Underland by Robert Macfarlane

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.