Tag: Parish ministry

Wassailing – let the season begin!

Some of the revellers watching the draw for the wassail King and Queen in the orchard behind the pub on Saturday

I’m not sure if the bloke in the stovepipe hat above was representing the Engineering Section of the Cider Club as Brunel, but as you can see, Littleton people – and lots from elsewhere – went the extra mile on Saturday night and turned up in proper mummers’ costume and makeup. It can be extremely cold in late January but if there’s a clear sky we often enjoy a perfect moonrise over the orchard just as the volley of blank, black powder shots are fired of to scare the demons away. Sparks and flames light the sky and we all get going on the saucepans and empty barrels while cheering lustily, fuelled by a variety of ciders. Lifesaver – the original cider – comes in at a modest 4% but there’s also Lifetaker which – our son reliably told us – is nearer 10%. I used to love cider but as I’ve got older it seems to have taken against me and in any case I’m usually driving so I have a perfect excuse not to make myself ill. Someone there liked it so much they’ve even had themselves tattooed.

Of course these ancient celebrations of the New Year – Plough Monday is another example – feel a bit pagan. My attitude to them is a bit too open minded for some. I’ve always thought of paganism as a sort of “open all hours” spirituality, a bit like a left luggage office where you can look for something that’s missing even if you don’t quite know what it is. The word pagan is bandied about so sloppily, often as a religious insult, that it resists all definition. For me, the Earth and her courses could never be appropriated into any spiritual systematics because we barely understand them, and so we just need to express our gratitude and joy at these times of turning. I’m there because I used to be the Vicar, and I can be relied on to bless the trees in as amusing a manner as possible and in less than 100 words.

The funniest part of the ceremony was the point at which a slice of bread soaked in cider is hung on the branches. The Green Man attempted a sub scientific explanation which had the insects which would otherwise have munched on the shoots and buds attracted away by the smell of cider. I prefer to think that the smoke from the bonfire would have been a more efficient deterrent. Anyway, someone asked a young boy – about seven years old I should guess – if he would hang the slice of bread on the tree. He demanded with a completely straight face – “Is it gluten free?“. So bread hung up and a glass of Lifesaver poured around the roots, a poem read by the Green Man, shotguns fired, pans beaten and a blessing from me and we all followed the King and the Queen back to the marquee in her ceremonial chariot.

As we walked down the avenue marked by lanterns I fell into conversation with a farmer I’d known for thirty years and whom I’d confirmed, married and whose children I’d Christened. I may well have also Christened him since I knew his parents well. He gave up an afternoon a few years ago to show a group of us his new robotic milking parlour. I thought I’d hate it, but it was evident that the cows who got their udders cleaned and backs scratched on their way through liked it so much they would try to go back around for a second feed – prevented by the software. Anyway we talked about regenerative farming and about his small wind farm – fiercely contested at the time, and the fact that he powers the whole milking operation from solar panels and sells raw milk from a vending machine in the yard. We talked about no-till and regenerative farming and soil improvements, not least how long they take to show results, and I felt I was talking to someone we should applaud as a farmer rather than offer knee jerk antagonism; lumping all dairy farming into an undifferentiated mass of baddies.

Later we bumped into a nursery nurse who’d looked after our youngest when he was a baby and she threw her arms around him and gave him a big hug. I think he was totally taken aback at being remembered at all, and touched by how much she’d cared about him. I was able to tell him that I’d had to fetch him home from Nursery once after they’d fed him “mud” aka mushrooms!

There was an excellent folk band, joined by a ukulele group and we sang a couple of wassail songs including the Gloucestershire Wassail and then they all went off on more well known songs. During the evening we discovered that an elderly parishioner had died during the night and there was palpable sadness at the news.

I remember Margaret Thatcher claiming that there’s no such thing as community. What a deluded thing to say! She’d obviously never known what it is to experience good neighbours; a shared culture; a village; a history and the mutuality that thrives on shared experience. 

Wassail, wassail all over the town!
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing-bowl we’ll drink to thee!

The first verse of the Gloucestershire Wassail traditional carol sung on Epiphany Eve

Postscript

I spent most of Friday writing another long piece, but I couldn’t make it work. It just felt bad tempered, incoherent and plain wrong. I know myself well enough to be sure that I’d have kept on fiddling with it and press the publish button with the faintly guilty feeling that I’d let myself down. Anyway in a rather Jungian moment, I somehow managed to press select all and delete; throwing away hours of work. After a few fiery moments as I hunted desperately for my deleted words I realized that my inattention and a fat thumb had done unconsciously what my unconscious was demanding, and I felt completely peaceful about it. I still don’t know how I did it, but thanks anyway to my inner critic. As someone (much disputed) once wrote, you need to learn to “kill your darlings!” It’s not unusual for me to incorporate twenty or thirty edits in a piece, but I’ve never ditched the lot before. Lesson learned.

Have we met somewhere before?

St Helen’s Church, Alveston

”I don’t feel comfortable hanging around here. Shall we buy some food and eat in the car? We can pull over once we get out of Thornbury.’

‘OK, as long as there’s plenty of food.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Robin, switching on the engine, ‘I remember your theory that nothing eaten on a car journey contains calories.’ ‘Exactly. Got to make the most of these opportunities.’

So they purchased food on the High Street, got back into the Land Rover and headed out of Thornbury. After five minutes , Strike said, ‘This’ll do. Pull in by that church.’

Robin turned up Greenhill Road and parked beside the graveyard. ‘You got pork pies?’ said Robin, looking into the bag. ‘Problem?’ ‘Not at all. Just wishing I’d brought biscuits in the first place.’

“The Running Grave” JK Galbraith

Normally/usually – [can’t make up my mind which is the better word] – when I categorize a post as “Potwell Inn Library”, it’s because I’ve liked a book I have just bought and read. In this case it isn’t true because I haven’t yet read “The Running Grave”, the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike series. My son sent a photograph of a single page and said I should read it. For reference it’s page 703 according to the photo. Madame, having seen the photo ordered the book immediately so I’ll get to read it eventually I’m sure.

I have no idea whether the location of this little scene crops up before or again in the book; it just went off like a Chinese Cracker in my mind because unusually for a detective novel, I was able to locate the exact place to an eight figure British National Grid reference. Rowling certainly does her research thoroughly, whether by picking random place names from maps, or by actually noting them down in person. I suppose she might have stayed at Thornbury Castle, bought the pies at Riddifords (the inspiration for the TV programme “Open all hours”), and driven up Thornbury hill turning right at the traffic lights and passing the church on her right hand after the playing field. The single error in the description is that you couldn’t (or shouldn’t) turn right into Greenhill in order to swing around the green and park next to the graveyard. Or maybe she recorded that tiny detail before the one way system was put in place maybe twenty or so years ago.

How do I know this? Well because the church in question was where I was Vicar for 25 years. The graveyard was full of familiar names; people I knew and those I knew about. I knew about the oldest occupant who died at 104 years old. His father had fallen off the wooden scaffolding and broke his leg when the church was being built. The family were all builders, quarrymen and masons and many still live in the village today. At his funeral the church was unusually packed for a person of such great age, and I had several wonderful conversations – one with a cider maker who would hoax the Customs and Excise by concealing his produce, which always exceeded the limit, by hiding the large 1000 litre barrels in the hedges.

Novelists and parish priests have entirely different modus operandi. Novelists, especially the good ones like Galbraith, gather sufficient detail to make their narrative believable. My job was to know as much as was humanly possible about the people I worked with, so that, (as I would occasionally confess to their grieving relatives) I knew where the bombs were buried. There are always bombs, landmines, secrets and evasions. People would sometimes say to me after a funeral – you sounded as if you knew him really well! – ‘oh yes I did! I’d think to myself’ and there are always ways of expressing people without revealing any secrets. Unlike one funeral where a son gave the address and said at the beginning that “my father was a good friend to most of the lonely women in the parish”.

That brief paragraph in the Strike story embraced a tiny patch of my parish in which lives were lived and occasionally wasted. In that couple of roads resided the echoes of real murders, of violent attacks, of incest, of betrayals and redemptions, of drug dealing. Over a period of 25 years I became the village Sin Eater and keeper of the secrets and the histories of the family feuds which stretched back over seventy years and hinged on such tiny details as who was driving the motorcycle and who precisely abandoned whom on the stone bridge at Berkeley. Did the village funeral director really turn his car over as a young man, while speeding down Thornbury High Street. It’s the novelist’s job to construct plausible narratives from the fragments of everyday life. It’s all very tidy and comforting to end a novel with each piece in place. Characters come, say their piece and often disappear again to live their fragmentary lives because real lives don’t resolve out like musical keys. Real lives don’t end with a triumphal modulation from minor to major – a modulation which Bryn, my first piano teacher would always describe as a “Curse de Picardy”. Real lives sputter and glow, flare out and turn to ash. I once married a couple on Saturday and buried their stillborn baby less than two weeks later. There are no words for that.

People often say I should write this stuff down – well I suppose that’s what I’m doing now. I love the Galbraith stories and I’d love to have her gift of cabinet-making the scenes together into a perfect narrative. But I’m more of a carpenter, like my Grandfather. My tools are the ripsaw and the nail. No hidden dovetails and Rosewood veneer for me, but a rough plank of Elm with a few scribbled pencil research notes on the side.

At the end of my incumbency I was approached on the street by a young man who asked me – “are you still Rev Dave?” ”Still Rev Dave!” I replied and wondered whether I would ever find a way to tell the stories.