For God and the Empire

Events in the UK and Vanuatu have both troubled my conscience in the last week.

Here the cause was Mothering Sunday, an event I had gladly filed in the dustbin of personal history after my mother died in 1992.

But then along came children, very late in life, and a sense of expectation in the household that they, unguided, were never likely to fulfil. So I ended up once again buying flowers and cards, and organising jolly lunch parties.

The five-year-old endeared himself to me on Friday evening when I outlined my plans for the weekend, and he sighed: “Why is it never Daddy’s day?”

Bringing him up to par with his three-year-old brother, who had played an absolute blinder that morning by escorting his mother to the checkout in Next yelling: “Put that back, Mummy! You don’t need another handbag!”

So naturally it was chocolate treats all round when I took them to buy their Mother’s Day cards and gifts on Saturday, as a step towards phasing myself out of the whole process.

The woman on the till fell into my clutches like a dozy bluebottle landing in a Venus flytrap. “Ooh, aren’t you lucky to have such an indulgent Grandpa!” she purred.

“I’m not their Grandpa,” I replied, inserting a sinister pause to savour the rising panic in her eyes before adding, “I’m their Dad.”

This always elicits a flood of apologies and explanations that can only make things worse, like trying to extricate yourself from the hole of asking a fat woman “When’s it due?”

I enjoyed it all immensely. But as I struggled to cook our Sunday roast (not too bad, but not as good as Mummy’s, which is surely how it should be) I did reflect on how much I take for granted.

So much so that I went back to my wedding vows and checked how I was doing. We had the 1662 full Monty, avoidance of fornication and all. My results were surprisingly good.

I may be falling a bit short on the “honour her” front, and will try to do better in future, but nothing like as short as Mrs Hann has consistently fallen in the small matter of “obey”.

A vow she was foolishly induced to make, along with “serve”, by the vicar’s assurance that the words had different meanings in 1662 and 2009. I think he probably had his fingers crossed at the time.

Anyway, what has all this got to do with Vanuatu? A place of which you had almost certainly never heard until it was flattened by Cyclone Pam.

Until 1980 Vanuatu was known as the New Hebrides, despite bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the Scottish originals, and was that rarest of colonial hybrids: an Anglo-French condominium (no, not an apartment) with two sets of administrators, speaking two different languages, and a similar choice of laws.

They didn’t go quite as far as driving on opposite sides of the road on alternate days, but everything else about the set-up seems to have been as absurd as you might imagine.

I know this because 39 years ago I started a PhD on British imperial history. Not long afterwards I was awarded a scholarship restricted to students “who intend to go on to devote their lives to the service of the British Empire”.

Reader, I have plainly failed in that duty. Though I can cite the reasonably good excuse that the British Empire had largely disappeared before I could get around to devoting myself to it.

What makes it worse is that one of my contemporaries did fulfil what should have been my mission. He joined the colonial service at its last gasp in the New Hebrides and was killed there when a camping stove exploded.

But for the subsequent Falklands War, I might have been able to cite him as the last person to lay down his life for the Empire on which the sun never set.

I can find no trace on the internet of his sacrifice, but if anyone ever deserved an MBE (Motto: For God and the Empire) it was surely he. Sadly, there is probably an equal chance of me getting one for cooking Sunday lunch.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A non-believer in search of a church that does not change

I wanted my younger boy to become a household name, but my wife refused to have him christened Cillit Bang.

That’s not strictly true, though we did have both our sons baptised in the Church of England, which also married us. All in services conducted by a delightful reverend gentleman using the wonderful language of the Book of Common Prayer.

A 1662 BCP christening in 2012. Now you don't see a lot of those about.

No small achievement these days, when the Church’s desire to “get with the programme” and be “down with the kids” so often means ditching words as beautiful as anything in Shakespeare in favour of something with all the majesty and mystery of an online shopping list.

Going to a parish church these days is a lottery. One may find a group of well-dressed elderly folk mumbling their way through a 1662 Holy Communion, or a church so filled with bells, smells and genuflections that even a Renaissance Pope might wonder whether things were not going slightly over the top.

Or one may chance upon a crowd of shining-eyed enthusiasts in leisurewear swaying and clapping to the twanging of guitars.

The last is naturally my pet hate. Because what I want above all from the Church of England is that it should not change. That it should be all Prayer Book and Hymns Ancient and Modern, bicycling vicars wearing proper dog collars (and Panama hats in the summer), and dear old ladies cutting fresh flowers and polishing the brasses.

Technically this appears to be a motorbike - but it's the best Google could come up with

And really I should have no say in any of this because, while I happily recite the creed and tick the “Christian” box on any form that comes my way, I do not in my heart believe the pillars of the faith to be literally true.

I would very much like it to be so, and hope my religious convictions may yet strengthen on my deathbed, but right now my belief in the virgin birth and resurrection is not much above par with my confidence in the reality of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

Which I would very much like to be true, too.

I suspect that most of us, in Britain in 2012, are in a similar place with regard not just to the Church of England but to religion in general, though we carefully steer clear of saying so to those faith groups that threaten to kill us if we disagree with them.

No such danger with the sweet old CofE, of course, which bears the added burden of being an established, State church. So that Roman Catholic, Jewish, Hindu and atheist commentators all feel entitled to submit their two pennorth on its little local difficulty in the matter of women bishops.

Rarely can so many words have been generated on an issue that matters so little to most of us. I have seen angry letters to the press condemning “dinosaur” male bishops (who were almost universally in favour of the change) and supposedly intelligent columnists feigning ignorance of the apparently comical concept of “Laity”.

Most, including right-on Dave our Prime Minister, seem to regard it as a simple issue of progress and equal opportunities, paying scant regard to the fact that some of the staunchest opponents of female bishops appear to be women.

As if things weren't bad enough, pedants assert that the new Archbishop doesn't know how to wear a mitre properly

Having looked into the Byzantine structure of the General Synod, and the requirement for a two-thirds majority in all its three houses to pass any substantive change, the puzzle is surely not that women bishops failed to pass over the hurdle but that it has ever managed to agree on anything at all.

As one of nature’s conservatives, I feel that it is a model that might usefully be adopted more widely in local and national government.

But it surely cannot be right for those of us who do not truly believe to criticise those who do, and who are doing their best to act in accordance with what they imagine to be God’s will.

I have no confidence that it will do the slightest bit of good, but I feel that I should now seek out a suitably quiet and happily unmodernised church, and offer up a little prayer for them all.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Here's a truly radical idea: let's value tradition

Amidst all the millenarian gloom arising from last week’s Biblical deluge, it was good to be reminded on Saturday of the helping hand that God extended to Noah, and to the children of Israel at the Red Sea.

The occasion for these reflections was the baptism of my younger son, James. Yes, I know I wrote that I had given up trying to organise this, but I reckoned without the steely determination of my Muslim wife.

Not that Mrs Hann ever demonstrates any of the conventional signs of adherence to Islam, like attending a mosque, reciting the Koran, praying to Allah five times a day, wearing a burka or eschewing pork. But she does have Iranian parents and invariably announces, “I’m terribly sorry, I’m a Muslim,” when the Jehovah’s Witnesses pay us a call.

Suitably fortified by wifely insistence, I somehow managed to arrange a service that stuck rigidly to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, over the twitching corpse of the rector whose church we were borrowing.

“Surely you would prefer the modern service,” he quibbled. “I find there is far too much sin in the BCP.”

So, just as the church now likes to omit the traditional bit about the prevention of fornication in the marriage service, and would no doubt prefer to skirt around anything as downbeat as death during funerals, it strives to avoid the whole point of baptism, which is the mystical washing away of original sin.

And it is not just me. All present agreed that it was a thoroughly uplifting spiritual occasion, replete with “tingle factor” phrases that have echoed down the ages such as “Ask, and ye shall have; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you”; and “Suffer little children to come unto me.” 

What could possibly be better than hearing three godparents solemnly promise to “renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh”?

In its attitude to its liturgy, the Church resembles a stately home owner who feels so embarrassed by his riches that he is moved to store all the Old Masters in a basement, whitewash the walls and put up some polystyrene tiles to hide the frescoes on the ceiling.

We might as well ban Shakespeare from the theatre, because the words of Eminem or Frankie Boyle would be more accessible.

It is the same possibly well-intentioned but ultimately vandalistic spirit that motivates Nick Clegg (who would make a perfect modern vicar if only he were prepared to undergo a sex change) when he seeks to destroy another institution that has worked perfectly well for hundreds of years, the House of Lords. 

No one disputes that the current mode of entry to the Lords is a touch eccentric, but it has produced a revising chamber that combines unparalleled specialist expertise with robust common sense.

It could once be argued that it suffered from inbuilt bias, but even when it was stuffed with Conservative hereditary peers, it defeated Mrs Thatcher’s government on more than 170 occasions, while the Commons did so only four times.

When discussing Tony Blair’s attempts to reform the constitution, I recycled Evelyn Waugh’s aphorism about it being like seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. With Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems, it is more like being trapped in a small room with a troop of howler monkeys and a live hand grenade.

What sort of nonentity is going to stand for election to the reformed Lords? Oh yes, the many Lib Dem MPs who will be made redundant come the next election.

We should treasure and rejoice in the great riches we have in our language, culture and institutions. And amongst these, there can surely be none greater than the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the dear old House of Lords. Please just let them be. Amen.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.