The collapse of the Church of England

There was a time when High Ham had its own rector. Then it was absorbed into Langport and High Ham had a vicar under the rector in Langport. Then there was no longer a vicar in High Ham. And now even Langport has no priest. The vicarage being let, the living is suspended.

The neighbouring benefice of Long Sutton, Pitney, Muchelney and Drayon is also suspended.

The Church of England has brought iself to this situation.  Distant, arrogant, high-handed, pompous, self-obsessed – the list of apposite descriptions is long. A failure during the Covid pandemic, lacking leadership, having little understanding of rural communities, the decline has been long an inexorable.

In Somerset, the irrelevance began a century ago. In his book In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist broadcaster John Humphrys remembers his father as not being very favourably disposed towards clergy,

‘That can probably be traced to an experience he had as a young man when he was staying with his aunt at her little cottage in a Somerset village not long after the First WorId War had ended. They were about to sit down for Sunday lunch when the door burst open and the vicar strode in. Without so much as a by-your­leave, a tap on the door or even ‘Good morning’, he demanded to know why my great-aunt had not been at the morning service. She did a little bob – not quite a curtsy, but not far from it – and stammered some sort of apology. She tried to explain that she seldom had visitors and she’d been busy preparing lunch for her nephew whom she hadn’t seen for a year and who had come from a long way away (the other side of the Severn estuary) but she’d make sure to turn up for evensong. He was having none of it. He barked at her, ‘See that you do! Don’t let it happen again!’ and marched out without another word. He did not even acknowledge the presence of her guest.

My father was outraged and remembered that en­counter in minute detail until his dying day. How dare the vicar treat his aunt with such disdain – exactly like a lord of the manor dealing with a serf! But those were the days of deference, especially in a rural backwater like Wellow in Somerset, when the working class knew its place and would never have dared to stand up to the authority of the vicar’.

As someone who grew up in a working-class family in another rural backwater of Somerset, the story told by John Humphrys’  is reassuring, this was how working-class people experienced the church. There is a certain schadenfreude in watching the disintegration of the institution. Perhaps something Christian will emerge from the ruins.

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Saints in Long Sutton and High Ham

Once, I was called upon to make the presentation at the retirement of a primary school teacher. It was a poignant occasion, (especially if you have to try to make the speech to say ‘thank you’). After decades of teaching the youngest children, she was calling it a day, as gentle and kind and patient as I believe she had been throughout her career. It was sobering to think how many lives she had shaped.

Primary school teachers in small schools had an extraordinary power to influence us, for good or for ill. They were people held in extraordinarily high regard. (In at least one part of rural Co Down, in the early 1990s, the headmaster of the local Catholic primary school was still referred to as ‘Master’ so and so, rather than as just plain ‘Mister’. It made the point that here was a man who was important to the community).

Perhaps it’s not just the attitude we have towards them, perhaps it’s also the way we treat them. Teaching salaries were never going to make anyone rich, but I suspect they used to go much further. School teachers, if they did not live in the schoolhouse, would have had good houses in villages. Now their salaries would not go near buying the sort of houses their predecessors occupied. In a society where someone’s worth is often reckoned by how much they earn, where do we put those primary school teachers?

When I was young we didn’t even know what teachers Christian names were, they were just ‘Miss’, even if they were ‘Mrs’, (in primary schools, ‘Mr’ was rare). I only discovered that the headmistress of the first primary school I attended was called ‘Susan’ at a wedding I attended in Dublin in 1999  – a different country and thirty-two years later to discover that Miss Todd had a Christian name!

I thought about Miss Todd when driving through Long Sutton today.

Miss Todd used to have groups of children to play board games in her house at lunch times. I remember having no idea about how to play the game, but at being overawed to be in Miss Todd’s house. (Miss Todd was the niece of the Archbishop of Canterbury and had been to Lambeth Palace – lots of times!) Miss Todd must have felt frustrated at times, most of us would not have been the most exciting or inspiring of pupils, but my only memories of her are of a firm and gracious lady.

On All Saints’ Day, when we recall the good and faithful down through the generations, I think I would want to put amongst them Miss Todd in Long Sutton and Miss Everitt and Miss Rabbage in High Ham, without whose efforts the lives of hundreds of Somerset children would have been very different.

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Unintended consequences of good intentions

A good-intentioned number of newcomers to the village decided ‘affordable housing’ was necessary. They seemed not well-versed in market economics which awards an immediate premium to those who acquire assets at below market prices.

Having contemplated ‘affordable housing,’ they then switched to the idea of providing ‘social housing’, rental properties at below the prevailing market rates. Of course, such provision provides the recipients a benefit that would not accrue to those not fortunate enough to be allocated a house.

The well-intentioned group would not accept the arguments that there were flaws in their reasoning, particularly that the cost of finance, the cost of providing services to the sites, and the cost of building materials, would require a level of rent that would make the houses little cheaper than market rates.

There was a lecturer during my undergraduate years at the LSE who would reiterate to students, ‘you cannot buck the market.’ Anyone who might have disagreed with the assertion would have needed only to look at everyday situations to have understood the point. Interventions in markets can sometimes have consequences that were not intended.

Thus it is that the planning application for six units of social housing that would forever destroy the view of the windmill as it appears in the photograph at the top of this page has brought unexpected dividends for local landowners.

A piece of land a little closer to the windmill, on the opposite side of the road was put up for sale. A family member inquired about the potential cost of the two acres of grazing. ‘£8,000-£10,000 per acre?’ he asked.

An uncle, a farmer all his life, thought about it and was umabiguous in his response. ‘It could go for £100,000.’ he said.

The figure seemed absurd. Who would pay such a price?

It transpired that my uncle’s estimate was £4,000 out – the two acres sold for £96,000.

The prospect of the council permitting a development in an undeveloped area has brought speculation that once one application has been granted, others cannot be refused. The intention of providing housing at a lower price has brought a sharp increase in the price of land.

A schoolboy economist would tell you that in a market economy, prices will always be determined by supply and demand. If prices are to be reduced, supply must be increased or demand must be reduced. The demand for housing will not reduce, the only way to make it affordable is for a wide scale building programme to be undertaken by local authorities. Local interventions can have the effect of making things worse.

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Flamengo?

No, it’s not a spelling mistake. It is a ‘g’ and not a ‘c.’ It is a Brazilian football club, not a form of Spanish dancing.

Had you ever heard of Flamengo? Perhaps there are footballing cognoscenti who would be familiar with the name, most people whom I know would not have heard of the club. I had not heard of Flamengo until this morning.

Most of the Third Year students have gone on a school trip to Belgium.  Just four students were left in the class, and one of the boys and I stood watching a soccer match from the classroom window. The under-18s were playing a team from another school in the county in a fiercely contested match.

‘Who do you support?’ I asked him.

‘In the Premier League – Liverpool, but at home in Brazil, Flamengo.’

Knowing nothing about South American football, I could not comment on the merits or otherwise of his preferred team.

At the end of the lesson, it was lunchtime and I took out my phone. Opening Facebook to check on family news, the first thing to appear was a suggested item. It was a picture of the Flamengo football team who had won the Brazilian cup last week, a team of which I had not heard until twenty minutes previously.

In the past, when I have suggested to people that mobile phones eavesdrop on conversations, I have drawn looks of incredulity, but this morning’s evidence seemed conclusive.

My suspicions had become very strong when the prominent Dublin surgeon John Crown came up in conversation some weeks ago. He had provided excellent care to my friend who wondered what age he might be.

Taking out my phone, I had typed ‘John’ into Google, when ‘Crown’ immediately came up on the screen as one of three suggestions from which I might choose. How many hundred or even thousand surnames might have been prompted by the forename ‘John’? Had there been even a dozen possibilities suggested, I might have thought it was a piece of random chance, but it seemed very unlikely that random chance could have provided the name as one of just three?

It is not just that the phone is eavesdropping, it is obviously also passing information on to third parties who are monetising the information they have gathered through being able to offer advertisers very targeted advertisments.

I think the time has come to start including random words in conversations to see which are noted and what responses they elicit.

 

 

Posted in The stuff of daily life | 2 Comments

Another United Nations Day

Being of a compulsive disposition, after classes on Friday, I wiped the board and wrote the date for Monday.

24th October? Isn’t it the date for something?

I remembered after a few moments. United Nations Day. I recalled school assemblies that presented a picture of an organisation which seemed at variance with the day to day reality of people’s experience of the United Nations.

United Nations Day recalls a moment travelling out of Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi one Sunday morning ten years ago.  The full extent  of the incapacity of the United Nations to effect real change had become apparent that morning.

A convoy of white buses, with black letters painted on the side proclaiming “UN,” were moving slowly.

“What are the UN buses for?” I asked

“Refugees from conflict in DRC.”

“I thought the trouble was further north?”

“There is trouble further north – this is different trouble. The buses are going to fetch people who have fled across the border.”

“Where will they take them?”

“To camps on the other side of Burundi; the UN says they must be 150 miles from the border.”

“Isn’t that almost impossible in Burundi?”

My companion had shrugged.

Sometimes conversations are pointless; what would be changed by repeating facts already known? There would be no reports on the world media about busloads of poor people being taken across a poor African country to live in great poverty even in UN camps.

The United Nations could provide buses for refugees but could do nothing about the civil war that caused them, even in a failed state like DRC.

it was a far remove from P Tang Yang Kipperbang, Jack Rosenthal’s 1982 television film set in the Post-War Britain of 1948.

“Quack Quack” Duckworth, the shy and awkward fourteen year old who loves the prettiest girl in the school, walks along with Tommy, the school groundsman as Tommy marks the boundary of a cricket pitch.  He believes Tommy has been a soldier serving in battle after battle, not knowing he is wanted for desertion.  Quack Quack tells Tommy that the soldiers have brought in a new age:

“From now on, there’ll never be any more wars, never again, for the simple raison d’etre that the United Nations will insist there’s no more wars.  Any country wanting to invade another, well, hard cheddar . . the United Nations will vote against them, QED”

It seems astonishing, in the light of the United Nations’ record in failing to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, and in Rwanda, and its record in being impotent in the face of countless incidents of military aggression, that anyone should still believe that the United Nations could do anything to protect people.  Unless the United States decides to intervene, the United Nations is no more than a talking shop.

The ideal world is inhabited by Quack Quack Duckworth and the school assemblies of times past; it’s not inhabited by those for whom there is no protection.

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