diaphania

There are leaping dolphins at Othona, and butterflies flying to the moon, too. These are wall decorations at a place by the sea near Bridport which is home to a community ‘rooted in a Christian heritage, open to a widening future’. They have been running the house as a retreat centre since 1965, after the community was founded at a centre in Essex. I stayed for a day’s ‘natural voice’ singing and an ‘open weekend’ of walks, talks and homemade food. And all for around £130.

The previous owners of the building were a group of contemplatives known locally as ‘the white ladies.’ They did much of the building work. There is a simple stone chapel, basic rooms and more basic bathrooms, a well-stocked library, biodiverse gardens, and fine walking down to the sea below.

Why do people make the journey and what do people find here? The sound of the sea and views of the blue horizon from way past Lyme to back towards Portland Bill. A welcoming group of permanent residents sonorously named ‘the Core’ who keep the place running with a team of shorter term helpers who cook, clean and garden. Home grown food, birdsong and quiet contemplation.

Reasons for being here seem to be varied. One of our teachers was a former monk and resident, at least two others have been part of some kind of religious community. One runs a Vanier l’Arche community in London, caring for adults with learning disabilities. A hard-pressed teacher had been visiting with her family for years. A recently widowed lady had been longing for a return visit. There were crafts people and landscape gardener, a wildlife teacher, a web designer and a young American Baha'i on a break from her theological studies. Typical weekend visitor: a woman in her 30s to 60s. A more disparate group joined us to sing barbershop tags, spirituals and more. Several defined themselves as pagan or ‘post-Christian’ and there was a turquoise-clad sufi who whirled as we sang a dhikr from her tradition.

Visitors are allocated tasks including preparing vegetables and cleaning their rooms. A bell is rung for meetings in the chapel where the day is formally begun and ended.

The library holds titles on radical religion, Rumi and chicken soup, works by Chatwin, Maupin, Spong, Dawkins and Dave Andrews, and a copy of Iris Murdoch’s ‘The nice and the good’, which makes much of a disparate people living together in disharmony.

So what is there of Murdoch’s ‘good’ at Othona? Certainly a quiet and unpretentious warmth and acceptance for all kinds of diversity. A lot of laughter. A searching in many directions, from Enneagrams to mindfulness via TS Elliot and country walks. A warm and restful simplicity, away from the usual pressures including  all the buzzing media that seem so essential but that waste so much time.

I dreamt of St Paul and went on a circular walk to the lovely warm sandstone church at Burton Bradstock where I was coaxed into the middle of Sunday service by the hymn ‘Lord of the dance’. The sermon, delivered in a gentle Dorset burr by a long-term incumbent on first name terms with all but one of his tiny congregation, quoted the uncompromising apostle and his injunctions to read scripture.

Back along the coast for roast lunch and and fossils and a river walk in Lyme Regis. In the evening a ‘One World Worship’ led by a Christian Aid trustee with a gift for primary school stye discussions on Ghandi, Aids and  assorted religious texts.

I left Othona after a quiet morning reading with another trip to the sea where I found pebbles embedded with tiny fossils.

Outside Winterbourne Abbas I picked wild garlic in a wood where a straggle-haired local directed me to a well-tended 4,000 year old stone circle that is he said connected with mysterious religious ritual: ‘they’re on a ley line and are supposed to be growing, but I’ve not seen it yet!’

I resisted the temptations of Athelhampton and Kingston Lacy on the way home, but was most tempted by a garden opening at Charborough Park, home since Elizabethan times of the impressively named Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Draxes. The estate boasts what is claimed to be one of the longest brick walls in England.

I have been out and about to the east of London today, getting home with the sun on my face after hours walking by water. I'd said I'd do an organised walk from Tottenham Hale to the Olympic site along the River Lea starting at 10.30, and knowing that a friend was in town (with a party of 40 unruly student Frenchies) thought I'd maybe catch her too. So I set off.
And missed my train by two minutes. And fell into a Sunday morning timetable black hole, which meant I missed the start of the walk by a good hour.

When I narrowly missed the walking group's departure from a café beside the wonderful Markfield sewage pumping station I wasn't deterred as it meant I had plenty of time to admire the engine. A nice man let me go right on the very top above the beam itself, and told me about the governor, the procedure for starting it up by ratcheting the flywheel round into prime position, and all manner of other technical things involving conrods and compression and horsepower and major and minor cylinders. Apparently the pump ran for 24 hours a day, and was one of the last to be built in the 1880s, with what is thought to be a left over flywheel, since it is so unfeasibly huge.
After tea and cake, and as I was lacking any organised company, I decided to enjoy the long walk to the Olympic site on my own.
The River Lea was formerly London's backyard drain (tho' they drank from it as well) but the Markfield Beam Engine meant that 4m gallons of waste could be pumped away from the river to the main sewer which discharged into the Thames estuary. The water was sparkling in the sunshine today. I chatted to far from elitist oarsman at the Lea Rowing Club and to various walkers in the Lea Valley Regional Park, which stretches for almost 30mi, from Hertfordshire to the river's end in the Thames near Canning Town. Filter beds are now a nature reserve and there are marinas and cafés and a strange mixture of bashed up industry, low income families (I lost track of the number of pitbulls) and the nearer you get to the Olympics, more and more yuppy flats.

Neare to Startford it's all gearing up for the games, with shiny new waterbuses, canalboats with banners saying 'f*ck the olympics' and high security razor wire and all along the river cameras guard massively mysterious grey glass and steel sheds. A little nearer and the main arena is recognisable.
The odd visitor bus with slogan 'you're part of it' forlornly cruised by the sheds. A long distance path called the Greenway has had to be diverted, but after a bit of a dogleg (I heard somebody muttering about paranoia about health and safety) I eventually got to theviewtube.co.uk - a set of recycled lime green painted containers, with various maps and a conning tower like viewing platform.



There's a bijou café with nice beardy young men with ornamental metalwork making bacon baguettes and flogging vegan pies, and views of the splendidly Indian largest piece of public art in the country: Anish Kapoor's 115m tall ArcelorMittal Orbit tower. Twisting helixes of rust coloured metal reminiscent of Russian constructivism are set off by a steel and glass rotunda - providing room for 115 observers. Boris Johnson has already taken credit for thinking the thing up, and but for its remote position, it would almost certainly have the potential to rival as a world landmark the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty. It's sandwiched between the main stadium and the aquatic centre (swimming not fish and plants) which has two vast galleries which are to be removed at the end of the games. In fact the whole site manages to provide over 80,000 seats, which the official olympic artist Neville Gabie decided to attempt to film himself sitting on. He also reconstructed Seurat's 'Bathers at Asnières' by the rather less troublesome method of posing some construction workers by the River Lea.

You might think it a sign of the times that this is the stuff that olympic art works are made of...
Next I took the DLR from a new station to Stratford, where is the olympically proportioned shopping mall from which the happy sports fans will be disgorged (I was reassured to see the stadium possesses what the Romans would conceivably recognise as vomitoria for spewing the bedazzled audience back into shopping reality when the spectacle ends).

From there it was a fairly rapid Central Line ride to Holborn for a botched rendezvous with my friend at the BM (I missed her by about 5mins, so at least I'd caught up on the morning's 60 minute delay). Eschewing the Hajj exhibition for lack of time, I did have time to admire the German Romantic Drawings on the fourth floor. Kolbe's fantastical vegation and the splendidly naked figures 'et in arcadia ego' were the real discovery. This misunderstood tag apparently comes from funerary monuments, where it is death who speaks: 'even in paradise am I'.

I also had time for a quick look at the Warren Cup. After it was featured in close-up in Neil Macgregor's History of the World in One Hundred Objects, it was a shock to discover just how small, at just 6" high, this gorgeous silver object is. Wonderful that such an uninhibited celebration of sex was passed round at Roman feasts almost 2000 years ago, only to be refused entry to the USA on grounds of indecency as recently as 1953. I particularly liked the knowing servant peeking round the door.

Then a rapid dash to St Pancras, with a by now exhausted phone and very sore feet, for a last ditch attempt to catch my friend before she caught the 6pm train. Of course I missed her. At least I had time for a proper look at the wonderful Betjeman statue, credited in an inscription at his feet for having saved the building.

My only slight reassurance relative to my disastrous performance today (even with all that enjoyable gazing upward) was that three of my friend's 40 students had apparently missed the departure from Paris altogether. I'll find out soon how many actually made it back...

I enjoyed this morning's discussion on Radio 4's  'Start the week' – check the link for iPlayer listening.

The participants were Richard Holloway, once a Scottish Bishop, Karen Armstrong, the former nun and writer on religion, and Jonathan Safran Foer, the Jewish writer whose book inspired 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'.

At one level it posed some big questions for traditions like Quakerism where religious meetings seem to be devoid of almost everything except silence. Even though both Armstrong and Holloway would describe themselves as 'Christian agnostics', both agreed about the importance of regular ritual and religious observance.

Holloway is a churchgoer in a place which sounded quite 'high'. He did not want the centrality of Christ's message to be lost, for its immense contribution to the attitudes and behaviour of people from a Christian faith.  He believes in the mystery of the universe as a totality, but not in a God that is separate to it.
He does not feel that any one religion has a formula that explains that mystery.

Armstrong speaks at the Royal Literary Society in March and argues that religion has more to do with behaviour than belief, and urges us to make compassion ‘a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarised world’.

Jonathan Safran Foer celebrated the questioning spirit of Judaism  - where no matter of faith was closed to inquiry. He has brought out a book celebrating the complex and obscure ritual of Passover, which is the single greatest enduring legacy of their faith in the lives of a quarter of a million New York people of Jewish birth.

All agreed about the centrality of regular gatherings of people who would otherwise be strangers in a common spirit of devotion and celebration. These should be meetings of those who do not put dogma above practice: 'the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath'. The message seemed to be 'if you are not part of a community like this, start one!'

There was a challenge to contemporary Islam to show it was able to welcome strangers in this non-dogmatic spirit, and implicitly another to the supposed reality of virtual computer worlds of all kinds.

In a different way this weekend I noticed a similar challenge in a recorded symposium at UCL on 'Beefcake: gay men and the body beautiful':

The editor of Attitude demands that gay men throw away their online networking tools Grindr and Gaydar and simply get together. The influential Mark Simpson who endlessly trumpets his invention of metrosexual man, seemed completely indifferent. And in last night's 'Room 101' Carol Voordeman got the biggest applause when she said the 800m users of Facebook should simply stop using it...

As a boy I loved trees. Not just walking amongst them, but climbing as high as I could manage into them. There was a giant Cedar of Lebanon in the school grounds and I delighted in clambering up the thick, dark trunk into the fragrant branches. In the autumn sunshine the open and almost horizontal branches were easy to climb, and I was soon lost in the upper canopy, amid the yellow flowers that when shaken released clouds of pollen. This was my refuge. ‘On the Mountain the cedars uplift their abundance. Their shadow is beautiful, is all delight’ (Epic of Gilgamesh).

Since then I've always known ‘special trees’. The aspen with quivering leaves and trunk that shimmers with reflections of light on the lake. The unstoppable ‘ghost gum’ in the garden that obligingly sheds its bark for kindling.

Last weekend was dominated by trees: on a walk, in building, in art and in music.

At St Botolph’s in Swyncombe the Ridgeway long distance path runs past a carpet of snowdrops spreading at the feet of beech trees. The eleventh century building is simply made, with a single nave and an apsidal east end. Appropriately it is dedicated to St Botwulf, the seventh century patron of travellers. In a gentle dip, the flint-knapped and limestone walls spring powerfully from the ground. Inside is dim with ancient mystery.

The beech is the tree of the Chilterns. Massed on the hilltops, they create great cathedrals of trunks and reaching branches, beneath a dense covering of dry leaves. This tree on Swyncombe Down is one of a grove of beech, each with girths of at least 4m. These were working trees, pollarded low for their branches. They skirt an ancient earthwork called the Danish Intrenchment, thought to date to their invasion in 870.

St Mary’s Ewelme is an altogether grander building than St Botolph's and much of it commemorates the munificence of Chaucer’s daughter and her husband, the first Duke of Sussex. They built the adjoining almshouses and nearby what is thought to be the country’s oldest continuously occupied primary school. We admired their monuments in the south aisle, which was reserved for the use of the 13 almsmen living next door. The aisle's Spanish chestnut roof is ornamented with angels. It is said of this wood that “over it the spider crawleth not ”.

Then on to Dorchester Abbey, where we given a tour by the very kindly vicar (glass in hand). Less a church and more a cathedral in the water meadows, Dorchester is somehow both awe-inspiring and welcoming. At Dorchester there is more ancient spirituality in the gurning head of a 14th century green man, not far from the great tree of Jesse window, whose undulating branches depict Christ’s descent from the Tree.

We were in London the next day for depictions of trees in paint and music.

David Hockney’s ‘Bigger Pictures’ fill the vast walls of the Royal Academy with intense colour.  Californian Technicolor burns from paintings of North Yorkshire trees, seen through the seasons. Hockney’s ‘totem’ tree is a hacked stump, with felled orange trunks either side of it. But it's far from being an unspoilt  paradise: according to a recent news report, the woods Hockney paints with such passion are now badly in need of a makeover, as part of the making of a new ‘Hockney Trail’. It seems that persistent dumping makes parts of it look more like the littered American Highway in one of his earlier works.

At the Wigmore Hall that evening, Alice Coote was Schubert’s lovelorn young man on his winter journey, Julius Drake her accompanist. At times her voice dropped deep and rich, seeming to spring up from the ground itself. The words of 'The Linden Tree' are desolate, even if the song was the only one to commend the cycle to a contemporary critic.

By the well near the gate
there stands an old oak tree
in its shadow I have lain
and dreamt the sweetest dreams

I carved into its wooden skin
many a word of love
in sorrow or in happiness
I’m drawn to spend time there

Tonight I passed by the tree
in the dead of night
and although it was very dark
still I closed my eyes

and its branches rustled
as though they were calling out:
come my friend sit with me
here you’ll find your peace

The cold winds blustered
right into my face
my hat was torn from my head
but I didn’t dare look back

Many hours now lie between
me and that old place
and still I hear the rustling
here you’ll find your peace

I got a £34 ticket in the front row of the upper balcony for £10, where empty seats there were more plentiful than in the packed arena above – where sat cost-conscious youth. So not a great commercial success. Does Mulhy pull off this attempt at using 'conventional' opera to bring social networking to the stage?

I certainly enjoyed the show, but with some major reservations. It had the clarity that so won over Edward Seckerson in his five star Independent review. Too trite to say this was because of it's lack of sophistication, but musically it lacked depth, dynamics and impact, save for the final, climactic ensemble scene. The orchestral music in particular is way down the list of what impressed. There's also naïvete about the libretto which was irritating. Did it have to be dumbed down for its conservative Metropolitan Opera commissioners? Some of the lines were either just daft or merely prosaic. A middle-aged DI who doesn't know what a server is? At least the chat speak made for some entertaining surtitles.

No wonder the music sounds a bit like washed out Britten: the wicked boy-loving gardener is a Peter (Grimes?) There's even gamelan. The vocal writing and performances especially are excellent, particularly Susan Bickley as the Detective, Nicky Spence as Brian and young Joseph Beesley as boy treble Jake. Visually it's impressive - all grey and monolithic, with huge whirling projections that map the net. The chorus gaze moodily into their eerily bright laptops and sing out in silhouette on the stairs of the two towers on which the internet chat that drives the story is projected.

Overall verdict: dramatically it's a compelling enough old style whodunnit with the bonus of sordid webchat fumblings (if you like that kind of thing) 'in the netherworld where there is nothing but cheerless cheer'. The singers are stunning, and the music has its moments, but too much of it lacks real impact. From the enthusiastic applause, 'Two Boys' was a hit with a mostly much younger, geekier crowd than is usual at ENO, if not with the group of twentieth century music enthusiasts that I spoke to in the interval. The internet brought them together, but Muhly's opera about its sinister side had failed to impress. Elsewhere the iPhones were glowing praise even before the conductor took his bow. Muhly can only get better, I hope.

Two differing reviews from blogs:

• Mark Ronan
• Boulezian

ENO plugs Seckerson's review

I very much enjoyed a visit to the Wim Crouwel exhibition on its closing day at the Design Museum. Looking at the show's design, which is very much in the spirit of his work, I was struck by a line in a video interview shown there. He attributes much of his success to an early collaboration with Chinese architect Kho Liang Ie, saying (if I paraphrase correctly) that he very much responded to the Eastern sensibilty in Kho Liang Ie's work, with its emphasis on atmosphere and simplicity.

Crouwel's huge influence and the freshness – even today – of his designs prove his success. Work by Peter Saville, Banks & Miles and 8vo were among many very evidently inspired by Crouwel. They also featured at the Design Museum. The exhibition asserts that Crouwel single-handedly defined the graphic look of Holland – from his work in the sixties on Schiphol to enumerable logos for companies like Fasson, Fodor, Makro, Rabobank and Randstad. The radical simplicity of these logo designs is very recognisably Crouwel, but how much has he caught the 'atmosphere' of the organisations?

Grids and fonts like Univers (and not necessarily Helvetica) continue to be key in his work. Some strikingly creative calendars were among my personal favourites. Crouwel is by no means averse to serifs, and attributes much of his early success to a fantastic relationship with an ideal client who only criticised his work after it had been published. If only they were all like that. In another memorable quote he describes a book 'as a three dimensional grid'. At almost 83, Crouwel is still productively and creatively working.

It's a pity that the slim and small format catalogue was so expensive at £17 and that it resorts to tricksy photography to show a great man's work.

These are useful links:

• Flickr Group
• A selection of Crouwel's posters
• Iconofgraphics biography
• Dezeen video interviews

Take one familiar Shakespeare play made up of mortals, immortals and a gang of rude theatricals. Turn into a popular opera in which half the play is gone, the fairies are all boys and the big story is Tytania’s mistaken love for an ass. Spice up in a new version set in a grey state school where Oberon wants to have his way with the boy, jealous Puck sulkily observes his own dream and all the fairies wear sun-glasses and blazers and smoke.

This is the recipe for an unnerving show booed by some and slated by one critic (who still loved it) as ‘nasty and gratuitous’. ENO is ambitiously setting out its stall as ‘the premier opera house for Britten’ in this new production by Christopher Alden of Britten’s A midsummer night’s dream. Iestyn Davies sings the counter tenor role of Oberon created for Deller, Anna Christy is a sparkling Tytania, Graeme Danby is Snug and Willard White is in excellent form as Bottom. However, whether Bottom really needed a band called the Tops is just one more than dubious decision on view at the show we saw last night.

The opera opens with warping, downwardly skidding glissandi and a chorus of boys. Britten brilliantly used different themes, chords and instrumentation – including a harp and celeste for Oberon – to delineate the mortals from the fairies. The 1967 Deller recording conducted by Britten establishes a bright and magical mood. His fairies are wicked, but not evil. At ENO a sustained evocation of grimness and corruption drained the first two acts of almost any hint of enchantment. The cast all moved like sleep-walkers and their dreams were far from pleasant.

In spite of the broodingly sinister treatment of the first half and the essay on paedophilia in the programme, Britten’s notorious pre-occupation with boys was chaste and connected with his own childlike psyche, not with corruption. In this production Oberon chain-smoked and chalked lessons in ‘amo, amas, amamus’ before leading his boy victim off to be initiated. The set was based on a photo of a Victorian board school, complete with a large sign over the central doorway advertising ‘BOYS’. Although Britten intended Theseus to be absent from the stage until the end, in Alden's interpretation he drifted about puzzlingly.

But for my promise that the best was yet to come we would have left at the interval. The best music and set pieces are certainly in Act 3, which played to 55 minutes after 100 minutes before the interval. In the mechanicals’ Pyramus and Thisby, Britten skilfully parodies a Donizetti mad scene. At the Coliseum the set was transformed, the players flashed and fellated and the immortals looked on from their box. The lovers’ quartet, with its interweaving rising themes, was delightful. Thankfully forgotten was the adolescent coupling by the school bins we'd seen earlier. All musically was very well indeed – but as troubled Theseus hovered, Alden’s intention was evidently to spook us still. 

Other reviews

I have breaks but I'm not broken. This particular butterfly is re-emerging, almost nine months after a devastating cycling accident. I was knocked off by a hit-and-run driver, who left me unconscious in a ditch with a smashed face that took 12 hours of surgery to put right.

Thanks to seven or so titanium implants and more screws than I want to count, the cracked bones are back in place. I didn’t get a new front tooth at Christmas, but an implant or bridge will eventually sort that. Weeks of physiotherapy have strengthened weak muscles and restored almost all normal movement. The aches and pains have almost all faded. I’ve been incredibly lucky. The medical team were fabulous, and so were so many friends, who buoyed me up and helped me through the most difficult time.

For a good reason, perhaps, my mind was wiped clean of almost all memories of the accident and the first few days of my recovery. Now I've time to reflect on what happened and what it means for the rest of my life.

My bike had lights and good reflectors and I remember that minutes before the accident I was cycling safely. So why did I choose to cycle down an unlit road late at night without the luminous clothing I normally wear? The answer is that being seen at night was the last thing in my head when I set off for Paris on a sunlit afternoon a few days earlier.

Like most adult male cyclists, I wasn't in the habit of wearing a helmet either  – and this is my legal right. Fortunately I sustained no injuries to the part of my skull a helmet would have covered.

I've always thought of myself as optimist, and someone who is by nature happy. Previously, long rides from Lake Garda to Venice, Florence to Sienna and the Hague to Bruges had all been without incident. Why should a 15 minute ride home be any different? This happy optimism turned out to be more than a little misplaced.

Inevitably, research has shown those who are happy really do die younger, perhaps because of a more happy-go-lucky attitude to risk. In addition, one in five Britons and half of all other Europeans are thought to be infected by toxoplasmosis, an ingenious parasite that lodges permanently in our brains, modifying our behaviour so that we are more likely to do dangerous things that might be to the parasite's advantage.

Read the press coverage of cycling behaviour and the emphasis is almost always on making cyclists ride safer (often with the implication that they are irresponsible), not on making motorists pay proper attention.

My perception of the risks of cycling has changed dramatically, as it should perhaps in other areas of my life. Cycling always seemed the most innocent and carefree of activities. But the truth about cycling, as James Cracknell and several friends have found out recently, is quite different. One set of statistics claims the length of time one would have to travel to have a one in a million chance of being killed is:

By air – 4,300 hours; By car – 10 hours; By pedal cycle – 2 hours & 40 minutes

So if you ride, ride as safely as you can manage. A helmet won't stop you getting killed, but it may prevent brain injuries. Be aware of the risks. And when you drive, always be on the look out for cyclists. Please.

‘The trouble with religions is they talk far too much about God!’ These words, spoken to the Revd Jamie within five minutes of meeting him, say a lot about mother. She disliked showiness, pretence and anything bogus. She had a very sharp mind – and it was sharp right to the end – and a knack for cutting to the truth when you least expected it.

She was the second eldest of five children, born to an engineer and saintly mother – who was herself one of 13, and people said took after the Queen Mum.

Doris grew up on the edge of the Fens in Peterborough surrounded by many friends and this large and loving family. I know she would be so delighted to see you here today.

We knew that we could always depend on her for quiet and sure counsel – even if it wasn’t necessarily what we wanted to hear. She shared with my father Noel a delight in providing impromptu hospitality, sometimes for slightly bemused complete strangers he brought home from Sonning.

Doris’ family moved down to Reading before the war, and her first job was working for old Mr Heelas at what became John Lewis. She loved returning to Peterborough to keep the books for her uncle Joe, who had peacocks, ran a farm and took her to watch his horses race.
Later she worked for a remarkable insurance broker called Sam Loades. It was there she met her first husband, Stan. Mr Loades was famously generous, showering the newly-married couple with regular gifts even after she was assigned to war work for the Inland Revenue. There she was asked to set up Reading’s P45 section ‘because you know as much about it as any of us’.

Doris and Stan helped her younger brother Ronald Allen realise his dream to become an actor, supporting him through RADA and seeing every production. She loved the theatre, and remembered meeting stars like Richard Burton and Vivien Leigh who she met on the set of the first Titanic film, A night to remember. Stan’s work took him to Birmingham and especially Newcastle where she delighted in the warm character of the Geordies.

Doris and Stan eventually parted and she was whisked off to Australia by Noel who she met on a Farmers’ Union holiday on the river Rhine. They were amazed to discover they had been born in the same street, and she was enthralled by his stories of sheep-shearing in the bush and dam-building in New Zealand. In Adelaide she worked on the Australian Stock Exchange where she said it was pointless speculating ‘because even the brokers never made any money’.

When they returned to England ‘because you’d better choose between Australia and me!’. She persuaded father to take a job at the flour mill in Sonning, which she remembered from her childhood trips along the river.

For Linda & I, that we were brought up by the most wonderful mother almost goes without saying; she brought these same qualities to her role as grandmother to Sarah and Katy.

She threw herself into community life, having great fun organising a fund-raising auction for the primary school. She became secretary of the Pearson Hall and helped oversee its refurbishment. She was produce show secretary, founded the Sonning Art Group and was an enthusiastic member of the village table tennis club. She loved the Burns Nights, the Elizabethan evenings at the White Hart and a famous ‘tramp supper’ where everyone dressed as vagrants.

Our mother loved the natural world. She took great pleasure in sharing what we children called her ‘kitchen sink discoveries’ – an upturned glass that moved on its own on a meniscus of water, or the sudden flash of a colourful bird seen from her belovèd kitchen window. She loved the SUMMER, and especially our three-week escapes to a beach-hut at Mudeford. There she rested from the hard work of making ends meet, whether providing bed and breakfast for four students or keeping the books – and my father – on track in the newspaper business they ran together.

Our mother loved the AUTUMN, as a time of harvest. She and a group of friends had great fun helping out with the potato picking in Sonning Eye and she made pots of jam with the soft fruit my father grew in the garden.

Our mother loved the WINTER and delighted in remembering how we children, just arrived in England, were got out of bed to watch the magical snowfall down by the river, in the light of the French Horn floodlights.

Our mother loved the SPRING most of all. She was an accomplished artist and in that season took great pleasure in going out to paint. She joked how, long ago, she had studied art and was awarded the prize for ‘the most promising student’ – because she had come on from such a very poor start.

For her, the Spring was a time for new beginnings; for the reawakening of nature after the dark of winter.  So whatever we are now feeling, I know she would want us to be comforted and to look forward – just as it says in our second reading.

Doris began to succumb to debilitating illness three years ago, stoically bearing the pain and discomfort, with the regular support of so many loving friends and neighbours. She kept her ability to look on the bright side, even to the end.

The day she died, she listened at Sue Ryder – where they took the most wonderful care of her – to a choir that sung ‘Hark the Herald’. Jamie said prayers with her. Two days before she had told me – somewhat wondrously – that she’d taken communion for the first time in some 70 years.

This was a good life,   a simple life,   a true life,   and a life of LOVE.
‘May she rest in peace and rise in glory’.

PDF of the service sheet

Music included 'Summertime' and 'Bist du bei mir' – translation

Listen to 'Bist du bei mir' as an MP3 sung by Elio Battaglia

The Society recorded the memories of dozens of local people for an exhibition held in the village hall and my mother was one of them. You can listen to her interview below:

Audio file part one.

Audio file part two.

This is Nuneham Park, the work of the enjoyably-named architect Stiff Leadbetter. The house has an additional wing by Smirke and decorations by 'Athenian' Stuart. Leadbetter was also responsible for Newton Park near Bath, as well as Taplow Court in Bucks, the UK headquarters of the Japanese lay-Buddhist order, SGI-International.

The first Earl Harcourt, who was a favourite of George III, had Stuart build his 'temple' after finding the medieval church inconveniently marred the view of the pleasure grounds he commissioned from William Mason (and that were inevitably later elaborated by Capability Brown). He also destroyed the churchyard. The then rector complained of the site of the churchyard: 'He mows and rolls it at his pleasure'. The Earl also found the village of Nuneham Courtney inconvenient, so he demolished it and re-located it in what were undoubtedly better houses on the main Oxford Road.
But the new grounds were good. Painted by a young Turner, they were admired by monarchs including Victoria, and used by Dodgson as a setting for Alice's adventures. 

The Chapel is also very much in the best possible taste, with all manner of Italianate fitments including a statue of a pretty curtesying girl and a piteous monument to the first son of a later Earl, who is carved naturalistically as if in sleep, clutching pristine flowers forever. The chapel also contains funerary wreaths for Edward VII, some carpet left over from his funeral service, and any amount of baroque candle-powered lighting equipment, since the place became redundant long ago and was never connected to the electric supply.



Earl Harcourt himself is not I think commemorated here, but was buried at Stanton Harcourt. The Estate he took so much pleasure in re-modelling claimed him in the end, since he drowned in a well there, after he attempted to rescue a favourite dog which had somehow fallen in.

Just once a year there is a service in the chapel. This year it coincided with a national church music festival. Gibbons and Tallis and the choir of Dorchester Abbey provided the music. Sounds from long before the chapel took shape spilled out past the white plastic congregational seating and into the clear blue afternoon where the land falls away to the Thames and the English landscape seems to roll on forever.

Afterwards we were entertained to tea in the house. I'd been promised vegetable samosas, but very happily ate miniature curved poppadums and scones and jam. Seated on elegant chairs on thick carpet and surrounded by immaculate gilt and plasterwork, the scent of the rose garden wafting in to us, we were served by white-clad, clear-eyed volunteers from the Brahma Kumaris, a worldwide 'spiritual university' which has made Nuneham Park its global retreat centre.

This new religious system was founded in 1936 by a diamond dealer from what became Pakistan. Brahma Kumari means 'daughters of Brahma' and women make up most of the leadership of the movement. Rising before 4am to meditate open-eyed, followers are sexually abstinent strict vegetarians (who according to some) believe the world will end in 2036 (They revised the date when one they had chosen earlier passed uneventfully). Their meditation system is based on the 2nd cent. BC treatise of Patanjali, which also inspired Transcendental Meditation and your local yoga evening class.

The 'Murli' is a collection of what are thought of as spiritual revelations, providing guidance on avoiding the unenlightened (including family and friends) and the cinema. I spoke to a Liverpudlian follower who had a quietly intense passion for the 'concentration' achieved through meditation by the leaders of the movement.

A website for 'exiting' Brahma Kumaris denounces the movement for its practice of taking money from followers. Since the world is soon to end, you don't need dosh, and had better store up credit for the life to come instead. Suicides of former followers are discussed together with the Brahma Kumari habit of taking money from young girls as dowry, so that they are not 'dumped' on the order.

As I drove back down the long drive to the new village of Nuneham Courtney, I passed a long line of sari-wearing Indian girls and their mothers. Full of tea and scones and the beauty of Nuneham Park I smiled broadly. None smiled back, and they seemed uncomfortable and apprehensive.

A major free musical event next Saturday provides another opportunity to view the Park and to find out more about the Brahma Kumaris.