The bells, the bells

There are, to be sure, certain benefits to living in a village. Chief among them is the sense of snobbery you can exhibit when you give your address and it conjures up an image of a hamlet with a pub, a post office and houses starting in the high-to-nosebleed-inducing price range.

The truth is likely to be somewhat different. These days, if you live in a village near a city, you most probably live in a ‘village’. Certainly, when I was growing up in the Wild West Midlands, villages were approached across open fields and they usually had a duck pond and inbreeding.

The duck pond is, I think, the measure of a true village. That or a horse trough – but only if full of water. If it’s full of flowers planted in an attempt to clinch third best runner up in the regional finals of ‘Britain in bloom’ then it’s not a horse trough, it’s just an impractical window box. A full horse trough can also take the place of a duck pond in a witch trial emergency. If you don’t know what I mean by witch trial emergency then you obviously live in a city, town or ‘village’ rather than a village.

I don’t live in a village, but I live pretty close to a ‘village’. In fact I walk into the village every morning and evening of the working week. It’s pretty easy to tell where the village begins and ends, it’s where the church and pubs are located, along with the houses designed for an age where malnutrition and rickets meant that five foot was a practical height for a ceiling. And I do pick up a little of village life. I see the same people every morning (but because this is England I don’t say hello,). If you bought one of the doll houses in the ‘village’ you would probably think that you were on a par with a proper village like they have in deepest Wales, only without the crushing sense of isolation and the hostility that would be shown towards incomers. Oh, and with better transport links and easy access to the airport so that you can go and visit your villa in another village in Croatia, where all that ethnic cleansing was just terrible but did open up some real bargains in the property market.

What you also get in a village is a church with a steeple. This means bells. Or it did.

It wasn’t until I heard the bells peeling a few Sundays ago that I realised they had not been ringing. Some sort of clapper issue, one assumes. Not so, apparently somebody had an injunction out against them.

An injunction. Against bells. In England.

What kind of execrable scum moves to a village and takes out an injunction against church bells? I’m assuming it’s an incomer because otherwise it’s somebody who suddenly has an objection, i.e. has gone mad. The church was there before the objector. What the hell were they expecting when they saw the steeple with the shutters in it?

This is on a par with people who move next door to pubs and then kick up a fuss about noise and dray-horses eating their flower beds.

Whoever it is (now the most reviled person in the area), I’m glad their petty injunction has been overturned and I’m doubly glad that this resulted in the bells peeling out for more than an hour on Sundays. I’d like to see some little Englander try that shit if it was a mineret and not a steeple they wanted to silence. Those Mohamaddens don’t fuck about when it comes to making their feelings known. Neither do campenologists, it would appear, as the warm weather means sleeping with windows open, meaning that I was able to hear, at half two in the morning the other night, the soft chime of the church bell striking the half hour. Good to know that even in the still watches of the night when the body is at its lowest ebb, there is a cheering chime that allows one to turn over, smile, and go back to a restful sleep.

Heaven's above!

Christ, of course, preached love for one’s fellow man. Ever since, paedophiles (or as they are sometimes known, Catholic priests) and homosexualists (their Anglican brothers) have been using the fact that the apostles were all blokes in order to stop women entering the priesthood.

Priests love shouting the odds about stopping women becoming priests or bishops or cardinals or popes or whatever because as long as the focus is on stopping women being priests, nobody’s talking about stopping bummers becoming priests.

Priests, one suspects, think that the role of women in the church is to dust, make tea and arrange flowers, rather than become a bishop and then banishing them from their comfortable twee country parish to some challenging inner city hell hole where they think that pastoral care is something that’s done with dairy products. The sort of modernising that today’s clergy would agree with is replacing the collection plate with a chip and pin machine, or better still direct debit because you wouldn’t even need to attend church to contribute. Easy payment tieth scheme; a tenner a week or damnation.

The Anglican church seems to be in a bit of a state about consecrating women as bishops (and yankee bummers in any capacity whatever). Not quite sure why, surely a bishop is just a priest but a bit more senior? So it seems like women will have a bit of trouble breaking the stained glass ceiling. Lots of the dissenting parishes appear to be African, where they take their religion rather seriously. That being the case, one has to ask, have they got the right church?

The Church of England (the head of which is, of course, a woman) is the default option for those who can’t be arsed to think enough about faith to decide whether they have any or not, those of us who go to church, well, never, but are quite happy to pray in moments of crisis. I, for instance, have made numerous deals with God, promising to be a better person if he graciously allows me to live through the hangover prompting my road to Demascus moment. I’m looking at the spire of my village church now and it gives me tremendous comfort to know that it is there. I never go, but it looks jolly pretty and the bells are appealing.

Much, much better a spire than a minaret. I’m always somewhat nervous of allowing priests to build what are essentially look-out posts. The last thing one would want would be to be explaining to one’s priest that you could not make last week’s service because you were ill, only to be confronted with a snapshot taken by a long-lensed camera of you relaxing in your back garden in the sunshine. The fact you are having your cock sucked by your neighbour’s daughter is mere detail, the sin is not turning up for church.

African Anglicans also seem to have something of a downer on ulists. This has always been something of a mystery to me although I suppose the concern in many of the poorer parts of the world that rely heavily on goat-herding for a living is that if the goat boys are frantically bumming each other behind a thicket, it’s easier for a lion to make off with the goats. How many farmers, one wonders, have pitched up for a surprise inspection only to see a couple of goatboys hastily pulling up their trousers while in the distance there’s a diminishing clanking of a goat bell as the lion buggers off with Billy.

The situation is such that there is speculation of schism. This would be very troubling, as it would mean that English churches would no longer be able to justify collections for their sister churches in Africa. On the plus side, it also means that hideous and poorly carved ‘thank you’ gifts from African villages for their nice new school would no longer require storage in the vicarage. Instead, the English churches would have to collect for the poorer parishes in the UK, where, for instance, the vicar only takes one foreign holiday each year, or where he has to iron his own vestments.

Saturday

I have no idea why there is nobody else on the allotments on a Saturday. Certainly, today, I might have understood it, for today is FA cup final day, and I drove past the Academy and noted that not only had they got blue and white balloons and bunting outside, but Chelsea flags too. Surely, like some sort of carnivorous plant, they should have displayed the ManU colours, so that they could have killed any fans who actually turned up?

Spent the day weeding on the allotment, listening to podcasts of readings of Sherlock Holmes stories. Am now watching the setting sun strike the spire of the church, towering above the bright, bright greens of the trees in the neighbourhood. I strongly suspect that there is no greater place than Great Britain, and there is no greater moment to live in it but now.

The sun colours the stone that particular shade of pink that lets you know that if you put ypur hand to what would normally be cold, grey, granit, it would be warm under your palm.