LOVE IS EMBARRASSING

 

Honington St. Nicholas

The drive up beyond Grantham this morning in the company of Nicky Campbell and his Radio  5 phone-in guests is depressing. Two subjects are aired. The much-heralded ‘Co-op Live’ mega-arena, due to open in Manchester a fortnight ago, has been cancelling gigs because the venue isn’t ready. In the course of Nicky’s morning conversations, it becomes apparent how much has been invested by the potential punters at Olivia Rodrigo’s scheduled performances, now no more. Heartbreak has been visited on families, and considerable money lost (some of it beyond the scope of re-imbursement). One family has been using the diarising of such events as a key part of the strategy for curing a thirteen year old’s anorexia.  A lone dissenting voice texts to say something to the effect of ‘Get over it. This is such a first-world problem…’. Campbell seems angered. ‘Have you no heart, man?’ he hollers at the unidentified contributor. Is the anger real or manufactured for his audience? And indeed, in the segment which follows, is his interest in, and tacit encouragement of tattooing equally disingenuous?  It’s news to me, but David Beckham is recording his life story by tattooed body modification. Again, a nay-saying listener volunteers the opinion that no one has ever been rendered more beautiful by a tattoo. Campbell shows some prurient interest about where individuals have caused their tattoos to be placed, and uses a coarse word to refer to his own backside. The two tattooing professionals refuse to indulge his enquiries, in one case amusingly mistaking ‘arse’ for ‘arm’.

Liking or not liking tattoos isn’t the point.  It’s the cost of this luxury, and the use of such body decoration as a psychological prop, which IMO are the more interesting aspects. Apparently, a day with a tattoo artist can set you back more than a thousand pounds, but then again, this pales into insignificance beside other cosmetic surgery, of which I suppose it’s a sub-set. With the cost of a packet of twenty fags hitting £15, perhaps a grand isn’t so very much… But yes, I agree, in yet another week of continuing world distress, the above are ‘first world’ phenomena. This was a pretty tawdry listening experience all round.

Sympathy is due to those who’ve lost money through the incompetence and commercial self-protection of others, and particularly to parents struggling with a young teenager’s acute psychological disorder, but this programme couldn’t have been better designed to show the difference between contemporary British social values and those of the struggling, sometimes retreating Christian Church.   ‘What would Jesus have said?’ is a valid question, but presumably it would have got short shrift from the Radio 5 production gatekeepers.

What a relief therefore to step up the path beside St. Wilfrid’s in Honington, into lush vegetation, with larks singing, and a pungency of wild garlic heavy on the morning air. The cloud is already lifting as I cross the field towards the Sleaford railway line, and then carefully follow the Lincoln road into Carlton Scroop.

There's a lot going on in Carlton Scroop

We play an occasional family game in which a fictional murder mystery story is populated by individuals with English place-names. Carlton Scroop would be a good candidate for inclusion, although equally well he might have been found in Trollope’s Barchester. A goodie or a baddie, do you think?  A friend once pointed out that in the US, given names and family names are so well mixed that they can be plausibly reversed…but this doesn’t work so well in Lincolnshire. I’m assuming that ‘Scroop’ is a family name, possibly a variation on ‘Scrope’. The motto of the Scropes is ‘Devant, si je puis.’ (forward, if I can…’) which is a lot of fun when one learns that ‘scrope’ may be an ancient word for ‘crab’ – and crabs of course, only move sideways.

After the ‘Lincoln Lawyer’ of which I’m a fan both in book and TV form, now the ‘Lincoln Cliff’, which separates the Vale of Trent from the Lincolnshire Wolds.  The benefice of churches which includes Carlton Scroop’s St. Nicholas, is (or was) the ‘South Cliff Villages Group of Parishes’. It may now have been more prosaically re-designated: ‘The Loveden Central Group of Parishes’, as a result of Lincoln Diocese’s reorganisation. If so, that’s a pity, because it seems to signify something less local, more bureaucratic.

God of concrete, God of steel...

As on my last walk, I now climb the Cliff, this time past the post-war microwave installation which towers above me as I toil up the brief, steep incline. Now the arable fields stretch away all around me, and I revel in the breezy warmth as I travel east and then north. A hare keeps company from the other side of a low wall, hopping over a couple of times to see whether things are more interesting where I am. Because I’m downwind, I’m allowed a closer look than would be usually afforded.

The track brings me to an untidy conglomeration of farm buildings and industrial units, and then I drop down again across the small enclosures of a riding school to an outdoor pursuits centre at Caythorpe Court, which looks as though it’s undergoing renovation. More fields follow once I’ve picked my way across the site, and very soon I’m at the haven of lovely St. Vincent’s church on the edge of Caythorpe itself. 

Caythorpe spire: another victim of past earthquake damage

Everything is right about this building and what it says to the world about our faith.  The words of welcome at its door are supported by the liveliness, thoughtfulness and beauty of the environment inside. The unusual double nave gives space and room to breath for the congregation, but the narrowness of the path to the altar must add a sense of mystery and importance to the eucharistic moment.  In short, almost any kind of worship one might wish to offer here is accommodated without fuss or difficulty. It was inspiring to sit for a while and drink it all in.  And hey, in all my walking I’ve never visited a church dedicated to my own nominal saint!

At prayer in Caythorpe

‘Never knowingly under-rehearsed…’ quips John,

Who has his priorities right;

encouraging us to sing the hard stuff

almost but not quite at first sight

in Uppingham’s soft Evensong light.

 

Cathedral choristers red-frocked and grave

give Britten, Panufnik and Dove:

flurries of notes that flutter around

the angels of stone which float above

congregations recapturing lost

innocence, faith and love.

 

Nostalgia and longing: two elements of song;

ingredients in a diet to help us thrive

while the mysterious Numen hangs overhead

and keeps us alive – just.

Ever under-rehearsed in prayer,

by grace we survive. 

(John Wardle is the Director of Music at Uppingham Parish Church. He is a fine musician and a real lover of music – these two things not being the same! He’s more daring than I could ever be as he flies into the unknown with his singers.)

Through Frieston, which is all of a part with Caythorpe, and up the slow incline to Hough on the Hill where Kev is minding the polling station in All Saints church.  Unsure of the etiquette/rules in this case, I sit on the convenient bench outside the church door, and chat when he emerges from the dark interior. I’ve just watched two octogenarians struggle up the steep church path, but there’ve only been about twenty in to vote so far ( it’s three o’clock) – but then this is simply an election for a Police and Crime Commissioner, and it’s hard to get much exercised about that – the man chosen by the Northampton electorate last time out proved to be a very poor choice by any standards, including those of his own party.  Kev served with the Artillery during the 80s, and enjoyed it. We talk about the delivery of ordnance, good memories, and Louth, whence Kev hails.

Hough was the site of a priory in medieval times. Nothing remains of it now, but oddly, there are architectural echoes in the buildings flanking the Grantham road, so I’d guessed this might be the case, before ever reading it was so. The walk back to the car is hot: I’m out of practice dealing with anything other than coolth. This was almost too far, today…

Honington – Carlton Scroop – Caythorpe – Hough on the Hill – Honington

19.5 km.  5.2 hrs.  Max 19 deg C.  a cooling breeze all day, particularly out of the valley.

‘Love is embarrassing’ comes from Olivia Rodrigo’s most recent album ‘Guts’. The line of descent in this song takes the listener from grandma-like Alanis Morrisette in a long-ago  generation to mum Avril Lavigne (‘Skater-boi’) in the one which followed twenty (!) years later in the early 2000s. Rodrigo herself acknowledges an admiration for Taylor Swift.   The image projected by all these artists combines a certain ‘don’t mess with me’, gritty, rock n’roll sensibility with the right to be youthfully pretty/sexy/feminine. In other words it’s reprising Shirley Conran’s ‘Superwoman’ idea for the 21^st Century.  You can have it all, kids. I don’t mean to be dismissive – that young women should still need that affirmation is a symptom of society’s continuing ambiguity about women’s rights and opportunities. But no Liv, love is not embarrassing.  The Church has unfortunately played its part in muddying the waters, so that people of all ages feel that it might be, or over-compensate by investing in a sugary, glitzy, Las Vegas version of what it is to love.  But as always let’s be provisional. Singers don’t always mean what they sing. Irony is alive and well.