Last words

My last post, as anyone who still reads this blog will know, was an appreciation of an old friend. And I was glad (you can tell I sang this yesterday, but that's another story) to learn that there was an obituary * of Alastair Fulton in the Herald last week. And that is where the gladness began and ended.

Previously I have bemoaned inadequate funeral services as being unworthy of the deceased and unhelpful to those who loved them. Now I find myself bemoaning what I see as a sadly inadequate piece of writing, let alone a reminder of someone I knew. There seems to be a tradition (is there?) that newspaper obits have to be dry and factual, covering a linear model of a life that resembles nothing so much as the "thank-you" speech at the end of a charity event: don't forget the lady who does the flowers or your life won't be worth living. That sort of thing. And as far as that goes, if indeed that is the requirement for a respectable newspaper, then as far as I'm concerned respectable newspapers have indeed had their day.

And that may be a very personal reaction to a piece that some of my friends thought was good. They perhaps had the advantage of hearing more of the real ABF at the funeral I sadly missed. What is not merely personal preference, however, is my despair that someone so linguistically talented and knowledgable should have been commemorated in such weak syntax. From memory, lest I come over all red pen, I shall recall only the strange use of the pluperfect verb in the opening sentence and the misrelated participle in the penultimate one. ABF would not have missed these.

So, ABF, this post is for you. Missing the certainty of acerbic comment on my own epistolary infelicities, I offer this last thought. You were much, much more than a mere list of activities could convey. Pervixisti indeed.

*Of course, obits like this can also be read online, but the ethos remains...

Pervixi ... in memoriam ABF

ABF and Mr B, 2012

I don't know what prompted me to take the above photo, but today I'm glad that I halted, called to the others to stop and smile in Great Western Road on a suddenly chilly Corpus Christi evening last year. It was my last but one meeting with one of my oldest friends. Alastair Fulton - forever ABF in my memory - died last week, and as I shall miss his funeral, in St Mary's Cathedral which we had just left when that photo was taken, this is my memory.


ABF was one of the first people I met outwith the 60-strong contingent of undergraduates from my old school when I went to Glasgow University as a fresher. He was a leading light in the Cecilian Society, and it was there that I realised what a wonderful comic actor he was - to say nothing of the wonderful tenor singing voice that years later joined the New Consort of Voices and brought him, memorably, to the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. On that occasion, he appeared at breakfast in the North College wearing yellow ochre pyjamas decorously covered by his borrowed surplice, having forgotten a dressing gown. Strangely, another ineradicable memory involves Alastair singing The Judge's Song from Trial by Jury wearing a white cardigan on his head: the Cecilian concert party used to perform for such oddly-named organisations as The Scottish Girls' Friendly Society (can this be real?) and in this particular concert performance ABF obviously felt the lack of costume and seized the cardi from one of the sopranos.

One year I invited him as my partner to the QM Ball; he was a splendid dancer and I've never been so entertained by any dance partner since (sorry, Mr B!).

The evening fled past on a wave of hilarity. Decades later, ABF loved to recount the memory of my father, appearing in his dressing gown at 3am to see his eldest daughter safely into the house and to engage this amusing young man in the kind of conversation he too loved. As ABF prepared to leave, my father told him that he would find "the usual offices", should he care to avail himself, on the landing.

Later, when I had left university and was a student at Jordanhill College, my school placement for teaching practice in Latin took me to Jordanhill College School, where ABF was now on the staff of the Classics department - a strange sense of continuity, of nothing really changing - and, five years further on, we found ourselves both on the staff of Hillhead High School, a happy coincidence that had Alastair turning up outside our marital home every morning to give me a lift to work and found us practising Byrd in a corner of the music department.

Over the years, the contact remained, intermittent but easy. ABF regarded Dunoon as dangerously rural; on one visit he became agitated as we walked along the (pavementless) coastal road at Toward. "There's someone coming," he hissed. There was indeed a distant figure, on the other side of the road, heading our way. "Do you know this person? Should we greet him?" More recently, sitting in the sun in our garden, it was he who realised that there was a thrush nesting in one of our shrubs, and carefully assisted me to retrieve the laundry from the line to avoid disturbing it. And constantly, over the years since I retired from teaching and took up blogging, he has been an assiduous and hilarious poster of comments - erudite, irascible, argumentative, hilarious. As he shared my tendency to midnight computing, I would often laugh myself into a state that rendered sleep impossible.

I realise I've only given a snapshot of a life here - the bits I saw and enjoyed. I know Alastair had his difficult times, and I know my mother used to enjoy meeting him in the cafés around Byres Road. I appreciated hugely his presence at her funeral, as I enjoyed sharing him with my family and friends at our Ruby Wedding party. I saw him twice last year - at the afore-mentioned occasion in St Mary's, and at the funeral of a friend's mother. He phoned me in Holy Week, amazingly upbeat and as amusing as ever despite the illness I'd only just heard about. His death came as a horrible surprise.

It's hard to write this in the knowledge that one of my favourite readers will not be commenting on it this evening; it's hard to think I have lost yet another person who would always have the answer to the difficult - or merely crazy - linguistic query. The heavenly choir may even now be rejoicing in the song of a new tenor - but down here the gap is immense.

Make sure they get the Latin right, Alastair ...

Pervixi; neque enim fortuna malignior unquam
Eripiet nobis quod prior hora dedit.

Petronius Arbiter

A requiem for Philip II

As dawn breaks and church bells toll slowly all over Toledo, an elaborate funeral procession winds its way through the city's streets. Clad in black vestments of mourning, the Archbishop leads the procession, followed by the upper echelons of ecclesiastics and then the nobility, each in turn, according to his rank. The cortège stops at several pre-determined locations where the choir sings a responsory, each station representing a stage in the journey of the soul of the deceased towards eternal salvation. As the dignitaries enter the Cathedral, usually dark and sombre, they are overwhelmed by the light of thousands of candles covering the funeral monument, or catafalque, a vast construction as hight as the cathedral itself, engraved with Latin tributes in honour of the deceased. Silence descends upon the church, and the solemn invitatory Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis begins the Matins of the Dead.

On a wet Friday evening in Glasgow we experienced a wonderful performance of A Requiem for Philip II by Cristobal de Morales *(c.1500 - 1553) in the acoustically fantastic central hall of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The above comes from the programme note, and Paul McCreesh, directing the Gabrieli Consort, set the scene before the singing began. We were told the performance would last about 70 minutes without a break, and would be liturgical in feel. As you can see from the photo of the performers' waiting seats (and bottles of water!), taken from my seat, we were at the front, very close to the singers.

The seventy minutes passed without my noticing them. I have never been so immersed in a performance, so swept along on a tide of plainsong and polyphony that I never once looked at my watch. The singing was peerless - four countertenors, two tenors, four baritones, two basses and, doubling the bass part, the muted bajon (dulcian) - with solo groups and tutti ensembles, solo plainsong prayers and readings  and the full-bodied singing of the mass. I felt I was a part of it; it's the kind of music I love to sing and I felt every cadence, every nuance, every false relation in such a way that when it was finished I was exhausted in the same exhilarated way that I feel after singing myself. The moment when the singers turned and walked off the stage and away in a long, singing procession round two of the adjoining galleries was electrifying. I also realise how privileged I am in that my education and subsequent experience in choirs mean that I can understand Latin well enough to participate in what is being sung without constantly referring to the programme, and that I was sufficiently familiar with the words of the mass and the plainsong customarily used for, say, the Sursum Corda to be immersed in the liturgy and to delight in the resonant tones of the bass singing the priest's part.

I realise as I write this that I'm doing a very inadequate job of conveying a very special occasion. The sizeable audience, completely silent and still for the whole performance, didn't erupt in applause; rather this began slowly, gently, as people shook themselves from their absorption, and grew to a sustained crescendo as the choir returned for several bows, only dying when the conductor had disappeared down the stairs away from the hall. We hurtled down the road to the ferry in a whirl of exuberance with our heads full of polyphony and caught a ferry within an hour of the last notes being sung.

The kind of evening I don't get very often, the kind of music that makes me glad to be alive...

*You can hear bits of the performance here, as well as buy it!

Weeping and alleluias

Today I attended the funeral of someone I've known since I was twelve - when I started secondary school, even though we were at different schools, I inherited her copy of Paterson & MacNaughton's Approach to Latin Book 1. Her parents lived two doors from mine, and as I sat listening to the minister talking about the early life that been contiguous on mine I thought of how little she had changed, really, from the girl in the regulation school hat passing our gate of a morning. The west of Scotland can be a small place, really, so it was only mildly surprising that for several years we should be colleagues in Dunoon Grammar school or that Mr B should even more recently have met her every week at the fish van.

There were several things that struck me this morning. The first was the relief that the organ was being played by a decent organist - for this was not the case the last time I was in that church. The second was that it was warm, and the third to notice what a terrific photo was on the front of the service sheet. So far, so good. But it couldn't last. The last funeral I was at took place in the same church, and the same minister did what she did again today. She announced that we were going to pray. She began all right and I thought 'Maybe someone's told her ...' - but no. Suddenly God was being told where the deceased had lived as a child, what school she had attended, what qualifications she had gained. There was the odd attempt to redeem the situation by thanking God for this and that, but then we were back to the life story. It was so far from what was needed - for me anyway - that I gave up any pretence that I might be praying, and instead thought of the person I had known, the laughs over some absurdity in school, the cleverness, the passion we shared about accuracy in language. I don't know how CofS ministers are trained these days, and I'd love someone to tell me why they should think it's all right to tell all this stuff to a God who knows us from our mother's womb and I'd love to know how they can justify inflicting this on people at a funeral - people who might have no church connection other than funerals must get a very odd picture of God indeed.

We sat there, solidly, in rows. No-one said "Amen" to anything. Oh - I did. There was a strange hiatus at the end of the service. Would we still be sitting there as they processed out? Oh good - a man, on his own on the other side of the church leapt to his feet and we all followed. I whispered the Nunc Dimittis to myself as the coffin was carried out. We all peeled out after it.

And outside, in the sun, it felt suddenly like being back at work. We stood there, surrounded by former colleagues, only one of whom is still teaching. We were all dressed more or less as we did for work - I actually wore the black shoes I used to wear for a day on my feet in school. The woman who was always putting her foot in things at staff meetings was doing it again. We all looked older - we are older, dammit, but not old enough to die, not yet. Maybe that's it. Maybe we're never really old enough to die, to miss the sunshine of the long-awaited Spring, to leave the others and go on this last journey alone.

I've just had a conversation on Facebook about this business of eulogies. Apparently in Nova Scotia (Anglican?) churches Canon Law forbids eulogies at funerals. They are seen as focussing on loss and grief and negating Easter hope. I can't help wondering if disguising the eulogy as a prayer would slip past the net, but take the point. However, I have attended funerals that did indeed celebrate both the person and the hope of resurrection, funerals that made no compromises in the face of a largely faithless society, funerals that had mystery and joy and were in no way an ordeal. If anyone's listening, that's what I want.

But I do want one thing, and it's not necessarily a eulogy. I want the Kontakion for the departed, in English, well sung. I doubt there will be live singers around to sing it for me, but get a decent recording and play it at a decent volume. Don't be timid. It says it all - the weeping and the Alleluias. And that's what it's all about, for me. Weeping and alleluias.

A pilgrim church?

What makes a church? The answer, the obvious answer, the answer you know to be the right one, is the people. The community that worships together. That's the church. And it was in that spirit that we met today in the venue shown in the photo, the church hall where, once upon a lifetime, I took the Managing Editor of BBC Online and the CEO of No Tosh Ltd to play with their pals in Toddler Group and Playgroup; where the wife of our last Bishop and I told people of the lively worshipping community on Kilbride Hill and encouraged them to join us and bring their children. It is also the hall where for years we went to vote in elections, outside which I used to stand with a CND badge and a stack of leaflets, picketing all those going in to vote and putting up with the banter of the Tories ... I could go on. It's a place with a lot of memories for me, and today and for the next few months I'm going to acquire a new set as it stands in for Holy Trinity church, about to turn into a building site as the lottery-funded renovation gets going.

Interestingly, the hall, which now belongs to the High Kirk and which they are graciously letting us use as we require, used to be a Scottish Episcopal Mission Church - the Church of St Andrew - so in a sense we were returning, with our 19th Century chalice, to roots that predated even the oldest member of the congregation.

How was it for me, do I hear you ask? Well, despite the fact that most of us resolutely sat in the same relative positions as we do in church - you can see two doing that in the picture, setting the trend - it felt nothing like church as usual. That's not to say it was a negative experience, but it wasn't what I look forward to on a Sunday. In the hilarity that preceded the service, it felt being in a holiday house with a large family as people discovered they had a heater overhead and had to strip off layers of clothing, or dropped hymnbooks and rummaged on the floor to retrieve them. The piano turned out to have a broken damper, throwing Mr B into a gloom, though neither gloom nor busted bit seemed to affect the music which miraculously shut everyone up and produced a tense unignorable silence (thanks, Larkin) before the service began.

So the good bits? The children had a room for their activities, with a door that shut, meaning they could make all the noise they wanted and have fun. (I think they did too). It was cosy. We felt like a family, perhaps even more than usual - a family on an outing. The calamine-lotion coloured tongue-and-groove boarding and the Virgin Mary blue of the wall miraculously replicated the interior of Holy Trinity's colour scheme, which raised a smile of recognition when I should have been concentrating. And our priest made it all work with an assurance that was in itself reassuring, interestingly.

On the downside, there was the dead acoustic, the feeling of being crowded, the piano accompanying the singing instead of the organ, the lack of visual beauty, the missing sense of the numinous that pervades our church building. I've worshipped plenty of times in a similar kind of venue, and this felt like one of these ad hoc communions for a meeting - jolly, enthusiastic, but lacking.

Once upon a time we were threatened with the loss of our building, the possibility that we might like to think about some modern, town-centre place of worship. This experience gives us the chance to see what it might have been like. I for one am happy beyond words that hard work and circumstance - and the Heritage Lottery Fund - have made it a temporary one. This week, the work begins on our church on the hill, and late yesterday afternoon we returned there to make a recording, the story of which is told elsewhere.

It was exciting - the acoustic, already fine, was wonderfully lively with the exposure of the stone flagged floor. I look forward to going home ...

De mortuis

What does someone of mature years who tries to live under/up to a belief-system that encourages compassion say about the passing of Margaret Thatcher? If she's wise, perhaps she says nothing. But if she's not as wise as she might be, is not as Christian as she ought to be and in addition is a blogger, what then? Blog as catharsis has always been a reason to keep writing, and despite my best intentions to think of something else, it keeps coming back to this ... this toothache of an internal dialogue. Besides, the media - social and professional - keep banging on about it; I hear politicians mouthing blandly political platitudes while others leap to condemn any outbursts of unseemly celebration.

So, for what it's worth, my take. I've just caught up on what Russell Brand had to say, and found myself sympathising. But he was a child of the Thatcher years, and I was an adult. I had somehow avoided any interest in politics in my student days, then I'd had a family and stopped thinking at all for a bit (you did that, in these days - your job wasn't kept open for you when you had a baby) - and then Thatcher came along and suddenly I was involved in the single-issue politics of CND and the US Navy Nuclear Submarine base, Site One, in the Holy Loch. We had a Tory MP in Argyll, the hectoring tones of Thatcher were omnipresent, and I have never felt so alienated or disenfranchised in my life as I felt in these days. I met miners at demonstrations, chanted "Maggie Maggie Maggie! Out Out Out!" at EIS rallies, met more veggie anarchists than I knew existed, gave evidence at the trials of Greenham women and was suddenly no longer welcome in the only church I knew.*

She came to Dunoon one day - must have been in 1976, I think - and was outside the baker's as I walked past (no, I didn't shake her hand). Her car passed as I and #1 son were waiting for a bus; she waved, and son treacherously waved back - and yet then I only knew she was a Tory. Presumably she was supporting the local candidate - but I didn't really know, then, what I came to know in the early 80s. And the strange thing is that hearing that voice on the radio the last couple of days brings it all back - even the genius who voiced her Spitting Image puppet evoked the same sick feeling. Not rational, really - gut feelings of the most basic sort. Not arguable, not at all.

So where on earth am I going? The thoughts that crowd in include this: We shall all die. Some of us will grow old first, and some of us will be frail or demented or both. But we shall still be the people we are now, and the people we were before. And, you know, I think I want people to think of me in some putative future as they do now. I've always believed in not patronising old people, just as I don't believe in patronising the young.

Thatcher's last word on her eviction from office by her party was that she would never forgive them. Fine. She was a politician who chose her job and stuck to it ruthlessly, and in the end her fellow-Tories were ruthless in getting rid of her. She set back the cause of women in high office by years - and I can think of other women in politics whom I admire and have admired far in excess of any reluctant admiration Meryl Streep's film might have engendered.

So I can't face even thinking about what the proposed funeral arrangements imply in terms of divisiveness, the reopening of old sores, the effect on people struggling through their lives under the current Tory economies, the cost of policing and the threat to public order. I shall do my best to avoid the media coverage. And I shall try to say as little as possible.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum? Aye, right.

*Everything changes. That too, I'm glad to say.

A pivot into eternity

Sometimes in life there is an epiphany, quite unexpected, quite unsought. So it was this evening, towards the end of a meal that I had enjoyed, sitting at table with the candles lit but the sky outside still a clear, pale, perfect blue. We were listening to Martha Argerich playing the slow movement of Ravel's G major piano concerto, and as a certain cadence which seemed to be a gentle pivot into eternity yielded a gentle trickle of notes on the piano I felt the miracle of a life that could encompass such things.

There are days when life seems very short - even the Beatles sang of it - but in that brevity we are allowed such riches of experience that they seem unfathomable. I felt in that moment of listening that this was an evening piece, this slow movement - that I couldn't imagine listening to it in a morning, and certainly not hearing it in this way. But to analyse that quietly soaring moment would be to dissipate its power, so I shall merely remark its passing, and my gratitude for having encountered it.

After the ninth hour

Dead. That’s about it, really -

dead inside my head, dead

inside my heart as we lift the dead

weight of our friend who was more

than just our friend and take his

dead body to this raw tomb that

just happens to be waiting for him.

Was it all meant to work out

like this? What about the two

hanging, groaning, haranguing, 

praying? Praying in extremis.

Everyone does that. 

There is no feeling left

for a time like this. Only the 

raw hole where the emotion

raged and the terror flared

and burned all else to black

as the sky darkened

and the woman bustles

home and her thoughts 

turn to food and tasks

and children make their

demands that obliterate

all dialogue with self

and leave you safe

from this empty pain.

Leave the heavy weight 

of body and the weighty spice

to scent the darkness

till another day. 

Leave the dark sky

light a lamp

do not let the pictures

fill your head

the hammer blows

your inward ear

the dull thud of wood

in the hard ground.

No. It is finished.

But how, God, how

do we live now

in the world that is so changed?

©C.M.M. Good Friday ’13.

Love your neighbours?

How does a Christian know she is living out her faith in her everyday life? (I'm not excluding chaps here, not at all, but I'm a she and it was going to be tedious to keep giving both pronouns. Forgive me.) This was something that came up in discussion at our Lent group yesterday; we reached no conclusion other than that it can be difficult to have any certainty for oneself, no matter how you may look up to others. At least, that's what I took from it.

But of course one example of living a Christ-inspired life is all over the news at the moment, because the Reverend Isaac Poobalan of St John's Episcopal Church in Aberdeen has invited the Muslims from a neighbouring mosque to share his church building rather than pray outside in the snow when there were too many of them for the space available. Presumably his vestry members also approved this move, so there's some more people doing real Christian stuff. And, as Jesus himself predicted, discipleship like this brings abuse.

For Fr Poobalan is being subjected to a torrent of abuse from internet trolls, according to the Huffington Post. Apparently they call themselves Christians, these trolls. Up this way we might call them something very different, but I shall restrain myself.

Instead, I'm going to say something positive. Fr Poobalan's action and continuing determination to love his neighbours makes me proud. Proud to be a member of the Scottish Episcopal Church where such things happen, proud to say I'm a Christian.

It's as simple as that.

Yes, I'm still reading ...

It's been a while since I last reviewed a book - November saw the last, I think - and I've almost forgotten what I've read since then. However, two of the books are sitting on the desk beside me, mute reproaches, and if I deal with them now they can find a home on a shelf. If there's any room, that is.

The first of them takes up the story of Robert Merivel, who first appeared in Restoration. In Merivel, A Man of his Time, Rose Tremain shows us a much more mature Merivel, a man in his late 50s who considers himself "much decayed" (ouch) with a life to look back on and one last great adventure to undertake. There is a lover, a trip abroad, a bear. There is the King, now also much decayed, and there is the melancholy of the end of a life imperfectly lived. Merivel is self-mocking and sad, and Tremain and her hero take us expertly through a world in which glitter disguises squalor and favour is given and withdrawn in turn. I was absorbed by the writing and made melancholy by the inevitability of ending, whether of a novel or of a life. So there.

And then I read Toby's Room by Pat Barker. A strange, inconclusive story of the 1914-18 war, of a brother and sister and their friend whose face is destroyed by shrapnel, it is described as "a riveting drama of identity and damage, of intimacy and loss", and "Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet". I dunno about that; I found myself driven to explore some of the history of Queen Mary's Hospital and the work of the artists who recorded the progress of early plastic surgery there, and in some ways I wish I hadn't. Having read the bood some months ago now, I find I've forgotten the conclusion of the narrative and can recall as it were the incidentals - but incidentals that are themselves far more important than any fiction could be.

I'd saved up the fat paperback The Villa Triste by Lucretia Grindle for a trip - the other two were hardbacks - and was engrossed by her story of wartime Italy and its resulting deaths in modern Tuscany. The time-switching typographical devices became easy after the first time, and the mystery remained - for me anyway - a mystery until satisfyingly late in the story. I liked Palliotti, Grindle's detective, and I loved Florence and the descriptions of backstreets and Sunday family eating.

And now I'm reading War and Peace, in the new translation. I've read about 200 pages of very small print, and there are another 1000 to go. I'm enjoying it more now than I was at first, having arrived in a War bit rather than the opening Peace section, and I shall certainly say more once I've finished it. Suffice it to say that I've learned from a translator's note that Russians consider the book an easy read, and I'm actually seeing why ... but of that more anon. Just don't give me any more books till I've finished it!

Costly love

It seems to have been several years since we observed Mothering Sunday in Holy T - if my files of past Intercessions are anything to go by, we've stuck to Lent 4 for years, and I had nothing to plunder for my prayers for today. In the event, it took me some time to think about and produce same, but it was a rewarding sort of time. The readings helped, of course - that wonderful line at the end of the Gospel: "And a sword shall pierce your own soul also", and the story of Moses in the basket among the reeds.

Why did these strike such a chord? I was thinking of the costliness of the love shown by mothers across the ages and over today's world. I was thinking of mothers who had to watch their children die or suffer; I was thinking of the lines of women leading tired children to a hazardous safety in Jordan, leaving behind the ruination of their lives in Iraq. I was thinking of how many mothers will do anything for their child, and how letting the tendrils of love for each new life twine around the heart is taking a step that will never be retraceable. And I thought of how often we forget to tell our own mothers what they mean to us - forget until it's too late. And I thought of how that kind of love would know anyway. But I still wished I'd said something explicit.

But people like me don't say these things explicitly. Where they emerge is often oblique, there to be seen if you look hard. And sometimes poetry has to do it. It was poetry that summed up the enormity of what that Levite woman had done to save her baby son, poetry I wrote the last time, I think, that we read that lesson in church. I've published it before, on Frankenstina, along with a picture of the font we floated our messages on in paper boats, but because I used it today I'm putting it here.

ONCE ...

In the hot silence
while he slept
and only the flies sang
she made the basket
strong with love
to hold this one most precious thing
and gave it, dry-eyed,
to the waiting flood.
© C.M.

A Lenten poem

Road through the Nevada desert

Eyes wide open

One pale, quiet morning, 

I open my soul’s eyes 

unarmed with faith or company, 

responsibility or joy, 

and see quite plain

the vastness of it all, the loneliness, 

the very impossibility of life.

A hand in the desert - 

will there be a hand? 

Someone who knows the way

to travel this grey distance

and find the distant hills?

The question hangs

in the still air. But 

in the birdless silence

is that the gentle ripple

not mocking or sardonic

but inviting, is that -

oh please, is that -

a companionable laugh?

© C.M. 03/13

A ridgewalk with the Third Age

A suitably splendid scene for a brief retrospect on last week's Argyll and The Isles Diocesan Synod, the above photo shows the moment when Bishop Kevin installed the new Dean, Andrew Swift, in the Cathedral in Oban. I was right at the back of the Cathedral, having arrived at the very last minute from Taynuilt, where we were staying and where we had gone to change into gladder rags for the Synod dinner, but a phone waved speculatively in the air seemed to do not badly, thank you.

Anyway, enough of the formalities. Argyll is unlike the more urban dioceses in that it holds its synodical gatherings over three days. After all, people take to planes and boats to get there - it seems only fair to give them a decent time to socialise, no? And anyone who cares to can attend, especially the pre-Synod day. This year's speaker, Ann Morisey, was the best yet. She talked about the Ages of our lives - not seven, as Shakespeare described them, nor the three of past generations, but the four ages we now see living: children (dependant); adults (generative, working); the active retired (new!); the old (dependant, letting-go). And of course, more than half of her listeners were the active retired on whom the church depends, and of whom, dear reader, I am one.

I'm not going for a blow-by-blow here. But I started thinking about the business of loss of status - the loss of status that is part of letting go. We all, I suppose, acquire varied status during our lives, and some people have the dickens of a job letting it go. Retirement can spell doom and depression for some, rather than joyous freedom. Men seem more bothered than women. I also thought about the things that apparently keep us going for longer - singing seems to be one, dancing another, and church membership and activity seems to be jolly good for one.

But this status thingy. People acquire status in church circles - and suffer a new bereavement when it is taken from them. We all know the criticism voiced of people who hang onto jobs in church - but do we think of why these jobs are so dear to these people? Should we all be practising letting go of things, sitting lightly on our little importances so that the wrench will be less?

Maybe it depends on why we do these things in the first place. And an echo of the instruction to pray secretly in your own room comes to me when I think of this. We do love to dress up in our church, and there is much to be said for the depersonalisation of the individual that is one result of this. But I wonder if every one of us, for our own future good, needs to think about why we cling to our assumed responsibilities.

In a voluntary organisation there will always be a need for someone to step forward. There was much talk this year of ridgewalking, with all the excitement and danger that the term implies. Suddenly it feels as if the diocese has set off on its precarious ridge walk with a song in its heart - and the Third Age to the fore.

Seeing the daffodils

Yesterday I posted about suddenly realising I could still feel what it was like to experience the world as when I was a child. And today I read the next bit in Michael Mayne's This Sunrise of Wonder and began to think again about this business of how we see the world around us. Is it simply the realisation that our time here is so limited - and getting shorter by the day? Is it also the fact that as we shed responsibilities - job, mortgage, family, aged parents - we are allowed to become like children again? (And if so, it's the best argument yet for not raising the retirement age).

Anyway, this is what John Updike has to say on the matter: (and yes, Mayne is quoting Updike; I'm not quite at the bonkers stage yet) :

Like my late Unitarian father-in-law am I now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather - that pathetic discovery which the old make that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience, that all species of tree and weed have their signature and style and that the sky is a pageant of clouds. Ageing calls us ... into the lowly simplicities that we thought we had outgrown as children ... The act of seeing is itself glorious.

Today, the sky is a perfect blue. The sea is darker, and in the open water there are small, north-wind-driven waves. But under the wall that faces the sun, there are daffodils in bloom.

LIfe in the bubble of wonder

On the boat
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Do you remember being a child? Oh, yes ... all these years ago ... But do you really remember? Do you ever find yourself re-inhabiting that wonderful bubble that could enclose you when you were small, when your imaginative world was the be all and end all; when the world of adults was an enabling machine, but little to do with you? Or are you so caught up in the business of being a grown-up that the bubble has long since burst, scattered like the rainbow, now only a damp circle on the concrete of your life?

I'm reading Michael Mayne's book This Sunrise of Wonder - at last, Jim, if you're reading this! - and it's fair got me thinking. Especially after last weekend, when I was visiting a Thomas the Tank Engine paradise with my four grandchildren and their assorted parents. Before we all headed away from the hotel and the theme park, we spent a couple of hours in a nearby playpark. The contrast with the theme-park rides was striking. Yes, there were swings and roundabouts, but there were also climbing frames and the wonderful galleon in the photo. And it was the galleon that kept all four of them playing together the longest. I could hear the oldest allotting roles to the others, who weren't really paying much attention; the smallest child was ferrying sand to the top of the chute that is just visible exiting the hull in the bottom corner; another had purloined a bottle of water the better to demonstrate the drainage the same chute afforded. There was another hiding under the deck, and the strange child that found himself in the middle of the gang was pressed into service as a pirate. And no-one wanted to come away.

And the combination of the book and the grandchildren's enjoyment of imaginative play brought an epiphany. I could remember my childhood bubble. And what was better: I could remember it in such a way that I could feel it again, feel it the way I did when I was under ten (the family moved house when I was ten; it's a useful watershed in my library of mental images of childhood). Here are some of the stand-outs:
  Sitting on the grass in front of our holiday house in Arran, around 6pm on the first of July, gazing at the hills at the head of Glen Cloy, smelling the bog-myrtle on the breeze, ready to burst with happiness because the summer was a lifetime long and I was back in the place I loved more than any other.
 Walking behind the rest of my family after a trip to the cinema - alone, because I was in a movie and Byres Road was actually Dodge City and a dangerous environment.
  Playing under and on top of the kitchen table, because it was a boat. The trick was to get onto the top without falling into the sea of the rest of the floor.
  Spending hours in a hollowed-out rhododendron bush with a few friends as the Arran rain teemed down, happy as could be because our 'house' kept the rain out.
  Looking forward to time alone - on a bus, on a train, in my bed - because I wanted to "think" - which I now realise was re-entering a bubble which was always there.
  Climbing rocks on the shore in the conviction that I was on a sheer rock-face on some distant mountain.

I could actually go on all day. Even writing these makes me feel I want to go out to play. The point is that it was all wonderful. Imagination took me way beyond what anyone else would have seen. On the odd occasion when I have a grandchild to myself, I like to put that child into a situation where they too will wonder at something I love - is this because I now need an excuse to be child-like?

Dammit. I don't need excuses. I'm fortunate in that I worked with young people for my whole life - ok, they were teenagers, not tots, but they were amazingly easy to make young again with a little encouragement. I was able to avoid growing up. I grow old, I grow old ... but I'm not going to succumb to the equivalent of Eliot's rolled trouser-bottoms: no. I may have reached the cardigan/tweed skirt era beloved of a previous grown-up generation, but there's nothing appealing there. Who cares what the world thinks?

I've had a taste of life in the bubble again. The life of wonder has been re-awakened, and it's ... wonderful.

Just war memories in Lent

I went to the first meeting of the Lent Course today and found myself involved - or perhaps trying not to get too involved, or trying not to talk too much which is an associated matter - in a brief discussion of Just War Theory. I first came across this a long time ago, when I attended my first RCC* in Edinburgh and had to second a motion put by the man who many years subsequently became our bishop. At the time of agreeing, I hadn't realised that seconding a motion would mean rather more than simply sticking my hand up, and I was horrified to find out that I was expected to speak to the gathering for about 10 minutes.

Of course, once I had prepared what I wanted to say, and typed it out double-spaced on, I think, A5 sheets of paper, I found the whole thing rather shockingly enjoyable. At the time, I had not yet returned to teaching after the weans, and it had been some six years or so since I had addressed a class, but the combination of a microphone, a largish audience and the applause at the end proved irresistible. It was also the fatal move that had me not only going along to a local CND group (in 1980 this was quite radical in a US Navy garrison town) but also becoming publicly vocal, and TV and radio interviews followed, as well as requests for copy from Peace News and other publications. Heady stuff, which didn't end till the navy left and I was not anywhere to be seen in the public deliberations of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

I went to Greenham Common too ...

It fascinates me now to see how mainstream such thinking has become in church circles, how we can discuss the ethics of Christians and violence without polarisation. My disappearance from church matters was directly linked to my CND activities, and I didn't enjoy much of the fallout. But today I relived that early introduction to the dilemmas of violence and proportionality, and I felt glad that I'd gone through the four minutes to midnight era and emerged into the morning.

But I do love a good demo ...

*Representative Church Council - where most of the laity functioned. The Provincial Synod at the time had 10 lay members, if I remember correctly - I was one of them.

A fashion for penitence?

Ash Wednesday. It snowed all morning, and now the rain is washing down the windows - but judging from the whiteness of the roofs opposite my study, it may not be enough to wash away the snow that can make the last bit of the walk - or drive - to church interesting. And as we don't have a car at the moment (it's a bit broken) we may end up walking. I'd call it the first of my Lenten penances, but I'd be less than truthful, for I'd be quite happy to have to walk somewhere on a day when I've not been over the door yet. It seems perverse to do something like that for pleasure in such weather, but for the Imposition of Ashes - well, I could make that sound noble, could I not?

So where am I going with this? To a question: did we always hear so much about "giving up something for Lent"? (It may well be that we just hear more about everything in the Times of Twitter, but that's another kettle of communications). Brought up in a questioning Presbyterian environment, I never even heard about Lent - not at home, not at school. There was one girl who appeared with ash on her head and tales of an exotic church where people dressed up and had wine out of gold cups, but at ten I tended to write her off as a romantic. Having spent my first years in the privation of post-war rationing (I mainly remember the butter ration of a "big week" and a "wee week" and the sweets that had to be hoarded before we went on holiday as we couldn't get them on Arran), I wasn't about to enquire about self-induced abstinence, and my parents never mentioned it.  And then I became a Piskie.

Nothing changed, at first. But a friendship with a clergy family who arrived here - kids the same age as ours, one just starting school - made me aware that other people Did Things Differently. Mainly it was the booze and the chocolate thing, presented as firmly and as unquestioningly as the need to clean one's teeth regularly. It began to seep in to my consciousness. Should I try this?

Now, this is where I ought to lead on to a life spent enjoying increasingly holy Lenten observances and self-denial, but it wasn't quite like that. In fact, it barely registered as more than an annual niggle, like a transient toothache. Not that I didn't give it a go, once. At the time I had returned to teaching and came home ravenous for a quick snack at lunchtime. I got into the habit of finishing off with a Twix (remember them? Not the big double one, but the smaller fun-sized one - no excess here). One Lent, I decided I enjoyed this so much I'd give it up, and eat a banana instead. Six weeks on, I discovered I'd become addicted to bananas instead, and had lost a pound or two. I'd also gone off Twixes. Not much self-denial there, eh?

On another occasion, I was spending a couple of nights at the house of dear friends who gave me these mini-holidays as I recuperated from surgery. Usually we had a drink with dinner, or just before it. Then Lent hit. And there I was, on a Monday evening, really wanting a drink. No, I don't have a problem - I'd just spent a week in hospital with nary a drop - but the more I realised they had no wine, no sherry, the more desperate I became. To cut a long and potentially embarrassing story short, I ended up with an elderly can of Guinness which had lurked in the back of their fridge since the visit of a son at Christmas.  I rarely drink Guinness, but ...

But to retreat from the anecdotal: There are several things that I'm not liking about my current awareness of Lent. People post on their Facebook status that they're about to give up ... whatever ... for Lent; others make sure they tell you why they won't have a glass of wine, thank you (all very proselytising - or is it?); there are jokes by the thousand (the Pope's imminent retirement provides the meat for this year's). Whatever happened to the idea of praying secretly in your closet? The entire Anglican community (I exaggerate) - to say nothing of RCs - seems to erupt in the twitter-era equivalent of sackcloth and ashes. Or people tell you what they're "taking on" instead, with the expectation that you'll match them.

But I won't. Because I don't think I'm asked to do any of these things. So I can tell the world that I have been practising portion control for 7 months and have lost 9 lb as a result - but that was for me, not for God. And besides, I feel smug about it. I've started reading "War and Peace" - but that's because I feel ignorant, and I feel it's something to do before I die (I could die trying...). And success may well make me feel smug. Again. I could give up my one drink a day, or my one chocolate a day - but I don't think that would make any difference to anything at all.

This is our life. We're given it as a gift, given the world and its beauty, given minds, tastes, delights, friends ... I know this. I don't need to turn from any of it to know it better.

Since I began writing this post, I have heard that the car is still poorly and in bits at the garage. So we shall be walking the half-mile up the road in the slush to church. Just remember - it's not a penance. Not for me. I shall enjoy it.

Pure dead relevant

The other evening - well, more like teatime - I attended an Information Evening in the University of Glasgow Medical School, the atrium of whose new building appears left. For several years now I have supported the Beatson Pebble Appeal, and now that the new building is in place, I have transferred that support to work in cardiac and stroke research. Call it enlightened self-interest. An agreeable spin-off from this comes in the shape of invitations to interesting events in the University, of which the other evening was an example. (Sadly, I can't go to the one of the future of print media - I'd be better informed at that!)

I've decided I like going back these days, though buildings like this have transformed the campus from my student days. I found it personally fascinating to sit in a lecture theatre and be enthused about a subject of which I know next to nothing, and to talk to researchers about their work - the two I spent some time with did a pretty good job of making their specialisms intelligible to an ignoramus like me. Clever, enthusiastic, committed people - what's not to like?

I have to add here that I share Mr B's sense of the evening's reminding him of those tales of a pal of a med student who donned a white coat and snuck into an operating theatre only to pass out at the sight of blood - so many of the guests were obviously medics, some of them possibly of Lister's era (I exaggerate, but ...) who had at least a handle on what was happening. I felt the need to preface every conversation with the apology "We're Arts graduates, but ..."

But it made me think. What use had my degree been to anyone? The Medical School is enormous and forward-looking and I'm glad - but I studied English Lit., Early English language, Latin ... cui bono? So that I can use tags like that and know why? So that I can slip bits of Shakespeare or Eliot into a Tweet and wonder if anyone will notice? I know that there are things going on inside my mind that are informed by what I learned all those years ago - but what did I ever do with them, what help were they to my fellow-creatures?

That's where I'm stuck at the moment. It must be wonderful to do something that directly affects life itself. One of the speakers on Wednesday had been delayed because he'd been called away to see a new stroke patient - how good to feel that something you know or propose might mean the difference between that patient's recovering or not. How completely relevant to us all. Does it matter (I ask myself) if that doctor lapses into comma-splice in a communication?

They served some mean canapés afterwards as well.

Talking posh

Just before I left the house this morning, I caught a snatch of Call Kaye on the radio. Should we be insisting that our children talk 'properly'? Sadly, in Scotland that tends to mean adopting a Pan Loaf accent - and, worse, using the first person of the personal pronoun regardless of grammatical context. And so it was, as I hovered over the off switch, that I heard with a crushing sense of inevitability a brief skit of a family scene. Pan loaf Mum, Glesgae Dad, silent wean. Mum: "You don't want to disgrace your father and I."

Grrrrr.


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Location:Dunoon ferry

Rebus in arduis *

It's Sunday. You've celebrated Candlemas, because you could - a day late, but in the boondocks you can't celebrate too often and get people there. It's been a joyous service, and at least one person has confessed to having their heart up in the air and tears running down their face because of the music. So you're happy. Actually, you were happy before they said that, in all sorts of ways involving children, young people capable of reading the lectionary as if it made sense, lovely imagery, a vision of how things can be ... I could go on, but I suspect I already have.

And then you go to the social area at the back of the church, greet someone standing alone - not a stranger, someone who's been coming on and off for decades - and he informs you, quite firmly, that he didn't know any of the hymns except for the first one and he'd hated them all anyway.

Time was I'd have felt wounded at that moment, for church sometimes leaves you vulnerable to the kind of barbs we don't often get thrown these days. But I've been around a lot of barb-fests, and I merely, mildly even, point out that what he derides as "happy clappy" music didn't form part of my tradition either (Church of Scotland, seduced by singing Byrd and Palestrina, in Latin) and that Mr B never chose happy crappy (sic) music and that this chap should perhaps widen his horizons ... Again, I could go on. I did, a bit - something about singing sentimental verse full of lamentable poetic diction set to dreary tunes - but I won't.

But I do wonder, sometimes often, about the future of parish worship. If I were faced with the prospect of worshipping where there was a diet of Victoriana, badly played at funereal tempi, led, perhaps, by a choir whose sopranos had voices that weren't, any more, I think I'd give up. On t'other hand, if there was an indifferent praise band with a very powerful amplifier, I fear it too would drive me away. So what am I looking for?

Easy. Either a competent musician, on any instrument, who has the gift of inspiring people to sing (and that often comes down to rhythm) - or silence. We sing too many hymns, mostly - and this is especially evident when actually hardly anyone sings anyway. They leave it to someone else. And I'm looking for hymns whose words are theologically meaningful, whose imagery I relate to, which don't ask me to think that God made us high and lowly and so on. I reckon that hymns tend to reflect the folk music of their day. That being the case, we shouldn't object to the odd bit of syncopation here and there. They also tend to reflect the world which informs their words - so we balk these days at singing that all must love the human race "in heathen, Turk or Jew", and some of us at least rejoice in discovering the songs of Christians in other countries, because the world has shrunk and we have access to a far wider song-pool than we did a century ago.

I didn't let all of this fly at the misery in the church; I'm letting go here instead. I didn't even ask him what made it all right for him to girn this way at someone who doesn't actually choose the music but who obviously had enjoyed singing it - or even just at someone who had offered him a friendly greeting.  Long ago I made the decision to try to be Pollyanna till I got home - or to keep out of the way of temptation if I felt unduly volatile.

 But sometimes, just sometimes, I want to throw something.

*Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem : Horace. Means Remember to keep an even temper in difficult situations.