vinculafido

  As I write, it’s only a week until the Coronation of King Charles when earthly and heavenly kingdoms will seem to touch.   Charles officially becomes Head of the Church of England. We state our allegiance to him, fingers crossed or not. He re-states his allegiance to almighty God. On the day, most people watching probably won’t be thinking much about any of this. Rather more perhaps about the expression on the Duke of Sussex’ face, or what Katharine’s wearing. Travel guide The geography of the Kingdom Is complicated. As you know, There are rivers of mercy and Unexpected springs of grace. The fields are invariably white unto harvest And the views from the heights unparalleled. But. Every valley is likely to be exalted. At short notice Every mountain and hill may be made low. The rough places may look plain but Stumbling and falling In these green pastures is not unknown. Suddenly You may find yourself out of your depth, And crying out Fro...

   'Into the woods without delay, but careful not to lose the way, Into the woods, who knows what may be lurking on the journey. Into the woods to get the thing that makes it worth the journeying Into the woods to see the King… …Into the woods then out of the woods, and home before dark.’   …so sings the company in Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful musical. Nursery rhymes have their dark side. Through them we confront our fears, still children at heart. Better that than tangling with the nightly recitation of all that's worst through violent TV fiction and sensationalised news. Once upon a time, I tried reading Sartre’s La Naus é e but couldn’t finish more than a chapter or two. These days I’ve my own version of the hero (anti-hero)’s disorientation, which I’m calling ‘La News é e’ . Listening and reading Stuff of the Day, I often quite literally feel queasy. So here I am entering the woods, or more precisely Rockingham Forest, or more precisely what’s left of it....

  You’re probably walking over archaeology every step of the way near Castor: houses, industry, graves. Think of the number of people who’ve lived hereabouts, compared with the number of known burials. The way out towards the river is down ‘Port Lane’, but how far did the navigable water come towards the present-day town in ancient times? The field I’m walking through is called ‘Normangate’ . The adjacent Roman town, Durobrivae, is on the far side of the Nene, near Water Newton. Before I reach the river there’s a sign warning of new excavations near the HT line on my footpath. And over there are the remains of Ermine Street, standing proud on the landscape for a few hundred metres. Later on, I stand at a badger sett on the old road’s side and inspect the scrabbled-out   gravel at its entrance to see if the animals have unearthed a Roman brooch or a fourth century coin, but of course they haven’t.   Ermine Street near Castor There’s a lively, chilly west wind in my fac...

So here I am in Peterborough again. I stop at the front of house and talk to Lesley who works as a volunteer one morning a week. She also does some Cathedral guiding. Here’s the tomb of Katharine of Aragon – not the original, which was trashed by Cromwell’s iconoclasts. It’s a slight enough thing for a Queen. You see the pomegranates which have been left for her? Katharine lived in Granada as a child. In adult life she often wore a pomegranate brooch.   Katharine was Henry VIII’s first wife. We tend to forget Henry was her second husband. At the age of sixteen, she’d married his older brother Arthur, the King that never was. Maybe that ultimately preserved her life for a few more years. Although she couldn’t produce a male heir for Henry, perhaps there was too much weight of family tradition to do away with her. Or perhaps she was already ill when Henry cast her aside. Yet alongside those past tragedies, she had to watch Henry take a mistress, had her marriage annulled, and suf...

  Hello friends old and new!   Sixteen months ago I finished the Big Walk I began in 2016, visiting every Anglican church in the Diocese of Peterborough – all four hundred of them.   Now I’m back on the road, this time symbolically linking our own diocese to its neighbours. I’ll start in Peterborough, and work my way back to our ‘new’ home parish of St. Mary’s Morcott, in Rutland, before setting off across our small ‘multum in parvo’ county towards Leicester. After that, we’ll have to see what happens.   Lincoln? Oxford? Coventry? Ely? At the age of 71, it’s more Cardinal Newman than Fleetwood Mac, ‘One step enough for me’, rather than ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’ … Stuff has happened since I staggered into Peterborough Cathedral in late 2021. Sue and I have qualified as licensed ‘lay worship leaders’. Sue has become churchwarden in Morcott. We have a new vicar in the Welland Foss benefice, and we’ve lost an ‘e’ from the end of our benefice name. (It tur...