Thurifer amuses himself during Lockdown
A tip of the Oxford cap (mortarboard) to Dr Serenhedd James for pointing me to a recording from 1950 of the 400th Anniversary of the Foundation of Sherborne School. The voices, enunciation, crisp articulation, sentiments of a different world an age long passed. A glorious rebuke to the feeble values of the present age, the language and ethos of no-platforming, strident sloganising, the woeful, slovenly articulation of glottal-stopped gibberish and cliché that passes for public discourse nowadays. It was also a revelation. I never thought to find anything in Dr Geoffrey Fisher’s oeuvre worth quoting yet in his address to the School, he said: “We can trust history, not as a fortuitous dance of leaves in the air, nor yet a predetermined mechanism but as the scene of a moral purpose, of a moral conflict in which man is engaged and in which each succeeding age takes its place in the unfolding of the purposes of God for man.” We might rediscover that there is a difference between erasing history and learning from history.
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During parliamentary debates in the mid 19th century on social legislation, not least sewers and drainage, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli commented that the Vulgate “vanitas, vanitatum, omnia vanitas “could now be read as, “sanitas, sanitatum, omnia sanitas.” The “lockdown” (another unpleasant addition to the lexicon) threatens to be permanent, but I shall not miss those locutions that caused me moments, well, hours, days of dyspepsia. Phrases I wish never to hear again: ramping up … wrapping our arms around (the economy) … doing the right thing … push back (i.e. disagree) … gaslighting (I am still not sure what that means) … world-beating, for some for some clapped-out-back-of-a fag-packet idea from some mountebank wide-boy/girl satrap who over-promised and under-delivered. I am a great admirer of Dr Jenny Harries (Deputy Chief Medical Officer) one of stars of the press conferences but, like all scientists, it seems, she began most answers with the word “So.” Why so? If anyone tries “to reach out” to me, they will have a slapped wrist. Why has a tick become an “uptick”? Is the opposite of “uptick” “downtick”? What happened to the trusty cross in red ink? What was wrong with rise and fall? I do not object to people “taking the knee” in a good cause but it is an awkward locution. Bend the knee I understand. Catholics are well used to genuflection. For the past year problems with my right foot meant this was denied me, I miss, more than I expected, this simple act of respect and adoration.
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Covid-19 was not the first and will not be the last pandemic. Much of the growth of Anglo-Catholicism in the 19th century could be attributed to the tireless pastoral work of many slum priests during outbreaks of cholera and other diseases. From this year’s lockdown one image captures something of that spirit. A priest of moderate Anglo-Catholic persuasion continued to celebrate Mass alone despite the advice not instructions from episcopal palaces. On Sundays, he said the Parish Mass and for an hour or so thereafter he sat in the church porch. There was constructed a modest altar on which reposed the Blessed Sacrament. Should parishioners pass through the cul-de-sac, after a whispered confession, the Sacrament would be administered. One Sunday this act of piety was accomplished against the background of a blazing row between residents of a nearby block of flats hurling oath-strewn insults from one balcony to another, a drug deal being successfully transacted on the corner and a devout parishioner arriving in collar and tie, black jacket, sponge-bag trousers, carrying a Boater. Not even Barbara Pym could have made it up. She would, I suspect, have approved.
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2020 bore the hallmarks of a lost year; the year that never was. The familiar signposts of life, all that we take for granted, and to which we gave scarcely a second thought, stopped. With what were we armed in our nothingness? I was consoled by reading this brief extract from a pastoral letter from Cardinal Robert Sarah, “[Each] time a priest celebrates the Mass or the Liturgy of the Hours, even if he is alone, he offers public and official worship of the Church in union with its Head, Christ, and on behalf of the whole Body.”
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The Bishop Fulham had issues with his mobile ‘phone earlier in the year. Fortunately help was at hand. The Church of England plc has a Help Line, accessible only by mobile ‘phone for “mobile ‘phone issue-related issues.” Once accessed a reedy, nasal announcement provides advice: “Close your mobile ‘phone. Do not enter your mobile ‘phone. Go the extra mile and smash your mobile ‘phone to smithereens. Once you have destroyed your mobile ‘phone and your credibility no-one will wish to contact you anyway. If further help is required send a messenger with a cleft stick to the House of Lords.”
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Social distancing is not easy if you lack spatial awareness. Seeing the Vicar and one of his Assistant Priests occupying each end of a short pew, I pointed out that they were not two metres apart. To help them visualise the required distance I asked them to imagine the Bishop of Fulham prostrate between them. Some bishops have their uses.
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My leafy suburb is now complete. At the beginning of autumn the latest must-have amenity opened: a dog café. I presume it is a restaurant for canines and not a description of the plat de jour. Bookings are taken for your dog’s “pawsome birthday.” I have not yet been in as I am still scouring the Battersea Dogs’ Home website for a suitable pooch.
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Edgar Lustgarten is a name from my youth brought back to mind by my discovery of an addition to my television menu of Talking Pictures (Freeview 81: Virgin 445: Sky 343). If you have happy memories of Saturday morning cinema, or the “pictures”, westerns, and tales of daring-do this is the channel for you. My particular favourites are Scales of Justice and Scotland Yard, two crime series narrated with delicious lugubrious eloquence by Mr Lustgarten. Murder figures highly and the dénouement invariably is that the perpetrators are “sentenced according to law.” In the earlier episodes when capital punishment was the outcome the final formulation is less squeamish. One of the joys is to identify actors who were once familiar figures, or those at the beginning (sometimes at the end) of their careers. Another is to see England in the 1950s in black and white. Police cars speed after criminals in virtually empty streets; social habits look decidedly quaint; landladies live up to every stereotype; police are beyond reproach. The pace of the films, the formality of the dialogue, the, frankly, wooden acting are a constant pleasure. If you like to wallow in nostalgia, here it is in spades.
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During lockdown I was particularly gratified to find this most admirable of channels repeating three significant formative cultural influences of my young life. William Tell – Sir Lancelot – Robin Hood. Yet, oddly, it was not those brave and selfless heroes, “loved by the good, feared by the bad” to which in childhood that I was drawn. Rather it was to the villains. The Sheriff of Nottingham, played by a lisping, silken smooth, gimlet eyed Alan Wheatley and above all to the enormous Landburger Gessler of Willoughby Goddard. His persistently futile attempts to capture William Tell were a staple of my childhood. He was frequently to be seen in those early days of television but had an even greater career on the stage. He was the first Cardinal Wolsey in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, a rôle I essayed myself as an adolescent. Then I was not quite as large as he was. In later years when I was shopping for a new pair of trousers a friend suggested that I better try the “Willoughby Goddard range.” Cruel but true. Born in 1926 Willoughby Wittenham Rees Goddard died in 2008. Thanks to Talking Pictures TV I have seen something of an unlikely childhood hero.
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There was also the opportunity to revisit House of Cards and wallow in the superb acting of Ian Richardson as the scheming politician Francis Urquhart. It held up well after so many years. Made in 1990, it was followed by To Play the King (1993) and The Final Cut (1995). I dipped my toe into the American version starring Kevin Spacey but he did not have Ian Richardson’s lethal charm. In comparison the BBC served up a poor, paltry, feeble offering in Roadkill which cluttered-up four Sundays in autumn. No doubt BBC panjandrums and the gods of Luvviedom know better than an ordinary punter like me but I have never quite seen the point of Sir David Hare as a playwright. This was played out at funereal pace, gloomy and predictable. Tin-eared dialogue, interspersed with screeds of lumpen explication which would just about pass muster for GCSE Politics, with no cliché knowingly overlooked. One character said she was cleverer than those in power yet was in prison passed by without authorial irony. I pitied the actors who could easily have been replaced by cardboard cut-outs. Not least poor Hugh Laurie, usually good value, who delivered lack-lustre prose with bored indifference. Come back from the dead Francis Urquhart, all is forgiven.
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Lockdown reading meant catching-up with books long on the shelves waiting for their turn. Mainly history and biography, with the occasional excursion into art and architecture. Crime novels for diversion and re-reading Barbara Pym after thirty years. One no-go area: I stopped reading Theology years ago. It never changes, and if it does, never for the better. My favourite line of the year was “a hacking cough developed from ten years of gasping disappointment.” (Rupert Everett) A close runner-up: “The Brethren [a local evangelical sect] had been hot on the sin of gambling, a vice on a par with adultery, sodomy. And not wearing hats to meetings.” (Ann Cleeves, The Long Call)
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There have been many deaths this year, too many, but among those many let these few whose paths crossed mine bear witness: Msgr John Klyberg: Canon Beaumont Brandie: Fr Geoffrey Kirk: Fr David Johnson: Fr Brian Findlay: Fr Colin Tolworthy: Fr Bill Scott: Fr Hugh Broad: Colin Niblett. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine : Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
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Our consolation can be found in the celebration of the Holy Child lying in a manger. Shepherds adoring, Kings bowing down, Blessed Mother and Saintly Father embracing him means that salvation has come into the world, death shall have no dominion. A Happy and Blessed Christmas and New Year.