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 ...

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...

Whole publications, industries, lives even, revolve around the pleasure that some people get from the choosing of clothes. It would be foolish for me, who delights in many much stranger hobbies, to denigrate the millions for whom this is a joy-giving aspect of existence, but I must confess, the opposite is true for me. If the selection of clothes does ever bring me joy it is, paradoxically, when no real selection is required whatsoever. When, in anticipation of a day romping around lanes and fields where, if I am un lucky I might bump into two or three other souls, I can throw on whatever is closest to hand. I recall once, when back in the midst of my family, I threw on just such an outfit that consisted of an old shirt of my father’s, a jumper, scarred from active service on the frontline in the back of the wardrobe taking the battle to the moths, some tracksuit bottoms, a pair of wellington boots and a coat which, when I returned from said ramble, one of my sisters informed me, w...

To admit to being a ‘collector of strange tastes’ sounds as if one is a Victorian trying to confess to a fixation with pornography or a middle aged Englishman in some century past, explaining what precisely it is he is up to in Marrakesh. I must confess I mean neither such thing- after all, Marrakesh has now joined Lisbon, Barcelona, Bath, and Berlin as one of those cities plagues with couples on long weekends, and so I fear it would take a particularly concerted effort by wild horses to get me there. But let us not dwell on the negative or the euphemistic vocabularies of the past: the strange tastes that I delight in observing and then collecting (if committing to memory might be counted as such) are those of others, the discovery of unlikely or unexpected passions held by those whom we think we know. There are many reasons to delight in the seemingly counter-intuitive tastes of others. On one level it is, I suppose, somewhat voyeuristic, the equivalent of a glimpse into ...

I cannot think of cider without thinking of a particular early summer, that of 2014, in all its teeth rotting, gut gurgling glory. I am stood in the narrowness of the Lamb and Flag Passage, the Oxford wind cold (for summer is always too late and too short in that strange Narnia of a city) and the stares from tight-lipped cyclists are even colder. We- for I am invariably there with a good solid reprobate of a friend as little inclined to work as I am and with the college groundsman, - half stand, half perch on the tiny stunted window ledge and there drink pint after pint of it- sweet, cheap and sticky. It made us, I think good humoured, imparting the spirit of the Devonian commune or the medieval midsummer festival. We would lose count early- not least because the kindly groundsman would almost always buy, allowing perhaps the sixth or seventh round to be bought for him, as a gesture towards social norms. En route to that moment we would wend our way through old rivalries, imagined ...