Foot-in-mouth disease strikes again

Chris Tingle sounds suspiciously like a 1970s Radio 1 DJ, currently on bail as part of Operation Yewtree.

In fact it is the name of a seasonal church service. Albeit one that can never feel like a proper tradition to me, because it wasn’t around when I was growing up.

If Wikipedia is to be believed Christingle was introduced to England in 1968. Making it a full five years later than sexual intercourse, according to the poet Philip Larkin.

I was only dimly aware of Christingle, as of many things, through years of listening to The Archers. There it forms part of the December fabric along with “stir up Sunday” and the traditional switch-on of the illuminations around Ambridge village green.

But I only started attending the service when I had children and, more particularly, one of them began attending a Church of England primary school.

Hence we dutifully trooped along to our parish church on Sunday morning and my two boys, like a plague of locusts who have spent too long on the 5:2 diet, stripped the sultanas and dolly mixtures off their oranges before their candles were even lit.

In keeping with the spirit of 1968, the rector leading the service seemed to me to bear an endearing resemblance to a Gerry Anderson marionette. I suspected he might have some underlying happy clappy tendencies, but if he did they were held in check by the uncomprehending stares of a bunch of irregular worshippers and his organist.

Perhaps those looks were what threw him so thoroughly off his stride in his address to the assembled children about the Advent candles.

“And who do you think we will light this last white one for, next week? I’ll give you a clue. His name begins with a G … I mean J.”

A vicar who does not know how to spell Jesus seemed like the gaffe to end all gaffes until I found my wife, after an alcohol-free lunch, referring to our elder son as “Whatsisname”.

But they both seem pallid amateurs compared to the weekend’s supreme champions of the foot-in-mouth world, UKIP. How did we fill our days with mirth before this shower came along, with their unbelievably rich cast of fantasists, apparent racists and homophobes, and all-round world-class loons?

Whenever I feel depressed about my current job, which is most days, I can at least pause to reflect, “It could be worse, you could be doing PR for UKIP or the Keystone Cops.”

I think, on the whole, that it would be easier to big up the latter as a credible law enforcement agency than the former as an alternative government, or even as a desirable holder of the balance of power.

I don’t write this without regret, being a traditional Englishman who favours tweed three-piece suits, the monarchy, the Book of Common Prayer and the old ways of doing things in general.

But I can more believe in Nigel Farage as a potential Prime Minister than I can really have faith that today’s CofE is going to offer me the secret of eternal life.

And even if it were, a heaven that consists of clapping, swaying and waving my arms around to the accompaniment of twanging guitars is one I would rather do without.

My idea of Hell

I wish UKIP could be displaced by a truly Conservative party that bothered to check what its name actually meant in a dictionary before setting out its policy agenda.

And that the Church of England could revert to being a provider of hard pews, rousing hymns, ancient rituals and thoughtful sermons, rather than a branch of the social work industry always embarrassingly keen to “get down with the kids”.

I’d like to believe that the son of God was born of a virgin in Bethlehem a couple of millennia ago, and I’m happy to go through the traditional motions of worship. But then I also put out sherry, mince pies and carrots for Santa and Rudolph.

Even so, I do value the church for helping to provide some excellent schools, preserving our architectural heritage and generally meaning well, in addition to providing some incidental entertainment.

Whereas with UKIP, I really cannot see beyond the laughs.

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.

Cheer up: it's great training for the British space programme

To look on the bright side, the English summer of 2012 is surely providing us all with absolutely perfect training for long distance space travel.

So something positive may yet come of all these weeks cooped up in confined spaces going slowly insane as Vitamin D deficiency and seasonal affective disorder take rampant hold, like the weeds now choking my dripping garden.

Why are we so intent on ruining the glorious Northumberland landscape with gigantic wind turbines, instead of investing in less obtrusive waterwheels? Yes, they might also only generate electricity intermittently, but on recent form a steady supply of rainfall looks a much safer prospect than the right sort of wind.

The great news for all opponents of wind turbines is that the Church of England is on the other side

I am also beginning to wonder what effect the conspicuous absence of anything recognisable as summer is having on my three year-old son, who has now entered that period of life when enduring memories form.

Like every other grown-up, I remember enjoying consistently fantastic summers when I was little. My parents took me to the sands at Druridge Bay nearly every Sunday in summer, accompanied by a black-clad Granny who must surely have been the model for those classic Giles cartoons.

Even if the weather looked unpromising at home in Longbenton, Dad would ring RAF Acklington for a chat about conditions on the coast, which often proved better. I can only recall one occasion when we ended up spreading our picnic rug on the dining room floor rather than the beach.

The sun also always seemed to shine on our two week summer holiday in St Abbs.

I keep repeating to Mrs Hann the sound advice of other parents that there is really no point in taking small children abroad, as the journeys will prove a nightmare and they won’t appreciate the destination when they get there. They just want sea, sand and, ideally, a bucket and spade.

All of which young Charlie Hann enjoyed at Bamburgh on Saturday, warmly wrapped up in waterproofs and with Dad on hand to help dig the moat around his sandcastle, and wipe his constantly streaming nose.

And that, poor soul, was the high point of his whole week off nursery in beautiful Northumberland, watching the rain tip down.

There is rebellious talk of a holiday in Majorca in September, though obviously without me as I do not like going abroad.

But then, over lunch on Sunday, a new danger emerged when our hostess revealed that she had been researching holidays in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Which are a British overseas territory, so technically not really “abroad” at all.

Flag of the Turks and Caicos Islands

Worse still, there are other potentially warm and welcoming Caribbean treasures including the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Anguilla and Montserrat.

Bermuda, more temperate and closer to home (though still much too far for my liking) is another theoretical possibility.

But then so too are the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and British Antarctic Territory, all of which should help to put the UK summer of 2012 in some sort of perspective.

As should the fact that my mother, who was Charlie’s age precisely a century ago, pitied me because the summers in the late 1950s were nothing like as good as they had been when she was a girl. I seem to recall that people blamed the atomic bomb.

Yet the summer of 1912, when she was three, was by all accounts the worst of the twentieth century, with the great floods of August causing widespread havoc after some places saw three months’ worth of rainfall in a single night.

Sadly I shall not be around to witness Charlie pitying the lousy summers endured by his children. That is assuming that they are not on a long distance spacecraft in search of a planet with a rather more agreeable climate.

Flag of the British Martian Territory

A long shot, I know, but I think any sensible bookie would probably give you shorter odds on that than on my ever visiting what is left of the British Empire in the tropics. 

www.blokeinthenorth.com

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Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Lost causes - from pork pies to Facebook via the dear old C of E

Now, children, for today’s quiz: what do pork pies, the Church of England, Coronation Street and Facebook have in common?

In the last two weeks, I have finally lost faith in all of them.

It all started with a pork pie – in the literal sense, not Westminster rhyming slang. For 20 years, I was principally employed to burnish the reputation of one of Britain’s largest food manufacturers, whose extensive product portfolio included the country’s leading pie brand.

Many times I proudly showed sceptics around the gleaming factory where they were produced, laying particular emphasis on the fact that the principal ingredient was good quality belly pork, and not the various unmentionables so often assumed.

Scanning the rather denuded shelves of a local shop for a quick snack lunch, and finding no sandwiches to my taste, I was pleased to pick up one of those reassuringly branded pies. My first bite contained a large lump of inedible gristle; my second a long auburn human hair. There wasn’t a third, nor will there ever be again.

Then the Sunday before last I was dragged, against my better judgement, to a christening contained within a “family service” at an Anglican parish church. My heart always sinks when I spot some grinning grey-haired loon tuning up his guitar at the front of a church, but this exceeded all my expectations.

First there were two non-hymns that combined no obvious religious sentiments with no recognisable tunes. Then we were enjoined to accompany a non-Bible reading about Samson with a variety of animal noises. After which, the harassed-looking lady vicar made for the front of the church for what I thought might be a sermon but proved to be the unveiling of a blackboard divided into squares and the joyous news that it was time for this week’s quiz.

I cannot say what happened after that as I was sitting in the sun out in the churchyard, feeling infinitely closer to God.

And lest anyone suggest that this hideous, dumbed-down farrago of a “service” was helping the young to appreciate religion, let me assure you that the many children in the congregation seemed to regard it with the same derisive bafflement as a landslide majority of the grown-ups.

The net result was to make me resolve not to bother christening my own second son. Trying to arrange this has in any case brought me close to despair, as various episcopal hurdles have been erected to prevent him from spending ten minutes by a font with a retired vicar friend and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Still, there was always Coronation Street to cheer me up. Until we made the fatal mistake of going to an arena in Manchester for the second (and, one can only hope, last) performance of the new musical based on the show: Street of Dreams. This combined a cringeworthy script that would have embarrassed a small hamlet’s amateur dramatic society with unmemorable songs and stumbling performances that were at least mercifully invisible from our top-priced seats, unless we looked at the projection on the giant screen above the stage – which surely rather defeated the object of putting on a live show.

Again, I fled at the first opportunity, but I find that the TV soap has also suddenly lost its appeal.

I would write about it all on Facebook, but Mr Zuckerberg’s hideous new Timeline has led me to pull the plug on that, too.

I expected my horizons to narrow as I progressed down the slope towards death, but if the things I once held dear keep going at the current rate I will just have to hope that my next church visit is not delayed too long.

And if the priest should diverge from the 1662 burial service to hold a little quiz, I can tell you now exactly where that muffled screaming will be coming from.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.