting?

And another thing. When is everyone going to realise that if they're going to read every word of an address, verbatim, from the paper in front of them, they will have to work hard to produce a paper in the register of speech? It is soul-destroying to sit, on an aching posterior, with a sore back and restless feet, listening to a monotone voice reading a written report which the speaker shows no signs of having mastered sufficiently to interpret in any way. Surely if someone has worked with a committee and laboured over its report, they can then set aside the written document and speak about the highlights?

I'd like to suggest a self-check for speakers: Are you enjoying yourself? Are you gripped by the thing you're saying, right now? Are you communicating that passion? No? Then think again. Try another tack. For if you're bored, or unable to convey the sense of that convoluted sentence without hesitating, what chance do your listeners have? In fact, what chance is there that they're still awake?

Of course there were great moments, witty speeches, ad-libbing and hilarity. But apart from the social aspect of Synod, I regard attendance at it as a kind of penance. And that's a shame.

On a brighter note, this morning I returned to the worship of my own wee church. Last week I worshipped with a bevy of bishops, a clutch of clergy, several dozens of delegates. The organ was loud and the singing confident. The liturgy was at times involving (though at times the reverse). But nothing happened. Not for me, anyway. This morning there was no priest - he was in Rothesay - and there was a congregation of about 15. The singing was gentle (but in tune!) and the organ is a computer (but in the hands of a fine musician). We received communion from the Reserved Sacrament.

But the magic was there, there in a way that reminded me of why I hadn't headed for the hills. Whew!

Holy Fanfic

Ever read a book that has been recommended by a friend, that bears on its back cover glowing reviews from sources you usually trust - and find yourself wondering what got into them all? My Name was Judas, by C.K.Stead, is such a book - at least, for me it turned out to be a dead loss.

Actually, I've just seen a comment on the Amazon page which hints at the heart of the matter - even though that particular reviewer, in the Observer, claimed that the book avoided being "a ghastly primary school exercise" by being written "with aplomb". I'm afraid I disagree. This book, as the friend who recommended it said, comes very close to the genre of fanfiction, in which (usually) amateur writers embroider stories onto existing situations, involving existing characters whose every move is already familiar to the fans who make up the primary target of their writing. As the constraints of the genre mean that nothing should deviate from what the original canon suggests might be possible, there is little room for real characterisation or imagination, and much of the appreciation of the new story depends on an intimate knowledge of the original.

And that is what is wrong with this book. A reader unfamiliar with the gospel story would struggle to follow the psychology of the narrator and the relationship with the man Jesus - a figure who is endlessly described but never becomes real. As in a schoolchild's first attempt at fiction, appearance is used as a substitute for any real insight, and Judas' scepticism is continually stressed without any real attempt to explain its origin. We are expected to know about the miracles, the mysterious feeding of multitudes, and be interested by the ingenuity of the narrator's debunking of each of them.

The writing is banal, and the "poems" with which each chapter ends are merely risible (Judas in his old age - and no, he didn't die, folks - is apparently a poet). I'm afraid I can only compare it with the exercise in Standard Grade Reading, in which the student is asked to write a new take on some aspect of a set text - compare it, and award it a Credit grade, but no more.

And as for Alan Massie, James Wood and these other critics from the Sunday Times and the Guardian, I don't know what they were thinking of. I hope they had too many books to read that week, and simply didn't bother.

A new shepherd!

Congratulations
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Yesterday - joyous yesterday - marked the end of one journey and the beginning of a new one for Holy Trinity Dunoon. It's been over a year since our congregation set off on the adventure of a road with only a map to guide us; now we have a leader again. In his sermon during yesterday's service of introduction for Andrew our new priest, +Mark, the Bishop of Moray, Ross and Caithness,* gave us a wonderful vision - a vision of sheep. I'm no expert on sheep, so I've forgotten the varieties involved, but it was clear that he considers us the kind of flock who might wander round the back of any shepherd who attempted to drive us from the rear. Andrew, proclaimed the bishop, should emulate those shepherds who march confidently ahead of their flock, not looking back to check if we're still there.

We were certainly there yesterday, with visitors, the local MP, clergy from the C of S and the RC churches - and golly, did we raise the roof. Mr B had written a new setting of the lovely Celtic blessing - "May the road rise to meet you ...", we sang his (and therefore our own) setting of the liturgy, we laughed and smiled and felt solemn and joyful, and at the end of it all, when we knew that all the official stuff that puts Andrew in charge of us had been done in good order, we applauded. And then we sang again.

And then the Marthas (with me at their head, not looking back ....) charged from the church, down the grassy path thoughtfully mowed through the field, into the strategically-parked cars and off to the RC church hall to assemble a fabby feast. None of your finger buffets here: this was an abundance of hot dishes, salads and exotic puddings to sustain the wandering bishop on his homeward journey (you'll gather there are many journeyings for Piskies in this narrative). The party went on long enough for several of us to have missed Doctor Who, but the sun shone and it really did seem as if being a Christian was a feasible option after all.

I cannot, however, end on this uncharacteristically Pollyanna note. Mention of Doctor Who brings me back to the church car-park, where a Tardis had materialised in the shape of a Portaloo perched perilously on the edge of the steep drop down to Kilbride Road. Despite our misgivings, no-one reversed into it, and no-one was catapulted inside it to instant ignominy among the rhododendrons. It served its purpose, and by the time we returned this morning it had vanished.

Just like the Tardis, really.

And I have to report that, the bishop's recurring nightmare about shrinking pulpits notwithstanding, Andrew preached from said pulpit this morning. It didn't shrink.

See? I was listening...

*In case you're wondering why we have to have a bishop from so far away, it's because he's looking after Argyll right now. We are waiting for the College of Bishops to find us a new one. Come on, chaps ...

Knowledge of Angels

I recently read this extraordinary book, Knowledge of Angels" by Jill Paton Walsh. It's a novel, but it's also a fable, and it's beautifully written. It's a series of philosophical arguments and a succession of brilliant illuminations that leads to an inevitable and painful conclusion.

The story of the mysterious stranger who swims ashore after being swept overboard from his ship, finding himself on an island ruled by a cardinal prince, is juxtaposed with the tale of the wolf-child being cared for and tamed by a community of nuns. The stranger is faced with the demand that he identify himself as "Christian, Saracen or Jew"; the child is faced by questions about its knowledge of anything that might be recognised as God. Both stories unfold towards each other, and the fate of one character depends on the responses of the other.

In the end I was left with the question asked by Palinor, the stranger, as "he wondered ruefully why it is that those who believe most passionately in a merciful deity who are themselves most murderous and cruel." The conclusion, coming almost as an epilogue, is inevitable and disheartening. It's not a book I can readily summarise, as the fascination lies in the beauty and the logic and the innocence and the guilt - so all I can suggest is that you read it, and ponder.

Elizabeth's song

The babe leaps in my womb.
and the Spirit has filled all my soul:
blessed are you among women,
and blessed the fruit of your womb!
And why is it granted to me
that the mother of my Lord should come?
For behold, when your voice came to me
the babe in my womb leaped for joy.
And blessed is she who believed
that the word of the Lord would in her
find fulfilment and dwell among men.

C.M.M.
on the day in which the church remembers Mary's visit to Elizabeth.

New baby, new poem

It's funny how a phone ringing in the night can have you lucid and wide-awake in seconds, especially when it's news of the safe arrival of a new grandson. James McGregor McIntosh was born in the wee hours of this morning - yes, it's been a long day: you don't really slip back into sleep after such news! - and I've been looking at his photos and thinking of the great mystery of life and birth. A new baby is somehow much more mysterious than the child he will become - all that potential, all that personality waiting to unfold but for now held in the precious bud that is a newborn infant.

I've posted a poem I wrote this afternoon here, thinking of it as a conversation with his brother Alan, who is, of course, far too young to worry about such ideas just yet. But I sense that he is still trailing traces of the clouds of glory that he might just recognise in his new wee brother.

Church must have ...?

I've been taking part in what one commenter dubbed a blogalogue over on Jim Gordon's excellent blog, and feel driven to do a little exploring among some of the distinctive features of my own brand of Christian practice - or maybe, more accurately, among my feelings about them.

Not having been brought up an Episcopalian, I was captivated at first by the experience of singing in the incense-tinged, lovely acoustic of the Cathedral of The Isles, Cumbrae. At first there was no belief, just the music, the beauty, the silence in the spaces, the wisdom of the old Dean, George Douglas. Belief came unsought - and I have always considered that these first factors produced the open-ness of the soul that made belief possible. A sense of mystery, of otherness, of possibility - and for me, an experience quite unlike anything in my Presbyterian upbringing.

So from this period, I would perhaps have said that for me, the things I had to have in my church life were beautiful music, preferably Byrd or Tallis, preferably with me involved in the singing of it; the 1970 liturgy - or even the Prayer Book; incense at the Eucharist; preaching of the highest order (but in 10 minute doses), and silence - profound silence. No chat before or after the service, no children, but high seriousness of purpose and demeanour. And certainly never, ever, a happy-clappy worship song - and note the pejorative description.

Things change as we grow older, and in the intervening 36 years since my confirmation I've come to realise a thing or two. For example, I understand more about my attitude to music. I'm still completely spoiled by having really good organ music when I'm in church (it helps if you marry the really good organist), but we haven't had a regular choir in 20 years and I now know (a) that singing with a good group is a huge privilege but (b) that I can worship with music just as well from the body of the congregation. But if the organist is incompetent at leading the congregation - and some well-qualified organists are terrible - or if the congregational singing is of the baying/dragging/out-of-tune variety, I'd rather go to a said service.

I'd chuck out big chunks of Victorian stuff from the hymn book these days, having discovered the power to move of some modern songs - though some of them would move me right out of the door. So despite my hair-tingling recollection of the first time I sang Let all mortal flesh keep silence, my list of absolute must-haves in music has altered over the years. Similarly, I've learned to place more store by modern liturgical language, though I still love the psalms in their prayer-book version. And Compline as found in the prayer book is a joy - especially if you throw in plainsong - though one I rarely experience. So I guess I'd go for set liturgy as a must-have, but a variety of language, as long as it is beautiful and poetic. And the central must-have of all is the communion, that meeting-point of heaven and earth, beyond rational explanation.

So what's left? Incense and silence. Silence is easy. I love it. I need gaps for things to happen in - gaps in intercessions, between readings, in the middle of the Eucharistic prayers, before a service. Yes. Let's keep silence. And incense? We had glorious incense today, Pentecost, but it has become a rare treat for high days and holidays. I think that's fine too - but the mystery of the symbolism and the antiquity of the ritual seem to me to provide a bridge between past and present, earth and heaven, humanity and God. I wouldn't turn from ecumenism for the sake of incense, but it'd be a missing element, a regret for something lost.

So I suppose I arrive at a situation where I want to share conversation, fellowship, love with Christians from other traditions, but need my own traditions of worship on a regular basis, complete with the Eucharist. Presumably this is what keeps us in our various ruinous buildings, each in our own small corner, struggling to find clergy and cash. And yes, this is diversity rather than division, but maintained at a cost that might finish us all off. And that would be sad, no?

New poem on Orkney

I've written a new poem, based on my experience in Orkney. I know I need to read and study some more poetry - there's a bit of a desert in my brain right now, born of excessive busyness - but this suggested itself in the form of a sort of incantation.

You can read Touching the past here

Waiting

Holy Trinity church
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

For the past year Holy Trinity Dunoon has been without a priest. As I write, our new priest is supervising the process of stuffing his life into a removal van in preparation for moving here. I know this because of Facebook - I even know that he began feeding the removers cups of tea at an early hour. Good old Facebook, and good old Blogger: we get to know people we've only spoken to for five minutes.

But do we? There is the comforting recognition of shared interests, of course, not the least being an interest in Web 2.0 communication. But despite this, there is a feeling of anticipation that is at once joyful and apprehensive. For a church does not stay alive for a year without a great deal of work from the congregation, people who have had to sublimate their various antipathies in the interests of the common good, people who have had to step far out of their comfort zones, Marys who have turned into Marthas and vice-versa.

The arrival of a new priest should not, of course, mean that all cooperation and hard work ceases forthwith while we all revert to tearing each other's hair out. But there is this sense of handing over the authority to make decisions from a group to one person whom at the moment we barely know. I've been trying to find analogies - is it like when you send your four-year-old to school for the first time? Or when your kids leave home? For this church is ours - maybe more ours than it's been in all the 36 years I've worshipped here. We've made huge decisions about rot and repairs, we've made huge efforts over money and our future, we've held our breath to know if someone would be appointed here or if we'd be stuck with visiting clergy (lovely, but not the same) for ever. And yes, we've felt ownership.

A new priest arrives with so much hope invested in them (I'm using this neutral if sloppy pronoun on purpose) - for growth, for care of souls, for care of our tired spirits. It is that hope which renders us all - priest and people alike - vulnerable as the four-year-old I postulated earlier. No wonder there are nerves on both sides of the equation.

Meanwhile, however, the future looks bright; the Rectory is in better nick than it's been in the whole of my time here and maybe ever (double glazing, for a start), and there's going to be a family living in it. So here's to all of us - and if you're the praying type, spare us a prayer!

Touching the ancestors

Henge and marker stone
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

The recent lack of posting on this blog has been largely because I was away on holiday in Orkney, and though I've been posting photos over on flickr I haven't got round to writing about it.

This was my first visit to Orkney, and came about partly because Mr B had a notion to do a bit of ancestor-hunting on the island of Shapinsay. In the event, we left the Shapinsay trip till our last day in the expectation of sun - a wise move, as it turned out. But before that day I'd already fallen in love with somewhere unlike anywhere I'd ever been. The usual transformation of landscapes brought about by changing light was there, of course, but it was the landscape itself that caught me: these smooth, rolling fields, the low hills backed in the distance by the dark lumps of the mountains on Hoy, the standing stones everywhere, from the huge henge of the Ring of Brodgar (photo) to the random pair we saw in someone's garden, the ancient stone houses of Skara Brae, still with their stone furniture intact.

To the south, there were more recent relics in the Churchill Barriers with their scuttled ships and the Italian Chapel built by the prisoners of war who were working on the barriers. But on the same day as we visited the chapel we also visited the extraordinary Tomb of the Eagles, where we were handed neolithic objects to examine and where I hauled myself on a trolley (such as was used in the movie "The Great Escape") down a low tunnel into the 5,000-year-old tomb on the shore and got stuck on the way back out because the uphill slope brought said trolley to a halt. Because the site here is not under the control of Historic Scotland there are few restrictions - we were told to follow the arrows and if we found ourselves opening a gate we were on the wrong track! There was no-one with us at either house or tomb, and the loneliness and sense of thin-ness was palpable.

The landlady of our excellent B & B asked us if we'd be likely to return. I think the answer is likely to be yes.

New blog on the block

There's a new blogger on the Pisky scene. The Revd Andrew Swift arrives in Dunoon this week, and it's high time his aptly named blog, Dances with Midges, appeared on pisky blogrolls. Please pay him a visit and encourage him as he prepares to move to the very heart of midgeland.

Argyll still kicking

The Electoral synod of Argyll and The Isles met yesterday. We should still have been in Oban today, deciding which candidate would become our Bishop, but there were no candidates to hear yesterday, and there is no election today. And I could perhaps have been forgiven for a bit of despair. It's been a long process since September, and we seem no nearer finding a suitable Bishop than we ever were.

But in fact yesterday's meeting was anything but despair-inducing. Without pre-empting the official sources (come on, chaps - what's keeping you?) I feel free to say that the mood yesterday was thoughtful, that our sense of purpose was stronger than ever, that our resolve to find not just any old bishop but someone who would have the special qualities needed for this diocese had deepened. I feel that we have changed over the 36 years I have known Argyll, that the laity are no longer content to sit back and smile indulgently at clerical quirks or leave all the thinking to one of two folks with cut glass accents or titles or both.

It was acknowledged more than once that just as managing a small parish could be a good deal harder than managing a large one, so the demands of running a numerically small diocese were in many ways more challenging than running a large one - and that's before you even begin to consider the ferries, the miles of single-track roads, the weather ... Yes: it takes a special kind of priest to do this, and we shall find one.

The road we chose demonstrates, I think, a profound acceptance of what it means to be a Scottish Episcopalian, and a considerable degree of trust. And after all these weeks of national politics, this felt good.


Stop press (or something): The official wording for what we decided can be found here. If you're too idle to go there, it says this: The Electoral Synod met yesterday (13 May 2010) and adjourned after discussion. The result of this is that the right of election will lapse to the Episcopal Synod, as provided in Canon 4 of the Church’s Code of Canons.

Bere bannocks

I've been on holiday - and though I took my laptop and had wifi in my excellent B&B I was too busy being on holiday to blog about anything. We were in Orkney (on Orkney?) and it was wonderful, and I shall say more about it when I stop watching news programmes and haring about the diocese. But today I want to share a culinary first and a little bit of Orkney with anyone who's interested in easy, wonderful-tasting food.

I made bannocks. Not just ordinary bannocks, but bere bannocks. That's them in the picture, almost ready to take off the griddle which is actually a beautiful pan for making crepes which I bought in Quimper many years ago. I bought a lovely big brown paper sack of bere meal in the shop on Shapinsay during a wonderful day of ancestor-hunting, and the owner of the shop, Thomas Sinclair, offered to have a recipe written out for me when I came by to collect it before we went for the ferry. This is the recipe, and the results were delicious.

BERE BANNOCKS

1 cup of bere meal
1 cup of plain flour (I used strong white)
1 teaspoon salt
1 heaped teaspoon baking soda
buttermilk to mix (I used a carton which was about the same size as a tall cup)

Mix all ingredients together into a soft dough, and knead thoroughly. Divide into two or three pieces depending on how many/big you want your bannocks to be.
Cook on a griddle till the squishy bit in the middle has just turned firm (I poked to make sure - Mr Sinclair's recipe just said 'cook till done')
Split down the middle and put delicious things on it. (Mr S suggested razor clams, but I had other ideas)
Enjoy!

Sermon: Love one another ...

This is what I preached today. It went down well with many people, but explosively badly with at least one other. It's in this awful bullet-pointed format because that's what I use - there is no ordinary joined-up copy of it on my computer. It's here for the people who don't use Facebook.

• Do you ever think about your tribe?
• What tribe you belong to?
• I want you to think about that now.
• Because you can be sure that your politicians, the people who want you to vote for them this week, have their eyes on you as members of a tribe.
• And they give the tribes names – names you may not even have heard of. Strivers – the aspiring middle classes who want more, better, who are prepared to work all hours to get it.
• Boomers – that’s people like me, all hitting pensionable age, though in our heads we may still be hippies or rockers
• Youth vote – not many of them around, eh?
• Digerati – sounds like an obscure tribe fighting against ancient Rome, but actually first time voters, organizing and being contacted online
• And then of course there’s our tiny tribe of Scottish Piskies
• And larger ones tied to political parties
• And national ones – Scots, English, French, Hungarian …
• And by and large, unless there’s an election on, we tend to mix pretty amicably and not make much of a fuss about our tribes … don’t we?
• And I’ll come back to that idea. Hold on to it.
• The Jewish believers in the reading from Acts were critical of Peter’s actions in eating with uncircumcised men.
• Both circumcision and the dietary laws of the Jews may have begun as common sense for hygiene in a hot country
• But at the time of the Exile in Babylon these laws were extended and firmed up to preserve the unity and the purity of the Jewish people
• So by the first century the Jews felt defined by the laws which the first followers of Christ took on with them into their new faith
• They wanted to maintain their “specialness” – their unique identity
• And here was Peter apparently throwing this uniqueness to the winds, sharing the new faith with all sorts of unsuitable people.
• And Peter tells them his dream.
• Look at how he first answers the voice which has told him “kill and eat”
• “By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth”
• Can you hear the tone of voice? Try emphasizing the word “my” – how exclusive, how self-satisfied does that sound?
• Think about how exclusive we can all feel at times … eg -
• Piskies – much better than Presbyterians
• Or think about the fact that there are people, like us, that we never even meet –
• For I found myself saying the other day that these Strivers, these men who spend their lives driving up and down the motorway from Milton Keynes, who hardly see their wives and the families they work so hard to support, who work all hours and make and spend far more than I ever thought of earning –
• I said that I didn’t know anyone like that.
• They are another tribe.
• I was talking then about voting patterns and the electorate
• But I could have been just like the circumcised Christians, couldn’t I? (meaning?)
• So – what is God’s answer to this exclusive behaviour? This exclusive mindset?
• Maybe the answer’s in the second reading:
• A new heaven and a new earth?
• But we have to look at the Gospel for the way to achieve this new earth.
• God has shown the way through the person of Jesus
• God has been glorified in the person of Jesus
• And in turn Jesus is glorified in himself
• And Jesus, glorified by God, with all the authority of God, tells us what to do in this short passage from his last supper with the disciples.
• We cannot follow Jesus on his final journey, we cannot be Jesus
• But we can do this new thing he tells us
• We have to love one another.
• We have to love one another in the way that Jesus loved his disciples.
• Now – remember what I said to hold on to?
• ..that in our own lives we tend to mix amicably and not care too much about the different tribes we belong to?
• The readings today all call us to go further.
• They call us not to the very British politeness that marks our electoral Leaders’ debates
• Not merely to the absence of confrontation – for it is a very British thing to avoid outright confrontation with people we disagree with –
• Not just to be polite to people who are different from us in some way – even if we say what we really think the moment we get away from them (GB)
• Jesus’ words call us not to turn our backs on people who do things differently or have a different lifestyle or background from us
• And right now, Jesus’ words call us not to condone the way our political parties smear their opponents
• Not to condone the way the press smears just about everyone in turn
• Not to let people get on with their own affairs without ever wondering if they need help
• None of these easy options – and I haven’t even mentioned the more extreme “not-to”s like going to war or using Trident missiles or punching people on the face –
• None of these things are what we are called to do.
• No
• We are called to love people
• How much love was there, do you think, in that incident last week?
• When GB described that woman as a bigot and was pilloried for it?
• How much love did the woman show in her complaints?
• How much love did the Sky reporter show for the woman when she tracked her down, told her what Brown had said – on camera?
• How much love did any of us show when we watched Brown’s face fall when he realized what he’d done?
• When we mocked his apology?
• Gosh, we all had fun there, didn’t we – but there wasn’t a lot of love around.
• But we are called to love everyone …
• We are called to love people in such a way that we don’t notice any difference between them and ourselves
• To love them in such a way that we strive to do the best for them in whatever area of need we find them
• To be honest and open in our love, to share not only what we have but also what other people offer us
• To regard nothing as alien or liable to contaminate us
• For God has created us all
• And it is out of that knowledge that we must live, and act – and yes, even vote – even if Christianity is no longer a part of our politicians’ lives
• - even if the Christian message is derided by those who seek power
• We have to live in the way Christ commanded
• We have to love one another
• And in that living, that loving, we shall find ourselves in God’s new creation.
• Amen.