Ordinary Glories

It was, I suppose, sometime in the early Blair years: a strange and foolish time to buy a single Toby Jug, let alone two. This was the dawning of the age of blow up furniture and the triumph of the beige palate and there was to be no room for ornament or chintz. Yet it was then that I, against the express advice of my parents, used what pocket money I had and bought two Toby Jugs in an antique-come-junk shop in Rye. I knew, even at the time, that this was an act not in tune with the prevailing march of taste- they were ugly things, a Saracen and Pirate, but they had not been bought for their exterior beauty, rather as totems of early onset contrarianism. At this point, the only person I had ever known to have Toby Jugs was Maud. My grandmother had, and continues to have, scant disregard for social norms and has a tendency to ‘collect’ people. Not in the manner of a Victorian big game hunter but rather like a planet, gliding serenely through the solar system taking objects into

Every so often it is decided by the powers that be that a clergyman’s soul will benefit from a visit to a Diocesan retreat house. This occasional episcopal prescription was last issued to me prior to my priesting, a little under a year or so ago, and so I was dispatched to Foxhill, a Victorian pile with predictable 70s adjuncts, tucked behind the great humped back of Helsby Hill just to the East of Ellsmere Port in Cheshire. All retreat houses are strange places. They are furnished with furniture that walks the line (enforced, I imagine, by budget rather than by theology)   between cold hard monastic simplicity and flammable conference centre plush. They are littered with books, the names the priests that owned them still carefully written in the front, though they be as dead as the theology they often contain and with countless prints of icons- Rublev’s Trinity, mostly. How strange for those painted angels to transition first, from the oak of Mamre, then to the splendours of t

A hillside in Buckinghamshire, overlooking acres unperturbed by the fussy botherings of mass human population since the stifling summer of 1349, and I am hungover. I am also about to eat the best cold lamb sandwich of my life. A salty crust, oozing blanched reservoirs of fat giving way to pink flesh all enwrapped in a crudely hewn section of a crusted baguette. The author of both my hangover and this delightful cure of it is my godfather- a rotund reservoir of generous bonhomie, who, whilst he might have been created by Dickens in a lighter moment, such is propensity for hospitality, was in fact an army friend of my father’s and, since 1992 has been entrusted with my spiritual growth. A side street in Cambridge and outside a building wedged between blue plaques and adolescent disappointments a friend and I wash the last crumbs of a superlative cold beef sandwich from our mouths with sloshes of beer. Topside fridge-cold, slimy in its rareness, beautiful. We watch our fellow ordi

If I allow my eyes to wander idly from the penates of my laptop screen and out of my office window- so starts every self-indulgent rumination in this age, I mean can you imagine how much more tedious Kafka might have been had he had a desk at a WeWork?- there is sat between the Mersey and me, the Crowne Plaza hotel. The extraneous ‘e’ presumably conjures the idea of chocolate box oak beaming, priest holes, and ghosts in the minds of unfortunate Americans but, alas, while the site is historic, standing as it does on the Prince’s Dock from whence many of the forefathers of said immigrant nation bid a last farewell to the old world, the building itself is a model of late twentieth century modernity. Its architecture and its purpose- to house those flocking to see the city that was the antenatal ward of Cool Britannia- belong defiantly to the Thatcher-Blair era; it is a melange of slightly-too-red brick, stainéd steel beams, and glass that gives one a view of the emptiness and limp cl