Monthly Archives: November 2009

A proud godfather

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I’m going to have to do a couple of weeks as a snake-handling Pentecostal to get it out of my system. Last week, a requiem mass with smells, bells and Latin. Last night a confirmation service with robes, choir and of course a bishop all mitred and croziered up. I’m just not used to all this high church.

But what a lovely service it was: formal but friendly, exactly as long as it needed to be and with a large element of personal pride. Yes, on Remembrance Day 1995 I became a godfather for the first time. Fourteen years and one week later I formally discharged that obligation. In the intervening years, as a result of a special bulk deal negotiated with the family I also became godfather of my godson’s younger brother. A similar bulk deal presumably negotiated with the bishop saw them confirmed together. For some reason the church only gave a week’s warning, so we packed into the car yesterday and headed down to the coast.

A strangely eschatological element – readings from Daniel + Jesus talking about the last days – but some good singable hymns, ending with “Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer”, and the bish’s sermon hit all the right spots about being prepared for life. The fact that we didn’t quite get the boys’ parents kneeling at the same communion rail at the same time was just down to the timing of the occasion: it could have happened. Peace was very noticeably offered.

“Well done,” their father whispered to me as the first boy went under the episcopal hands. Well, I can’t claim that much credit but I’m prepared to take every scrap that I can. I was even proud that when the bishop told all the candidates to hold up their confirmation candles, guess whose senior godson was holding his the highest?

And then it was back into the car, returning to Abingdon past midnight and treating myself to a lie-in in lieu of the usual morning writing. Well, it was a special occasion.

I was also delighted that the deed was done by the Bishop of Sherborne. After the service I told him I had been confirmed by one of his predecessors. “St Aldhelm, 705?” he asked.

I say I’ve discharged the duty: obviously I have no intention of just ticking that box and moving on in life. As they get lives of their own they are more likely to be the ones moving on. But right here, right now and with permission of both parents and the boys themselves, here is a very proud godfather with his senior and junior godsons.

And all that I knew was the hole in my ceiling letting out water

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I like to think (and I probably flatter myself) that I don’t make many mistakes, but I have to admit that when I do they are ones to remember.

The great flood of October 09 was the crashing opening note of a symphony that goes on to this day, though I do feel it’s in its final movement. The builders performing extreme renovation on the flat above us have never failed to entertain. Next they did something (and we’re still not sure what, and that includes them) to divert rain water through a hole in the roof, down one of their walls and into our living room. That does seem to have improved despite an absence of roofwork. Maybe they put the whatever-it-was-they-moved back.

Next the newly installed boiler upstairs decided to leak, also into our living room. Of course, that’s on the opposite wall so it missed all the carefully positioned buckets very nicely.

Then all was quiet, waterwise, for a while … until on Friday I went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and felt my fingers get wet. Water was very gently dripping down the light switch cord. Not a flood. Drip drip drip. 12 hours was enough to gather about 1.5 inches in a bucket. And it hadn’t been going on for long. This is at the other end of the flat. Our bathroom is under theirs.

I pointed this out to the foreman. He’s an ex-Marine with a Marine’s quickest-way-to-solve-the-problem attitude. “We could cut a hole in your ceiling,” he said. “Not my preferred option,” I replied. “You could lift up your recently laid and heavily, expensively tiled bathroom floor.” “Or we could cut a hole in your ceiling,” he pointed out.

And that, to my shame, is what they did, even though it meant over-ruling Best Beloved, because I was persuaded it was the quickest way to get the leak stopped, and they could patch the hole on the same day to the point of near-invisibility. “Near invisibility” might depend on what spectrum you’re using but in the normal range of human sight it’s pretty visible.

Here’s the hole in mid-operation. Don’t be alarmed – even the best appendectomies probably don’t look very pretty halfway through.


Note the drops of water on the left and the dismantled light switch dangling on the right. The right hand pipe that you see had a pinprick hole in it that was letting out a very thin, fine jet of water.

They couldn’t plug the hole the same day because the cavity was too wet. The next day I left them to it. When I got back the hole was plugged all right … and the muppet who did the plugging had moved the light switch. It used to be slightly to the left as you come into the bathroom. It now hangs in front of the door. You have to go into the room, close the door and then turn the light on; and when you go out again, you have to make sure the cord isn’t caught.

We have asked for it to be redone.

Before work began, I let the flat’s owner know, in writing, that this was a one-off solution to a one-off problem and any further leaks would be dealt with through his brand new bathroom floor. And I suspect there might be some. The leak was a weak spot in one pipe which the plumber thought had been opened up in some old flux because the cold water pipes are now connected directly to the mains rather than to a tank. I know, you’re way ahead of me: if one hole can open up in an old pipe under the new pressure, why can’t others? Time will tell.

As I drove into work yesterday Classic FM started playing Handel’s Water Music. Ha ha.

Requiem for Jennifer

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I didn’t know Jennifer Swift that well but I knew her well enough to be sad to hear she had died. I must have first met her at a convention but I already knew the name from her stories in Interzone. She was Christian, she lived in Oxford, she wrote sf and she liked C.S. Lewis – obviously we were going to get on. Thanks to her I even got to give a talk at the C.S. Lewis society: Lewis was quite strongly opposed to space exploration, but I humbly proposed a few takes on the topic through the lens of science fiction that he might have approved of.

We developed an annual tradition in which she and her husband Tim would explore yet another picturesque cycling route around Oxfordshire on their tandem, and the route would intersect with a pub where I could join them for lunch and she could pick my brains about agents, writing novels and other related affairs. When Jennifer had identified you as a source of information you got a distinct feeling of being locked on to. She was born to be a journalist. The parallel world where her novel did finally get published is a richer place than this one. My input would have accounted for a fraction of the whole which would have been drawn from the many, many streams and strands of thought that so fascinated her.

Latterly, of course, it was we rather than I who joined them for lunch. No lunch this year, though. Didn’t think anything of it and it was probably unrelated to her illness, which was only diagnosed mid-July. Then on 30 September Tim emailed all her friends to say she had died: stage 4 metastatic breast cancer in the liver and possibly the spinal column. Requiem mass sung this morning in the chapel at Magdalen.

Good grief, if I was doing a reading at my wife’s memorial service I couldn’t possibly be as dignified and calm as Tim was, reading a passage from Julian of Norwich in which she saw God hosting a banquet for all the honoured souls in his house – i.e. all of them – and taking a lower seat himself, refusing to hold an exalted position in his own home.

After a couple of shaky starts – the lad must be just on the verge of his voice breaking – a child sang a solo from Perelandra: the Opera, music by Donald Swann (who Tim has always strongly resembled in my eyes):

No man may shorten the way.
Each must carry his cross
On the long road to Calvary,
Follow where other feet have trodden.
Though the burden seems too great
For bleeding shoulders to uphold,
Too dark the path
For failing eyes to see,
Yet the lonely hill must still be climbed,
The desolation still be borne.
No man may shorten the way.

And what a difference it makes at a funeral where the minister delivering the sermon actually knew the deceased.

Once in a while it’s good to splurge out on some really high church. Incense, Latin, the lot. (Though if I had one teeny, tiny criticism, it would be that the incense was kept in a separate room the other side of a closed door, and the server in charge of smells would duck in and out from time to time to get it. The first time he left I honestly thought he might have badly needed a pee and questioned why he had to go in the middle of Tim’s reading. Okay, this was probably for a good reason: I expect the incense was kept in a liturgically sanctioned fume cupboard without which it would have reduced visibility in the chapel to five feet – but even so, it was distracting.)

I thought of the contrast with my usual church and remembered an analogy by C.S. Lewis, which therefore Jennifer would approve of. In fact I know that even Philip Pullman approves of this one because he’s who I heard it from. Roughly it goes: when I was a child, I liked lemonade but I didn’t like wine. Now I’m an adult I still like lemonade but I also like wine. I now enjoy two experiences where I used to enjoy only one: my maturity has enriched me.

Those churches that resolutely use only forms of worship devised this century are confining themselves to lemonade only – and the more determinedly modern they are (“this unsingable piece of whimsy was a hit at New Wine so we must sing it every week until either one day someone learns the tune or we bring back a new hit from New Wine next year – whichever is sooner”) the flatter the lemonade is. Everyone needs a good vintage draught from time to time.

Back to Jennifer, her Church Times obituary is a lovely read and I’ll finish as the service did. Jennifer:

In Paradisum deducant te angeli, in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere aeternam habeas requiem.

May the angels lead thee to Paradise; at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee into the holy city Jerusalem. May the choir of angels receive thee, and with Lazarus, once a beggar, may thou have eternal rest.