There's Mutual Obligation, after all...

NMRBoy alerted me to this curious story today, presumably having read about it over at Bullied Academics. It seems that one Kaye Carl, an hourly-paid lecturer at the University of Sheffield, has won a legal fight to be recognised as an employee by her University. Apparently her contract had stated that she was no an employee, but on looking at the reality of her situation, an employment tribunal had recognised that she most definitely was an employee.

Whether she'll get anywhere with the substantive part of her case -- she claims that she was treated less favourably than regular employees -- is a different matter, but I'm delighted that she's managed to at least win herself a beachhead.

Ms Carl's victory should certainly have ramifications, as anomalous positions like Ms Carl's are far from rare in academia. It's interesting that a spokesperson for Sheffield University has now claimed that Sheffield is 'currently leading the way on the regularisation process of atypical workers'. Yes, 'atypical workers' are almost par for the course in Britain's ivory towers, many of them having signed letters saying that they're not employees.

Bosh, of course, signing a letter saying you're not an employee no more means that you're not an employee any more than signing one saying you're a fish means that you're a fish!

I could say a lot more about this, but at the moment I think prudence calls for me to wait a while. Just for a while...

It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you

And after the wonderful Rick Astley diagram from the other day, a quick glance through Graham Linehan's archives gives us this wonderfully childish Batman gag.

I sent the Brother a link to it at nine yesterday evening, seeing he was on Skype just as I was wrapping up another chat, and he replied moments later.

'Right as Batman Begins - see what I did there?'
'Oh very good. And yes. I think I shall come down now. I'm tired of checking stuff here.'

As indeed I was. For all that I was hopeful after the marathon meeting in mid-February, the last week has rather ground me down, as I've been ruining my eyes trying to check and correct the minutes. Seriously, checking them has involved working off a copy of the minutes on the screen, consulting e-mails I've sent over the last month, scrutinising the files from the meeting itself, sifting through the documents beside my feet, listening carefully time and time again to the recording of the meeting, and having long discussions with NMRBoy, who's not exactly been skimping on his end either.

I'd been catching up on Skype for the previous couple of hours while analysing the corrected version of the minutes, comparing it when the original and highlighting any areas where I'd amended the text. Sadly, about half the text is now a lurid red showing where I've corrected, adjusted, tweaked, or otherwise clarified the minutes I'd been sent for my approval. It's hard on the eyes, I have to say, so I was glad to leave it behind for a bit.

It was fun watching Batman Begins, not least because it's eerie how much Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow resembles NMRBoy. In truth, there's not a lot to dislike about the film. It looks great, has some nice dialogue, is exceptionally well-plotted barring one scene that could do with a little more justification, and features a balletic sword-fight on ice. Liam Neeson adds instant gravitas in his role as mentor to the apprentice Batman, Tom Wilkinson is sparkles as an improbably-cast mob boss, Gary Oldman breaks with tradition by not playing a freak, and Morgan Freeman somehow makes the whole thing marginally less implausible than normal.

I always tend to suspect that deep down, The Batman is an even more ludicrous concept than Superman. I know, nobody else believes me either, but bear with me for now. I'll expand on it one of these days. Trust me. It has theological implications, curiously enough. Oh yes, I've got your interest now, haven't I? No? Oh...

I'll leave that for another day, anyway. Instead I want to leave you pondering what an odd family the Cranes must be, with a retired policeman for a father and three psychiatrist sons: Frasier, Niles, and Jonathan. That last one really didn't turn out at all well, did he?

One Egg is Un Oeuf

Well, it would have been. Today, however, was an egg-free day for me. I don't just mean a day free of chocolate eggs -- it has been several years since I've had one of those -- rather it's been a day free of your regular common-or-garden eggs. I'm not quite sure why, as they'd been one of the things I gave up for Lent. Shouldn't I have been indulging today, in a frenzied orgy of yoke and albumen?

That's a mental picture you'd probably rather do without. Well, too late for you, my friend, too late for you.

So anyway, last night I went to the Vigil Mass at the Pro-Cathedral. I'd been to Vigil masses in Manchester in 2004 and 2005, but had never been to one at home; I'm glad to say that my first Irish Vigil Mass didn't disappoint, being just as beautiful and as prayerful as those I'd previously participated in.

Thomas Howard, in Evangelical is Not Enough, which I read a few weeks ago, in the aftermath of Bleak House, does rather more justice to the celebration than I could hope to, so I think it's probably best just to quote his description in full:

On Holy Saturday in most churches no rites occur until the end of the day when the highest feast of the Christian year is celebrated. It is the ancient Paschal Vigil, leading up to the First Mass of Easter.

It is a rite that seems to go back to the earliest years of the Church, perhaps even to years when the apostles were still alive. Toward the end of the day (afternoon, evening, ery late evening, or, in some churches, just before dawn on Easter morning itself) the Christians assemble in the darkened church. The procession of clergy, servers, and choir assembles at the rear of the church, in darkness. Then fire is struck, from which the Paschal Candle is lighted. This is an immense candle, sometimes as tall as a man and several inches in diameter. There are affixed to the side of this candle five grains of incense, representing the five wounds of Christ. Then the deacon moves into the dark aisle with this single, flickering light. The procession follows him. Presently he stops. "The light of Christ!" he sings, and all the people respond singing, "Thanks be to God!" Again he proceeds, and again he stops. "The light of Christ!" this time on a higher note. "Thanks be to God!" we sing. Yet a third time it happens, on a higher note still. Then, from that candle tapers are lighted, and the flame is passed to all the people, who have been given unlighted candles.

Here is the church, glimmering now with this light from candles that are themselves almost perfect symbols of what Christ is, since a candle's light comes from its own self-giving.

Presently the deacon sings the Exsultet:

Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels,
and let your trumpets shout Salvation
for the victory of our mighty King.

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
brought with a glorious splendor,
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.

Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church,
and let your holy courts, in radiant light,
resound with the praises of your people.

All you who stand near this marvelous and holy flame,
pray with me to God the Almighty
for the Grace to sing the worthy praise of this great light.

Scripture readings follow, tracing the history of Redemption: the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, Noah, the Red Sea, and other milestones leading to Christ.

Eventually comes the most blissful moment of all. Alone the priest sings, "Glory be to God on high!" Suddenly all the lights in the church blaze on, bells are jangled merrily by the servers, the organ thunders out its triumph, and Easter has begun! He is risen! He is risen! The First Mass of Easter!

... I grew up in a household and a tradition that loved the Resurrection of the Lord. Evangelicals felt that they were almost alone in defending the doctrine against the modernists and unbelievers. But here was the Church, celebrating this event with an amplitude of joy that finally seemed not only to answer to what I had loved and believed all along, but unfurl it for me. If we could blow horns at New Year's and wave flags on July 4 and have a picnic on Labor Day, why -- oh why -- were we denied celebration, ceremony, hilarity, and an extravagance of pageantry on this feast, next to which these mere national holidays were literally nothing -- nothing at all? What religion was it that said to us, "No. Sit still. Or stand and sing, 'Up from the grave He arose.' But your main job is to think about the event and hear a sermon about it. Don't do anything."

I have often thought, in the years since those days at St. Mary's, "Oh, my own crowd, the wonderful evangelicals, with their love for the gospel and their zeal; for God -- how they would leap for joy if ever they returned to the ancient Church and thronged in by their hundreds and thousands, singing, praising, and bursting with pure joy at the discovery of the liturgy!"

The mass itself was beautiful, with the litany of the saints being chanted at the two baptisms that took place, Archbishop Martin's homily being a real call to arms, the Sanctus -- like the Gloria -- coming from Mozart's Missa Solemnis in C, the Agnus Dei coming from the beautifully simple Mass XVIII, and the Recessional Hymn being the 'Hallelujah Chorus' from Handel's Messiah, to my knowledge the only part of the Classical canon that was first performed in Dublin.

And so, suitably fortified by the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Our Lord, I filed out of the Church and pelted down O'Connell Street as fast as I could go, only to see the last bus rounding Westmoreland Street and cruising off down the Quays. If I were to make one suggestion to the Archbishop of Dublin, it'd be that he bring the Vigil forward from half past nine to nine o'clock. Considering that the whole mass ran for two hours, getting the last bus would have been a miracle.

I coped, though. I only had an hour to wait till the Nitelink. And me being me, I had a book.

'You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that..'

I find it very peculiar that, in drawing up its list of what its members regarded as the top movie heroes of all time, the American Film Institute somehow overlooked St Thomas More, as unforgettably played in A Man for All Seasons by Paul Scofield, who died on Wednesday.

Too easily dismissed as 'dull but worthy', A Man for All Seasons is genuinely worthy, but it's anything but dull. On the contrary, it's as compelling a study of heroic integrity as has ever been committed to celluloid, even more inspiring than Atticus Finch and Will Kane by virtue of being true.

Steven Greydanus sums it up well:

A Man for All Seasons is the story of a man who knows who he is. The 1966 film, which won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, is brilliant and compelling, steely with conviction, luminous with genuine wisdom and wit. The screenplay, well adapted by Robert Bolt from his own stage play, is fiercely intelligent, deeply affecting, resonant with verbal beauty and grace. Scofield, who for years starred in the stage play before making the film, gives an effortlessly rich and layered performance as Sir Thomas More, saint and martyr, the man whose determined silence spoke more forcefully than words, and who then spoke even more forcefully by breaking it.

The film's superbly acted throughout, with Orson Welles suitably imperious as Cardinal Wolsey, Nigel Davenport hilarious as the Duke of Norfolk, and Wendy Hiller stubbornly defiant as More's wife Alice. John Hurt steals many a scene as Richard Rich, a gifted but vulnerable and vain young man who loses his soul for worldly success, having ignored More's early advice that she should put himself out of the way of temptation.

'Why not be a teacher?' More asks him, 'You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.'
'If I was, who would know it? '
'You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.'

Rich's rise in the world is marvellously -- if none too subtly -- conveyed in his increasingly opulent garb, but his face never loses the worried expression we first see upon it, and if anything he wears an increasingly hunted look. It seems apt that the film's last words refer to his fate here on earth.

I do not know if this is indeed -- as Greydanus opines -- the most profound cinematic depiction of the life of any saint, though I'd not be surprised if it were. Certainly, Greydanus is right to call it a great film, and that's due in no small part to Scofield's delicate yet powerful performance through exchanges like this, after More has allowed the untrustworthy Rich to leave his home unmolested, much to the horror of More's family who insist that he arrest him.

Sir Thomas More: And go he should, why if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

There are lessons there.

How do you make a Rick-Roll?

You push him down a hill, presumably.

It's Brother the Elder's birthday today, and since I doubt there'll be any cake on the go in the Gargoyle house today, I hope he'll enjoy this charming pie chart. I first saw it, thanks to Mr Linehan, resplendent in glorious technicolor over at Why, That's Delightful!

I'm quite taken by the diagram, I have to say, and have been proliferating it a bit since I saw it the other day. Not surprising, I suppose, considering my weakness for ingenious pie charts and Venn diagrams.

I passed it on to NMRBoy, himself a big fan of Ben Fold's rather delightful take on perhaps the most offensive song known to man - many's the time I dared him to play it at a formal hall concert, and even now I think that should be part of any ultimate deal we have to make. Trust me, it's not the weirdest dining hall fantasy I've had.

Anyway, on looking at the Rick Astley diagram, NMRBoy replied with the cryptic observation that he had once seen something similar on a wildlife park sign, before adding 'And had you heard the term "rickrolling"?'
'Er... no?'
'It's deceiving someone into clicking a link that points to Rick. Quite the sport, I believe.'
'Hoho,' I chortled, as one does on t'internet.
'I think Rick Astley is the poor man's equivalent of Bill Watterson,' he added. 'Never jumped the shark; quit while he was ahead.'
'Wow, ' I replied, thinking this a comparison more audacious than calling Suzanne Shaw the poor man's Hannah Spearritt, 'That's quite an analogy.'
'It may be stretching a bit,' he conceded.
'Ever so slightly.'

Anyway, as is the way of these things, yesterday's Guardian had a fine feature on Rick-Rolling, culminating in an amusing tale of how the unassuming Mr Astley is being deployed as a human bomb against the forces of Scientology.

'...Rick-rolling has begun to permeate the mainstream. It comes mostly courtesy of Anonymous, a diffuse group of hackers and activists who have declared war on the Church of Scientology in an initiative called Project Chanology. Organised without official leaders or hierarchy, Project Chanology manifests itself in Denial Of Service attacks against Scientologist websites, stupid YouTube videos, and in-person protests at Scientologist centres worldwide.

At recent protests in New York, Washington, London and Seattle, masked protesters held up boomboxes and chanted the Stock Aitken Waterman lyrics which Astley made famous. "Never gonna let you down!" they roared, in a live rick-rolling of the Church of Scientology.

Their cleverest move however is at AnonymousExposed.org, a website created this week that perfectly mimics the subtly different Anonymous-Exposed.org, created by Scientologists as an indictment of Anonymous' "cyber-crimes". Of course instead of showing an anti-Anonymous documentary, the mimic site displays - well, we'll let you have a guess.

But the final word goes to Rick Astley himself. Click here to watch our exclusive interview with Astley. The singer, now 42, has forceful words for Anonymous, Scientologists, and all those who have prolonged the rick-roll phenomenon.'

Click here indeed.

The Thirty-First Ghost

Douglas Adams, being interviewed years and years ago for Neil Gaiman's Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was far from kind in his appraisal of most writers of science-fiction. The standard of writing in the field, he felt, was abysmal. Taking Isaac Asimov as an example, he said that while he was in awe of his ideas he wouldn't have employed him even to write junk mail.

I have no idea what he thought of Arthur C. Clarke, who died yesterday. I've read hardly anything by Clarke, I'm afraid, though I've long been fond of his 2001: A Space Odyssey, the foreward to which starts with the poetic observation that:

'Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.'

No, I have no idea if he was right, whether about the historical population of the Earth or about the astronomical population of the Heavens, and rather suspect he's way off, not least because his claims begs the question of what counts as a human being, but it's a beautiful idea nonetheless, isn't it?

Neil Gaiman says on his journal today that the Clarke story that made the deepest impression on him when he was a child was 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It's conveniently online, and temptingly short, so I may have a read later on. Gaiman's description of how he met Clarke more than two decades ago is really quite bewitching:

'I met Sir Arthur C. Clarke in 1985, when he was in the UK to promote the film of 2010. He was staying in Brown's Hotel in London, where the doormen wore top hats and the hotel interior didn't seem to have changed in a hundred years. I interviewed him for Space Voyager magazine, but all I remember is that he was very kind and polite, and a vague surprise in discovering that he had a West Country burr in his voice. He seemed like someone from a past era, in that elderly wood-and-leather hotel, frail and elderly 22 years ago, but he was someone who had showed me the future, and who was living, very happily, in the future.'

I must confess that I'm a little surprised that he was surprised at discovering Clarke's 'West Country burr', not least because he'd evidently watched The Goodies a few times back in the day. Had he seen the episode where Graeme Garden turns in a marvellous performance as Arthur C. Clarke, dismissing one Fortean phenomenon after another? If not, he'd missed out.

'The Himalayan foothills, traditional home of the Abominable Snowman or Yeti,' says Garden's Clarke. 'Or is it? Well, once again - cobblers.' It's funny even as read, especially if you know Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, but for real comedic value it needs to be proclaimed in an earthily impatient West Country accent.

While the Cat's Away...

This evening, with a couple of his brilliant flatmates being away, Dublin's most incorrigible punster took advantage of the situation to treat a batch of us yp an absolute feast of chowder. It was, in a word, superb.

Having dined, and after an inappropriate joke or two -- eskimos were involved, and someday if you're good I'll tell you -- our host decided to introduce me to a pleasure that has somehow eluded me over the years, being Fry and Laurie's celebrated televisual sally at P.G. Wodehouse's peerless tales of a hapless toff and his omniscient valet.

The episode, 'Bridegroom Wanted!' came from the fourth season of Jeeves and Wooster and was basically a hybrid of two short stories, 'Jeeves and the Greasy Bird' and 'Bingo and the Little Woman'. I'm afraid I approached it with some trepidation, having in effect been warned by no less a person than Stephen Fry himself, in his introduction to What Ho! The Best of P.G. Wodehouse:

When Hugh Laurie and I had the extreme honour and terrifying responsibility of being asked to play Bertie Wooster and Jeeves in a series of television adaptations we were aware of one huge problem facing us. Wodehouse's three great achievements are Plot, Character and Language, and the greatest of these, by far, is Language. If we were reasonably competent then all of us concerned in the television version could go some way towards conveying a fair sense of the narrative of the stories and revealing too a good deal of the nature of their characters. The language however . . . we could only scratch the surface of the language. 'Scratching the surface' is a phrase often used without thought. A scratched surface, it is all to easy to forget, is a defiled surface. Wodehouse's language lives and breathes in its written, printed form. It oscillates privately between the page and the reader. The moment it is read out or interpreted it is compromised. It is, to quote Oscar Wilde on another subject, 'like a delicate exotic fruit -- touch it and the bloom is gone.' Scratch its surface, in other words, and you have done it a great disservice. Our only hope in making the television series was that the stories and the characters might provide enough pleasure on their own to inspire the viewer to pick up a book and encounter The Real Thing.

Let me use an example, taken completely at random. I flip open a book of Jeeves and Wooster short stories and happen Bertie and Jeeves discussing a young man called Cyril Bassington-Bassington . . .

'I've never heard of him, Have you ever heard of him, Jeeves?'
'I am familiar with the name Bassington-Bassington, sir. There are three branches of the Bassington-Bassington family -- the Shropshire Bassington-Bassingtons, the Hampshire Bassington-Bassingtons, and the Kent bassington-Bassingtons.'
'England seems pretty well stocked up with Bassington-Bassingtons.'
'Tolerably so, sir.'
'No chance of a sudden shortage, I mean, what?'

Well, try as hard as actors might, such an exchange will always work best on the page. It might still be amusing when delivered as dramatic dialogue, but no actors are as good as the actors we each of us carry in our head. And that is the point really, one of the gorgeous privileges of reading Wodehouse is that he makes us feel better about ourselves because we derive a sense of personal satisfaction in the laughter mutually created. The reader, by responding in his or her head to the rhythm and timing on the page, has the feeling of having made the whole thin click. Of course we yield to Wodehouse the palm of having written it, but our response is what validates the whole experience. Every comma, every 'sir' every 'what?' is something we make work in the act of reading.

I'm very grateful for having been so prepared. The show was wonderful -- sure, it wasn't quite Wodehouse, but it was never going to be and I knew that. What it was, though, was two of the greatest comic creations ever brought hilariously to life by two men who seemed born for the parts. All told, I think the adaptation was about as good as could be hoped for.

Try it, if you don't believe me.

The Appliance of Genius

The latest American Hell cartoon couldn't help but make me smile.

'Why are you quoting the toaster?' I asked Brother the Elder earlier, glad that he had done so, as it was only this morning that I'd noticed the label about the actuating lever and thought it was a great sentence.
'It's the appliance of genius,' he said.

There wasn't much I could say to that, so he followed up by saying that he'd just made tea, and to ask me whether I'd seen the original ending to I Am Legend. I hadn't, so immediately clicked on the link he sent. You'd be well advised to do likewise, at least if you've seen the film.

Interesting, eh? Radically different from the film as it stands, certainly, and implicitly closer to the book, in that it makes pretty explicit how the film's vampires see him as a legendary being, hunting them down like a mythical monster or a serial killer. I'm not sure that the film would really have been any better with this ending, though, not least because of the final sequence involving a somewhat confusing bridge.

I was glad to see this anyway, as it happens, as I'd been thinking again the other day about the differences between the film and the book, which I read a few weeks ago in the immediate aftermath of Bleak House. The Cheesemonger was intrigued to hear this when I mentioned it on Saturday, not least because he'd been disappointed by the film, and felt that the film I described was far more interesting than the film he saw.

What was the book like? Very different, was really all I could say. My feeling was that the film's makers had read the book, liked it, summarised it for a producer in one of those ludicrously concise pitches so lethally lampooned in The Player, and been commissioned to make a film based on their pitch rather than on Matheson's brilliant novel.

The novel really is something special. Granted, I'm hardly a connoisseur of either horror or classic science fiction, but I think Stephen King has it spot on when he says that Matheson

'... single-handedly regenerated a stagnant genre, rejecting the conventions of the pulps that were already dying, incorporating sexual impulses and images into his work as Theodore Sturgeon had already begun to do in his science fiction, and writing a series of gut-bucket short stories. What do I remember about them? I remember what they taught me; the same thing that rock’s most recent regenerator, Bruce Springsteen, articulates in one of his songs, no retreat, baby, no surrender. I remember that Matheson would never give ground. When you thought it had to be over, that your nerves couldn’t stand any more, that was when Matheson turned on the afterburners. He wouldn’t quit. He was relentless. The baroque intonations of Lovecraft, the perfervid prose of the pulps, the sexual innuendoes, were all absent. You were faced with so much pure drive that only rereadings showed Matheson’s wit, cleverness, and control.'

The pace alone is stunning, but King's right, there's far more to it than that. It's a jewel, really. A strange one, but a real one for all that.

One of these days I must get round to watching The Last Man on Earth which is conveniently viewable online, having fallen into the public domain somehow. I'm intrigued by the idea of Vincent Price as Robert Neville, or whatever he's called in the film. Not just yet, though; work needs doing.

Shouting like Trumpets from all the Roofs and Pinnacles

Gargoyles, strictly speaking, are waterspouts. The word 'gargoyle', ludicrous though it sounds, is cognate with 'gargle', ultimately coming from Latin via the French word gargouille. Most of the fellas you probably think of as gargoyles are in fact their purely decorative cousins, more properly termed 'grotesques'.

So your man in the picture here, looking like a rather innocuous lion, is in fact a pedigree gargoyle, playing a useful role in society by, well, gargling.

Yes, I'm sad to say that thirsty gargoyles -- or dry ones, if you like -- are merely grotesques.

Anyway, this fella here is doing sterling work channelling rainwater from the chapel's roof in Cambridge's Ridley Hall, an Anglican theological college around which I've been orbiting over the last day or so; my host of last night is a student there.


I arrived in Cambridge rather later than I expected yesterday, having had all manner of ticket issues first at Victoria and again at King's Cross, causing me to miss my train by moments. Still, eventually I arrived to be greeted by a beaming face was the first to welcome me to my Mancunian home when I arrived there back in 2001 and that hasn't changed a bit since I last saw him on his wedding day, nearly three years ago.

Over a nostalgic pizza in his house I chatted with him and his mischievous other half, reminiscing and being regaled by tales of old pranks, browsing through the wedding photos as he dispelled my confusion over the A, B, and C issue.

Far from standing for anything, A, B, and C refer to Church of England resolutions in connection with the issue of women priests: Resolution A allowed parishes to bar ordained women priests from celebrating communion or pronouncing absolution in the parish, Resolution B allows them to prevent women priests from working as incumbents in the parish, and the so-called 'Resolution C' allows them to seek a special 'extended episcopal oversight' if they disagree with their own bishop's decision to ordain women as priests.

The elasticity of the Church of England never ceases to amaze me.


So this morning we were up early to head into college where I was introduced to the famous Book of Common Prayer in the fascinating little chapel, with Church Fathers and Reformers depicted in stained glass on either side. Tea followed in my host's room, where I met the lad he shares with and briefly discussed the importance of the Apostolic Fathers -- the disciples of the disciples -- as a source of Christian knowledge.

Into town then for a wander around bookshops and coffee in a former church, complete with a chapel that's still occasionally used, there to be asked awkward questions, and to frown, and to grapple with things, before returning to the hall, passing a multitude of gargoyles and grotesques, cursing myself all the while for not having brought my camera.

Lunch was fun, though the aftermath was moreso, as I lounged in Ridley's common room over tea with a few of my host's friends, discussing Eamon Duffy's views on the Second Vatican Council, the fate of Calvin's sermons, Vincent McNabb's wry observation that most of us simply aren't very good at sinning, why Anglicans who were happy with women priests might be less so with women bishops, how one goes from being an economist to becoming a curate, and the dangers of buying more books than one can ever reasonably hope to read.

After a couple of hours, filled with tea and clever chat, I slung my bag into position and strolled off with my host towards the station, taking our time as we went, allowing me to deploy my camera at daffodils, gargoyles, and even the one-time local of an old mentor of mine.

I was sorry to say goodbye to my host -- and indeed hostess, who turned up while I was at the station -- but am looking forward to seeing them before too long. A lot will have changed next time we meet.

And then, having said goodbye it was time for me to board my train to Stansted and fly home, to be picked up at the airport by one of my two oldest friends.


It was a marvellous trip, and a much-needed break. I can't wait to be back. In the meantime, though, there's work to be done.

Brighton Early

'A cow just blew past,' I remarked, peering through the blinds.

'What?' yelped my hostess from the corner, startled into wakefulness by my surreal comment on the weather.
'Well, not quite,' I admitted, 'but the lampposts are waving about.'

Not the best day to be visiting the coast, you might think, but I had plans for lunch in Brighton with an old travelling friend who I've not seen since the summer before last, so after braving the craziness of London's rush hour to cheerfully accompany my Fairy Blogmother to work I savoured a leisurely breakfast and had a quick gander around Gosh! Comics before strolling to Victoria Station, stopping on the way to gaze at some Life Guards on the Mall and to return the missal I'd accidentally borrowed from Westminster Cathedral yesterday.

I didn't have long to wait for a train to Brighton and spent most of the journey there perusing today's Metro, which reported that people had been warned to stay away from coastal areas lest they be 'swept away amid gale-force winds, rain and hailstones'. Just the day to be heading south, so.

I've a rough enough idea of Brighton's layout, but that counted for nothing as I squinted at my scrawled map outside the station, hunching up against the elements. This made less sense than my Chelmsford map. What the hell did that word say? Is that a road or a slip of the nib? Does that scribble mean anything? Eventually I shoved my Moleskine back into my bag and set off, guided only by instinct and the hope that asking for directions would solve everything. Soon enough I was able to find a kindly local who smiled and said I needed to go to the new Sainsbury's, before pointing me in the right direction.

Somehow, again, I arrived at exactly the right time -- I seem to be developing an alarming tendency towards accidental punctuality -- though, unsurprisingly, other problems arose. Still, resourcefulness won the day, and lunch and some long-overdue catching up were indulged in.


I'd a few hours to spare before I was due to head back north to London and thence to Cambridge, so I went for a wander, starting by going to have a proper look at St Bartholomew's Church, just round the corner and one of the most striking structures in a city that's not short of memorable sights. I'd had it pointed out to me when I was last in Brighton, and a friend had recently advised me to have a glance within, it being 'quite funky inside'. I wasn't sure that was an entirely auspicious description, but considering the hurricane that was blowing outside I was only to glad to step into the porch and be let into the church by an old dear who was tending some sort of stall.

The church's interior startled me, and not just because of how the walls seemed to go up and up and up -- rather there were stations and mosaics on the walls, an enormous neo-Byzantine baldacchino over the altar, and crosses and statues everywhere all draped in a mournful purple. Hang on, wasn't this an Anglican church? How high were these Anglicans?

A smattering of art students sat in the pews, and when a group of schoolchildren came in the old dear swiftly hushed them, saying that they mustn't distract the students. She was almost as quick to apologise to me for the children's noise, and then apologised that there were girls among the schoolchildren.

'We don't normally have girls as servers,' she whispered.
'You don't?'
'No,' she said, lips pursing, 'we're an A, B, and C church.'
'Oh,' I said, wondering how the Archbishop of Canterbury was involved. 'What does that stand for?'
'It means we don't have women priests, and we stick to the old traditions.'
'I see,' I said, frowning and clearly doing nothing of the sort. 'And A.B.C. stands for what?'
'Well, it just means that we stick to the old traditions, really. If it's not broken, why fix it?'

By this point I was feeling a bit like the bemused fellow on the Ship of Fools website who was greeted in St Bart's by a little old dear -- possibly the same one I met today -- who thrust a service sheet and a candle into his hand and whispered at him for ten minutes.

Like him, I hadn't the vaguest notion what she was on about, so just nodded, resolving to quiz my man in Cambridge about it tonight, and wandered about a bit before fastening my coat, hoisting my bag back on my shoulder, pulling on my gloves, and sidled out in the wind and rain. At least, I thought, there'll not be many seagulls about in this weather.


I wandered about North Laine, browsing bookshops and keeping a none-too-keen eye out for Shakeaway, as I'd been advised to try their choc brownie milkshake. I wasn't convinced that'd be a good idea; I was sure the milkshake would be fine, I just wasn't persuaded that a tempest is really ideal milkshake weather. Maybe next time.

Eventually I made my way down to the seafront, there to battle the elements along the beach as far as Embassy Court, my face being battered by wind, rain, and hail, my lips salty with spray and my camera almost being blasted from my hand whenever I tried to point at anything, listening to the ringing of masts and chimes, watching the waves crashing against the world of tat that is the Palace Pier and the beautiful charred skeleton of the West Pier, with the beach's infinity of pebbles glistening in the rare golden shafts of light. It was sublime.

The wind eventually dropped, just as I started back towards the station. I didn't hurry, though. I wanted to take another look at the Pavilion first, partly because it's a marvellously absurd building that has no place in any British city, and partly because last time I was in Brighton I'd entirely forgotten its signal importance in the opening chapter of Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

'I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool.'

If you wonder why the great Gilbert started his spiritual autobiography -- published a hundred years ago this year -- which such an image, you'll just have to read it yourself.

The Crack is Mighty

It's been a brilliant day.

Bagels and bacon are surely an auspicious start to any day, and as the morning wore on the Blogmother and I headed into central London, getting out by St Paul's, where I wondered at the origins of the charmingly named Knightrider Court before we set off to cross the river to the Tate Modern, one of London's must-sees that I have somehow contrived never to visit.

It took a bit of effort getting there, the Millennium Bridge being closed while a film was being made -- a helicopter seemed to be shooting it from above -- but we eventually made it over, and ambled in, with me hoping that I was going to enjoy the crack. The Brother's a big fan of it -- he specifically went to London for the crack a few months back.

Well, despite all my usual discomfort about modern art, I liked it a lot. To be honest, I'm happier just looking at it, and walking along it, and watching others do the same, and just thinking of it as 'The Crack' than remembering that it's actually called Shibboleth, and is by Doris Salcedo, and is apparently 'addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world.'

This is what I learned at the Tate today. Do not read labels. I'm perfectly capable of enjoying non-representative works of art, but the moment I read what the artist says he or she had in mind I get confused, and anxious, and start staring at whatever the artwork is, just thinking 'Really?'

Anyway, we strolled around the Turbine Hall for a while, and then worked our way around the building, with me feeling a bit embarrassed that I've delayed so long in visiting. Without a doubt the highlight for me was the Juan Muñoz retrospective, all the pieces in which were eerily, unsettlingly beautiful. Curiously, other than that I think my favourite pieces were two paintings by Meredith Frampton, marked by an almost icy precision, a frozen elegance with more than a hint of Van Eyck about them.

Over the Millennium Bridge then -- and how have I never set foot on that before? -- and off to Earl's Court, there to dine at The Troubadour, inspirationally discovered by the Blogmother only the other day. I'm not sure what was the best thing about the place -- the food, the wine, the setting, or the company -- but I was sorry to slip away to mass, leaving my hostess to the delights of coffee and the Sunday Times.

The Oratory would probably have been the nearest Catholic church, but I had no idea what time mass was there, so I reckoned the best thing to do would be to grab a tube to Victoria and go to half five mass at Westminster Cathedral. I was impressed by how packed it was -- sadly, the Pro in Dublin never seems to get crowds like that, except at Christmas. Mass was wonderful, though I must confess that the inevitable side-effects of a heavy Sunday lunch rather meant it took all my efforts to focus during the homily, and afterwards I slipped for a few moments into the Chapel of Saints Gregory and Augustine, where Cardinal Hume is buried.

Although I first visited the Cathedral during my first trip to London, as part of a school tour when I was fifteen, it wasn't until August last that I actually set foot in the church proper; as schoolboys we'd attended mass somewhere in the warren at the back of the building. I was captivated -- enchanted, even -- by the place, by its beauty, its prayerfulness, its grandeur, its solemnity, and its warmth. I think I've spent maybe ten days in London since last summer, and I've visited the cathedral on maybe eight of them.

If the Cathedral is one of my favourite places in London, the Chapel of Saints Gregory and Augustine is my favourite place in the cathedral. The chapel, the theme of which is unsurprisingly the conversion of England, is dominated by Clayton's neo-Gothic mosaics of the two saints. This week's Catholic Herald conveniently answers a question I've long pondered about the depictions. Aidan Bellenger, Abbot of Downside, in a column arguing that we need fewer dioceses and more monasteries, says 'Augustine of Canterbury's missionary props included a beautiful icon of the Lord and the book of the Gospels.'

It's an icon. I'd always wondered why he was depicted carrying a picture of Christ. Is this a conventional attribute for the saint, I'd wondered, like Peter's key and Paul's sword, or even Zeus' thunderbolt and Hermes' staff? Well, leaving aside the fact that saints always point to Jesus, it's certainly intended that way. It seems that when he landed in Kent in 597 AD with his forty monks, he brought with him a cross, a book of Gospels, and an icon. The emphasis on the visual is important, especially in view of how almost all those he was to convert would have been illiterate! That's worth remembering when blowhards like Christopher Hitchens attempt to claim that the defining characteristic of a Christian is having personally read the New Testament. Even allowing for St Jerome's famous assertion that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ, I'm pretty sure that literacy -- however desirable -- has been demanded of the Faithful. Our Lord never instructed his disciples to write anything, after all -- he told them to baptise, and to teach, and to break bread in memory of him, but he never told them to write a word!

Anyway, I returned back to Earl's Court to rendezvous with my delightful hostess, and settled in with her to watch Brick, an extraordinary film which successfully -- if jarringly -- marries high school dramas with film noir. The Blogmother's a big fan, and I can see why. The director's probably going to be someone well worth watching over the next few years.

And so to bed, as good old Sammy P would say. Tomorrow's going to be busy.

Is this the way to Amaretto?

I saw this sign in Southwark this evening, and haven't been able to stop grinning at it since. Alas, it seems to be one of a kind. In an ideal world -- or an ideal Southwark, at any rate -- there'd be a whole serious of similarly stuffy signs, straight out of an Ealing comedy. 'Commit No Nuisance'. 'Do Behave Now'. 'Well, Really.' 'Oh, Put That Down'. 'Now Look Here'. And so on.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Last you heard I was in Fulham, and indeed I was happily encamped there till late this morning, wondering why on earth my hair had metamorphosed from Han Solo to Farrah Fawcett. It may need cutting.

Taking my leave of my industrious hostess I strode out into the grey and damp of London just after eleven today; I was due to meet Technically and the Fairy Blogmother by Knightsbridge tube station, and was rather winging it in terms of how much time I'd need for the trip. I wasn't too worried, though, as I was walking more through desire than need; were time's winged chariot to hurry too near I was more than happy to grab a bus.

My curious London knack for punctuality when dependent solely on my feet paid off again, and I wound up skulking under an awning waiting for the others to arrive, dug into Conrad's masterpiece of spy fiction while wondering why the fur protesters next to me were complaining. If Harrod's were indeed engaged in illegal trade, as the protesters' banners claimed, then why didn't they just report them to the police?

The girls joined me soon enough, and we set off to meet up with the Cheesemonger before going for a stroll along the South Bank, browsing in the somewhat overpriced book market. Eventually we ambled towards Southwark, there to increase our numbers, to quaff an ale or two, and have some dinner, before setting out for the main business of the evening.

The centrepiece of this trip was always going to be tonight's performance of Involution, running in Southwark's Pacific Playhouse for the past fortnight, and which I first heard good things of back in September, wandering through Whitehall with the Blogmother, saying that she thought it was Ms Welch's best work so far.

I'm inclined to agree; while I've enjoyed her earlier plays, all of which I've found hilarious, this was a lot meatier. It's not just that the characters seem more substantial and better-rounded now than before; it's that she's grappling with serious questions this time, and does it well. I like plays and novels of ideas anyway -- it's hard to like Edwardian writing otherwise! -- and this is a fine example of such. I'm hoping to have a read of the script itself at some point, since I'd like to think it through properly. There were a couple of aspects of it that didn't ring quite true for me, but until I have a look at the script I'll reserve judgment. Like I said, it was a meaty play, with lots in it.

I'm still not sure about the performances of the two blokes, but the four girls were, I thought, spot on. Jane Lesley's Violet was -- for my limited amount of money -- the best of the quartet, but the other three were good too. Samantha Hopkins's 'Gemma' was hilarious and must have taken a phenomenal amount of control, Sara Pascoe's Talulah was disturbingly reminiscent of one or two people I know myself, and Ursula Early's Dorcet had a Jo Brand-esque earthiness that grounded the character remarkably well.

As for directing, there were a couple of violent scenes that were brilliantly executed, while the set seemed depressingly apt, though I'm sure the Fairy Blogmother is deluding herself in her conviction that Cohen's flat, in which all the action is set, is based on her own. Granted, it's about the same size, and both rooms have ingenious folding out chair-bed things for guests, but there the similarities end. And yes, I know, such clever bits of furniture surely have names, but I'm drawing a blank.

Anyway, enough of this. There's Amaretto to be sampled, and old Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy sketches to watch. I'll play your game, you rogue.

Let's All Go Down the Strand!

I've been doing a lot of walking on this trip. Hovering over the model in the Building Centre yesterday I got rather ambitious. Can I walk to Shepherd's Market? Surely I just go back down the Tottenham Court Road, keep going along Charing Cross Road, swing right at Oxford Circus along Shaftesbury Avenue, and then once I hit Piccadilly Circus I just head up along Piccadilly itself until I hit Green Park?

Which reminds me, having read Do Not Pass Go is causing me to run a risk of becoming a London bore. God alone knows what I'll be look once I've got my teeth into London: A Biography. Still, in answer to something I've wondered for years, and which I suspect at least one of you has done too, here's the tale of where Piccadilly earned its name, courtesy of Mr Moore.

If you don't know how it got the name, don't waste your time guessing. What happened was that in the early seventeenth century the land near what is now the Circus was bought and developed by a tailor who had made a fortune from the manufacture of pickadils -- spiked metal collars employed to support the elaborate ruffs popular at the time. See what I mean? It's like a risibly transparent false definition in Call My Bluff.

As the fields along the ancient road disappeared beneath grand mansions, so repeated attempts were made to endow the street with a more appropriately stately name. For a few years it was Portugal Street, honouring the nationality of Charles II's missus, but Piccadilly was just too good to waste and by the end of the eighteenth century it had stuck fast. Dozens of dukes and earls built or acquired large and plush residences all the way up to Hyde Park Corner -- for a hundred years until the 1850s, Piccadilly was the grandest address in London.

And in case you're curious, the first electrically lit hoardings appeared at Piccadilly Circus in 1893. Yes, you wanted to know that, didn't you? All part of the service . . .

That was yesterday, though, before drinks and embarrassing recollections with an old friend who I haven't seen in an eternity, and before heading off to meet up with the charming young lady with whom I've been staying for the last two nights.

Today saw me being rather more ambitious in my walking, setting out from Fulham Broadway, getting lost somewhere in South Kensington but eventually finding South Kensington tube station where I almost collided with Chris Evans before heading up past to V & A to the Brompton Oratory -- a tad too pompous for my tastes -- and Holy Trinity Brompton, mothership of the evangelical Alpha Course, the bowels of which I eagerly explored, browsing and pondering books whilst comely wenches flitted about with a peculiar air of serene industry.

On then past Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, along Constitution Hill towards Buckingham Palace, down the Mall - stopping to stare open-mouthed at the Household Cavalry who have enthralled me as a child -- to Trafalgar Square. Glad to see it rather less heavily plagued by pigeons than before, I took a right onto Strand -- not 'The Strand' curiously enough, and deriving its name from an Old Norse word for pebbly beach, don't you know? -- and hurried along onto Fleet Street, tracking the course of what was once a notoriously foul river. Ah, Bell Yard and St Dunstan's, where that nice Mister Todd once plied his tonsorial trade! And then, somehow, making it to St Paul's at exactly twelve, there to soak up the sun in Paternoster Court and wait for an old friend and onetime neighbour for lunch!

After lunch and much catching up -- it's been five years, after all! -- I wandered around by London Wall to the Museum of London and idled my way onto Holborn, by which point my feet were starting to ache. I'm afraid my boots were not really made for walking, after all.

Into the Cittie of Yorke I slipped, there to sip at a pint, to reminisce on my last evening there more than two years ago, to scrutinise my map, and to ease myself back into The Secret Agent. It wasn't long before the Fairy Blogmother phoned, and, on realising how close I was to her place of work, zoomed around to join me for a post-work beverage. A couple of pints and much catching up later -- and no progress made with my book -- I realised the time and raced for the tube to Fulham!

It's been a leisurely evening, which is just as well after my walking and my hostess's week. Tomorrow should be a little livelier. For now, though, the wine continues to flow, and I'm learning rather more than I expected about Italy.

Sandwiches in the Sky

Having wrestled with my map and a nightmarish junction while walking to the station this morning, missing a lunch arrangement as a result, I'm doubly grateful I didn't have to rely on my ropey map last night, instead having been cheerfully chauffered from Chelmsford station to the house. It was a lovely evening, and was great to see my sister and the newest additions to the extended Gargoyle clan.

With my lunch arrangement with an old school friend having been scrapped -- well, rescheduled to instead having drinks in Shepherd's market when he'd finished work -- I popped up to Camden instead where I had a fine lunch and discovered a fine little bookshop before returning to the familiar delights of Zone One.

One thing I'd meant to find out more about this trip was the forty or so ghost stations on the Underground. I'd mentioned this to a friend the other day, an expert in the arcana of rail travel and cathedrals, and asked whether he'd be about.

'Sorry, old man,' he replied. 'Will be there on Easter Monday. If it's disused Underground stations you're after, then check this out. Looks to be a very exciting exhibition. How the devil are you?'

I'm not sure that 'exciting' was really the right word, but the exhibition at the Building Centre on Store Street, entitled 'Underground: London's Hidden Infrastructure', promised to expose London's inner workings and demonstrate that without a successful underground, nothing built on top could function. Suitably intrigued, I strolled over and had a good gander. The mail tunnels alone fascinated me. How had I never heard of them?

I'm afraid the highlight of the Building Centre in general, though, was the enormous scale model of London, tracking the Thames from Battersea Power Station to out beyond the site of the 2012 Olympic Stadium.

I circled it like a fascinated vulture, stopping, hovering, squinting, thinking. Take a look at it here, where you can see Paddington Statin in the fireground, the train lines running into it from the bottom of the shot. I imagine that's the Marylebone Road running up the left-hand side of the shot. It's not hard to pick out the BT Tower, Centrepoint, and the London Eye, all more or less in line with each other, and off beyond them you can see the great mass of buildings springing up round the absurdly nicknamed Gherkin.

Which reminds me. There's a new building planned for Fenchurch Street, a 155 metre high tower due in 2011. So what, you might shrug.

It'll have a roof garden. A publicly accessible one. Imagine -- a park 500 feet up! It seems the plan is that it'll be like any other park, except 37 stories up. It'll be free in, and the kind of place you can go to eat your sandwiches in.

And people wonder why I want to move to London.

Quinctili Vare, legiones redde!

Right, so having taught my last two classes of this absurdly short term -- on laws regarding cleanliness and Godliness in ancient Greek city-states, since you don't ask -- I'm heading off for the airport in a moment.

The plan is to fly to Stansted this evening and spend the night at my sister's, with her, my brother-in-law, and my niece. I hope they won't be too traumatised on seeing me. Last time I saw them was more than six months ago, and I'd just had my hair cut. It's not been touched since, and now leaves me more than slightly reminiscent of Han Solo in the original Star Wars film.

Only cooler, and more handsome, of course.

Curiously, the week I had my barnet last pruned also saw me seeing three very dear friends just before they departed to Brazil, France, and the United States respectively. I've not seen them since. I've half a mind to leave my hair untouched until they shall be returned to me. Like Augustus, I guess, after the disaster of the Teutoburger Forest. . .

I'll be getting a bus from the airport to Chelmsford, but although I've drawn a map in case I need to walk to the house, I'm rather hoping I'll be picked up when I arrive. Worried inspection of the maps just a few minutes ago suggests that I must have engaged in my rudimentary cartographic endeavours while drunk and without my glasses, probably under cover of darkness.

This doesn't bode well. Wish me luck.

Squeezing the Oranges

I'm off to London tomorrow -- or at any rate I shall be flying to the ludicrously-named London Stansted, an absurdity akin to arriving in Dublin Mullingar -- for a few days in and around the metropolis with family and friends.

It seems fitting then that just today I've finished reading Tim Moore's Do Not Pass Go, an amusing and enlightening guide to London inspired by the classic British 'Monopoly' set. I started reading NMRBoy's copy of it a year-and-a-half back, but returned it to him just before we left Manchester; it was only a few days ago that I finally got stuck into my own copy.

Anyway, it's definitely worth a read, not least for some strategic tips about the 'Monopoly' board; it seems that 'Jail' is the space most-commonly landed upon space, whereas -- as the more astute among you may have noticed in your youth -- no set is as landed upon as frequently as the oranges. In fact, it seems that they're the most productive set on the board by quite a long way, a fully-developed orange set netting on average £24,619 over a game, as opposed to £14,835 for the dark blues.

Yes, don't tell me that visiting this site is a waste of time!

The oranges are an odd collection anyway, as it's difficult to see why such obscure streets were chosen for the game. Bow Street is an inoccuous enough street by Covent Garden, home of the famous Bow Street Runners. There isn't a Marlborough Street in central London, though the game's makers presumably meant Great Marlborough Street, where a famous magistrates' court sat till a few years back. And Vine Street? Vine Street is an obscure alley off Bond Street, where a police station was once located, and with just one notable anecdote attached to it, though Moore concedes that it's a gem. Ahem.

The only story the street had in its locker (admittedly it's a cracker) concerns the encounter that took place there between Frantisek Kotzwara and Susannah Hill on 2 September 1791. Then sixty-one, Kotzwara was one of Europe's greatest double bassists and the noted composer of fantasias with a military bent -- The Siege of Quebec; The Battle of Prague. Bohemian by birth and nature, he was a regular in the bagnios and fleshpots of Georgian London, and on the night in question found himself in the company of the aforementioned sex worker at her room at No. 5 Vine Street.

Nothing if not a gentleman, Kotzwara suggested a meal before the main business of the evening, furnishing Susannah with two bob for a substantial and well-lubricated spread of victuals. Some people like to round off a good meal with a smoke or a snooze, but Kotzwara was made of different stuff. 'After a dinner of beef, porter and brandy,' read one studiously sober account, 'he asked her to cut off his genitals.' perhaps unwilling to bite the hand that fed her, as it were, Hill refused, but interestingly agreed to assist Kotzwara in fastening a ligature first round the doorknob and thence his neck. Five minutes later, the kneeling, trouserless maestroeagerly conducted himself to a breathlessly memorable finale -- tantalisingly uncertain, even at the end, whether he was coming or going. Arrested and charged with murder, Hill was acquitted after the judge accepted her testimony. The court records were withheld to keep the precise and shocking details from the public domain, but the case still remains a landmark for suicidally adventurous perverts and bored law students alike.

Barring an outdated legal connection, all that Moore could imagine that might link the three streets was that nowadays, 'alone amongst the Monopoly groups, its three streets couldn't muster a single McDonald's between them.'