Underland by Robert Macfarlane

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

The focus on place and our interaction is a common thread between this book and Tom Cox’s Ring the Hill.

Macfarlane is skilled at bring a place into being in the readers mind, not just a set of physical descriptions but an emotional response.

Linking the places with the theme “Underland” Macfarlane shows that human beings across the wide reaches of existence seems to have always had a rich, if complex, relationship with underground spaces. Early humans used caves is ways that don’t seem to have been driven by utilitarian needs – spaces that often seem to have been treated as somehow “holy”.

The twin poles of the earth as place to bury the death, and dispose of waste of all sorts, and the earth as place of resource, the soil that supports crops to feed us, the mines that supply fuel, metals, gem stones – these play against one another in creative ways.

Some of the places he explores are natural and some are human creations, - spaces hidden within the visible city – in those places he joins with others in “urban exploration” - “Urban exploration might best be defined as adventurous trespass in the built environment...” but he feels that there “There are aspects of urban exploration that leave me deeply uneasy, and cannot be fended off by indemnifying gestures of self-awareness on the part of its practitioners. I dislike its air of hipster entitlement, its inattention towards those people whose working lives involve the construction, operation and maintenance – rather than the exploration – of these hidden structures of the city.” an unease I can recognise and one that seems to increase with the sharing of resulting photos on social media – the desire for an encounter with a space and place exchanged perhaps for good quality click-bait that will return a healthy crop of “likes”?

Ring the Hill by Tom Cox

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

In recounting his experiences of living an various parts of the country, and in houses of varying character, Tom Cox is paying close attention to the ways we are influenced by place. Some of the places he lived enriched his spirit, others were draining – and the differences between them were subtle – it is hard to pin down exactly what it is about a place that gives it a positive energy, it is more that the sum of the parts.

He writes “These places weren’t homes. But where exactly was ‘home’? There’d been so many, now. The definition of the word had splintered. Home – by the ‘house where your parents live’ definition – was a wonderful place but it wasn’t a building where I’d ever been a resident. Home – by the ‘house where you lived the longest period during your childhood’ definition – now had strangers living in it… [These] towns and villages I was passing through on my walking expeditions were not places where I’d ever lived, just places half an hour away from places where I’d lived; places where I used to go with my family a lot.” but he finds in them an experience of ‘home’ ‘turned up to eleven’.

This question of home, and of belonging, is probably increasingly tricky as society becomes more mobile – perhaps the popularity of the BBC “Who do you think you are?”, and genealogy generally, is a response to a certain sense of rootlessness for many people.

He also writes of his Cats, and it was through the twitter personality of one of them, The Bear - aka “my cat is sad”, that I discovered Tom as a writer in the first place – he writes powerfully about place the Cats had in his life, and the hole they left when they passed away

Seriously Messy by Collicutt, Moore, Payne, & Slater

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

For Messy Church to talk about death is a wonderfully counter-cultural thing, and I am really grateful for them producing this book.

Engaging meaningfully with death rather than avoiding it as a topic is something society at large is in need, and actually if we are honest much of the Church is also in denial and needs to get real about death.

Two quotes play together …

“it wouldn’t be a funeral without a wake.”

“In the past, certain mourning rituals, such as wearing black for a time after a death, gave permission to grieve and signalled to society that they needed space to do that. Secular society no longer has recognised social structures that support bereaved people in this way. The journalist Colin Brazier recently wrote an article following the death of his wife called ‘Let funeral be sad’, in which he said that he felt ‘ill at ease’ with the modern trend to wear bright clothes at funerals and to insit that they be only about ‘rejoicing in a life now passed’. Not to be allowed to be sad or to cry is too much to expect of the children, if not the adults, he says, and wearing black gives permission for people to be the way they feel. Having opportunities to express our grief and to have it accpeted and validated by others is crucial to the healing process.”

Or to put it another way it wouldn’t be a wake without a funeral?

Too much of current Church activity seem scared of the dark – if it is not permanently effervescent then it is deemed invalid – this is a complete abuse of the Gospel – it has no room of the Jesus who wept in the Garden, much less still the Jesus who died on the cross, it becomes the Gospel of Instagram not the Gospel of Jesus.

Soho by Richard Scott

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

The power of this collection of poems is they do not self-censor those parts of gay life that are less than respectable – they speak of the fullness of love, and of lust.

The long poem “Oh my Soho!” begins...

“Urine-lashed maze of cobble and hay-brick! Oh

chunder-fugged, rosy-lit, cliché-worthy quadrant. I

could not call you beauteous but nightly I’ve strolled your

Shaftesbury slums for a bout of wink and fumble.”

It is a nostalgic look back to a Soho that was not pretty but was a space for people that didn’t belong anywhere else, and now is an expensive honey trap for tourists.

Another poem that stood out was “love version of”

tonight I watched you sleep

naked on the futon

face down sweaty like a small child

and knew that everything else was bullshit

it’s so hard to stay alive these days

or sane

so keep on snoring danny

while I guard you like a rottweiler

being in love with you is fucking awful

cause one day you’ll stop breathing

in this grey light you already look dead

but then you smile thank fuck

what are you dreaming about baby wake up

tell me if the word soul still means anything

By Way of the Heart by Mark Oakley

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This collection of sermons is rich and engaging, Mark Oakley ranges widely in the themes and occasions on which he preaches.

He shows that a “liberal” expression of Christianity can be serious and full-bodied, and it is very welcome to have his mix of pastoral care and scholarship deployed.

There are a few places where he uses familiar image in ways that make you stop and think again. In particular he says a one point that “The bread of the Eucharist… is the food that makes us hungrier, making us long all the more for communion with God.” More often Jesus saying that those that eat “this” bread will hunger not more is used – and it is well worn and risks being glib – but the “food that makes us hungrier” speaks of the journey of faith, that way gaining insights can often be a new revelation of how little you know.

One of the phrases he uses repeatedly is “God loves you the way you are, but love you too much to leave you that way” - and even when spoken within this liberal context it rings the same bell as “love the sinner hate the sin” - and it left me feeling awkward.

The collection ends with sermon remembering Matthew Shepard, a young gay America who was brutally murdered. There was a particular tenderness to this sermon, the care and love expressed in the face of violence, we defeat the forces of hate with love, and the forces of shame with courage, and we will prevail.

Redbrick by William Whyte

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This is a fantasising reflection on the development of Higher Education in the UK.

By giving us the “birth narratives” of many of the Russell Group Universities you find that for all the glory of their current ivory towers they were touch and go for many years, and many of the questions asked of them in their early years were the same as those asked of the 1992 Group as they moved over to University status.

Also they provide great case studies in “imagined traditions” - that even the newest University graduates in gowns linking themselves back to the monastic Colleges – and the “Architectural History” part of the sub-title also plays on this – somewhere in the mid-Twentieth Century there was a shift from building ancient seats of learning to modern cutting edge research centres (even when in both cases the building was going to house the Chemistry or the Classics Department).

The part played in the story by Keele made me smile – Keele is a personally significant place, that it is of importance within a national story is pleasing – even if the conclusion of Whyte is those things that would have made Keele have been lost to conformity with a wider lowest common denominator…

The Good University by Raewyn Connell

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

There is an interest in this book because Raewyn Connell is writing from the perspective of Australia – outside the UK – but in reality one step removed from the Anglo-America pattern of High Education.

However overall this intervention adds little to our understanding of the purpose of “higher” education or the effective organisation and delivery of that activity. The interface of enhancing academic knowledge (either through teaching or research) and institutionally finance management is not an easy one – but if we look closely enough the fierce debates within mediaeval colleges were probably about matters pertaining to financial management rather than academic knowledge – it has been ever thus?

Philosophy in the Present by Badiou and Žižek

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

I read this book a few years ago, and had the feeling that I had made no sense of it at all and so it went back on the “to read” pile, and so I took it with me to Gran Canaria this year to have a second go – it might not be typical “beach” read but having the opportunity for a few uninterrupted hours helped to keep at least some grip on the ideas Badiou and Žižek were sharing.

They are exploring how Philosophy relates to contemporary issues, that simply asking a philosopher their opinion on a political issues is not getting a philosophical response, but there are properly philosophical responses that can be offered – philosophy can not tell you who to vote for in an election, but it might tell you that the underpinnings of a so called democratic system are logically flawed.

Philosophers, in the same way as anyone else, have a duty to call out injustice but just because a Philosopher said it doesn’t make it philosophy.

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

When I was a student I helped back stage with a production of this, which closed with Portishead Glory Box as Blanche is led away -which was one of the best things about the whole production.

Having only being involved a couple of days before the show, and being focused on trying to ensure the actors had the right props and the set changes happened, the plot of the play has always hung loosely in my memory and so the desire to revisit it and give attention to Tennessee Williams words had been growing.

I don’t think I have any clever thoughts about the play that can add to existing commentaries on it.

The Church of England Eucharist 1958-2012 by C Buchanan and T Lloyd

I don’t normally include the Joint Liturgical Studies in this blog but this double issue is exceptional.

To have two of the leading actors in the Church of England liturgical reform provide an account of both the process and the substance of the steps that took us from the uniformity of the Book of Common Prayer to the poly-formity (I want to say chaos) of Common Worship is invaluable.

The first hand account allows us to set the personalities that influenced the changes in appropriate relationship to the theology.

During the period of change Dix’s shape of the Liturgy, that for many was the starting point of reform, was largely discredited – but Buchanan and Lloyd are helpful in reminding us that while Dix’s liturgical theories might have lost favour that does not mean that the liturgies born out of them should likewise be set aside. Liturgy is a living not a theoretical thing.

I don’t if it was just my own position reading between the lines, but I think overall I was left with a sense that the authors are disappointed that the Church of England did not make more of the opportunity of the era of liturgical revision – held back by the timidity of Bishops and the need for some Synodical compromise – especially in the case of the tokenistic nature of the “responsive” Eucharistic prayers.

The New Churchyard By Robert Hartle (Crossrail Archaeology)

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

The archaeological opportunity that major infrastructure projects present, such as road-building and rail, is the wide areas that have to be exposed and the resulting wealth of information that is added to the record which would never be justified on academic research objectives alone.

This is particular true in the case of post-medieval cemeteries – in this case the cemetery next to the Bedlam Hospital – although it is quickly pointed out this was used as an overflow by most London Parishes and should not be understood as “the” Hospital’s cemetery.

The interface between London’s compact medieval boundaries and its rising population created the need for new burial grounds even in the 16^th Century – well before the big Victorian cemeteries such as Brookwood.

The fact that the New Churchyard was receiving the death from across London gives a useful cross-section of the population, although also clear that there was some social section about who was buried in the Parish and who sent out.

The fact that increased burials during periods of plague could be identified but that these remained orderly is a counter-point to some historical accounts of chaos – there seems to have been at least a residual level of human dignity afforded to the victims of plague.

That not only excavation but research and publication are supported by the developers is very welcome.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Set in Colorado this is a tale of small-town mid-west America – and one of the things I found interesting is I found it difficult to place when it in time, the conservative attitudes of a small-town could be contemporary or could be 1950 – only small clues, like the newspapers the boys deliver being dropped off by train perhaps pointing to the later. That might be the success of the integrity of the world that Haruf invokes – it becomes complete in itself.

There are hard situations but a kindness and humanity between people that redeems them – people living in the more or less comfortable ruts of their lives have eyes opened by mutual encounter to a richer version of existence. It is a charmingly hopefully tale.

Men from the Ministry by Simon Thurley

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This is a book about the evolution of the “heritage” sector within the UK, and in particular the way the State moved from being the awkward custodian of a few royal relics to the principal actor in protecting the build environment (and ends at the point when the State tried to outsource this function).

However I got hooked in by the way this is a case study on the development of the “State” - how we got from the amateur public servant to the professional civil servant. How we moved from absolutely minimal state intervention to the current “Big State” - which despite forty years of governments calling for the rolling back of the State seems to have continued to grow – Departments were once small enough to yield (for good or ill) to the influence of their leaders individual preferences, priorities, and personality, but no more.

Maybe I am a geek about the machinery of government, but I really enjoyed this book... 

But I should note that it was never just the "men" from the Ministry, the book highlights the key role of a number of women so the title is unfortunate!

Building a new Catalonia Edited by Ignasi Bernat and David Whyte

This is a large collection of short reflections on the situation in Catalonia since the October 2017 referendum – and that continues to be played out, most recently with the jailing of the political leaders of Catalonia.

This collection suggests that there has been a comprehensive exercise in collective forgetting, and in so doing it shines a light on the way that the transition from Franco to democracy was not a complete process. This week the remains of Franco have been moved from the national tomb, as step in the right direction, but how far is there left to travel...

That Spain and Catalonia are in a troubled place has gone unnoticed in UK because we have been distracted by our relationship with the EU?

However as you progress through the collection the more specifically left-wing the solutions, and the sense of a partisan analysis perhaps undermines the earlier insights...

Conformity by Cass R. Sunstein

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

I did probably buy this book for the cover…

The point that we like to be part of the group, and we have a significant tendency to put aside the evidence in front of our eyes in case we look stupid, seems fairly self-evident.

There is a lot that is rooted in the US system, especially their judges, which is difficult to read across to the UK.

Anyway it is a small book, it didn’t take long to read...

BRIT(ish) by Afua Hirsch

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Afua’s family heritage is a mix of Ghanaian, Yorkshire, and Germany Jewish – making her well placed to explore “Race, Identity, and Belonging” (the book’s sub-title).

Part of this is the “belonging” - finding herself perhaps too black too be British, yet in Ghana too British to be Ghanaian.

Within this is a reflection on her mispronouncing her own name, which resonated as I mispronounce my name – resulting in a moment of acute cultural humiliation when I overheard someone at our University Welsh Society correcting my friend’s pronunciation because she said my name just like I do…

I was also caused to reflect on this after a recent Church training event where I meet a 20 to 30 new people who without fail upon hearing I had a non-English name asked me where I was “from”. A couple of people followed this up with the top ten facts they knew about my presumed country of origin, and one clearly couldn’t process the answer “I’m from North London” as their conversation kept coming back round to which bit of Wales I was actually from.

Sat here with a massive amount of middle-class white privilege I am not suggesting equivalence in experience but it brought home for me the power on unconscious bias and the subtle power of assumptions that “other” people.

Ending the book in response to those that say they ignore race she writes “Blindness, it seems fairly obvious to point out, is not a good strategy for seeing what is there. Race is there, as lived experience, as the basis for the most dramatic economic and human shifts in history. Colour is there, and while people work on their myopia to avoid confronting awkward truths, others are finding their identities shaped by it. Identities are not becoming less important in our globalised world, they are becoming more important than ever. And Britishness is an identity that is excluding a growing number of people who, like me, should be among its core constituents.”

To be colour blind it to perpetuate white privilege...

1519: A Journey to the End of Time by John Harrison

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This book is a mix of three, a history, a travelogue, and a last will and testament.

During the period he is researching and writing John Harrison is very ill and receives ever bleaker diagnosis – that leave you mostly assuming it was a posthumous publication.

He travels in Mexico, and this beyond the tourist trail this is a not easy – and his tales of the places and people are engaging.

He explores the events and mindset of the Spanish as they invaded Mexico and ended up massacring the people – with a mix of swords and small pox.

In the clash of cultures, Harrison’s narrative empowers the natives of Mexico and rejects the myths that the Spanish civilisation overran cultures that were backward and barbaric – on balance it was pox that provided the Spanish victory despite their violence and bloodshed.

The contested role of Malinche, as a women, translator, native of the Americas but not of Mexico is one of the strongest points of interest – and although Harrison gives her greater attention than many I think she remains more marginal that she really was.

While the three streams within the book are full of interest it was not always clear how they were intended to speak to one another and overall I found it some what disjointed and muddled.

I am not sure if I have somehow ended up with a review copy, because there are various references to illustrations that don’t exist and errors in the layout and typesetting – if this is the standard edition it reflects very poorly on the publisher Parthian.

Legacies of the First World War edited by W Cocroft and P Stamper

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

The Historic England publication seeks to explore the full range of impacts of the First World War on our built environment and landscape.

Within the UK the war was a period dominated by construction rather than destruction, as new facilities were needed to meet the direct needs of the massively expanded armed forces or the array of supporting functions and industries.

When the war ended some were quickly dismantled, some re-purposed, and some retained in military use. Where they have lasted until today layers of Second World War and Cold War adaptation often masks their origin.

We tend to think of the First World War as something that happened in northern France, in contrast to the a way that collective memory of Blitz and Battle of Britain locates the “Home Front” of the Second World War more squarely. This book helps to rebalance that showing that in every corner of the UK the First World War was having a physical impact, and alongside the physical there were social, economic, cultural impacts too.

Penguin Monarchs – William I by Marc Morris

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This is the first of the Penguin Monarchs – a slim volume at less than 90 pages which I read in a single sitting one evening, but that accessibility is a key element of the appeal.

While we all know “1066 and all that” but even as someone that would claim good general historical knowledge I was surprised how much I learnt reading this.

William I is the 5^th volume in the series and one of the most profound transformations – England before and after 1066 without much exaggeration can be seen as different countries. It might be all but a thousand years ago and yet the legacy of that change still echoes for us.

Poem for the Day – Two

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This is by design a wide ranging anthology, not based on a theme or style or time period, but just the simple task of offering a poem to the reader each day of the year.

From it I will share just one poem, Sheenagh Pugh’s Sometimes, which I read on 20^th Dec 2018.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,

sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

elect an honest man; decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave a stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Sabbath by Nicola Slee

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

That the is a rhythm to life and that human beings need time to rest in order to thrive might be a negated idea but it is hardly a new idea, and if I am honest I don’t see Nicola Slee offering anything new to our understanding here.

The book takes as inspiration, and as the structure of its chapters, one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems, and to the extent that this book acts as a commentary on Wendell Berry’s work it has some interest – but perhaps this could have been equally well achieved with a shorter more focused article.

Each chapter includes some extracts from Slee’s journal, these are reproduced is a rather small faux handwriting font which for me rendered them virtually unreadable – perhaps due to my need for new glasses and touch of dyslexia – so I can’t really comment on whether these were enriching or not.

One thing that did set me thinking was whether the question of Sabbath gives a challenge to active church-going, because “Sabbath is a different kind of space altogether, when we are invited into not-doing, not-knowing, not-inteding, not-working, not-pursuing.”. The consequence of the combination of the empowerment of the laity and decline in numbers attending is that for an increasing proportion of church-goers Sunday is no longer a day of rest but instead dominated by “doing” Church. If we want to keep the kind of Sabbath Slee advocates we will probably need to steer clear of the average Church.

The Aerodrome by Rex Warner and The End of Law by Thérèse Down

I happened to read these back to back but I am writing about them together as they speak to each other.

The Aerodrome was first published in 1941 – a time of national emergency in the UK when the military, the state was actually taking over whole villages in the interests of what officials had determined to be the greater good.

The Village seems to be a mix of Thomas Hardy and Cider with Rosie and at the time of writing rural England probably did have places that were still like that, but now few places in the UK are genuinely “rural”. The Air Force is technocratic and that model of rational progress was dominant in the UK not only in the 1940s but perhaps on into the later 1960s before it began to falter.

But there is a layer of the story about whose parents are who which to me confused matters, and the fact that the end point is the revelation that the Air Vice Marshall is “mad” perhaps softens the critique of the institutions.

The Aerodrome is a fiction the End of Law engages with the reality of the Holocaust.

There is real horror in the End of Law – as much as we pretend we don’t we forget the Holocaust, or some how within the big numbers become detached from the individuals that died – and Thérèse Down brings you back face to face with the individuals. I felt physically sick at times reading this.

She also shows how step by step ordinary, compassionate, reasonable people found themselves enacting the Holocaust – and that is the most scary thing. We can perhaps label Hitler himself as evil or crazy, and maybe a small number of others – but the industrial scale of the Holocaust could only happen when a vast number of ordinary people participated.

I worry that we think we would easily notice a new Hitler rising but what we really need to see is the low level but pervasive toxicity – that can creep up on you all too easily.

The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This is a complex novel but deeply touching.

It sits is a similar context to Armistead Maupin’s tales from the city, set mostly within the gay community of the west coast of the USA devastated by the first wave of AIDS.

There was also an echo of Ece Temelkuran’s Women Who Blow on Knots – with mysticism and fantasy, but also because Jacob as an Arab Christian and a non-White gay man has a status of a minority within a minority.

It is funny, on played for laughs and one-liners, but there is a humour in a recurring sense of ridiculous.

It is deeply painful, the way loss is written so clearly – love lost, love that maybe wasn’t so perfect in the first place – it perhaps asks the question does losing imperfect love actually hurt a little harder that losing a perfect love would?

Perfect Blemish Perffaith Nam by Menna Elfyn

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This is a bilingual edition, but its purpose is to provide Menna’s poems in English translations (the blurb on the back is in English only).

It brings together a number of collections, and each collection had a different translator. It is a frustration not having Welsh and so not being able to engage with the poems in their original form – I did try to read the Welsh to have a sense of the sounds and the form even if I didn’t have the meaning before turning to the English.

The range of topics covered by this collection is impressive, with an authentic and powerful voice.

Jochen Klepper 1903-1942 by J. W. Rogerson

Rogerson presents Klepper as someone with flaws, but placed in the horrific context of the Nazi regime that any light remained is a miracle.

It is also an insight in to the world that exists beyond the English language – I searched “Jochen Klepper” on a popular book selling website and of the 80 results this is the only one in English – if his works were available in English he would not be, from our parochially monoglot perspective, an esoteric figure.

Rogerson found Klepper because he used the Moravian Community’s “Die Losungen” daily readings and now I have begun to follow those readings, via the Moravian Community’s American cohorts and there is something particularly rich in that joining of dots.

Designs for Churches and Chapels by W. F. Pocock

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

This reprint of Pocock’s 1819 pattern book of Church designs is a window into the life of the Church of England before the Oxford Movement – it is a collection of preaching boxes, the key design consideration is to maximise the audibility of the preacher in their pulpit to a varying size of congregation (with a choice of neoclassical or gothick facades) – how far the Church as travelled in terms of liturgical practice, and even in terms of understanding of design and dynamics of space and place. .

On the way to the Holy Mountain by Arne E Sæther

Although this book is in English the website I had to order it was in Norwegian and seemed to resist Google’s attempts to translate it – so there was a definite sense of achievement when the book actually turned up!

It is an unusual format with a little under 400 A4 sized pages which have the feel of a scrap book – full of pictures, with inserts and text layered over the main image. But when you are addressing the use of space and liturgical fixtures and fittings the visual context is vital.

It feels at times like it is a guide of what not to do, and because much of the text is short annotations to pictures the critique can come across as blunt and lacking nuance, and while maybe agreeing with most of the conclusions I was at times nervous that we run the risk of dressing our particular understanding of “good taste” in fancy theological arguments?

But overall because of the range of material brought together it a valuable resource and it would be good if there was a UK based book seller.

A Month with… Edited by Rima Devereaux

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

These 4 books, A Month with Julian of Norwich, St Augustine, St Teresa of Avila, and St Francis, follow the same simple format – providing a dozen or so lines from the writings of the relevant spiritual guide for each morning and evening of a month.

These are offered without comment – and that was perhaps one of the things I liked most, Rima Devereaux doesn’t give a gloss to the words or force a particular interpretation, there is space for the words to breath and your own response to form.

Of the 4, the last I read was St Francis and this was the one I didn’t engage with as much of it was medieval “Life of...” with some odd supernatural happenings rather than the spiritual reflections of the other collections.

If more follow I would definitely follow them.

British Rail The Nation’s Railway by Tanya Jackson

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Tanya Jackson provides an engaging overview of the organisational life of British Rail, it is an affectionate account – which makes the case that the 50 years interval of public ownership was the most golden of our railways’ various golden ages in their nigh on 200 year history.

As we bid farewell to two iconic BR legacies with the withdrawal this year of the HST and the Pacer, one beloved the other ridiculed but both in fact successful responses to BR’s rolling stock needs, nostalgia for BR in is fashion.

We can play “what if” imagining where BR would be today if it haven’t been broken up – passenger numbers have risen but we can debate whether that is because or in-spite of privatisation etc. Would the economies of scale of a single national organisation have been paying dividends, or inflated bureaucracy crippling innovation (because in BR’s history you can find plenty of examples of both).

We might suggest it all went wrong when BR was made to sell its ships and hotels – it went from providing an end to end logistic solution / customer experience to “just” running a railway – or maybe that was when it came into its own.

The current Williams Review is perhaps going to kick off another major reorganisation of the way our railways are run – it seems unlikely that the answer will be a triumphant return for BR but lets hope it doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2018

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

According to Harry Baker there are two sorts of people when it comes to prizes for poetry; those who have won a prize, and those who believe poetry is an art form and not a competition (aka those who haven’t won).

But as someone that is trying to have more poetry in my life this sort of anthology is a god-send (in a similar way too the catalogue to the AOI World Illustrators Awards for art) – I don’t have time to read the bad stuff and this is the good stuff :-)

It is a strong collection but this poem stood out

Alan Buckley, Scum, 15/04/89

I lay on the turf, under a steely sky.

No one picked my pockets. No one pissed

on me. The copper who gave me the kiss

of life wasn’t beaten up. I died,

that’s the truth; and though I’d never known

such closeness, our bodies like beans in a can,

when the air was squeezed from me I died alone.

That’s all changed. The words we’d sund as fans

became our bond. We’ve walked, the ninety-six,

through parish halls, ,hushed stadiums, and courts.

Now we walk back through time. Something sticks

in our throats. You’re at your desk, lost in thought,

scanning a page of lies you’ll say is true.

What’s the headline that can trumpet this?

Look up. We’re standing right in front of you;

what burns in us is fierce as any sun.

That word you want to use. It’s on your lips.

Say it to our faces, one by one.

The Imagined Past edited by C Shaw and M Chase

Doesn't seem to be available to buy but I got hold of it via inter-library loan :-)

A slim collection of essays, which explore the ways in which the past has political power – we probably accept “nostalgia” as an interpretation which might not give the whole truth, but tend to see “history” as political neutral (although some many have pointed out that all history is selective and generally written by the “victors” how many really is it as neutral is questionable).

Most of the thoughts explored in the collection make sense to me, but few were new to me – but I guess should acknowledge it is 30 years old, and maybe when published in 1989 the collection was more radical, ideas that were new then have largely become mainstream now?

Some specific thoughts…

In the introductory essay Shaw and Chase reflect that “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” But I wonder if that is still true, or true in the same way, in our current age of the constant selfie.

They go on to quote Raymond Williams “It only takes two generations to make anything traditional...” but in my experience “tradition” can be established much more rapidly than that, a couple of years rather than a couple of generations is usually plenty of time to have cemented a practice as traditional, and even sacrosanct.

While David Lowenthal makes a key point, saying that “No one ever experienced as “the present” what we now view as “the past”, for hindsight cannot clarify today as it does yesterday; the past as reconstructed is always more coherent than when it happened.” and so “...history reveals and nostalgia celebrates an ordered clarity contrasting with the chaos or imprecision of our own times.”

Malcolm Chase begins his own essay with a quote from Arthur Gardner’s 1942 book Britain’s Mountain Heritage “When we think of England we do not picture crowded factories or rows of suburban villas, but our thoughts turn to rolling hills, green fields and stately trees, to cottage homes, picturesquely grouped round the village green beside the church and manor house. It is a green and pleasant land.” This is still largely true, and it becomes challenging because it tends to render those who are “of the City” as excluded from authentic expression of “English”

The collection ends with essay by Andy Croft about how the 1930s are remembered. Despite being the decade of the Great Depression, the decade that the world slid back towards a War World, and many other negative features, Croft shows that the 1930s is recalled as a Golden Age, and that recollection is not politically neutral. He is writing in the late 1980s, so with a 50 year gap, which gave the 1930s the chronological relationship we now have with the 1960s however I think many of the features of the memory of the 1930s Croft identifies are still true. The 1930s perhaps still feel more recent than they really are, and more positive than they really were – and we need to be alert to whose narrative of the present that does most to support.

Eavesdropping by Henry Martin

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

I found this collection of daily reading for Lent particularly engaging, grounded in real life and pushing at the boundaries of the safe and tidy Christian community. The focus is on prayer, the ways we pray, our motivations, and our expectations.

At one point he writes “I really do not understand the mechanics of what happens when we pray for others. The questions make for interesting theological discussions, but do not yield clear answers, at least not for me. However, the truth remains that it is good to pray for others and it is good when others pray for us.” This honesty, an invitation to share in exploration alongside him, not receive explanations from him.

One of the points that stuck most with me is the exploration of the story of the Widow that nags the unjust Judge into finally giving her justice if only to shut her our. We mostly read this as a story about how we should continue to ask God until he answers our prayer – but this would raise doubts about God, God is surely unlike the unjust Judge – and so Henry Martin switches it around, maybe Jesus is the Widow and we are the unjust Judge, Jesus continue, endlessly to seek relationship with us, will keep on inviting us to come to him.

This is the kind of refreshing approaches that are offered throughout the book – too many Lent books cover the same old ground, but this one got me thinking in new ways.

Forbidden Lives, LGBT Stories from Wales by Norena Shopland

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Telling the stories of LGBT lives is previous centuries and decades can be challenging.

How far should one draw people into the LGBT community or cannon who never (publicly) self-identified as LGBT?

Most LGBT people, even today, will at times self-edit their identity, and it seems the majority of biographers have applied a heavy edit to any evidence that might have been past down to us.

So for many we have only hints, glimpses, assumptions about our LGBT forebears – we can’t say how individuals would self-identify it they were alive today, but we can probably say that they lived outside the heretonormative cookie cutter identity.

But it is telling the level of outrage that can be felt when we then claim someone for the LGBT community, as the National Trust found out a couple of years ago https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/04/national-trust-facing-membership-boycott-gay-campaign/

This is deeply troubling – people still fear damage to someone’s reputation if we suggest they were gay – and that fear is exactly why books such as this must be written and celebrated.

The Solitary by Vuyelwa Carlin

One of the poems…

Guy Fawkes and the Torturers

A cobweb-scrawl – he could bearly hold the pen

he signed – just – a bag of loose joints for the flames.

He was racked for days, in the forbidden rooms,

the cellars of the dark soul, fallen.

One day, hour, minute more – to the God of pain

he clings; wrenches to mind the vales and loams,

beloved, where they crouch, the lodged names

- gouged at last from the deep bed, scraped from the bone.

The fracturing sticks of this incarnation,

its twisting strings: the torture-scholars grind

the rope and tackle: crush the shadow, blind

and dumb; they’d pincer out the nerves of God

if they only could – pay back the terrible Word,

the act, intolerable, of creation.

The Poet Prophets of the Old Testament by J. W. Rogerson

Rogerson makes a few key points in these lectures which suggest that the prophets have generally been misunderstood.

The first misunderstanding is to see prophets as fortune-tellers, it was not some magical knowledge of future events but the close and careful observation of the present that gives the prophets words they power – Rogerson terms this speaking of the “eternal now” - the depth of truth the prophets saw in their own ages allows their words to speak to the truth in our age too.

Linked to this, once you have freed the prophets for the fortune-tellers is the opportunity to recapture their poetry, and their poetic reading of the world. Rogerson sees a greater poetic relationship with the world as key to gaining a proper understanding. Poetry is, for Rogerson, the most effective medium to speak of depth truths.

Funderland by Nigel Jarrettt

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

This is a collection of short stories that has a consistent power and punch. The lives shared in these stories while not exactly “feel good” are full of authenticity and there is a connection to the humanity of the characters does actually warm your heart.

Pilgrim Journeys by Sally Welch

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Although the chapters in this book are linked to different pilgrim routes the link is very loose and instead they focus on a theme associated with some aspect of pilgrimage.

This is not really a travelogue or a guide book but a meditation on the emotional and spiritual experience of walking pilgrimages rather than the physical or practice consideration.

It probably serves as a useful introduction before making a pilgrimage for the first time, or as a tool to help organise and understand the experience for a new walker – maybe on the road, maybe after returning home to ease the post-pilgrimage blues when you find yourself back in so-called reality.

Boy Erased by Garrard Conley

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers

Garrard provides an account of his experience of so-called ex-gay “therapy” and his wider experience of growing up gay within a conservative Christian family.

While the experience of small-town Christian America is not replicated here in the UK the social pressures that bear down on Garrard can be found here. The world is changing fast - there are so many more role models for LGBT+ young people than there were ten years ago – but the impact is uneven and so there are many communities, many families, in which growing up gay remains an experience of deep pain. And of those families as disproportionate number will be religious.

At one point Garrard talks about Cosby, who is leading one of the sessions at the ex-gay programme “He didn’t need this documentary to be straight. He just was. His straightness buzzed off him, inhabited the room … with none of the self-consciousness the rest of us felt. … Though over the years I’d done my best to pretend otherwise, I’d had a string of male crushes that wouldn’t go away, a constant guilty ache that ran through my body for so long that I came to believe the feeling was just a part of what it meant to be alive.”

This contrast between the easy self-identity of someone society defines as “normal” and someone society defines as “other” is not unique to the LGBT+ experience, within “western” society “normal” is white, male, heterosexual – if you don’t tick all of the boxes you will have an uphill struggle, if you don’t tick any of the boxes it can become a mountain climb.

At the very end of the book, reflecting on the time since he went to the ex-gay programme he writes “I will not call on God at any point during this decade-long struggle. Not because I want to keep God out of my life, but because His voice is no longer there. What happen to me has made it impossible to speak with God, to believe in a version of Him that isn’t charged with self-loathing. My ex-gay therapists took Him away from me, and no matter how many different churches I attend, I will feel that same dead weight on my chest. I will feel that pang of a deep love absent from my life. … Perhaps one day I will hear His voice again. Perhaps not. It’s a sadness I deal with on a daily basis.”

This, for me as a person of faith, is a great scandal, those who claim to be Ministers of the Gospel are blocking the path to God. And it doesn’t need a fully fledged ex-gay programme to happen – I know of plenty of LGBT+ people who have been driven from the church, driven from God, by the denial of their being by those that claim authority within the church. Some have fled to protect their own wellbeing. Some do find places of encounter with God elsewhere but for too many the church has become an enduring barrier between them and God.

I find myself increasingly disappointed and despondent about inclusion within the Church of England – ongoing engagement with its institutional life and Synodical processes is leaving me embittered but I feel called to remain because the alternative would be LGBT+ invisibility that plays into the hands of our oppressors. But this means I have to divorce my self-worth and my faith any official positioning of the Church.

Europe’s Deadly Century Edited by Forbes, Page, and Pérez

One of the strengths of this volume comes from bringing essays from different parts of Europe together.

In the UK we have a particular narrative associated with the “Deadly Century” of the title, having been on the “winning” side in both World Wars as well, arguably, as the Cold War – this creates a strong temptation to frame our relationship with the physical remains of those conflicts within a context of pride.

The contrast to this is powerfully explored within the essay about the relationships to the monuments and other physical remains from the Franco era in Spain.

While Michael Kimmelman is cited as saying that Franco’s monuments should be ignored because “they have been displaced from Spanish collective memory” there is a concern that this can create a silence around them and “silence belongs with dictatorship and is the product of fear and trauma”.

The essay looks at both the “monuments” put up by Franco and the regime and also some of the other remains, in particular the Carabanchel Prison, where political prisoners with held and tortured. The site has been demolished – and some would see that as a positive act, cleansing and allowing Spain to move on. But there is a risk that this allows a dark era to be forgotten – and forgetting favours those that might support authoritarianism more than those that support liberty.

We end up with “sanitised, apolitical visions of the past” when Jameson claims that “History is what hurts”. They go on to say “A narrative that presents everybody as a victim or everybody as a perpetrator is politically irresponsible. As Hannah Ardent wrote: ‘Where everybody is guilty, nobody is; public confessions of collective guilt are the best defence against the discovery of culprits, and the magnitude of a crime is the best excuse to not do anything.’”.

This plays out beyond our relationship with remains of war.

When governments give apologies for past wrongs it can be a powerful act of reconciliation, but it can also be used to draw a line – a logic that says that once the apology is given no further inquires needed, it can act as a way of blocking access to the truth.

It is also at play in some of the debates within Universities around statues of past benefactors who made the money they gave to the institution from slavery. There needs to be an open relationship with that past – if you are too quick to take down the statues and rename the colleges and lecture halls you can miss out on a real acknowledgement of the link between the crime of slavery and the good of the University. Hiding that past is potentially as problematic as celebrating it. It would be better, for example, to explore how you might use historic links to slavery as a motivation to action tackling modern slavery?

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers

This is a tale of holding back – Renée hides her inner life, playing the role of concierge that the other residents expect. She ensures the outward observed habits of her life are consistent with the status of an uncultured working-class woman – she sees this as a route to successful interaction with the other residents, who are her employers.

If they knew of the inner life, her passion for art and culture, they would she her as trespassing on their territory – they would feel she was demanding a status akin to their own, they might have to treat her as an equal, as a person, and the functional relationship would be lost.

It is an exploration about whether the caterpillar can become the butterfly – there is a risk in breaking open the shell and becoming a new self, that fear is very real.

If this was not a French novel (read in translation by Alison Anderson) one might worry that it was a caricature – the social world of the novel is not one that exists in England – although the themes of status and pretentiousness are universal.

Inner Gold by Robert A. Johnson

Read this book for a book group – at 76 pages of fairly large print at least it doesn’t take too long to read…

I found the ideas within it odd at a number of levels - your “Inner Gold” would appear to be a metaphor that Johnson has pushed too far towards the literal. The handing over of your Gold for someone else to look after until a time when you are strong enough to carry it yourself takes you a certain distance as an idea. There is something about self-worth that can at times in your life be difficult to hold onto, and having someone within your life who sees that worth and cherishes it even when you yourself can not could be valuable.

Johnson seems to focus on the male or masculine experience as the primary point of understanding the world, and portrays both masculine and feminine in a rather thin manner, caricatures – he claims that men come “factory equipped – it is absolutely ingrained – with two visions of women.”, which are essentially the Virgin and the Whore. For women their vision is of man as either “a knight on a white horse [or] a barbarian” while “If you’re homosexual, the same thing happens, but the labels are reversed.” Johnson writes in absolute terms – his pronouncements are made as universal “facts” - and therefore it would seem that the whole of human existence is trapped in gender norms of a rather up-tight version of Victorian morality. It is a deeply depressing prognosis.

I would also note that Johnson has a somewhat offhand approach when he views the roots of Nazism as an “archetypal force” which “miscarried” - it would suggest that the greatest crimes against humanity were the result of people’s sense of identity getting a little out of shape rather than an evil perversion of the essence of humanity.

For the most part the book was neither convincing nor compelling. While I find the idea of throwing books away painful, after we have discussed it in my book group I think I will be dropping this one in the recycling bin.

The Extra Mile, A 21st Century Pilgrimage by Peter Stanford

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 

Peter Stanford begins his introduction with Waterden Church, a “Small Pilgrim Place”, before going on to explores 8 major places of Pilgrimage. Some have a pretty solid Christian identity – Walsingham – some less “solid” with significant pagan interest - Glastonbury – while Stonehenge despite its rich mix of identities has very limited explicitly Christian interpretations.

Stanford goes to these places at the times they get their peak pilgrim numbers, and observes – except that more than once he does get sucked into being a participant, he is interested in the people, the pilgrims, as much as the places.

One surprise was the realisation that I haven’t actually been to most of these places – Iona, Lindisfarne, Glastonbury, and Bardsey sit so firmly in my imagination that I have sort of forgotten that I have never physically travelled to them. This perhaps points to their power, a pilgrimage is only ever partly physical – the physical is a token signifying the “real” journey of the mind or spirit – the place of pilgrimage, even when you at physically present, is a place that you imagine.

In exploring the non-Christian pilgrimage, particularly at Stonehenge and Glastonbury, the absence of the traditional narratives of pilgrimage perhaps offers more direct insights into the question “What do people think they are doing?” as they have had to find a language of their own rather than wrapping responses stock phrases (although it seems they is plenty of borrowing of “Christian” vocab...).

Stanford finds common themes across all the expressions of pilgrimage – desires for connection, desires for a grounding, desires for a sense of something beyond the worries of everyday life. There are twin experiences of something intensely personally and something common or collective.

Stanford is visiting major pilgrimage sites at points of above average visitor numbers and this might explain the emphasis on the collective experience, but even in the absence of others the sense of a place “where prayer has been valid”, as T. S. Elliot put it, feels an essential part of pilgrimage.

These places have great stories associated with their pasts, and particularly with their origins – and our relationship to these stories can be complex. Many have rich layers, full of colour and drama, through which the location of historical “facts” is not always easy. The stories explain why the place is worth visiting, and yet in many cases the stories are probably not true. In some cases the place almost certainly existed before the stories – some have long pre-Christian heritage going back well beyond the Saints and Martyrs we recall today. There is a bit of Chicken and Egg – the Story that tells us why the place is significance only exists because the place was significant and people needed to explain why.

I am probably not someone who needed to be convinced that Pilgrimage is good for you, but nevertheless Stanford provides such engaging insight that he reaffirms its value. There can be great healing found through pilgrimage, not from some magic associated with spring waters or saints bones (although I wouldn’t rule that out), but in the intentional act of going somewhere, a bringing together of mind and body that allows renewal to take place.

Even reading it in the depths of winter I found my feet start to itch to be on the road again.