UK

Ripon Cathedral’s Space Age Chapel

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This is photo of the Apollo 11 control system-themed hanging pyx at Ripon Cathedral

The Chapel of the Holy Spirit in Ripon Cathedral represents a sadly stillborn Anglican Space Age tradition of church furnishing. Completed in 1970 in honour of the previous year’s Apollo 11 moon landing, it is very much of its time.

I have seen some horrified reaction on social media to my photos of it, complaining at such a supposedly jarring presence in one of the finest buildings of the Romanesque-Gothic transition anywhere in Europe. Let us not forget, however, that the places of worship on this site have been substantially altered many times, including by St Wilfrid himself in the 7th Century, and even destroyed and completely rebuilt once. Perhaps most obviously, the Victorian restoration was imaginative but also far more inappropriate than this: yet Ripon Cathedral would not be what it is today without that and without a few fine pieces of Edwardiana and post-Edwardiana that are hardly redolent of the High Middle Ages.

Having long since passed through its groovy phase, to my mind the Chapel of the Holy Spirit has also by now finished its naff phase, and is becoming established as the sort of quirky period piece that any great cathedral must have many of from many different eras.

Located at the east end of the south choir aisle the chapel represents the Holy Trinity in themes astronomical and astronautical themes.

The hanging pyx represents Christ, who is sacramentally present within it, as this is where the Cathedral reserves the Blessed Sacrament.

Public domain image used courtesy of Wikipedia – thanks.

The design of the pyx is essentially copied from the reaction control thrusters for the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module. Really, I’m not making that up.

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Things Have Gone Wrong At The Tavistock. Central Government Must Step In.

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I’ve long since passed the point when I thought posting anything political on the internet made any difference, and what I’m about to say is on an issue where questioning a particular orthodoxy often results in abuse.

But I don’t actually want to look back in a year or two and think I kept my head down on this issue for fear of some aggro on social media. Or even for fear of losing friends who had once been good friends.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust’s lead for safeguarding children, Sonia Appleby, is taking her own employer to court as a whistleblower, claiming that she was victimised after bringing forward concerns from clinical psychiatrists working on the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the only adolescent gender clinic in England, which also receives referrals from Wales and both jurisdictions in Ireland.

The Trust is bringing forward disciplinary action against another clinician, David Bell, who had been approached by GIDS staff with concerns because he was a staff governor on the Trust, and who then wrote an internal report critical of GIDS.

It has been reported that 40 clinicians resigned from GIDS in just three years to early 2020.

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A country is a home or it’s nothing

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My latest piece in The Critic… A cheery-looking chap from the local Lib Dems dropped a Focus leaflet through my door last weekend, the first political leaflet I’ve received since moving here a few months ago. It may surprise you that this isn’t the start of a Lib Dem-bashing article: while I no longer hold … Read more

The Case for Socialist Healthcare in One Country

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“If China and Covid can’t shake doctrinal globalism, can anything?” My latest piece in The Critic… My friend Murat runs two tailor’s shops in the south of England. Having arrived from Turkey as a sole trader five years ago running a little alteration business in Salisbury, he now employs eight people, has a second premises … Read more

The Blind Eye Turned to Barrow

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What’s not newsworthy about fascists, Islamists, grooming and death threats to journalists? My latest piece for The Critic. When we sit at an obvious hinge of history, the tendency of the press is to look in the wrong direction for the events that will define a new era. 106 years ago this month, foreign correspondents … Read more

The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

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Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

The Sheldonian Theatre, located in Oxford, England, was built from 1664 to 1669 after a design by Christopher Wren for the University of Oxford. The building is named after Gilbert Sheldon, chancellor of the University at the time and the project’s main financial backer. It is used for music concerts, lectures and University ceremonies, but not for drama until 2015 when the Christ Church Dramatic Society staged a production of The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

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Presbyterians, Salvation, and God

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole.

We cremated my friend James on the freakishly warm Friday before St Patrick’s Day, between the two bouts of even freakier snow. We did this after a celebration of the Supper of the Lord Jesus Christ who was his Saviour and the anchor of his life. The daffodils bobbed in the sunshine as we took his coffin through the traffic from the church in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral to the crematorium in East Finchley, his terminus ad quem before his voyage to heaven. As an Angus-born and Edinburgh-reared son of the Kirk, he came to mind after this week’s shenanigans at the Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast.

James lived with MS for thirty years, something unimaginable when he was first diagnosed in the late 1980s. His continued life was a miracle, but it was also a struggle. I never knew the wordsmith, cyclist and cook that his older friends wrote about (movingly here and here). By the time I met him, sixteen years ago, his disease had robbed his legs of the power to walk, left his hands unable to handle a pen or a carving knife, and made his speech slurred and slow.

What he was never robbed of was his indomitable spirit, his twinkly smiling eyes, or his dry humour. Nor did MS prevent him throwing the legendary champagne-soaked parties in his Barbican flat, attended by a mix of characters who had little in common but their friendship with this delightful bon vivant: nonagenarian grand dames from Islington garden square mansions would rub shoulders with middle-aged actors struggling long past any hope of stardom and recently arrived twenty-somethings from Doncaster or Brazil, penniless but sure they’d make their fortune in London.

I never heard him complain about his lot: at most he would sigh wistfully that people should avoid getting MS if they could, not that they can. In that I saw a shadow of the boy, many decades before, whose father died when he was only nine, who then had to grow into a man far too soon and just get on with it.

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Meet the Box-Setts: the Demographic that Will Decide Britain’s Future

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Originally posted at Slugger O’Toole…

David Box gives his partner Seema Sett the dorky, Mr Bean-ish look, with the back of his tongue poking out of his gob that he knows always makes her smile when she’s had a rough day. The kids are asleep and they’re in bed too, sprawled on top of the duvet. The tablet is streaming one of their favourite series: Babylon 5. Season 2, the episode where the Technomages first appear. Pure nostalgia for their student days. They’re both a bit geekly about sci-fi: maths graduates, what do you expect? Lying prone, she stretches her hand up, strokes his face, says she’s tired but if he wants to turn that bloody thing off, she has something else in mind before they go to sleep.

If past general elections were defined by demographics spoken about for months in advance – Essex Man, Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman – the surprise results of 2017’s snap poll were driven most of all by Mr Box and Ms Sett: the people whom nobody saw coming and nobody much realised existed. This year’s local elections shows that they haven’t gone away.

Middle-class, entering middle-age, and hitherto deeply depoliticised, last year they voted for a Labour Party led by an overt Marxist perhaps to their own surprise and in numbers that still haven’t really seeped into the consciousness of political analysts and pundits a year later: 50% of 35-44 year olds voted for Corbyn’s Labour last June. At the point in their lives when their financial commitments and personal responsibilities are greatest, with kids at school and jumbo mortgages barely starting to be paid off, only 30% opted for Theresa May’s message of Tory stability.

On Epochal Political Shifts

In the late 1970s, it was young, prosperous, skilled, blue-collar workers who were about to deliver a radical change in the balance of political opinion in Britain. Detaching themselves from family loyalties to Labour that had existed for the two generations since poor Britons first won the vote, they flocked to Margaret Thatcher’s message of hard work, self-reliance, and opposition to the choking stranglehold of bureaucracy and unions.

Thirty years later, that vision is looking increasingly hollow to those who were schoolchildren during the Thatcher revolution, from the bottom of the social scale to the top. Those who work in the public sector haven’t seen an inflation-matching pay rise for eight years, which puts downward pressure on wages even for those in the private and third sectors. The house price spiral keeps them trapped on the same step of the housing ladder if they’re lucky enough to have bought; if they rent, costs are spiralling even more rapidly, while security of tenancy has vanished and is usually hemmed in with massive deposits and restrictive clauses that would have been unimaginable in their turn-of-the-millennium house shares. Both last year’s election and this one’s took place during a round of staff cuts in their children’s schools that went unnoticed by the national press, still less by the strategists who ran the Tory election campaigns.

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Who Benefits from the Collapse of Power Sharing?

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole…

We’re unlikely to know for a long time exactly why talks on restoring devolved government collapsed in such spectacular fashion last week. It’s always worth asking, in those circumstances, ‘cui bono?’

A long-term collapse in devolved arrangements, and a return to Direct Rule, whether or not it is acknowledged as such, would seem at first blush to benefit the DUP, at least in the short term. It also represents a significant shift in power within the DUP, away from Foster and the Assembly group with its stratum of moderates like Simon Hamilton, and towards the consistently hardline Westminster group, which is currently keeping Theresa May in power.

That in turn gives the DUP Westminster group a free hand to push for a hard Brexit with a relatively hard border, not tied into any Executive or wider Assembly approach which would see the DUP constrained by the need for consensus with Sinn Féin and a broader majority of pro-European opinion in the Assembly.

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