DECK OF CARDS

 

I negotiate refuse trucks and nervous drivers and then find a safe place to park in Coleby’s narrow streets. It’s said there can be distant views of the Boston Stump if you go to the village junction with the A607, but though the pollution cloud of the last few days has cleared and the morning is bright, there’s still too much haze to see that far.

The path is flat today along the top of the ‘Cliff’s’ little escarpment, so I’m taking it easy in Merrells. Across the green I pass an enormous disconnected arch at the back entrance to Coleby Hall. Does it celebrate some battle triumph of an erstwhile owner? Maybe they saw action at Waterloo or Crècy, or would have liked to. The stones which support its span are huge, robbed out from some grand long-gone building. I head north, fields to my right and a secluded tennis court to my left.  The crops are mown to stubble now, and there’s been no rush to plough them in. In the end, after all the dampness earlier in the summer, the harvest seems to have been safely gathered, although I guess yields were variable. For all its bluster and telly exaggeration, ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ has done us a service in airing issues about land use and the value of food. The BBC’s ‘Country File’ is also very good, particularly when its presenters are those who’ve actually put in the hard yards. As Bruce Forsyth might have observed, ‘Adam’s my favourite’. That’s Adam Henson, whose farm is a little to the west of Clarkson’s. Of course, my personal consciousness about farming matters has been raised since living in Rutland, but it needed to be.

Jeremy Clarkson has lived where he now farms for a fair while – famously he was a clubbable neighbour of David Cameron down Witney-way during the noughties – so perhaps he never needed converting from an urban lifestyle. Most recent governments including the current one sometimes appear not to be able to see beyond Willesden: they don’t accept that for our nation to be healthy and secure we need to work with something very close to the current balance between town and country. ‘Just give us one per cent more of the land’, they say, ‘it won’t make any difference…’  Oh, but it will, Sir Keir, it will. As I’ve said before, we ought to worry that ‘solar farms’ are a Trojan horse or a hostage to fortune:  brown fields-in-waiting. 

It would be fun to put Jezza through a lay worship-leader’s course, and send him to a rural parish to supplement the ministry of the dwindling ordained priesthood.  Let’s call it, ‘Clarkson’s Church’. The rest of the cast could be happily drawn from desperate churchwardens, kindly disposed yet incompetent bureaucrats at Diocese Central, cheerful but uncomprehending parishioners, funeral directors with a morbid sense of humour, resistant DACs etc. etc.  - with the resultant fun and games being wrongly reported in the National Press.  Here’s my pitch: 

Ep. 1 :  Jez sacks the organist, and brings in a local blues band to play for the services.  Half the congregation leaves. The church is blacklisted by the Musicians Unions for not paying the proper rates. The band breaks up, citing musical differences, leaving only the bass player to accompany the hymns. The organist is reinstated on double fees.

Ep. 2: The church appeal is failing miserably to gather sufficient funds to pay the Parish Share. Jez seeks to solve the problem by starting a major marijuana growing operation in the Church Hall, unaware that this is illegal. On the contrary, he argues, the enterprise will encourage a whole new demographic into church membership. And indeed, the lovely new, particularly fragrant incense goes down well with the congregation. But everyone falls asleep during the sermon.

Ep. 3: It’s time for the annual Pets’ Service. The Jezmeister calls up his old mates down on the Farm. When the trailers bringing the animals arrive, the goats eat everything in the vicarage garden, escaped Belted Galloways cause gridlock on the surrounding roads, two ostriches flatten the Deputy Lord Lieutenant’s Aston Martin, and the church needs a deep clean after an outbreak of porcine flatulence.

Ep. 4: A minor earthquake causes the church to be condemned. The whole religious operation has to shift to the ‘Waggon and Horses’, which happens to be situated next to a Paul Hollywood-endorsed bakery.  Bread and Wine on tap, you see.

And so on…

In All Saints’ Harmston, the church booklet mentions some names I know.  The Thorold family are important in the parish’s story, and their tombs are eminently placed near the altar.  Yet a Thorold also once owned the advowson of our own St. Mary’s, Morcott, nearly fifty miles away.  And priests towards the end of the nineteenth century included a Gilbert Arthur Heathcote - presumably of the famous Normanton (Rutland) family - and a George Charles Augustus Rowley, who may well be related to the folk who even today own Morcott’s Hall. The world of Anglicanism is a small one, as we found when we visited South Africa in the early eighties and kept running into people we knew or had known back home.

And on, across the fields to the outskirts of Waddington, which are spreading. We’re close to Lincoln now, not more than four miles really, so if you can stand the occasional racket of planes taking off and landing at the RAF base, this is a fine place to be. In St. Michael’s church I find Jo Duffield, churchwarden, and her happy team. They’re sorting and assembling items for a sale in a couple of weeks’ time. A plastic paddling pool lies across the pews, there are cuddly toys on the altar, the vestry is filled with sundry bags and boxes. Everyone is clearly enjoying what they’re doing.  The church is a solidly, stylishly built product of the nineteen-fifties: its predecessor was broken during an air raid in 1941. The village of Waddington suffered badly at that time, with many houses and the pub also victims of the bombing. St. Michael’s website proclaims a lively, open-hearted faith.

I’ve gathered that the viewing area for RAF Waddington on the A15 is closed (permanently?) so from the village I trudge a footpath across a field to the perimeter fence for a peek at what’s going on, which is precisely nothing. Ahead of me is the aeronautical analogue of Edward Thomas’ ‘Adlestrop’ although there’s no steam hissing. ‘No one left, and no one came on the bare platform’.  I can see two parked transport planes, and that’s it. Disappointingly not even the station security staff come to check me out, although presumably they can see me on their telly screens. And so I walk back to the village again, stumbling over bits of Roman Samian ware as I go.  Well, nothing remarkable about that, Ermine Street runs slap bang through the middle of the base.

 All things must pass. After eight and a half years church-crawling and blogging, this chapter in my life will finish once I reach Lincoln Cathedral at the end of my next walk. It’s been enormously entertaining and instructive, and I’m very glad I did it.  Thank you, if you’ve been a virtual companion.

It’s said that every politician’s life ends in failure: the journey is the thing. I think differently now about my advocacy for the idea that as Anglicans we’re better together.  However much I might want it to happen – in the sense that all wings of the Church could bury the hatchet and decide to move on together – I think the best that can be hoped for now is a loose coalition of separate institutions. I hope and believe the parish system will live on in some form, but for a while it may become more like a secret or underground Church.  Parish ministry will survive if we’re wise, because if Britain ever became severely dysfunctional, we might need it, as we needed it in medieval times.  Local churches are more planet-friendly. Nucleated communities are good for our mental health. They’re also scriptural. 

Notwithstanding, many other Christians who are now nominally under the Anglican umbrella will go on expanding their own thing, seeking security in numbers (and who can blame them for that?)  free of liturgical constraints (as they see them) or any hierarchical church governance.  I hope they rise to the challenge of putting theology and open-minded learning back into their enthusiastic worship, just as I hope the rump of parish Anglicanism finds a renewed passion for scripture, and a determination towards seven-day a week Christianity.

In all cases, I hope the various branches of the erstwhile Church of England resist the perennial temptation to circle the wagons and look inwards. Personally, I’ll also be praying for a revival in ministerial vocations, whilst hoping for a reformed (in the general sense) consideration of what our faith means by the term ‘priest’.  In fact I’d like to do away with the term altogether: too much baggage.

There’ll be an argument about who is leaving who – actually, there already is. We must also hope any dispute about who owns what isn’t too acrimonious, although I find it difficult to imagine it won’t be. 

For the moment I think the priority is to do the small things faithfully. We must do right by the people among whom we witness from day to day - to be faithful to God in the way Christians have always done – though you may not mean by that what I do.  Pray. Love God. Read the Bible. Ask each day what Jesus means to you. Be kind. Does that cover it?

Nevertheless, I’ll go on maintaining to anyone who’ll listen that we Anglicans would have been better together - as Britain would have been politically if Brexit had never happened (which was where my first walking blog came in!) We’ll also be  Better in Colour and Better than we think we are if we continue to remain in friendly dialogue.  The swallows and swifts have left our village this past week to begin their latest pilgrimage. I find it astonishingly moving to look at these tiny birds and think of the immensity of the journey they undertake. If in our worship we fail to replicate the staggering variety and beauty of God’s creation, we’re not doing our job.  Christians of all sorts make a much-underestimated contribution to society.

We have to keep saying these things, even when there’s criticism and pushback, because we’re still a superglue that holds civil life together worldwide.

But there’s still one more chapter of this blog to write… so TTFN.

Coleby – Harmston – Waddington – Harmston - Coleby

13 km. 4 hrs. 21 deg C. Fresh and sunny, with cloud slowly gathering.

‘Deck of cards’ is a weird period piece, not even pop in most people’s eyes.  It’s a fine example of a genre of spoken-word country I first encountered courtesy of ‘The Letter’, Pat Boone’s 1961 B-side to ‘Speedy Gonzales’, his biggest hit.  In numbers like ‘Deck of cards’,  it wasn’t that Tex Ritter, or Wink Martindale or Hank Williams couldn’t sing – but the storytelling was the thing. Not all stories make good lyrics.

Why include it here? Well, mostly just a joke. We have several decks of Waddington’s playing cards at home… and where have I just been?

But the song does say something about how faith relates to warfare and tragedy, and how faith and America have interacted. The action at Monte Cassino was awful, but no more awful than the events which have unfolded in eastern Ukraine and on the Gaza strip. And many of us find contemporary American Christianity a challenge.

This isn’t necessarily the weirdest country song which embraces faith.  For that I nominate ‘Drop kick me Jesus through the goal-posts of life’, which though not his song, was part of the repertoire of the late and lamented British country singer and comedian Hank Wangford.