CRAZY, CRAZY NIGHTS

 

On a crisp and sparkling morning, I cross the canal bridge where Woolsthorpe’s wharf would have been. As soon as I hit the towpath, there are John and Dave, both uber-cheerful and by their accents, neither of them from round here. John twits me about the compass dangling conspicuously from my neck.  ‘You won’t be needing that’, he says. ‘Well, I might, if I go ‘off piste’,  I counter. ‘Not much chance of snow today,’ says he.  And so on.  

They’re volunteers for the Grantham canal, the restoration of which is an ongoing project. You can walk its length, pretty much, but it’s closed off at the West Bridgford (Nottingham) end, and also as it arrives near Grantham, because the big gorilla of the A1 blocks the way. Today the only barges working it are for pleasure, courtesy of the Grantham Canal Society. They provide income to support the restoration, and the 2024 season begins this Sunday at Woolsthorpe’s ‘Dirty Duck’, so get yourselves down there, folks!  The canal was constructed in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The premise was to distribute coal more efficiently than could be done by road. The workers’ cottages I see later at Harlaxton’s ‘The Drift’ are dated 1820, before the railway boom which began the canal’s decline. Too little product, and too slow compared to the iron horse. Eventually and inevitably the canal was closed to boats in 1936.

John served in the Falklands, although he pitched up after the conflict had ended.  He remembers the total clarity of the night sky, ‘like a velvet cloth’, and the abundant wild life. He and Dave invite me to join them in the volunteering. From busy-ness I have to politely decline, although I should think the craic at the Dirty Duck would be pretty good, and perhaps the occasional glass might be raised after all the hard labour.

In Denton church

I needed something to jolly me along, in view of the latest C .of E. news. The clergy of the Lincoln Diocese have been away on a conference at Swanwick, and at our local zoomed Morning Prayer a friend tells us one delegate vicar had afterwards shared that they were now personally overseeing 36 churches. This is unsustainable, and very sad.  But is it any more logical for us to complain than if we’d been canal-owners in the early twentieth century? Maybe the die is now cast.

Nationally, a number of stories are breaking which should be a cause of anxiety. Firstly, and in a way trivially, wedding photographers are cross that clergy lay down rules about what they can and can’t do during the service. Apparently, brides’ big days are being spoiled. Having watched some of the snappers at work from close quarters, having been filmed without my permission while playing for some happy couples, having been kept waiting for more than half an hour for the arrival of more than one bride, I’m not overly impressed. Frequently we’ve been there for one purpose, and they for quite another. But.  Very few choose to get married in church these days. Are we bothered?  Yes, of course, because God is being shut out of so many relationships from the very start.

Two far more difficult matters.  The Church Commissioners through a committee chaired by Bishop Rosemarie Mallett have announced that the £100 million the Church is setting aside to make constructive penance as a result of its historic involvement in the slave trade is not sufficient.  They propose that the sum should be £1 billion.  I’m not privy to the depth of the C. of E.’s pockets, but I’d hazard a guess that this would bankrupt us, and mean a countrywide collapse of our national expression of faith. So, is it revenge which motivates Bishop Rosemarie?  I say it again at the expense of being boring, but the purpose of this blog to make a plea that we’re better together and better in colour i.e. in diversity of approach.

And finally, Sir Paul Marshall, co-owner of GB News, prominent supporter of HTB ministries, and the finance behind the now dominant clergy training centre of St. Mellitus College, has deleted his tweeting history in view of his ‘liking’ clear, even vehement anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant comments made by others.  To someone with my background this nexus of connections is sinister. It implies a politicised wing of the Church is moving away from the rest of us, or worse, is achieving large-scale entryism. After eight years of saying so, I maintain better together etc., but is there a point where this too becomes unsustainable, and I have to change my way of thinking?

The canal walk towards Harlaxton is beautiful: a variety of hills and meadows to admire, then a section surrounded by a belt of woodland, until in a cutting I turn south up The Drift to the Gregory Arms for a J2O - in the absence of my preferred ginger beer. The last song on the pub’s playlist is the rampant individualism of ‘Crazy, crazy nights’:  they try to tell us that we don’t belong/ but that’s all right, we’re millions strong / you are my people, you are my crowd/ this is our music, we love it loud / yeah, and no one’s gonna change me, cause that’s who I am, uh!  And that was 1987.  I never saw it coming…

St. Mary and St. Peter’s Harlaxton is a gorgeous space. I eat a sandwich and pray for the benefice of which it’s part. There was money in the endowment of this generous building. The massive pile of Harlaxton Manor, which from a distance and with my less-than-20/20 vision looks like a Cambodian temple, is now owned by the Methodist foundation of the University of Evansville in Indiana. Now is that weird or what?

My boots are cutting me. I stop in a bus shelter and re-strap my right ankle, and then set off through copious mud at Village Farm to take a turn round picturesque Denton Reservoir. After the rains, the top of the ground is just beginning to turn from sloppy to tacky, but underneath everything’s still sodden. In Denton, I notice that the cottages built from the fragile local sandstone (?) are all well pointed, and St. Andrew’s church is in good order too. I grind up the short climb away from the village and turn down the old tramway, now a cycle path, which used to serve the local quarries. In due course I turn north again, up ‘Sewstern Lane’, an ancient north-south drovers’ track.  Once it has climbed to regain the road, I quickly dive into the woodland along the ‘Jubilee Way’ to emerge above Woolsthorpe.  The ending of many walks is disappointing, because I’m tired, dirty or hungry: just getting back to the car is enough.  Not so today. In the late afternoon sun, the view across the valley to Belvoir Castle is stunning with Woolsthorpe, yes, and its church of St. James looking cosy and welcoming. Dear Duke.  How about putting some money into Woolsthorpe’s church? Dear residents, whatever’s happened in the past, how about some loving restoration of fabric and morale, just like John, Dave and others down at your canal?

What you need to know about what follows is that ‘balm’ was a famous product of the land around Jericho in biblical times. These places have always been contested. Today, of course, Jericho lies in the West Bank of Palestine.

Woolsthorpe 

Still

is there no balm in Gilead?

No peace, no calm?

We cannot heal the wounds,

bind up the broken hearts.

Our convoys cannot reach

the barriered parts which need our aid.

 

You think I may mean Palestine?

I do,

but my alerting cry

comprises matters local and mundane.

Each day reveals a bloodied British face,

reports another night of neighbour’s pain.

‘Why have you left me?’

troubles every little place.

 

The scars are slow to heal,

worn as marks of pride.

The rising generation feels

they are not just unless they too are torn.

The vicious tide returns;

old resentments hungrily re-learned.

 

Though IT replicates the harm,

we live beside the antidote;

the Spirit hovering

sounds her note of grace;

her nature is to make us whole and bless.

We have to do one thing:

acknowledge and say yes –

and understand our Jericho is immanent,

ever close at hand.

Woolsthorpe – Harlaxton – Denton reservoir – Denton – Woolsthorpe

19 km. 5.5 hrs. Beautifully sunny but fresh: a little cloud early in the afternoon. Max 10deg C.

 As ever, I know you know this, but all material © Vince Cross

‘Crazy, crazy nights’ was a no. 4 for the American glam-rockers ‘Kiss’ in 1987, though it passed me by at the time. Kiss’s biggest hit was Russ Ballard’s song ‘God gave rock n’roll to you’, which in their version is just magnificent swaggering nonsense. ‘Crazy, crazy nights’ is slightly more restrained, and straight out of the Diane Warren playbook (Cher/ Bon Jovi et al)  such that you know exactly when and where the guitar solo, the breakdown, and the key change in the last choruses are going to come. I know I shouldn’t like it, but I do.