Category Archives: Life

Chill in Chichester

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We were married in a half hour service from 10.30 to 11am. Exactly four years later we were sitting in a communion service in Chichester cathedral, lasting from 10.30 to 11am. The parallel didn’t occur to me until later but I thought it was a nice one, especially when Best Beloved pointed out that a communion service is the exact opposite of the rigidly, unyieldingly secular civil marriage service that I once ranted of.

So, anyway, happy anniversary to us as of yesterday.

Chichester cathedral is smaller than my favourite (Salisbury, of course): blockier, more Romanesque, which is my understanding of “small, rounded arches”. A Wellington or a Whitley, if you will, to Salisbury’s Lancaster.

But it has a character very much of its own, especially since, as a community, it made the decision to be a sponsor of the arts and crafts. It was also being extensively renovated right up until the 1990s, still in the original style and stone; but these two facts together mean there is a lot of modern that blends very nicely with the old, and the gleaming white stonework might actually be how the entire building once looked.



And there’s the more trad cathedrally stuff too. The Arundel tomb actually inspired a poem by Philip Larkin, which is actually quite good. He was moved by the way that the knight has taken off his right glove so that he can hold hands with his wife for all eternity. And it is sweet.

As the local MP, this guy gets a slightly more heroic statue than his manner of death would suggest (plonker).

From the department of “they did it different in those days” comes this affectionate memorial.

If I had tried penetrating anyone to bring them to a settled faith in Christ then my youthwork career would probably not have lasted so long.

Still with the sponsoring arts thing, outside where the sun had finally decided to shine there is an exhibition of sculptures going on in the cloisters.


There was also this intriguing display …

… which turned out to be practice for all those times souls get lost somewhere up on a very high roof and have to be picked up. There’s probably sermon material in there if I contrive it enough.

In other news, I now have an eighteen-year-old stepson. The difference between the adult and child Bonusbarn has yet to be remarkable, except that this year he can steward and take booze to Truck.

Look on my works, ye walkers, and despair

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Beauty on the Harwell campus doesn’t exactly jump out at you, but it is there if you know where to look. It helps if the Ballardian post-apocalyptic nature-reclaims-the-works-of-man vibe presses your buttons, like it presses mine.

Tucked away in the north west corner of the site there’s a network of man-made roads being extremely reclaimed: now useful for tasks like teaching Junior Godson to ride his bike (a few years ago) or just strolling on a Sunday afternoon (us, today).

This used to be Hillside.

The odd modern-ish road sign suggests they were in use relatively recently …


… and indeed (I’m told) up until about 20 years ago this was a post-war prefab residential area. In places the road is all but gone, with only the occasional concrete path leading up to a square clearing of moss in the bushes that once was someone’s home – often with interesting displays of feral ox-eye daisies where the flower beds have burst free of their banks.

[UPDATE: My copy of Harwell: The Enigma Revealed tells me this was once the Aldfield estate, built in 1946 by German POWs. The prefabs were such desirable property that in one case an engineer’s wife stood on the concrete base while the house was assembled around her, in case someone pinched it. They were lovely in summer and freezing in winter, as the walls consisted of two metal sheets with a 4-inch air gap and that was all. A programme to demolish them began in 1986 and by 1991 all were gone. Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs lived at no. 17 Hillside.]
I find it interesting to see how obviously fertile the area is in its natural state. Twenty years after the great plague, Abingdon will probably look a bit like this. Actually, if I was a spaceman who landed here I might conjecture that civilisation had been destroyed by the weird triffid-like thistles that flourish so happily (see foreground, right).
If I was a spaceman I would definitely want to investigate this feature if I spotted it from orbit. It’s the end of Thames Rd in the map above …

… and looks to me like somewhere that the original inhabitants might have used as a launchpad. Maybe they did. Not much to see from ground level, though.

The two-hour lump of cinematic cheese that is Logan’s Run redeems itself with a five minute section where Logan and Jessica come across the post-apocalypse ruins of Washington DC, and marvel at such wonders as an overgrown Lincoln Memorial and Capitol, which unlike the rest of the movie actually look quite convincing. At one point they slosh through a marshy swamp, the camera pans around and we realise they’re wading down the Reflecting Pool in front of the Washington Monument.

(Image (c) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976, and taken from this site, which has many more.)

That’s a bit what it’s like in the top left corner of Harwell. But only a bit. Or possibly a bit like my favourite part of Prince Caspian, where the Pevensie kids explore the ruins of Cair Paravel.

Seriously Opposed to Christ Agency

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You might think that SOCA, if you’ve heard of it at all, is the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the nearest Brit equivalent to the FBI, the Untouchables, the high-tech Thin Blue Line that stands between law and anarchy.

You fools, I once thought that too until the scales fell from my eyes as I walked down Park Road this afternoon. The truth was tacked to a tree just outside St Michael’s.

Truly, there can only be one reason that SOCA’s logo resembles the description of the Biblical Beast. Just in case you think that’s circumstantial, there was a URL at the bottom which I have blanked out to preserve your sanity and innocence. Just trust me that it takes you to a very long web page – a lesser mind would say “rambling”, I prefer “comprehensively argued” – that starts with the eye-catching line: “Visiting pornographic chat rooms I discovered the girls were captives […] The girls I met are locked up for an existance of being forced to have sex with animals or Mafia …”

Following that discovery, our hero stumbled across a veritable web of vileness and corruption that involves Google, Yahoo and Serco. He mistakenly took his evidence to SOCA, only to discover that they are in it too, having started well but been corrupted by the Freemasons, an organisation which includes both George Bushes, Barack Obama and Tony Blair. And guess who provided SOCA’s IT systems? Serco. Can it get more conclusive?

Unfortunately it does with screenful after screenful that takes our hero to destinations including Russia, Estonia, Poland and Auschwitz. I then came to a link to Page 2, but ventured no further. There’s a black helicopter hovering outside the window and the doorbell just rang and-