Big Brother

George Orwell's "1984" described numerous horrors in the future totalitarian Britain or "Airstrip One". Secret police everywhere, people denouncing their loved ones, torture chambers, perpetual war, hate propaganda, beer served in litres..... All of these actually existed in under various tyrants various parts of the world.

But the really creepy horror was the perpetual observation by TV. The worst bit was the interactive TV with a hectoring harridan urging the reluctant comrades onto greater efforts in their early morning gymnastics. It must have seemed particularly unsettling in the 1940s when TV was an exotic novelty which few people had seen and even fewer could afford. Not even Hitler and Stalin had the technical resources to spy upon their people so comprehensively and intrusively. Even at a much later date, the East German Stasi depended on pretty old fashioned methods of spying on the population. When practically all the people were potential Enemies of the People, they went in for tens of thousands of snoops.

This premise in "1984" was that all this intrusion was compelled by an all-powerful state. Surely no one would "voluntarily" submit to perpetual public observation unless in the grip of some particularly pitiable mental disorder? Well, the good people of Reading were only too willing to show the way to the rest of the planet.

This reminiscence was prompted by the recent death of Margaret Sainsbury (formerly Margaret Wilkins), the pioneer of "Reality" TV. Back in the early 1970s, new lightweight video cameras made documentary filmmaking far easier that it had been with the earlier massive TV cameras or even the compact 16mm and 35 mm movie cameras. Documentary makers seized the new technology and boldly went where no sane man had ever gone before. Reading was the venue for two of the most notorious programs.

I suspect that this was at least partly due to financial restrictions - once TV crews went further out from London, a higher rate of salary and/or allowances was payable under the union-negotiated conditions. So I have seen an episode of "Inspector Morse" (set unforgettably in Oxford) being filmed at some suitably imposing building in Reading which might double as an Oxford college or library.

Reading Police let one of these newly equipped crews into their interrogation of a rape victim and changed British police procedures forever. The way they treated the traumatized woman created a national uproar and the police had to drastically revise their guidelines for such questioning.

But the Wilkins clan paved the way for any number of media creations, from "The Truman Show" to "Big Brother" and arguably any number of grisly confessional daytime TV shows all over the world. Mr Wilkins was a bus driver, Margaret was his wife and the family matriarch, and their unconventional family lived about a mile south of Reading town centre. Their crowded apartment in Whitley Street was barely half a mile from the green campus of Reading University, but it might as well have been on another planet. For a few weeks it was obviously even more crowded with a TV crew squeezed in.

The resulting program called simply "The Family". Its purported aim was simply to observe the everyday life of a British family. At this distance I cannot remember if the producers were so brazen as to claim it was a "typical" British family. An obvious problem with such a program was finding a family which was sufficiently stupid and/or venal to take part, especially with the paltry sums which were on offer. A second problem was to stop it being boring beyond belief, when the raw material was the trivia of everyday life. Even with the most selective shooting and ruthless editing, it threatened to lose much of the audience after the first or second episode, once the sheer novelty wore off.

Plainly the uneducated Wilkins were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. But I doubt that it would have been more exciting if a family of professors from the prosperous University area half a mile to the east had volunteered. Everyday life is pretty mundane in any home. Although, of course, a University household might have exercised more forethought about the impact on their family dynamics of displaying all their dirty laundry on nationwide TV and would have been less tempted by the money.

At the time I cynically assumed that the producers had picked the Wilkins simply because their unconventional (i.e. immoral) lifestyle might add a little spice to a desperately dull pie. Mrs Wilkins' youngest child was sired by another guy during an extra marital fling and the older daughter was cohabiting with her boyfriend under the family roof. It is difficult now to imagine how disturbing this was to ordinary British families who still struggled to maintain Christian family values, if not religious practice. It was that period when the lifestyle of the swinging sixties was spreading out from a tiny minority to a wider population, but before it had become complacently accepted - or, if not accepted, resignedly tolerated as being as unavoidable as a tsunami.

Looking back on it now, I see "The Family" as a blatantly political exercise to further the destruction of Christian values. It showed yet again that there is no such thing as "impartial" observation in social matters (vide Margaret Mead and any number of "scientific" anthropologists). The "observer" was a promoter of the values displayed by the Wilkins, merely by showing them as "normal". Even the luckless Mr Wilkins was praised as being forgiving to the wife who made him a cuckold. Though possibly not that forgiving....they divorced a year after the program, which is why Margaret Wikins died as Margaret Sainsbury.

And where the Wilkins went, any number of British families have gone since so that cohabitation and illegitimacy are an "accepted" part of the social scenery.

Also the program broke any number of taboos on basic decency and kindness, which have been gleefully exploited mercilessly by even less scrupulous program makers since. Most unsettling of all was the treatment of the youngest child, the 9 year old son. The adults could hardly have known what they were letting themselves in for when they "volunteered" as guinea pigs. It was a wholly unprecedented experiment. But at least they were consenting adults, even if ignorantly consenting. The 9 year old obviously was a helpless victim of their decision. Apart from having his illegitimacy exposed for world wide entertainment, he was filmed in floods of tears as his parents gave him a hard time about a poor school report. Imagine going into school the day after that episode........ I suspect that today child abuse teams would be on the job and am amazed that little fuss was made about it at the time.

The wonderful "Truman Show" skipped the less appetizing aspects of the hero's 24 hours-a-day TV exposure - such as his trips to the bathroom and his horizontal relations with his "wife". But then Peter Weir is an artist of taste and subtlety, unlike the majority of TV producers around the world.

I can't help wondering if the Stasi missed a trick; what if, instead of paying a fortune for an army of professional agents and informers, they had simply offered loads of cheap TV deals to East German families???? Get all your citizens to expose their intimate secrets voluntarily - and get a profit on world wide syndication rights.....

Rubish Galore

I spend a few minutes each Sunday morning before Mass starts picking up garbage from the grounds of St. William of York. I have gathered plastic and glass bottles, fast food boxes, drink cartons, candy wrappings, a woman's purse, beer and coke cans, plastic toys, leaflets, newspapers, various small garments, shoes, plastic bags, bicycle parts, a television, fencing panels, condoms, a child's scooter, hub caps, traffic cones, cigarette packets, cigarette butts and countless fragments of broken glass. Even down on your knees with dustpan and brush, it is near impossible to remove the latter completely and you can see lots more glinting like diamonds when the sun is at the appropriate angle.

The scariest item was a needle exchange kit (unused, as far as I could tell) and the biggest and heaviest was a stack of scaffolding poles dumped by a dodgy roof repairer. I took the exchange kit back to the local drugstore for safe disposal - it was still in their plastic bag. But the scaffolding poles took some serious effort to remove them to the local refuse dump.

You obviously can't leave such objects lying around for both cosmetic and health and safety reasons, especially in premises open to children. It is a depressing revelation about the complete lack of respect for public spaces, even consecrated public areas. But garbage always provides a fascinating insight into society, if only to illustrate how wealthy a country must be to casually dump so much raw material.

At the beginning of April I saw a huge queue snaking out of the Oracle shopping mall. The queue was people who had waited for hours to get tickets for the Reading Rock Festival. Even though the Festival is not held until late August, all the tickets had allegedly gone already - unless you go on Ebay and pay an arm and a leg (See below for further rip-off details). Where the queue had been there was the most appalling mess of discarded bags, drinks containers and food wrappings dumped by the fans during their long vigil. Just after I saw the mess, a team of council workers arrived with brushes, bags, a large road sweeping vehicle and a small sidewalk sweeping vehicle and cleared it with admirable speed and efficiency.

It was a microcosm of the debris left by the real Festival. The only time I have ever been to the Festival was in 1989, when I helped man the Christian outreach tent. After the Festival, which runs only from Friday evening to Sunday evening, the garbage beggared belief. Plastic bags, ground sheets, huge water containers, paper galore; the shambles stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see across the huge site. I thought it would take most of the months until the 1990 festival to pick it up. But there is a huge well organised operation to clear it away in a week or so.

A new store has just opened on Caversham Road, on the direct route from the railway station to the festival site. It is one of the rapidly-growing Aldi chain of budget food stores. Like their budget rivals, Lidl, they are also German and very well positioned to take advantage of the economic downturn, when people hunt for bargains. (The third big German supermarket chain, Kaiser, has not yet arrived in the UK - their name carries unhappy WW1 connotations..... But they are huge at home - there are 155 branches in the Berlin area alone.)

Aldi's introductory offers include a complete "Festival pack": a tent, two sleeping bags and two ground covers for a total of £9.99. At that price, it is not worth taking the pack home after the festival and no doubt there will be even more non-degradable garbage abandoned afterward.

Now that the festival has actually started, you can see the indescribable mess already accumulating. I drove behind two large vans, each towing a large caravan, en route to the site three days before the start of the music. One was the Chinese take-away caravan, the other a burger-and-kebabs caravan. So that's two more heaps of fast-food wrapping.

The festival site is beside the river on the north side of Reading and the nearest supermarkets are over the river in the suburb of Caversham. So you see a procession of youngsters coming back over Caversham Bridge loaded with plastic bags from the supermarkets. If there are 70,000 festival goers and each gets only only one plastic bag and half leave that bag as litter......Holy Cow, that's 35,000 plastic bags for starters.

It is not just the lightweight litter. One of the supermarkets, Waitrose, had a guy stationed in the middle of Caversham Bridge to grab back all the shopping carts which the festival goers were using to transport the mountains of drinks and groceries. So there were two large groups of shopping carts either side of the bridge waiting to be wheeled back to the store. We have two lovely rivers in Reading, the Thames and the Kebnnet, plus any number of picturesque smaller tributaries. These all act as rubbish magnets, with abandoned shopping carts being a prominent ingredient. As they are well made and coated with rust resistant material they can stay in a waterway indefinitely until the next periodic clear out. You can bet that many of Waitrose's expensive carts would have ended up in the Thames unless swiftly recovered. And the path along the south bank of the Thames leading to the Festival site is already strewn with drinks cans and fast food debris, to be cleared up at public expense.

Once the Festival starts, the graffiti artists are out in force as well, adding to the £120,000 a year the local council already spends in scrubbing down walls and other vertical surfaces. That's not to mention the noise pollution created by the multi-megawatt amplifiers. The main recipients are the people in the million pound plus riverside homes on the north bank, but it easily spreads to my humble home two miles away on a hilltop; sound bounces in unpredictable ways all over town. And then there's the glorious pollution and traffic congestion as traffic converges from all over the country.

Obviously somebody's making truckloads of money off this. With tickets at £145 ($280) a go just for admission, there's obviously still money to burn in this country despite the impending recession. And that's excluding food, camping gear, souvenirs and travel to the site. Some people were ripped off £145 by bogus internet sites and STILL descended on the on-site ticket office, queing for hours from early morning to pay another £145 to the legitimate sellers for the remaining 3,000 tickets. No wonder they could afford to pay £1 million just for a temporary bridge spanning the Thames, linking to a campsite on the north bank. We have been waiting 80 years for a third Thames bridge in town and a temporary one springs up in days. I am remained of General Patton's Rhine crossing in 1945. The US Army engineers in Patton's sector alone put 5 bridges across the Rhine in 24 hours, under threat of enemy attack. If the US Army had been run by Reading Council, WW2 would still be in full swing. This temporary bridge is a rare example of recycling - it was allegedly made from structures used for the stage on Madonna's last world tour....

Any Christian presence in this pagan celebration? Well, the warmth and hospitality of local people has been evident in some places. The Baptist Church in the centre of Caversham, across the road from Waitrose supermarket, was holding open house, with festival goers welcomed in for coffee, sandwiches, toilets and a chance to recharge their mobile phones. Another church on the south bank was offering coffee sessions in the morning. But, given the sheer size of the affair, the Christian input is very marginal.

Given the size of Great Britain and the 60+ million people squeezed into it, it is a wonder that there is any land left unoccupied by rubbish tips and landfill sites. There's even less spare space this weekend.....

My parents are buried in the Henley Road cemetery, about a mile from my house. Compared with Italian, French and Greek cemeteries, British graveyards are boring and drab resting places. The wonderful cemeteries I have seen in Paris, Milan and Athens are full of remarkable family vaults, some like small chapels, plus elaborate headstones and statues galore.

You get occasional disappointments. Francois Truffaut's grave in Montmartre cemetery is marked by a flat black slab, overhung by branches. It is a surprisingly low key memorial for one of the brightest lights of the French New Wave of filmmakers. There was little sign that anyone had visited it recently; I had considerable trouble finding it despite the helpful cemetery plan given out at Montmartre's entrance. I remember Steven Spielberg's heartfelt tribute to Truffaut at the 1985 Oscars after the French master's tragically early death. In the same cemetery, the composers Offenbach and Berlioz have far more impressive tombs.

But Henley Road cemetery has its points of interest. On its north side it is dominated by the BBC's monitoring centre with its huge satellite dishes. This records TV and radio programmes from all over the world. Thus it was the first place outside Germany to learn of the surrender in 1945 and the first place outside Russia to learn of the coup against Gorbachev in 1991. Bizzarrely, Gorbachev explained afterwards that, while he and his family were locked up after the coup, he kept in touch with what was happening in Russia by listening to the BBC Russian service.....

Most of the graves in Henley Road are more like Truffaut's grave than that of Berlioz. This is especially obvious on the newest section on the east side where the graves are packed in very tightly between narrow paved paths. At least my parents' grave is more widely spaced from its neighbours and covered in grass. I usually visit an old friend's grave in this cramped section. He died in October 2002. But it was not until January 2003 that we finally had his funeral. He died in the Royal Berkshire Hospital and there was no known relative to claim his body and arrange a funeral. Thus he fell into the care of a specialist worker at the hospital who looks after such bodies. At any one time there are around twelve bodies in the cold store awaiting a relative to be traced. Some may have a name; some may be completely unidentified.

Sooner or later an unidentified body has to formally disposed of and the social worker at the RBH would visit the local Registrar of Births and Deaths to sort out the paperwork. Brian was fortunate in having friends to take an interest in him and push for a decent funeral. We did not know where any of his family, even his ex-wife, might be living or how to trace them.

It was not just the social worker at the hospital who took an official interest in Brian. To our surprise, he had several thousand pounds in various savings accounts, even after the funeral expenses. Thus, the "Bona Vacantia" department got involved. This is one of the oldest Government departments anywhere in the world. The Latin title means literally "empty goods" and it looks after the affairs of anyone who dies without leaving a will and without known relatives. I had a brief correspondence with them, listing the friends with an interest in Brian and suggesting destinations for his money - such as charities I knew that he was interested in. They replied courteously, explaining that, unless there was a will legally recording Brian's wishes, they could not accept our suggestions. Any surplus funds from Brian's estate would go to the State, though if relatives turned up years later the money would be distributed to them.

But Bona Vacantia were legally able to fund a headstone and so we chose a beautiful blue granite slab with gold lettering : "Brian Brewer: A good and kind man". That wording was chosen by a genuine friend and neighbour who looked after Brian in his last years as he was sinking into early senility and took him a meal each day. It summed up our happy memories of him. But compared to the surrounding headstones talking about a much-loved grandfather, mother, sister, etc, it seems a very bare memorial to his 60+ years on earth.

But Brian's end was not without humour. He worked in the motor trade for years and was very patriotic. I remember another friend on the funeral day declaring how outraged Brian would have been to be transported on his final journey in a stretch Volvo (and a metallic silver one to boot!) rather than a good traditional British hearse... By the time Bona Vacantia had approved the release of funds and we had chosen a headstone, it was going into 2005. Not surprisingly, the engravers put the wrong date of death on the headstone - October 2004 rather than 2002. They had probably just been doing loads of "2004" engravings. It was a serious blunder, as they should have sent us a proof-reading copy of the proposed text before putting drill to granite. But we were sure that Brian would have been amused; a friend declared that he was given two years off Purgatory, courtesy of the bungling Co-op Funeral Service. So the headstone will bear the wrong date in perpetuity.

I heard some time ago that the London police typically have 800 unidentified and unburied bodies on their hands at any one time. This sounded incredible, until you realise that London has about thirty times the population of Reading. Thirty times twelve makes 360. Then add in the fact that London is going to be a magnet for the homeless, vagrant, drifter and refugee from all over the world and 800 does not seem so high. It is part of the squalid underside of any prosperous city or town which no one wants to think about.

A local voluntary worker with the homeless ran a soup kitchen and drop in centre and was regularly summoned by the police to identify bodies. Typically it was an old alcoholic who had fallen in the river or been found dead from exposure after a winter's night outside. Usually the conversation would go: "Yes, that's old Tom. He was a regular for the last six months at the centre. No, sorry, he never gave his surname. I think he had a sister in Glasgow....sorry, I don't know her name...".

Without a name or date of birth or any official documents such as a bank card or National Insurance (Social Security) Number, the police are totally stuck. The body will eventually be laid to rest in a pauper's grave at public expense.

About twenty years ago, workers demolishing an old house about half a mile east of St James found skeletal remains in the attic. There was an empty cider bottle nearby, but no other clue to the identity or lifestyle of the deceased. I remember our parish priest at the time praying for the repose of this unnamed soul and felt some inadequate consolation that someone cared about him for a few seconds.

The wonderful words of "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" always come to mind in a graveyard:

Time like an ever flowing stream
Bears all her sons away.
They fly, forgotten as a dream,
Dies at the waking day.

Most of the people in the fancy tombs in Paris are forgotten, apart from a few big names like Berlioz, Jean-Paul Satre, Chopin, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. And, to judge from the size of the memorials, they were all people of serious substance and fame while they were alive. The BBC site seems a fitting neighbour for Henley Road; one full of forgotten news which seemed so important at the time, one full of forgotten people.

All Are Welcome - Part 2

Friday 15th August. 1215 Mass at St James caters for the town centre Catholics and is usually short to allow people to come in their lunch breaks. This year the Feast of the Assumption Mass was expanded by having to accommodate a funeral ritual. I turned up just before Mass and the coffin was being unloaded from a gleaming black Mercedes hearse. Bonus points for Walkers Undertakers, sticking to traditional black and a suitably upmarket motor. A bagpiper in full Scottish kilt and shaggy headgear leads the procession in to the tune of "Amazing Grace". Another bonus point. The bagpipe tone was made for lamentation, though there are plenty of jaunty airs played on it. The opening hymn is "Hail Queen of Heaven", Double bonus points, for the feast of Our Lady and its heartfelt pleas for mercy and salvation.

Then Father Dominic opens his mouth and it's all downhill. He reminisces about Joe's life as a faithful Catholic and a parish pilgrimage to Walsingham, a shrine of Our Lady in the east of England, about five hours drive from Reading. Joe was accompanied on that pilgrimage by Pat, his partner of 20 years......er, excuse me, is Pat male or female?? I think female, though I wouldn't swear to it. Any mention of marriage or teaching on chastity? No, I thought not. Wouldn't do to upset the mourners or any of the numerous parishioners with irregular sexual couplings and illegitimate children. Wasn't Our Lady blessed ever-Virgin? Well, I wouldn't stress it too strongly, especially not on the feast of the Assumption.

I remember reading the comment of one Protestant theologian after the formal definition of the doctrine of the Assumption in 1950 by Pope Pius XII: "The Assumption is just an assumption". What is not an assumption is the assured salvation of Joe and all the other people whose funerals I have attended in recent years. It is as assured as the rising of the sun. A bloody big Assumption if you ask me.

It is of course the inevitable consequence of the "All are welcome" philosophy I described in my previous post, though to call it a philosophy suggests too much logical and coherent thinking. If you are extending a posthumous welcome to anyone, regardless of lifestyle, how can you exclude the living, regardless of lifestyle? If you give a Catholic funeral to a prominent Freemason, how can you refuse him Communion while he is alive and well? How can you say anything to the parish councilor showing off her illegitimate child to the cooing congregation at the after-Mass coffee? Or expel the happily fornicating seminarian (who is shaping up to be the next priestly front page in our diocese)? Or forbid the cohabitee from being a Special Minister of Communion? Or control the Medjugorge zealots promoting their monstrously fraudulent scam? The last is probably the most difficult as they profess such a fierce devotion and are exemplary parishioners in every other way.

Of course, everyone should be welcome in a Catholic Church - the Hell's Angels, Freemasons, gangstas, cohabitees, Medjugorge nutcases and all the rest of us poor sinners whose multiple vices are not quite so publicly visible. The problem is promoting a welcome which is almost on the level of an invitation to the neighbourhood barbecue, where your only commitment is to turning up for the beer and burgers. All the above are welcome, but only on the understanding that they are willing to change and that Catholic doctrine will be charitably, but firmly preached whenever necessary.

Friday 15th August. 1215 Mass at St James caters for the town centre Catholics and is usually short to allow people to come in their lunch breaks. This year the Feast of the Assumption Mass was expanded by having to accommodate a funeral ritual. I turned up just before Mass and the coffin was being unloaded from a gleaming black Mercedes hearse. Bonus points for Walkers Undertakers, sticking to traditional black and a suitably upmarket motor. A bagpiper in full Scottish kilt and shaggy headgear leads the procession in to the tune of "Amazing Grace". Another bonus point. The bagpipe tone was made for lamentation, though there are plenty of jaunty airs played on it. The opening hymn is "Hail Queen of Heaven", Double bonus points, for the feast of Our Lady and its heartfelt pleas for mercy and salvation.

Then Father Dominic opens his mouth and it's all downhill. He reminisces about Joe's life as a faithful Catholic and a parish pilgrimage to Walsingham, a shrine of Our Lady in the east of England, about five hours drive from Reading. Joe was accompanied on that pilgrimage by Pat, his partner of 20 years......er, excuse me, is Pat male or female?? I think female, though I wouldn't swear to it. Any mention of marriage or teaching on chastity? No, I thought not. Wouldn't do to upset the mourners or any of the numerous parishioners with irregular sexual couplings and illegitimate children. Wasn't Our Lady blessed ever-Virgin? Well, I wouldn't stress it too strongly, especially not on the feast of the Assumption.

I remember reading the comment of one Protestant theologian after the formal definition of the doctrine of the Assumption in 1950 by Pope Pius XII: "The Assumption is just an assumption". What is not an assumption is the assured salvation of Joe and all the other people whose funerals I have attended in recent years. It is as assured as the rising of the sun. A bloody big Assumption if you ask me.

It is of course the inevitable consequence of the "All are welcome" philosophy I described in my previous post, though to call it a philosophy suggests too much logical and coherent thinking. If you are extending a posthumous welcome to anyone, regardless of lifestyle, how can you exclude the living, regardless of lifestyle? If you give a Catholic funeral to a prominent Freemason, how can you refuse him Communion while he is alive and well? How can you say anything to the parish councilor showing off her illegitimate child to the cooing congregation at the after-Mass coffee? Or expel the happily fornicating seminarian (who is shaping up to be the next priestly front page in our diocese)? Or forbid the cohabitee from being a Special Minister of Communion? Or control the Medjugorge zealots promoting their monstrously fraudulent scam? The last is probably the most difficult as they profess such a fierce devotion and are exemplary parishioners in every other way.

Of course, everyone should be welcome in a Catholic Church - the Hell's Angels, Freemasons, gangstas, cohabitees, Medjugorge nutcases and all the rest of us poor sinners whose multiple vices are not quite so publicly visible. The problem is promoting a welcome which is almost on the level of an invitation to the neighbourhood barbecue, where your only commitment is to turning up for the beer and burgers. All the above are welcome, but only on the understanding that they are willing to change and that Catholic doctrine will be charitably, but firmly preached whenever necessary.

All Are Welcome - REALLY!?

It is 2nd June 2007 and the big day at St James Reading: the first ordination in the church for over 25 years. The weather is wonderful, the church is full and a long procession of priests and altar servers heads up the aisle as the intensively rehearsed choir leads the opening hymn "All are welcome". Marty Haugen's hymn summaries the open inclusive church's attitude to members and non-members alike. Our new priest, Father P.J. Smith, had free rein to choose just about any music he wanted for his ordination and this hymn obviously proclaimed his approach.

Who could possibly disagree with such sentiments? Scripture and the sayings of Jesus are full of words of invitation, any number of which are selectively meshed into modern hymns. I have yet to see "Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire..." versified and set to a catchy tune. So why do I feel uneasy at some of the people who are welcomed in?

A recent "Reading Post" headline bizarrely highlighted some of the problems. You see some very strange things in the British press, but this really caught my eye. "A new Hell's Angel in Heaven." A 42 year motor cyclist had been killed in a crash and his funeral was held at Christ the King Church, 4 miles south of St James - the very church where Father P.J. had been ordained deacon in 2006. The main reason for the front page coverage in our local rag was the 400 motorcyclists from all over Britain, other parts of Europe and even California who turned up at the funeral. They then formed part of the huge procession bisecting the town en route to the crematorium on the north side of town. Thank God I wasn't driving round town at that time.

Needless to say, the Hell's Angels fraternity were very prominent in this band. The photographs reminded me of P. J. O'Rourke's observation on the saddest sight he had seen recently - a hippy with a walking frame and a hearing aid. All these Hell's Angels, with their graying hair and beards and pot bellies, should have grown out of this 30 years ago, but will doubtless carry on riding until Alzheimer carries them off. The priest who conducted the funeral referred to the deceased's devotion to the motor bike fraternity, but did not comment on how a proclaimed Hell's Angel might have any problems getting through the Pearly Gates.

Another smaller report in the Post summarized the life of a local elderly business man whose funeral was held at St John Bosco on the east side of town. Prominent among his interests was his enthusiastic support for the local Freemasons, but this is obviously no barrier to a Catholic funeral any more. His own son described him as a "proud Freemason" who had recruited him into the Craft.

Much of the gruesome mawkishness and sentimentality evident at Princess Diana's funeral permeates modern funerals. The salvation (and sometimes the canonization) of the deceased is taken as a given. Plainly any connection between conduct and sanctity is irrelevant. The luckless Anglican clergy have a particularly heavy burden to carry, as they are legally obliged to conduct the funeral of anyone who dies in their parish, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof. This was particularly obvious in the case of Diana, whose religious status was confused to say the least. As for her trumpeted saintliness....her life would have provided ammunition for a regiment of Devil's Advocates.

The young man stabbed to death in St Mary's Butts in May received a lavish send-off at the ancient St Mary's Church, only 50 yards from where he was stabbed. Call me a rancid old cynic, but this looked like a really good gangsta funeral. The unfortunate Anglican vicar who presided over the service had to tolerate the family parading with a poster which proclaimed "Fallen Soldier" on one side. This is a favorite title on Facebook and other teen-social websites when mourning the brutal death of a gangsta. It is a grotesque insult to any genuine fallen soldier, but most modern people, remote from the realities of warfare, have as little understanding of genuine heroism as they have of genuine sanctity. From the lamentations and tributes in the "Post", you would never guess that he died as a result of a squalid fight between two drugs gangs.

As the brilliant funeral director Barry Albin-Dyer noted when a crook phoned from inside prison to arrange his father's funeral in London, no expense was too much - including a horse drawn hearse. Sure enough, the funeral at St. Mary's featured a white hearse drawn by two beautiful white horses. Again, the ancient symbolism of white, signifying innocence, holiness or purity has long vanished, along with the ancient symbolism of black or purple for death and sorrow. Barry Albin-Dyer is very strong on this tradition of black and explained its significance in a recent TV documentary (with a tongue-in-cheek soundtrack playing Johnny Cash's "Man in black"). But our local funeral homes have all but abandoned their splendid black Vanden Plas and Daimler hearses and our deceased are now carried to the cemeteries in metallic silver stretch Fords or Volvos. By the time I go, they'll probably transport me in a pink or powder blue Hyundai.

I doubt that our local Catholic clergy would have been any more selective than the vicar at St Mary's if asked to do a gangsta funeral. I went to Mass at Our Lady of Peace on the east side of town recently and the newsletter contained the usual request "please pray for the following deceased whose anniversaries occur round this time....". Sure enough, one of the names listed was John Nottingham, a colleague of mine who died in 1978. I was instantly transported 30 years back to this funeral, which was conducted at Our Lady of Peace by Father "Flash" Flanagan (The nickname was a result of his high-speed Mass recitals). This funeral was a mercifully more sedate pace.

What made even religiously ignorant bystanders blink was the fact that John was an Anglican. You could hardly plead emergency or remoteness from Anglican clergy in a town with numerous Anglican churches. I vaguely assumed that a Catholic funeral was a privilege reserved for a Catholic, however flawed or lapsed.

As I noted in an earlier blog on weddings, such funerals are a clear signal to huge numbers of religiously ignorant people that formerly essential points of Catholic teaching are now minimized or ignored. Plainly priests do not want to offend potential churchgoers when congregations are dropping like cinema audiences in the 1950s. Funerals and weddings are among the few occasions when the unchurched ever see any religious activity. Funerals are an even worse quagmire than weddings for the clergy, with an opportunity to offend as many people as possible in the shortest possible time. But in their almost palpable desperation to fill the pews they are removing some of the most important reasons for anyone to come to church as active, believing worshipers.


Many years ago, the wickedly funny Malcolm Muggeridge observed that no-one, from the Pope to Mao-tse-Tung, could say that he was NOT an Anglican. The boundaries of Anglicanism had become so wide that they had practically dissolved. A cruel cartoon in "Private Eye" summed up the Anglican situation at the recent Lambeth Conference, with the Archbishop of Canterbury declaring: "We are divided on whether to have a schism or not". "Schism" implied some sort of clear dividing line which cannot be fudged by endless smooth diplomacy and soft words. Some are included, some are excluded and all are definitely NOT equally welcome in a given place. As the Anglicans are being forced into formally recognizing the undeniable de facto schisms they have endured for decades, sooner or later Catholic clergy are going to be forced to draw boundaries and exclude those who have excluded themselves by their publicly scandalous lifestyles.