Every day, all the usual heartbreaking news. In our own quite ordinary lives, endless stress, most of it pointless.. Sooner or later, somebody will buy the place we needed so we could WFH. (impossible in our dead zone) Hopefully, we’ll be able to sell soon, won’t have to pay triple tax. One day, urgent dental treatment will be over and paid for, and finally, we’ve found a plumber willing to take on our weird and ancient house. Oldest parts definitely the fossils in the floors. Runner up might be the Romano-British quern stone in the woodshed floor, and we’re not allowed to modernise either of those. Ditching an ancient and fractious WC is long overdue, and the washbasin that’s trying to escape from the wall. Dodgy bath too…. Running out of water every summer, why would anybody splash out on a new bathroom ? Miraculously, an appeal to .gov.uk worked. Better still, we were ordered to acquire adequate water storage. Exactly what we’d been trying to do for years. The law we had to obey dates from 1991, so Other Ranks of government had been ignoring it for more than thirty years. Which is more than enough politics, especially this year. ( See How to take on Authority and win, without getting arrested)
Magnificat ?
Q. If a dozen or more villages share two vicars, how many churches do they need ?
A.. Two might be the sane answer.
Especially in rural areas, with or without hills, churches tend to be old, cold, draughty, plagued with every kind of damp and rot, and far too often, empty. Luckily, as places of worship, they don’t pay tax, nor do vicars for their vicarages, but , especially when empty, churches can be ferociously cold, vicarages too. My favourite Christie vicar, the Reverend Julian Harmon called his cat Tilglath Pileser and his vicarage a ’ great rambling draughty place’, though his wife claimed to like living in a lovely big house, sleeping in a big cold room and lighting the boiler at half past six. A Murder is Announced, Agatha Christie, 1950.
In our valley the news was ominous. No more services ? Ever ? Outrageous ! Even if the outraged only managed church at Christmas, not even Easter or Harvest .
My self imposed embargo on all politics includes religious politics. Concentrate, instead, on what to do with an ancient, cold, damp religious building with wonderful acoustics so wonderful, you’d suspect it was designed to showcase the human voice, send a top F soaring to the hills, ad majorem Dei gloriam… as Bach used to write on his work.
What are churches best known for ? Music ! Singing ! Choirs !
Quite how this happened is a mystery, might even qualify as a miracle. How to recruit from a bunch of scattered individuals, all perverse enough to live miles from the nearest shop, pub, or phone signal, or anything so normal as a street, and persuade them to sing church music. To sing, we’d need to search for long lost voices, find a teacher, sign up for choir practice too, learning to sing again for the sheer joy of it. On a summer evening, in an ancient barn, vocal exercises, some crazy, some great fun, then sing My soul doth magnify the Lord, in the version by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, the Wilkie Collins of Victorian church music. Walking home, in the shivering scented evening, count the days till next week.
East of the Sun, West of the Moon, sat nav won't like that 