Through a glass darkly – 178

A hospital stay

I came out of hospital last Thursday evening after 8 nights in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Along the road at Little France. [Named from French members of the entourage brought to Edinburgh by Mary Queen of Scots, who took up residence at nearby Craigmillar Castle.] It was the longest that I have been in hospital in my life. And I was unbelievably happy to be back at home again.

The sequence began when Susie had an elective hip replacement, her second in 12 months, over in Kirkcaldy on July 24th. All went well, and I had my own elective hip replacement here at the Royal Infirmary on August 3rd. I was home the following  day, and we had the treat of a visit from granddaughters Amelia and Eloïse, who were on a flying visit to Edinburgh. With them I walked slowly up the road on two crutches.

But a day later I was back in the Royal Infirmary with major urine retention problems following spinal block surgery, a disturbing kidney malfunction, and a modest fever. Cue 8 days in the Renal Unit with a bewildering pattern of medications. Hourly blood pressure tests, blood samples, blood sugar tests, cannulas, catheterisation, a blood transfusion – I’ll spare you the details. I’ve never been very happy with the sight of blood, especially my own!

The nurses were uniformly delightful. And the morning round of the doctors was a daily encouragement, though I could never quite distinguish the Consultant from the Junior Doctors. The food was stodgy, but could have been a lot worse. What I hated was the early morning start, the tedium of the day, largely bed-bound, with no view of the sky and only artificial light, and the long, awful stretches of the half-lit night. Twice I came close to murdering the man in the next bed who coughed at regular intervals through the night. Alternating with rumbling expectoration. When the doctors said that I could come home [at the second attempt: the previous day I had packed to come home but spoiled it by fainting], I nearly wept with tears of gratitude. 

The National Health Service

The NHS is much the same age as me; it was born under Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government in July 1948.  At its launch, by the Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, three core principles were laid down: that the service should meet the needs of everyone, that it should be free at the point of delivery, and that it be based on clinical need and not on the ability to pay. This is axiomatic to anyone of my generation and younger. You need to go back to A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel [my copy went to the OXFAM bookshop a few years ago] to get any idea of how things used to be. This 1937 best-seller tells the story of a young Scottish doctor in the 1920s; he starts his medical career in a Welsh mining village, and then works for  a Miners Co-operative scheme, before he moves to London where he is seduced, metaphorically  and literally, by the corrupt and greedy world of Harley Street doctors and patients. The book is based on Cronin’s own experience working as a doctor in Tredegar, and apparently had a significant influence on Nye Bevan. 

In recent years there has been recurrent, sometimes heated, generally inconclusive, debate about the future of the NHS. Danny Boyle’s innovatory sketch at the 2012 Olympics extolled the NHS as one of the great unifying institutions of national life. Securing approval ratings above those of the Royal Family and the BBC. 

Much of the debate about the  future of the NHS is occasioned by the sheer size of the organisation. England’s NHS is the largest employer in Europe; it is said that 1 in every 25 adults in England works for the NHS. A decade ago the BBC estimated that the NHS across the United Kingdom had 1.7 million staff, which made it fifth on the list of the world’s biggest employers, comfortably bigger than for example Indian Railways.  Nearly all hospital doctors and nurses in England are employed by the NHS and work in NHS-run hospitals. General practitioners, dentists, and opticians on the other hand are almost all self-employed and contract their services back to the NHS.

The population of the United Kingdom is ageing. A rise in chronic diseases and a growing proportion of older people in the population leads to a steady increase in demand for health services and funding. An older population means significantly more people are being admitted to hospital for emergency treatment. Hospital stays are kept to a minimum,  but people cannot be discharged without some home visit assessment. Hence the phenomenon of ‘bed-blocking’. Recent successive governments have failed to improve the linkage between health services and social care.

From almost the very beginning of the NHS people have been arguing as to whether the country can afford it. Sir Stafford Cripps, Labour’s post-war Chancellor, an eager proponent of austerity and financial discipline, was horrified by the overspending, and wanted to impose charges, especially for things like spectacles, as a way of holding down costs and raising revenue – but failed to get his way in Attlee’s Cabinet. 

Funding the NHS through general taxation is the key reason why the NHS is affordable. This method of funding has many strengths; it’s cheap and efficient to raise money through an existing tax system; it’s as fair in its impact as the tax system itself, sharing the cost across the whole tax-paying population; and it allows the government to plan the allocation of resources according to need rather than relying on the political decisions of dozens of local councils or the whims of charitable donations of the wealthy.

But the weakness of the system is that the level of spending at any point is decided by the government of the day, and shaped by the political priorities and allegiances of the party in charge rather than by any link to levels of health needs or the costs of delivering services.

Reform UK’s latest headline policy, launched by the despicable Robert Jenrick, is to massively reduce the UK’s benefit bill in order to fund tax cuts for their crypto-currency millionaire cronies; the people who have been financing Farage’s extravagant lifestyle.  Leaving aside this kind of right-wing rant, there is a continuing debate about the issue of NEETS; young people not in education, employment, or training. There are said to be a million or so NEETS between the ages of 16 and 24, some half of whom are in receipt of benefits. This is clearly not desirable. Nor sustainable.

Gratitude … the uncomplicated kindness of friends

I am writing about the NHS as a consumer rather than a political commentator. My recent experience was definitely positive. It is no-one’s fault that days in hospital are long and boring. The food was stodgy, but could have been a great deal worse.  I appreciated the daily rounds of the doctors and consultants. Who were engaging and encouraging. The nurses and ancillary staff were kind and seemingly tireless. Since my return home I have had notification of 5 different outpatient appointments, from the Orthopaedics and Physiotherapy and Renal departments. 

So, I give thanks for the care of the NHS. And I give thanks too for the uncomplicated kindness of  family and friends: above all for Susie, a tireless support; for lifts to and from hospital from Mike and Wendy, the amazing David Dickson, Walter, Derek, and Dave Healey; for hospital visits from Susie, from Elspeth Burrell, from Liz and David, from Barry, from Mike and Wendy, and from Peter Jeffries. And for our son Jem and grand-children Freya and Oskar, who have come to Edinburgh for a week to support us through this time of transition. All of which brings me back to Oliver Sacks who underlined the  importance of developing ‘an attitude of gratitude’. 

Envoi  The death of reading …

There was a piece in The Times last Saturday about the death of reading. Linked to a forthcoming book of that title or similar. And referencing, inevitably, Donald Trump. Who is quoted as saying that the Bible is his favourite book. Asked to select a possible favourite verse or book, Trump said that he wouldn’t like to be too specific !

I’m old-fashioned enough to still be on books. Before I went into hospital I was re-reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, his magisterial, and for me almost hypnotic, account of how President Kennedy’s star-studded administration led the United States deeper into a disastrous and unwinnable war in Vietnam. While in hospital I turned the pages, a bit vacuously, of an early Brunetti book by Donna Leon, and also The Riddle of the Sands, a 1903 thriller by Erskine Childers which influenced, among others, John Buchan. And then a book by Edward Stourton, the broadcaster and journalist who died last month, about clandestine crossings of the Pyrenees during the last war. With particular reference to the PAT line and to Andrée de Jongh and the COMET line. Since I came home I’ve been reading Max Hastings’ Going to the Wars, an enjoyable run-through of his battlefield adventures and his  love affair with the British Army, culminating in his boastful exploits in the Falklands War. But also telling the complicated story of writing a book for George Weidenfeld,  the biography, ultimately unpublishable, of Benjamin Netanyahu’s older brother who lost his life at Entebbe.

And I’ve also been discovering the wondrous Sophie Roberts. Of whom more another time.

August 2026

Through a glass darkly – 177

Birthday blessings

Another year, another birthday ! It seems that 81 is the new 80. We hobbled along the road for coffee at the Earl Grange cafe. [See official birthday photo.] And sat in the sunshine talking to 2 people that we knew and 2 people that we didn’t know. Then home to lunch in the garden: cold salmon and prawns and mayonnaise, and celery and cucumber. Followed by raspberries, some from our own garden. All very good. While parts of Europe have been coping with 35ºC, even down in High Wycombe, it was a very pleasant 23º here. And an evening of football-free television ! Is it just me or are football games at 90 minutes about 60 minutes too long  ?

And I was spoiled with a stack of presents. Prominently hand-written letters from the grand-children including a drawing and a short poem. Excellent. And 3 pairs of soft-top, bamboo socks. Suitable for diabetics. And a pair of navy cotton chinos. And a clutch of Staedler marker pencils. In case I read any books that justify a marker pencil. And 6 second-hand books; including the latest Brunetti book from Donna Leon [Is it the 33rd, I’ve lost count]; and 2 books by Max Hastings, one of them the autobiographical Going to the Wars; and a lovely little book by one of the last men to be born into the remote and distinctly primitive community on St Kilda. 

SOE 

Like Max Hastings, I grew up in the 1950s reading a lot of Second World War books: Guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead, and Leonard Cheshire’s Bomber Pilot, and Pat Reid’s two books The Colditz Story and Latter Days at Colditz and Paul Brickhill’s book on The Dambusters. And the central characters [all British] were cast in a heroic mould. “If there ever is a Valhalla, Gibson and his fellow pilots will sit in places of honour high above the salt”, wrote one reviewer of Enemy Coast Ahead. [Guy Gibson, who led 617 squadron on the Dambusters raid was an authentic war hero, earmarked by Winston Churchill as a future Tory MP. He was also an emotionally stunted public schoolboy, who called his black labrador dog Nigger, contracted an unsuccessful marriage with a showgirl, bullied his subordinates unacceptably, and died by flying into a hill in the Netherlands !]

Eventually I moved on from these heroic tales, mostly published by Pan Books at 2/6d each, and at a later stage I was attracted by the dramatic and sometimes mysterious activities of Special Operations Executive [SOE]. So it is now a small shelf of SOE books that are going to OXFAM or to the Bethany shop.  SOE was a British organisation formed in 1940 at a time when there was no obvious way for the UK to engage militarily with Nazi Germany. SOE’s varied roles included espionage and irregular warfare, including sabotage, and special reconnaissance in German occupied Europe. And to support, and procure military aid for, local resistance movements. SOE worked in all countries occupies by the Axis powers. But my particular interest was in France, where F section operated under [Colonel] Maurice Buckmaster, an Old Etonian who had previously worked in Europe as a journalist and a banker and then as a senior manager for the Ford Motor Company. It should be stressed that SOE was essentially an amateur organisation, recruiting agents, men and women, by word of mouth, seemingly majoring on language skills. And then equipping them with at least a basic tradecraft for clandestine activity. SOE was strongly disliked and distrusted by ‘the professionals’ that is by SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, the official foreign intelligence agency of the UK. 

Buckmaster’s right-hand woman was the redoubtable Vera Atkins. Although not a British national Atkins initially joined SOE as a secretary in February 1941 before becoming Buckmaster’s personal assistant. In 1944 she was naturalised as a British subject, commissioned as a Flight Lieutenant in the WAAF [the Women’s Royal Air Force], and formally appointed as F Section’s Intelligence Officer. One of her particular roles at SOE was the selection and deployment of the 39 women agents who worked as couriers and wireless operators for SOE circuits. She took care of their housekeeping details and maintained contact with the women’s families.

Squadron Leader Vera Atkins

SOE was peremptorily wound up soon after the end of the war. Many of its records were shredded and others disappeared in an office fire. In 1946 Vera Atkins, now a Squadron Leader, went to Germany, with official backing, to investigate the fate of missing F section agents, and in particular to find out what had happened to 14 F section women.S

SOE heroines: Odette

Understandably post-war Britain was hungry for stories of wartime heroes and heroines. And SOE’s women fitted the bill. In 1949 came a biography of SOE agent Odette Hallowes, [née Sansom, aka Odette Churchill]. Written by the Irish author Jerrard Tickell with the co-operation of the War Office. Odette, born in 1912 in Amiens,  although married with 3 young children, volunteered for SOE. She arrived in France in November 1942 to work with Peter Churchill in the SPINDLE network.  She and Churchill were arrested near Annecy in April 1943 by Sgt, Hugo Bleicher, an energetic and self-regarding spy-catcher.  She was held initially in Fresnes Prison, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo. And condemned to death.  A year later she and 6 other SOE women were moved to Germany. Odette was the only woman who survived, after being held in solitary confinement in the bunker at Ravensbruck concentration camp. It is likely that she survived because it was thought, wrongly, that she was married to Peter Churchill, and was thereby a distant relative of Winston Churchill. Neither of these things was true. At the time. After the war she effectively became a poster girl for the SOE, and was played by Anna Neagle in the film. Her 1947 marriage to Peter Churchill did not last. And subsequently some doubt was expressed about her [and his] wartime record and achievements. 

Odette Churchill, née Sansom

SOE heroines: Violette Szabo

In 1956 came the publication of Carve Her Name with Pride, a biography of Violette Szabo by a journalist and playwright. Violette Bushell, born in Paris in 1921 of Anglo-French parents, was at school in Picardy and in Stockwell. Aged 19 she married Etienne Szabo of the French Foreign Legion. He was killed at El Alamein in October1942.

Violette Szabo, née Bushell, and Etienne Szabo

In July 1943 she was recruited into SOE F Section. Impish, attractive, a good dancer, she was much liked and much admired by her fellow recruits. Her first mission to France was in March 1944 to Paris and Normandy with Philippe Liewer of the SALESMAN circuit. In June 1944 she was parachuted with the same team into Limoges to co-ordinate the resistance after D-Day. She was captured by the SS Das Reich Panzer Division, interrogated by the Gestapo in Paris, and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Where she was executed in January 1945, aged 23. Alongside 2 other SOE women; Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. In 1946 she was awarded a posthumous George Cross and Croix de Guerre. The book is arguably more hagiography than biography, and the story that she held off 400 German SS troops with a sten gun is undoubtedly a work of fiction ! The film followed in 1958 with Virginia McKenna as Violette Szabo, and Jack Warner as her father Charles Bushell. [And Michael Caine in an uncredited role as a prisoner on a train.]

Violette Szabo Royal Mail commemorative stamp

Russell Braddon: Nancy Wake: SOE’s greatest heroine

Also published in 1956 was Nancy Wake: SOE’s greatest heroine, a biography by Russell Braddon, an Australian journalist., onetime prisoner of the Japanese and author of the phenomenally successful The Naked Island. Nancy Wake [b. 1912] was a flamboyant Australian who married Henri Fiocca, a very wealthy Marseille steel industrialist. In 1941-43 she worked with Ian Garrow and then Pat O’Leary [a Belgian doctor, real name Count [Major-General] Albert-Marie Edmond Guérisse]  on the PAT escape line.  In 1943 she escaped to the UK; her husband was captured and executed. In April 1944 she was parachuted back into France, into the Allier, to co-ordinate activity with the Maquis groups in the Auvergne. The book contains accounts of a marathon, 500 kilometre  cycle ride across German-occupied territory, and of dramatic fighting against the Germans in the months following D-Day. But there is no real evidence.for these stories.

Nancy Fiocca, née Wake

A changing perspective

The true story about SOE F section was further obscured by Maurice Buckmaster’s 1958 book They fought alone.  Perhaps his memory was going. It is a patchy book which concentrates on a very few agents. All his men [and they are all men in the book] are outstanding, and all his geese are swans. There is no mention of the PROSPER disaster, no mention of the radio game, no acknowledgement of the missing women.

The [men and] forty or so women who worked for SOE in France were undoubtedly brave and resourceful. They were operating in a hostile environment, far from home, and risked imprisonment, torture, and death if they were discovered.Which many of them were. Twelve of the women were executed by the Germans; twenty five survived the war.  From the late 1950s writers like Jean Overton Fuller and Elizabeth Nicolas, personal friends of two of the SOE women, started to ask questions about what had happened to the missing agents. And how they had been captured. And a murkier, more nuanced picture emerges. About which I will write more another time.

Envoi

Ann Widdecombe’s murder has pushed the inexorable march towards victory of Andy Burnham off the front pages. I didn’t much like what I saw of Widdecombe, but politicians and others are falling over themselves to say that she was feisty and good fun. She had only a couple of junior roles in government, and in the end was best known perhaps for her [self-mocking ?] appearances on Strictly Come Dancing and reality television. She was clearly on the right wing of the Tory party, but I was surprised that she decamped to Reform when she did. Unlike the obnoxious Robert Jenrick and the unbelievable Andrea Jenkyns she can’t have been motivated by leadership ambitions. We clearly can’t tolerate the regular killing of random MPs and former MPs. But I think it is unacceptable for Nigel Farage to exploit her death to make political propaganda. Particularly since he is himself in part responsible for the low esteem in which we hold our politicians.

Susie is having a second hip replacement, across in Kirkcaldy, on Friday of next week. And I am scheduled for hip surgery all being well on Monday, August 3rd. We have lots of offers of help from friends and family. But I think there may be a few tricky moments  in the coming  days …

Stop Press

England are out of the World Cup. Beaten last night by Argentina, the better team. It was a nasty, niggly first half. But after England got their first goal they retreated into their shells and surrendered the initiative. And Messi, arguably the GOAT, ran the show for the final quarter. Thomas Tuchel will get a lot of flak for his team selection and his ill-chosen substitutions. Spain v. Argentina could be a good game on Sunday evening. Numbers at Evensong could take a tumble.

July 2026

Through a glass darkly – 176

Journalling: then and now

‘The unexamined life is not a life worth living.’ Is a quote usually attributed to Socrates. I was clearing out my three in-trays and I came across a jumbo-format ring-bound exercise book labelled Journal. At the first M.Th residency at ICC, Glasgow, in 2006, Peter Neilson told our M.Th cohort that spiritual journalling was an integral part of the Personal Development Development Track. In the opening entry, dated May 12th, 2006, writing with a fountain pen in black ink, I noted my reservations: “Is it that real men don’t journal ? That journalling is the spiritual equivalent of eating quiche ?” In a more positive frame, I set down my prayer objectives: to discern the future location of our Sunday church worship [we were embarking on the process that took us from rue de Créqui to the chapel at Gerland]; to think about enlarging the Lyon ministry team; and to reflect on how best to integrate the MTh. work, Mission and Ministry in an Urban World, with our church life in Lyon.

MTh cohort, ICC Glasgow, 2006

It didn’t last. [The journalling I mean. Not our time in Lyon, which continued through to 2013.] An early entry was inspired by a remark of Eugene Peterson; that we are called to the important and sacred work of a Pastor, but we all too often behave like check-out clerks in a religious emporium. I was talking to a church member, Dave, who didn’t feel that he  could match a seeming call to ministry in God’s church with the various demands made on an ordained Clergyman in the Church of England. But I was honest enough to admit, at least to the pages of my nascent journal, that I couldn’t use the faults of church structures as an excuse for my own shortcomings.

Looking at these early entries, I am struck by how busy I was. And how quickly time passed. Entries in May-June 2006 record a first MTh. residency in Glasgow; Passion Week and Easter celebrations; an ICS Family Conference with Bishop Pat Harris; a Stade Français v. Toulouse semi-final at the Stade de Gerland; visiting Jem and Anna in Plymouth, and deputation preaching for ICS in Taunton; and an unexpected tour in Italy, at the invitation of Robert Calvert, with stays in Trento, Florence, and Rome. We were guests of the Focolari, a Catholic renewal movement. It included an introduction to Chiara Lubich, their charismatic [and authoritarian] founder. I was struck by the warm hospitality of our Focolari hosts. And by my mid-life realisation that the celebrated Roman Catholic Council of Trent took place not in the English midlands, but in Trento in Northern Italy ! [Looking at the journal I now realise that one of my fellow travellers was Angus Morrison, then Church of Scotland Minister at Stornaway, and currently the excellent locum minister at Newington Trinity.] The Italy trip ended on a down note when my wallet was stolen in Rome on the last afternoon of the trip. I came back to Lyon to World Cup football [Zidane’s head butt and red card] and a heatwave in Lyon. From which we were delighted to escape to do a summer campsite chaplaincy at Benodet in Brittany.

Trento, Italy

Good intentions of regular journalling did not last. After a long empty space I was writing again in April 2008, when Easter celebrations and a day at Lord’s [which included a century by Alistair Cook]  were followed by a ten-day study trip to Nairobi. I was well out of my comfort zone, grateful to be travelling with other members of the MTh. cohort, and grateful for an effective mosquito net. Preaching in a tiny Pentecostal church in Kibera, on John’s vision of the resurrection appearance of the risen Lord in Revelation 1, with simultaneous translation into Kiswahili broadcast from a speaker on the roof, was a whole new experience ! I think the sermon probably sounded better in translation !

Patmos Evangelical Church, Kibera, Nairobi, 2007

And then another long gap … And the journal resumes in August 2013 when we retired from Lyon. Sitting in this house in Edinburgh I had mixed feelings. The mechanics of leaving Lyon were familiar enough; a night in the Novotel in Mechelen and a night on the Ijmuiden-Newcaste ferry. and the removals firm were excellent. But sitting in Edinburgh surrounded by cardboard boxes was a bit unnerving. I wondered how I would adjust without the familiar daily and weekly routine of service preparation, church meetings, pastoral visits, and e-mails. And my journal tells me that I had quite serious financial concerns about retirement. Would we have sufficient funds on a monthly basis ? Or would we be in a debtors’ prison by Christmas ?  A dozen years later, although I believe that the state pension in the UK is substantially smaller than in many European countries, the financial worries turned out to be quite unfounded. On a more positive note we were grateful to be property owners in retirement. We were back in a city where Susie grew up and where we have a variety of friends. And the last journal entry records the prospect of six months in Brussels, helping out at Holy Trinity. In the event it turned into eighteen months, bringing new friends in a new congregation and a new country, all of which was a bridge into full retirement. And which led in turn to locum work in Strasbourg, Chantilly, Paris, Amsterdam, Ankara, Kyiv, and Grenoble.

Other people’s diaries

Other people’s diaries are more interesting. I have greatly enjoyed re-reading three volumes of the diaries of Chris Mullin, onetime campaigning journalist, and Labour MP for Sunderland South from 1987 to 2010. These are the most readable political diaries since Alan Clark. [Whose diaries are immensely entertaining, but which exhibit great conceit and an admiration for Adolf Hitler which is alarming and doesn’t seem to be entirely a joke.] 

Chris Mullin

[Sir] Chris Mullin, who was instrumental in securing the release of the wrongly convicted Birmingham Six,  had been characterised as ‘Loony MP backs Bomb Gangs’ by the right-wing tabloid press, and was initially a Bennite. Alongside Peter Hain, and Stuart Holland, and Jeremy Corbin. But he became disillusioned with the Labour Left. He is an acute observer of the halcyon days of New Labour, and a not uncritical admirer of Tony Blair, whom he calls ‘The Man’. During his years in parliament, he held some minor jobs, at Environment, and the Foreign Office, and at DiFID, but was more influential as Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee. His family holidayed more than once in the Scottish Borders, and I’m sorry not to have bumped into him walking round Hen Poo on Duns Castle Estate in the 1990s. Mullin has a nice line in self deprecation and a dry wit. One of his attractive features is his ability to enjoy good friendships with people who are not his natural allies, such as John Major and Nicholas Soames. Another is his evident pride in his two daughters. He stood down from the Commons in 2010. Not like Tony Benn ‘in order to devote more time to politics’. But to spend more time creating a garden in his Northumberland home. I see that he was knighted by King Charles in the honours list last week. And I look forward to reading the fourth volume of his diaries which is sitting unopened on the shelves. 

Duns Castle Estate

Envoi

The promised heatwave hasn’t yet arrived in Edinburgh. The temperature is stuck at around 17º. We have some rain forecast for the next couple of weeks. The garden is appropriately green and I was pleased to cut the grass yesterday. The World Cup now dominates our television schedules. Scotland had an extra bank holiday this week to celebrate their thrashing Haiti 1-0 a few days ago. As an exercise in nostalgia I watched all 90 minutes of the 1966 World Cup Final last week. England didn’t look any better than they did then. And it is very strange to see England playing in red shirts when I clearly recall seeing the game in shades of grey on a black and white television. I showed my age by staying up to watch 10 minutes of Brazil’s first game, remembering how glamorous they were in the 1970s. Sadly its not like that today. But Morocco looked good. 

Brazil, World Cup, 1970

June 2026

Through a glass darkly – 175

Rabbis wrestle for the soul of Judaism

Something very unusual happened last week. I found three things of interest in the Church Times. Two things were only of minor interest: Dr Mark Barwick is retiring as Chaplain of St Alban’s, Strasbourg, on June 1st. And the Ven. Dr Peter Hooper is standing down as Archdeacon of France and Switzerland at the end of July. I don’t know Mark Barwick at all, but Susie and I did a two-month locum spell at Strasbourg ten years ago in 2016. It was a few days after returning from the States, and we certainly enjoyed our time with an interesting congregation in that beautiful city. I don’t know Peter Hooper either, but we met at the ICS Celebratory Service in Eaton Square a couple of years ago. He spent ten minutes telling me how busy he was, and then excused himself as he had someone more important to speak to !

Strasbourg, 2016

Of much greater significance was an article by Paul Vallely, the British journalist who writes regularly on religion, ethics, and development issues. He has a weekly column in the Church Times. His starting point was an exchange on Times Radio. The political journalist Adam Boulton had asked the question: “Wasn’t it the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza that was the trigger for the significant rise in anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish community ?” Vallely calls this question the elephant in the room. Certainly politicians respond to it in different  ways. Baroness Falkner, a Lib Dem and cross-bench life peer, and a Muslim, has criticised her fellow Muslims for their “deafening silence”on anti-Semitism. But both the Muslim Council of Britain and Baroness Warsi, a prominent Muslim peer, were very swift to condemn the Golders Green attack. As was the Prime Minister, who convened a Downing Street forum on the heightened threat to the Jewish communities, and then told us all that it was “everyone’s job” to confront “the crisis”. [This week the Prime Minister has of course a crisis of his own to confront.]

Paul Vallely then reported the publication of Progressive Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel, a collection of essays by some 40 British rabbis and Jewish scholars. The essays warn that the behaviour of the current government in Israel is ”incompatible with Jewish values”. And that the Netanyahu coalition now poses an “existential threat” to Judaism itself.

Gaza city

They highlight weaknesses in Israeli democracy, corruption, inequality, threats to the independence of the judiciary, abuses of Palestinians, and violence by Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank. All this, they argue, undermines the “millennia-old moral and spiritual underpinning of Jewish existence”, which ought to make it “a light to the nations” and “a blessing to all mankind”. 

The authors stress that the 9/11 bombings taught us to “make the necessary distinction between the religion of Islam and the political ideology of Islamism”. Now, they say, they must do the same thing for their own faith. The nationalistic, political ideology of the Netanyahu coalition has “ridden roughshod over Judaism’s moral orientation towards compassion, justice, and peace”. They urge such Jewish leaders as the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, to condemn publicly the disproportionate violence of the current Israeli government. Such a pronouncement might lessen the willingness of pro-Palestinian demonstrators to blame innocent Jews for what is happening in Gaza and in the West Bank and in southern Lebanon. Which might mean fewer peaceful demonstrators being arrested on London streets ?

Return to Gaza

Three Years on Fire

Andrey Kurkov [b.1961] is a Ukrainian author and public intellectual. He is the author of some 19 novels and is a respected commentator on Ukrainian affairs for the international press. I have just been reading Three Years on Fire, the third volume of his war diaries. He is a civilised and thoughtful commentator, who offers a balanced picture of what has been happening in Ukraine in the past couple of years. He does not shy away from the human cost of Putin’s war; the ongoing pain of casualties and bereavement; the destruction of entire towns in the east of the country, and the damage to Ukraine’s patrimony and culture; the huge numbers of internally displaced persons. But he also notes the small victories: the mother of a young soldier killed in the fighting who uses his compensation money to create a rehabilitation centre for veterans; the ingenious ways that Ukrainians cope with disruption and shortages; the market gardener who is producing a range of bijou banana trees in varying sizes. He explains the unexpected popularity of Touareg pop music from Mali. He notes that the Dnipro river seems to flow more slowly as the first missiles fall. And he gives thanks for the way that Zelensky has grown from being a jobbing actor into a President who is respected both at home and internationally.

Maydan, Kiev, December 2021

It is difficult to fully appreciate that this war has been going on for over 4 years. The invasion came within a month of our leaving Kiev in January 2022. Which means that Putin’s war has already lasted longer that the Soviet Union’s participation in the Second World War. And it is also difficult to remember Trump’s bombastic promise that he could/would end the war within 48 hours of taking office. Trump has clearly lost interest in what is happening in Ukraine. So we go on praying that Europe will be able to continue to make good any shortfall in supplies of weaponry and matériel. And for some kind of peace with justice. It may be wishful thinking but there are some signs that Putin’s popularity in Russia is in significant decline. And that the time may come when the huge cost of Putin’s war may be too much for a struggling economy [Smaller than that of Italy.] Or that death or illness may remove Putin from power after some 26 years ? We pray on.

Kiev, January 2022

The People’s Flag

After last week’s devastating local election results there is a media storm about the way ahead for the Labour Party. Reform under Nigel Farage made the biggest gains. But there was also an equally threatening growth in support for the Greens on the other side of the political spectrum. So we now have an interminable debate about the future of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. Several junior ministers have resigned and several dozen back-bench Labour MPs have signed a letter of ‘No Confidence’. Most members of the Cabinet have remained silent.

Clearly the electorate have lost faith in our parliamentary leaders. And the two old centrist parties have lost support to Reform in one direction and the Greens in the other. At the same time Starmer has clearly been a disappointment to many. He suffers from being a poor speaker [whiny voice, with a boring delivery]. And he has made some serious political mistakes: scrapping the winter fuel payments, with a subsequent U-turn; proposed cuts in welfare spending and disability benefits, with a subsequent U-turn; the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson; and the perceived move to keep Andy Burnham out of the House of Commons. What are essentially local elections turned into a referendum on Starmer’s first two years in office. And it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this centrist lawyer is just not very good at politics.

But. But … The lemming-like rush of Labour back-benchers, many of whom are relative newbies and politically illiterate, to bring about a leadership challenge is incredibly stupid. For one thing, there is no credible alternative. Wes Streeting is perhaps the most able, regarded as a Blairite centrist. But he would be unacceptable to many on the Left and soft-Left of the Party. Andy Burnham is said to be the most popular politician in the country. But he has no seat in the Commons. And creating a by-election for him to re-enter the House is not a fool-proof solution. Remember Patrick Gordon-Walker. [Gordon-Walker, formerly an Oxford Fellow in Modern History, was Harold Wilson’s first choice as Foreign Secretary in 1964, Sadly he lost his seat in Smethwick at the General Election. To a strident, racist-sounding Tory. The Labour Party promptly elevated the MP for the safe seat of Leyton to create an opportunity for Gordon-Walker. But he lost the subsequent by-election in January 1965. The safe but dull Michael Stewart became Foreign Secretary.] And Angela Rayner as Prime Minister would come into the same category as Lis Truss of dreaded memory. ‘Just not up to it’, as Attlee would say.

What the Labour Party ought to be doing is helping Keir Starmer, an honest and decent man, to do his job better. The 2024 election gave him a resounding parliamentary majority. Which could/could have been used to deliver significant change for the better in the UK. After the chaotic decade of Tory misrule. Starmer has been successful in building relationships with other world leaders; with the Europeans, with Zelensky, and even [more-or-less] with Donald Trump. It is on the domestic stage that he is seen to have failed. It is true that there is a yawning shortage of experienced politicians in the Labour Party, with men like David Miliband and Ed Balls earning a living elsewhere. There is a case to be made for a greater degree of financial redistribution. There are obviously ways in which the National Health Service could be better managed. There is genuine outrage about the performance of the privatised water companies. There would be popular support for taking on the seemingly unassailable power of the tech giants and social media. It would be worth pointing out that Scottish and Welsh Nationalism/Independence are the wrong solutions in a globalised world. The case needs to be made, loud and clear and often, that BREXIT was an act of unparalleled economic and cultural self-harm. And that Reform politicians are a bunch of self-interested, politically inept, tax evaders and never-wozzers. And failed Tories. [Tax evasion now seems to be a common factor across politicians of all parties.] Why do I not hear any of these things from the Labour Party ? Not from leaders and not from back-benchers ?

Envoi

After hip surgery in Lithuania in the autumn, Susie is now having problems with the other hip. She now has a Pre-Op assessment for surgery on the second hip, in Kirkcaldy across in Fife, at the end of this month. She may well have a second hip replacement before I get my first ! Which may cause some domestic problems. We may need to be advertising for a live-in gentleman’s gentleman !  Where is Jeeves when you need him ?

May 2026

Through a glass darkly – 174

The days go slowly, but the years go faster. It is ten years ago this week that we made our first and only trip to the States. It was a package tour with Great Rail Journeys, a kind of retirement prize after I had just done eighteen months [post-retirement] locum work at Holy Trinity, Brussels. We had talked about going to the States forty years earlier, in the summer of 1976, in the days of Freddy Laker and Skytrain. But it didn’t happen. And that year we went from Paris to Scotland instead, and stayed with friends in Glenbucket, and took the little, original ferry across to Skye, from Glenelg to Kylerhea [the last manually operated turntable ferry in the world].  And in the heatwave of 1976 we swam and sun-bathed at Elgol. It was a good summer.

A first taste of the States

In May 2016 we flew from Heathrow with Virgin Atlantic. Of the outward flight I remember nothing except that the entertainment console broke down. The trip started in New York, in a hotel on Upper West Side with breakfast in a cafe above a supermarket across the street.

Our friends David and Cindy Kreh came up from West Grove, Pennsylvania. With them we did a boat tour around the State of Liberty. And looked at Times Square and the Twin Towers Memorial. On Sunday morning we went to Trinity Church Upper West Side and heard Tim Keller who was preaching. Very well, about being reconciled with your enemies.  The music was restrained, a grand piano accompaniment and a clarinet. The congregation seemed to be predominantly young, yuppy, Asian-American. 

American trains were generally comfortable and spacious. The first lap was to Washington. A city tour, on day one, the White House, the Jefferson Monument, the Martin Luther King Monument; followed by a day to explore. I went to the Arlington National Cemetery; Susie to Georgetown. And we met up in one of the magnificent [and free] Smithsonian Museums. 

From Washington we had our first overnight on the train, arriving in Chicago after breakfast. The beds were comfortable enough. The attendant told us with amusement of a woman the previous trip who had tried to get into the bunkside string container. And was then unable to get out again without his help. AMTRAK policy was to mix people up in the restaurant car, so we had breakfast with a very young Amish couple who were travelling out to California for their honeymoon. Chicago itself was a bit of a blur. A bus trip took us past [a] Trump Tower and to the edge of Lake Michigan. Which was very grey and a bit misty. And we rode the A-Train, the elevated metro system. Trying unsuccessfully to remember the jazz standard by Billy Strayhorn that was the signature tune for the Duke Ellington orchestra

Go West Young Man

The phrase is attributed to the American journalist Horace Greeley. Colorado was in various ways the high point of our tour. By the end of the first week we were in Denver, the mile high city. I skipped out of a bus trip up into the Rocky Mountains, to Pikes Peak and the Estes National Park, [too scared of heights] and took in a Sunday morning service at Denver First Presbyterian Church. In a building that might have seated two thousand, there were roughly a dozen of us. Seated in the vestibule. Accompanied by three guitarists, one in snakeskin boots and a cowboy hat. we sang Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, and Give me oil in my lamp. The lady minister discovered that I was from Scotland, and asked if I knew Scott Rennie, a gay Church of Scotland minister from Aberdeen [now at St Giles Cathedral here in Edinburgh.] But I didn’t. [And I still don’t.] After church I visited the Denver Museum. And fell heavily twice on the simulated ski jump. We spent an hour or two browsing in Tattered Page, an excellent  bookshop and cafe in a converted church on Colfax Avenue. But I began to doubt my sanity when I nearly bought a biography of John Wayne !

After Denver we had a night in Grand Junction, and from there we took a bus up to Silverton, a historic, former mining town, 9,000 feet up in the San Juan Mountains. The population of the town dwindled as the last mines closed, and Silverton is now best known as the terminus of the historic, tourist railway, the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. The railway was built in the 1880s to transport gold and silver ore from the mines, but it now runs purely as a tourist attraction. Using historic steam locomotives. The track runs along a narrow shelf high above the Animas Canyon. Happily I was distracted from looking out of the window by an invitation to the bar. From Bob Cottam, the former Hampshire and England cricketer, one of our group.

At Durango I had a copious breakfast in a diner adjacent to the hotel. Then, still on a bus, we made our way to Monument Valley, the valley of the rocks. On the border of Arizona and Utah. It is famous for its iconic sandstone buttes, which rise steeply out of the desert floor.  The valley is best known [at least to me] as the setting for a clutch of John Ford Westerns. The film critic Kevin Phipps declared that the valley epitomises what cinema-goers think of when they think of the American West. Monument Valley is held as sacred by the Navajo Indians, and we had a very good lunch in a Navajo restaurant.

We were back on the train at Flagstaff, for a trip to the Grand Canyon. Extraordinary. A bit alarming for an acrophobic [me]. And impossible to photograph. And then back on the train for another overnight to Los Angeles. Of which I remember very little, other than the footprints of Hollywood celebrities. How can John Wayne have had such small feet ? The same size as Shirley Temple. Here we stayed on the Queen Mary at Long Beach. Compared with the enormous rooms of our usual hotels, the cabin was modest in size and the walls very thin. The Queen Mary was also hosting delegates to a big gay convention, and the noises from the adjacent cabin were disturbing. 

The final destination was San Francisco. Our arrival there was delayed several hours by a body on the line. A bus took us from Oakland across the bay to our hotel. An initial city tour took us across the Golden Gate bridge, and up to the viewpoint of Bernal Heights, and through Haight-Ashbury, On our own we walked steeply uphill to the house where Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, and then on to the City Lights bookshop to buy a copy of the book. Which I hadn’t read for some 50 years. And we ate clam chowder on Fisherman’s Wharf, courtesy of a gift voucher from Rebecca.

Susie said that she could happily live in San Francisco. But after three days we flew home to Heathrow. Initially to child-sit at High Wycombe,  and the following week to embark on a locum spell at St Alban’s, Strasbourg. It was a great introduction to the States. Good trains, good hotels. Great scenery. But an enduring memory is watching [parochial] news programmes on American tv. Which always featured an XXL-sized sheriff standing in front of the flashing lights of an enormous police car talking about a break-in at a local liquor store.  And, even worse, we saw something of the debates between Trump and Clinton prior to the 2016 American election. When Hilary was speaking, Trump would leave his lectern and start prowling around her in a sinister, spooky way. Like a sex offender sizing up a potential victim on Wimbledon Common. 

Envoi

I’m delighted that we made that trip to the States. Once. But while the country is under the present management we wouldn’t dream of going back. Incidentally I thought King Charles did as well as one could have hoped on his recent state visit. It sounded like a well-crafted speech to the two houses. And he did well not to react to Trump’s oleaginous remarks about his [“amazing, wonderful, much-loved, much missed” etc.] mother having a crush on the young prince. Whether it will influence this week’s elections I very much doubt. The whole Mandelson furore is a self-inflicted injury for the Labour Party. We’ve all known for years that Peter Mandelson is as bent as a corkscrew. And long committed to personal gain and self enrichment. Sometimes I think he’d fit well into the Reform party. Along with the other dubious millionaires and tax evaders 

May 2026

Through a glass darkly – 173

Madeleine Bunting: The Plot: a Biography of My Father’s Acre

I have been reading a difficult to categorise book by Madeleine Bunting, a former Guardian journalist. The book is an oblique history of her father and the small plot of land that he loved on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors. Her father, John Bunting, was born in London in 1927 and educated at Ampleforth where he subsequently taught Art. He was also a professional sculptor. On a  remote corner of North Yorkshire he built a remembrance chapel.

Bunting elegantly explores the history of the piece of land that her father loved. She begins with prehistoric burial mounds and earthworks, used for centuries as village boundaries, and inexpertly excavated in the late nineteenth century by the local Church of England vicar. When the Romans occupied Yorkshire in about 70 AD they built a Roman road across the high moors known as the Via Regalis. In later times this became the basis of the Hambleton Drovers’ Road, along which Scottish drovers, “described as thickset, hirsute men. shaggy, unkempt, wild, and fond of their drink”, drove sheep and cattle down from Scotland to market in York or in London. 

In 1137 a shaggy group of monks appeared in the area, having been forced to flee from Calder in Cumbria where they hd been raided by the Scots. They were members of an obscure group, the Savigniacs, later absorbed into the Cistercian order. The church that they built nearby at Byland Abbey was England’s biggest and most ambitious Cistercian church. Although the monastic calling was [notionally] a retreat from the world, the Cistercian monks developed on the North Yorkshire moors a highly successful sheep farming industry, collecting huge quantities of wool to export from Hull to merchants in Flanders and in Italy. Although the monastery was dissolved at the Reformation and the buildings crumbled, the practice of sheep farming continued, and subsequent generations continued to benefit from the ponds and ditches that the monks had built.

Even as Bunting’s father was building his chapel the landscape was being transformed by the Forestry Commission. During the 1950s the Commission embarked on some 60,000 acres of coniferous plantations, not native broadleaf trees, but mainly Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine. Bunting claims that this epidemic of planting was a belated response to the timber famine of the First World War, when the country was unable to import vast quantities of timber from Scandinavia, Russia, and Germany. But sadly the geometric blocks of conifers had a negative impact on the habitat for wildlife. And rising labour costs made the cost of felling these trees on steep hillsides uneconomic. The timber is good only for wood pulp or fencing.

For Bunting’s father North Yorkshire offered the opportunity to build his Promised Land. The Plot and the chapel that he built on it were an escape from the urban sprawl of twentieth century England. He lamented the ‘internal decay’ of rural England. He looked back to a world uncontaminated by arterial roads, pebbledash semis, and suburban streets. He was inspired by William Morris and shared his enthusiasm for traditional craft skills, for a world in which craftsmanship and art  were intimately connected.

This is a delightful book, wide-ranging and multi-layered. It gives us a picture of Bunting’s complex father. But also a glimpse of the history of North Yorkshire; drove roads, medieval ruins, sheep farming, grouse shooting, acres of alien coniferous plantations. Of how we are shaped by the landscapes we inhabit. And of what it means to be English.

Renewing my passport

When did we first need passports to travel abroad ? The concept of being under a ruler’s protection while travelling in a country under another ruler goes back a long way. In the Old Testament, in the book of Nehemiah, at about 450 BC, Nehemiah who was working as cup-bearer to the Persian king was given letters by the king that requested that the rulers of lands across the Euphrates grant him safe passage.

Here in the UK the first mention of such a “safe conduct” document appears during the reign  of Henry V, in an Act of Parliament dated 1414. Seemingly these could be granted by the king to anyone regardless of nationality. And foreign nationals could receive such documents free of charge while native English subjects had to pay. [Reform wouldn’t like that !] From 1540 the granting of travel documents became the business of the Privy Council. From 1794 responsibility for issuing passports passed to the Secretary of State and thence to the Home Office. But passports were not generally required for overseas travel until the first world war. [During the first world war enormous numbers of British men travelled abroad for the first time. But I have never understood that troops deployed overseas needed individual passports. A Great War forum on the internet tells me that troops in the First War only required an army daybook, and an additional pass authorising travel if they were travelling on their own.] 

The first familiar, British blue passports were issued in 1920, and the format remained largely unchanged until they started to be replaced by  the burgundy, European passports in 1988. [It was one of Boris’s first decrees that the British passports should return to a dark navy blue colour rather than the European burgundy. All part of ‘taking back control’. But it then transpired that these new, British, dark blue passports could only be printed in France !] The passports of many other countries are remarkably similar to the British model. 

I have just renewed my passport. As a sign of hope in the future. It was all done on line, and was remarkably easy and quick. I have read many negative reports about the Passport Office in the media in recent years, but this time their performance was exemplary. The whole thing took no more than about ten days, including sending them an acceptable [improved] photo. And they e-mailed me a progress report at every stage.

Of people born in the UK, apparently 80% have at least one passport. Which is, to me, a surprisingly high figure. The comparable figure for the United States is that only 37% of the population have a valid passport. And that 40% of Americans have never had any passport. Which, it is argued, is why Americans are so often ignorant about countries other than their own.

My passport history

My first passport was issued in London, at the Passport Office in Petty France, in August 1961. For my first overseas trip across France, hitching from Paris down to the Med and back, with my brother Paul. It seems that passports were not regularly stamped in those days. But that first passport has entry and exit visas for Jugoslavia and Bulgaria, both issued in London for another hitching trip across Europe in 1964. In order to obtain the Bulgarian visa I had to make multiple visits to the Bulgarian Embassy in London. These included walking in St James Park with the wife of the Bulgarian press attaché, who told me that Sofia was a delightful, romantic city. A bit like Heidelberg !

My second passport dates from July 1971. The few stamps are mainly from France and Spain, but also from Yugoslavia and Turkey. But exchange controls meant that [even quite small]  sums of money taken out of the country are carefully recorded. And page 6 of this passport has the hand-written addition of Joanna Clare, a girl, born March 10th, 1977, recorded by someone at the British Embassy in Paris. Hand-written with no supporting official stamp.

My third, final dark blue, passport dates from July 1981. It was issued at the Passport Office in Newport, Gwent, which necessitated a day trip to Wales and an early start from Woodstock. Details of money taken out of the country are no longer required. There are entry and exit stamps for France and Spain, for Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. And, more exotically, a visa for Indonesia, issued at the Embassy in London and needed for a marketing trip to Indonesia and Singapore in August-September 1982.

My first burgundy, European style passport dates from July 1991. This passport went through the washing machine in Lyon in about 2001 which means that there are no legible stamps inside it. The laundered passport caused some problems at the borders, and needed to be replaced. It was replaced by another, replacement passport, which may have been issued in Lyon. Which I no longer have.

Another burgundy passport was issued in August 2006. This time I took the form and photo to the Passport Office in Glasgow, as I was there for the first residential module of an MTh. course at ICC Glasgow. The only markings in this document are a single-entry visa for Kenya, needed for an MTh study trip to Nairobi in 2007. And an entry visa for South Africa, when we went to see Joanna and Craig in Pretoria in February 2010.

The final burgundy passport with I have just surrendered dates from March 2016. Required for a first [and only] trip to the States in May 2016. We had to apply slightly prematurely because there was a new [?] rule brought in by some countries that you needed to have at least six months before your passport expired.

Envoi

I hope to be able to use my new passport before too long. What I have in mind is a few days with Susie in Biarritz. Cue pictures of Edward VII in a bathchair. And then perhaps a Great Rail Journeys trip across the Baltic countries. And I saw the other day that there are now direct flights from Edinburgh to Ljubljana. Where I haven’t been since 1964. Provided that Trump’s War doesn’t push the cost of flights and jet fuel through the roof. But first, God willing, hip surgery.

April 2026

Through a glass darkly – 172

I made the mistake, a few years ago, of buying a book that got rave reviews in the Church Times. The book was The Nazareth Manifesto by Sam Wells, the prolific and very effective Vicar of St Martin’s in the Fields. It was a disappointing book, but two things stay with me. One was a matrix that looked something like this:

Doing for … l Being for …

_______________________________________

Doing with … l Being with …

If I remember correctly, Wells argues that Christian worship is essentially about Being with God and that Christian mission is ultimately about Being with the poor and disadvantaged. And somewhere in there, I don’t have the book any longer, is a reference to another book that I have just been re-reading at the back end of Lent.

God’s Hotel

Victoria Sweet is an American doctor. [She shares her name with an international porn star. Which complicates things if you look her up on the internet.] God’s Hotel, first published in the States in 2012, tells the story of her work and her journey of discovery at a hospital in San Francisco. It is a wonderful book, written in the same tradition as medical people like Oliver Sacks. 

Laguna Honda is the last almshouse in the United States. It is a direct descendant of the medieval Hôtel-Dieu. It cares for those who have fallen on hard times and who are in need of medical care. That is, it cares for those who can’t care for themselves. The hospital looks like a Romanesque monastery set on a hill. There are six wings of wards, each lined with windows and crowned with a turret. Laguna Honda occupies some sixty-two acres, and comes complete with its own farm, its orchard, its massive greenhouse, and its aviary and a barnyard.  Patients were expected to work, if they could, in the kitchen garden or the laundry or taking care of the pigs, cows, and sheep.

When Sweet arrives there she is assigned to the Admissions Ward. Much of the book tells the stories of her patients for whom she does the initial examination and diagnosis. Her initial patients are a mixed bunch. One has Parkinson’s disease and has fallen and broken his hip; another man has been hit by a car, and is recovering from head trauma and multiple orthopaedic injuries; another man is disabled from a brain tumour and is on dialysis; a woman has Alzheimer’s, and another is recovering from a stroke. Parkinson’s and alcoholism are conditions that recur. One man has terminal alcoholic cirrhosis, bleeding, confusion, and jaundice. But he is improving.

Sweet notes that her patients were not unlike those she had encountered in medical training. They were complex, fragile, and unstable, in need of close medications and laboratory tests. More than that she sees her patients two or three times a day, often over a period of several months, and has time to build relationships with them and to learn from their experience of being a patient.

While Sweet had been impressed throughout her training by the power of modern medicine, she remains curious about the nature of illness and about the doctor-patient relationship. She looks at alternative medicine, at Chinese and Indian medicine, but finds little that is of help. And then she stumbles across a book from the Middle Ages, a book by Hildegard of Bingen, translated from Latin. She is intrigued to discover that author was a twelfth century German nun, a mystic and theologian, and additionally a medical practitioner, who had written a book about her medicine. Alongside her job at  Laguna Honda, Sweet embarks on learning Latin, and medieval Latin. And then she embarks on part-time graduate studies in medieval history and the history of medicine. And her Master’s thesis becomes the prelude to a Ph.D. 

In order to complete her doctorate Sweet is granted a year’s sabbatical. She flies to Switzerland.  Her plan is to visit Hildegard’s monastery and villages. She attends an international conference in Bingen. She discovers that there were two Hildegards – the mystical Hildegard who is revealed in her theology, letters, and autobiography, and the other Hildegard. displayed in her medicine, down-to-earth and practical. From the medical Hildegard she learns the importance of careful observation of the patient. And of the proverbial Dr Diet, Dr Quiet, and Dr Merryman.

On her return to Laguna Honda Sweet is assigned away from Admissions to two new wards, E.4 a complex medical ward and E.6 a dementia ward. From the patients in E.6 she learns that there are many forms of dementia. And that the tendency to use Alzheimer’s and dementia as synonymous is not accurate. And that these other forms of dementia sometimes had treatable causes.

In the background the city Mayor and the Board of Supervisors and the all-powerful Dt Stein have plans to demolish the old hospital and to replace it with a five hundred million dollar, state-of-the-art health facility. Lawyers from the Department of Justice are determined to close down all the country’s remaining long-term care institutions. Sweet admits that she wasn’t paying much attention. She had finished her PhD and determines to walk the Camino de Compostela in four stages. She flies to Paris, takes the fast train to Lyon, and the slow train to Le Puy.

Victoria Sweet went initially to Laguna Honda for two months. And she stayed for over twenty years. This is a wonderful book. It addresses important questions; about community, about pastoral care, about pilgrimage, about hospitality. About the role of doctors and the nature of medicine. Sweet’s understanding of her role changes; she returns to an older model of the body as a garden to be tended rather than a machine to be fixed. She develops a technique of ‘Just Sitting’. She begins to believe that Slow Medicine provides as good an outcome as Modern Efficient Health Care. And her patients, poor, needy, chronically ill, often addicted, seemingly derelict are at the heart of the book. Some of them may have been loveable, but many were not. Sweet’s practice exemplifies Sam Wells’ definition of Christian mission quoted above.

Envoi

I am sorry that this comes too late to wish any readers a Happy Easter. Thankfully I now have a date, later in April, for a Pre-Op at the Royal Infirmary, and then, God willing, a date for hip surgery next month. Meanwhile our life is very restricted. We went a couple of weeks ago to have lunch with Mike and Wendy at Mortonhall Garden Centre, which is probably the furthest I’ve been from home this year. And in the afternoons, when it is dry, we hobble down to the Prestonfield House Hotel. Complete with highland cows and a resident peacock.

My school-friend Pete came to stay in March. He runs a small business producing high class art cards, and turns up at irregular intervals while visiting his customers in Edinburgh and in St Andrews. 

During Passion Week there were the usual early morning services at Mayfield, now known as Newington Trinity. Ministers from Newington Churches Together take it in turns to lead a short service, followed by a simple breakfast. On Good Friday I failed to get to the Newington Churches Together Walk of Witness. But there was a sombre Tenebrae service in the evening. During which we both thought a bit about Joanna. A Facebook posting from Lyon of the Good Friday walk/pilgrimage at Rontalon brought back good memories. Easter Day dawned dry and sunny. But by the end of the service at Mayfield there was a spectacular snowstorm. When the snow stopped we came home to slow-cooked lamb with our friends Mike and Wendy. Clive used to swear by a recipe for gigôt à sept heures, with a bottle of white wine and haricots and a lot of garlic, sealing the lid of the roasting pan with flour and water paste. But we found that four-plus hours was enough.

April 2026

Through a glass darkly – 171

Downsizing is a slow process. As you pick up items and  remember where and when and why you acquired them. And then think of a few reasons for not throwing them out. So too with books. Many books hold associations, both of places and of people. I remember reading four volumes of George Orwell’s Collected Essays on a beach at Vsar, in what was then Yugoslavia, in the summer of 1975, the year that we got married. And I remember reading Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl during an IATEFL conference at Groningen in 1984. [About which I remember little else.]

As regards remembering, I wonder how many friends from the Lyon Anglican Church [now trading as TCL] remember Richard and Caroline Travers. They were/are Australians, from Melbourne, who worshipped with us in Lyon for several months in 2008.

Clearing out a few books, very slowly, I came across Richard’s book The Tennis Courts of Lyon, Les jeux de paume de Lyon. It is a beautifully produced book of some 140 pages, printed in two colours, black and sepia in China, and published by Oryx Publishing of St Kilda, Australia, in 2012. Three hundred and fifty numbered copies were printed. Mine is number 199, a signed copy.

We enjoyed having Richard and his wife with us in Lyon in 2008. He is/was a medical practitioner, a consultant, who was on a sabbatical. And we appreciated their leaving gift which enabled us to buy half a dozen copies of Mission Praise music book. In a wonderfully incestuous/it’s a small world way,  Richard and his wife lived for six months in an apartment close to the Saône, which was [before or after] also lived in by another visiting church couple, an American academic from Texas and his Mexican wife. I can’t at the moment recall his name. But it transpired that he was authoring an academic paper, probably epidemiology, with Jean-François, the husband of Viviane Jusot. Viviane was visiting Lyon one time from Niger, where they were living, and she and the American met wholly by chance in the rue de Créqui chapel on a Sunday morning.

Lyon Church Weekend, with George Lings, 2006

My interest in real tennis is limited. But it is too attractive a book, and too niche a topic, for me to simply pass it on to the OXFAM bookshop. If anyone in Lyon is reading this and knows of a good home for the book, please let me know, And I will gladly send it to you. Otherwise I will make enquiries of the Real Tennis Association of Great Britain.

Envoi

We are rushing through Lent. The Six Nations ended with an exciting game in Paris. England’s performance, their best of the season by miles, probably means that Steve Borthwick will keep his job. The day that our boiler went on the blink was the first day of the year when we had overnight snow.  But the flowering cherry tree in the front garden is in blossom. And the magnolia stellata will follow very shortly.

March 2026 

Through a glass darkly – 170

Birthday Girl

It was Susie’s BIG birthday in the week. We had a celebratory lunch with our friends Mike and Wendy at Left Field, a bijou restaurant on the edge of Bruntsfield Links. It was a Sunday lunchtime, and warm sunshine flooded in on our window table. The other window had an excellent view of Arthur’s Seat. My starter was squid rings with a spicy mayonnaise.As a main, Susie and I had pan-fried sea trout on a bed of courgette and fennel. With blood orange. The trout was excellent. Friendly service. The bill was not small, but not excessive. Susie paid – which made me feel like a toy boy ! A splendid birthday celebration. 

Anthony Powell

One wet Saturday morning in the very late 1960s, when I was staying in the Pergamon guest-house in Pullen’s Lane, I went down into Oxford, to Blackwells, and and bought the first two volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, in English translation, and the first two volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. All in hard cover. I never read a word of the Proust books. And although I read the two Powell books, it was another three decades before I read the rest of the twelve volume sequence. Since Christmas I have been reading them again before taking them along to the charity shop.

Anthony Powell was born in Westminster in 1905, the son of a military family. He was always interested in genealogy, and traced his descent to land-owning families in Lincolnshire and in the Welsh Borders. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford.His Oxford friends included Maurice Bowra and the novelist Henry Yorke and Evelyn Waugh. He came down with a third class degree in history. [Nothing wrong with that.]

From 1926 to 1936 Powell worked for the publishers Gerald Duckworth & Co. Who published several of his early novels. In London his social life centred around formal debutante dances at big houses in Mayfair and Belgravia. As well as other authors, he got to know the painters Nina Hamnett and Adrian Daintrey and the composer Constant Lambert. In 1934 he married Lady Violet Pakenham, the sister of Lord Longford. During the war he served in the Welch Regiment, in South Wales and in Northern Ireland, and then in the Intelligence Corps. In 1952 he and his wife moved to The Chantry, a small, Regency country house near Frome in Somerset. He died in 2000 at the age of 94. He had written a score of novels, and a variety of other books of history and literary criticism, including four volumes of memoirs. On his death his publishers, William Heinemann, claimed him to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

 A Dance to the Music of Time

Powell is best known for the twelve volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, which traces the stories of an upper class group friends from the First World War to the 1970s. The books were published at irregular intervals between 1951 and 1975. There is an enormous cast of characters. The central character is Nick Jenkins, a publisher and literary man, clearly based on Powell himself. Jenkins’ friends and family appear and reappear in a variety of settings, school reunions, deb dances, weekends in the country, family weddings and funerals. And seem to make a habit of marrying each other’s ex-wives ! Powell’s admirers celebrate him as an excellent observer of [a certain stratum of] English society. Who was well connected in a literary sense as well as socially. 

The first book, A Question of Upbringing [published in 1951], opens with Nicholas Jenkins’ school-days in 1921-22; and introduces us to his friends Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, and also to the universally despised Kenneth Widmerpool. In the years that follow Jenkins works in publishing and attends a succession of deb balls in the later 1920s. At one such ball Widmerpool is humiliated when Barbara Goring pours a bowl of sugar over him. Jenkins is invited to the Templers’ house in Maidenhead, and embarks on an affair with Templer’s sister, now married to Bob Dupont. Mona Templer leaves her husband for J.C. Quiggin, a Marxist literary critic, who is now working as secretary to St John Clarke. During a weekend visit Jenkins meets the Tolland family: Erridge, Lord Warminster, head of the Tolland family, and his sisters including Isobel whom Jenkins decides to marry. From A Buyer’s Market [published in 1952] to The Kindly Ones [published in 1962]the narrative of the next five books revolves around a growing circle of friends and acquaintances, including: Jenkins’ erratic Uncle Giles; Professor Sillery, a well-connected Oxford don; Mark Members, a budding writer and poet; Sir Magnus Donners, a wealthy industrialist; the painter Mr Deacon and his consort Gypsy Jones; the novelist St. John Clarke; Jenkins’ fellow script-writer Chips Lovell; the musician and composer Moreland and his wife Matilda. And a few thousand others ! The settings are mainly in London, Foppa’s restaurant, Soho pubs, and a West End nightclub; but occasionally in country houses.

Things change with the seventh volume, The Valley of Bones [published in 1964]. The book is set in 1940 and Jenkins has joined his regiment, initially stationed in Wales. We meet his superior officer Captain Gwatkin and the alcoholic Lieutenant Bethel. The regiment moves to Northern Ireland. When both men are disgraced Jenkins reports to the DAAC at Divisional Headquarters – and learns that his new superior officer is Major Widmerpool. For me the three wartime books, The Soldier’s Art [published in 1966] and The Military Philosophers [published in 1968] are the strongest books of the series. Possibly because Powell himself is operating in a new and different  [and larger] world. Jenkins fails to find a role with the Free French. Stringham, a recovering alcoholic, turns up as Mess Waiter for F Mess. But is posted to Singapore in time for the surrender. Chips Lovell and others are killed when a German bomb falls on the Cafe de Madrid. Another German bomb kills Lady Molly and Priscilla Tolland. By 1944 Jenkins is working in Allied Liaison and living in Chelsea. He is promoted to major, and leads a party of military attaches on a tour of France and Belgium. A meeting with Bob Dupont in Brussels reveals that Templer was killed under mysterious circumstances in the Balkans. By spring 1945 Widmerpool is engaged improbably to the wild and unpredictable, and sexually profligate, Pamela Flitton, Stringham’s niece. Together the books bear comparison with Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy.

Simon Russell Beale as Major Widmerpool

Books do Furnish a Room [set in 1945-6, and published in 1971] brings Jenkins and his friends into the post-war world. The opening set piece is Erridge’s funeral, which is severely disrupted by the late arrival of the Widmerpools, J.C. Quiggin, and Sir Harold and Lady Craggs [formerly Gypsy Jones]. Jenkins agrees to work for Fission, a new magazine to be published by Quiggin and Craggs. Their much heralded new writer is the louche, penniless X. Trapnel, complete with long, black greatcoat and swordstick. Trapnel absconds briefly with Pamela Widmerpool, but she subsequently leaves him and throws his precious, not yet published, manuscript, into the canal.

There was a longer than usually delay before the publication of the final two volumes. Temporary Kings, set in the late 1950s was published in 1973. The book opens at a literary festival in Venice. A new character is Russell Gwinnett, an American, the prospective biographer of the late X. Trapnel. At an army reunion Jenkins hears further stories about Templer’s mysterious death. Moreland conducts at a Mozart party given by Odo Stevens and Rosy Manach. The book ends in late 1959 with Jenkins reflecting on the death of Pamela, apparently from an overdose while in bed with Gwinnett, and the situation of Moreland who is dying in hospital.

Hearing Secret Harmonies, set a decade or so later, was published in 1975. The twelfth and final book.  In 1970 the Jenkins have allowed Scorpio Murtlock and his gang of hippie followers to camp on their land. Widmerpool is Chancellor of the local new university, but is converted to the counter-culture. Jenkins is part of the committee that awards a literary prize to Gwinnett for his biography of X.Trapnel. Widmerpool develops a growing link with Murtlock’s cult. There are reports of naked dancers celebrating the midsummer solstice at the Devil’s Fingers. As the book ends, Bethel, now one of Murtlock’s followers, brings news that Widmerpool has died on a naked run with the rest of the cult.

Somewhere in his four volumes of memoirs – I’ve been turning the pages of the abridged one-volume version, To keep the ball rolling, Powell determines that A Dance to the Music of Time will comprise twelve volumes. And wonders whether he will have the energy to carry it through. My feeling is that he didn’t. The final two volumes show a marked decline. And that Powell, living since the early 1950s in rural Somerset, became progressively out of touch with the world of the 1970s about which he was writing. For me there is a staleness about these two books, and a sense that the writer is merely going through the motions. That the books are on Autopilot.

Roman à clef

The memoirs also confirm what the reader may have long suspected. The books and their settings, and the characters who recur, are all drawn closely from Powell’s own life. Commentators have derived much pleasure from identifying the people on whom the characters are based. “Most novelists draw their characters and scenes in some degree from real life,” Powell acknowledges in Infants of the Spring. Nicholas Jenkins is clearly Powell himself: an Old Etonian, involved in publishing and script-writing in the 1920s and 1930s, who served during the Second War in the Welch Regiment and the Intelligence Corps. Charles Stringham is based on Hubert Duggan, a school and university contemporary, whose glamorous mother married Lord Curzon. Erridge, Lord Warminster, owes much to George Orwell, who had also seen time on the road.  But the Tolland family also bear a likeness to the Pakenham family, into whom Powell married. Mona Templer is the model Sonia Brownell, who worked with Cyril Connolly on Horizon and later married George Orwell on his deathbed. J.C. Quiggin is thought to be based on C.P Snow, though there are also similarities to Powell’s nephew-in-law, Harold Pinter. St John Clarke is generally agreed to be based on the writer John Galsworthy. Moreland resembles Powell’s good friend the composer and conductor  Constant Lambert. X. Trapnel is recognisably as Julian Maclaren-Ross, down to the dark glasses and sword-stick.

Julian Maclaren Ross

Scorpio Murtlock is thought to be based on Bruce Chatwin, the bisexual traveller and writer. The Quiggin twins may be based on the Jay twins, the much photographed daughters of Douglas Jay who were at the University of Sussex in the 1960s.

There are divergent theories about the model for Kenneth Widmerpool. The consensus is that he is based on Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, a lawyer widely known as Bullying-Manner, who became Lord Chancellor in the Macmillan government and was elevated to the Lords as Viscount Dilhorne. The other possibility is that Powell drew on Denis Cuthbert Capel-Dunn, under whom Powell served in the Intelligence Corps in 1943. Capel-Dunn, a barrister , also known as The Papal Bun, was said to be extremely fat, extremely ambitious, and totally humourless. He was killed in a plane crash in 1945 returning from the San Francisco Conference.

Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller

The model for Pamela Flitton is undoubtedly Barbara Skelton, an English socialite and novelist. Skelton , born in 1916, grew up in British India. In the Second War she was recruited into the Foreign Office by Donald Maclean, the Soviet spy, and then assigned to Cairo. In 1943 she became the ‘official mistress’ of King Farouk, whom she described as very sweet with a good sense of humour but incredibly mean. After Farouk she was married successively to Cyril Connolly and to George, later Lord, Weidenfeld; and had affairs with, among others, Peter Quennell, Felix Topolski, Charles Addams, John Sutro, and Alan Ross. The story is told in her two volumes of memoirs, Tears before Bedtime, and she has a walk-on part in one of Jeremy Lewis’s books of publishing memoirs.

Envoi

On his death in 2000 Powell was hailed as “one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century”. And as “an excellent observer of British society”. A Dance to the Music of Time is certainly a highly ambitious sequence of novels., And the ambitious, widely disliked, humourless Widmerpool has passed into the English language. [Very many years ago I was having lunch with a civil servant, an urban planner, in a basement restaurant in Regent Street, and she described someone to me as “the Widmerpool of the planning world”; and was surprised when I failed to recognise the reference.]

Powell himself was an acid critic of some of his contemporary writers. {He described Laurie Lee as “utterly unreadable”, Graham Greene as “absurdly overrated”, Virginia Woolf as “humourless, envious, and spiteful”.] If you have a nostalgia for a slower-paced, educated, literate, upper middle-class world, and plenty of time to spare, then A Dance to the Music of Time might suit you very well. For myself, I find the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, a cold fish, and the whole sequence urbane, pretentious, sometimes witty, and at least two books too long.

I saw a good, three-part documentary on the Tony Blair years on television the other night. One commentator described his premiership as a ‘Golden Age’. Compared with political debate and leadership today. So – I think I’ll look again at the Diaries of Chris Mullin, a not uncritical supporter of Blair and the finest political diarist of his generation.

February 2026

Through a glass darkly – 169

To the Sea by Train

The most enjoyable book I read in January was a Christmas present from Jem and Anna. Andrew Martin is prolific railway historian and novelist, and To the Sea by Train is a historic, anecdotal look at the golden age of British railway travel. In 1846 there were [apparently] 272 railway companies in the UK ; a number that was reduced to about 120 by the Railway Grouping of 1923, and later reduced to the Big Four. The Bank Holiday Act of 1871 and, later, the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 transformed the holiday and leisure industry. And British seaside resorts and British railways grew in parallel with each other. In the 1890s Blackpool received a million visitors a year, the majority arriving by train. Blackpool was served by three separate stations, and it was said that in 1911 Blackpool Central with its fourteen platforms [the same number as Paddington] was the busiest railway station in the world. There were 36 licensed photographers on the Blackpool foreshore in 1895, 62 sellers of fruit, 47 of sweets, 52 of ice-cream, and 21 of oysters and prawns.

Away from the obvious resorts, Martin tells us about lesser-known railway-made resorts. Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire was a genteel watering place until the arrival of the railway in 1863. The prime mover in this initiative was Edward Watkin, General Manager of the Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. [Watkin’s more ambitious project was for the Great Central Railway, which would link London to France via a Channel Tunnel.] Silloth was a sleepy village in Cumberland on the Solway Firth, inhabited mainly by rabbits. But a railway line was built in the 1850s, followed by a housing estate, two hotels, a gasworks, a sewerage system, and public baths. On Whit Monday 1963 3,000 visitors came to Silloth by train. But Dr Beeching closed the line there following year, and Silloth has returned to obscurity.

Martin has some interesting comments on class issues. The more popular seaside resorts were characterised by risqué postcards, holidaying drunks, fearsome landladies, and spooning couples. So gradually the middle class developed their own, more genteel refuges from the [common] excursionists. Thus, by 1901, Brighton had its Hove, Hastings its Bexhill, Margate its Westgate and Birchington, Whitby its Sandend, Cromer its Sheringham, Blackpool its St Anne’s, Weston-Super-Mare its Clevedon, and Ilfracombe its Woolacombe.

I can be quite nostalgic about railways and steam trains. My paternal grandfather was a train driver on the London Underground. My maternal grandfather was a station master on the GWR [also known to its followers as God’s Wonderful Railway]. Until 1953, when my grandfather retired, we spent all our holidays at Minety, two stations out of Swindon on the Cheltenham line; and my brother and I had the run of the station for our entertainment. Before the invention of Health and Safety ! It was like something out of Thomas the Tank Engine. But, although we holidayed at a succession of English resorts for the rest of the 1950s, in Devon and Cornwall, in North Wales and Dorset, the family now travelled by car. And I have no experience of the noisy, beery anarchy of the Bank Holiday Specials.

Rugby

Those who don’t like rugby should look away now. It is time for the Six Nations. A season that usually spans late Epiphany and the early days of Lent. The mornings are getting a little lighter. There are signs of life in the garden, snowdrops and hellebores. I have made two shepherd’s pies, one for the freezer, and there is some beer in the fridge. The hobbling gloom of January lifts a little. There is a month of Six Nations rugby to look forward to.

Yes, I played rugby at school some 70 years ago. But not very well and without much enjoyment. I usually played prop and occasionally number 8. The scrum did all the work and the backs got all the glory. Or so it seemed. In the 50s the public school divisions between athletes and aesthetes had largely disappeared. But I remember a boarding school contemporary, subsequently a Cambridge professor, going to some trouble one Friday night to carry a large turd out to the first XV pitch and to deposit it near the midway line. The memory is embarrassing. And he is no longer with us.

Watching rugby

I first got into rugby in the aftermath of the British Lions tour of New Zealand in 1971. It was the only Lions team to win a series in New Zealand, achieving a 2-1 victory over the All  Blacks; and the stars of the team were mainly Welsh, Gareth Edwards, Barry John, and J.P.R. Williams. I don’t remember seeing any of the games on the tv at the time, and black-and-white clips on YouTube look distinctly dated. But there was certainly a buzz in the rugby world, and I started watching live games, initially at Rosslyn Park, where my younger brother Peter subsequently played for the CCs; and then at London Welsh, a team that included a clutch of British Lions, notably John Dawes and Mervyn Davies. They were an attractive side to watch, but looked a bit lightweight when teams like Gloucester with a pack of gnarled forwards came to town.

J.P.R. Williams with 1971 British Lions

During the following 50 years I have watched a wide variety of games, both internationals and club rugby, in England, in Scotland, and in France. And memorably in South Africa. I don’t easily remember who won, or what the score was. But I remember people and places and glimpses of wizardry. Early memories are of Middlesex Sevens. My first visit must have been in 1970, when Loughborough Colleges were the winners and Keith Fielding, a dual code international, ran in a hatful of tries including four against Edinburgh Wanderers in the final. For the next few years the winners were London Welsh, initially with Gerald Davies on the wing. But he subsequently moved inside to centre as they uncovered a succession of Welsh speedsters.

Gerald Davies

When Susie and I lived in Paris in the mid-70s I would go to home internationals with my friend Clive. France played then at the Parc des Princes, which was a  straightforward bus journey from Alésia. We never bought tickets in advance. In those days it was possible go early, to scout around the cafes near the ground, and to buy surplus tickets from other fans usually at cost price. Susie and I were married in Edinburgh on January 11th, 1975 and one week later, after a short honeymoon in Annecy, on January 18th, Clive and I saw the France v. Wales game, in which Wales gave first caps to the Pontypool front row, known as the Viet-Gwent. In the second half Graham Price, on his debut, ran some 70 yards to score and fell on the ball over the line out of exhaustion. Wales won 25:10. It was their last victory for another 25 years. The following month we were there when Scotland came to town. Within the first ten minutes Gérard Cholley, a tough French prop from Castres, and an amateur boxer, had laid out two of the Scottish forwards.

The following year Clive and I trained to London for the weekend for Middlesex Sevens. As I recall it was London Welsh again. More intriguingly we also went to a PUC [Paris University] sevens tournament at the Stade Charlety.  Of which my chief memories are of a rampaging Andy Ripley, playing for some English guest side, going on bullocking runs up the centre of the pitch. And of a curly-haired Jo Maso, who must have been very close to retirement, showing some very silky skills playing for the Narbonne seven.. 

Andy Ripley, Rosslyn Park

On a very wet day in south-west France in November 1977 I saw the touring All Blacks captained by Graham Mourie beat a French regional selection at Angoulème. The All Black pack included ‘Fearless Frank’ Oliver and a young Andy Haden. I got into conversation with a big New Zealander under an umbrella on the touch-line about the relative merits of fly-half Barry John and Phil Bennett. And discovered from a regional paper the next day that I had been talking to the legendary All Black full back Don Clarke.

Back in England I went up to Gloucester occasionally, one or twice with my friend Peter. The crowd in The Shed were always very vocal and very partisan, and happy to boo any opposing kickers. I was in Cambridge once and saw what looked like a British Lions team masquerading as Steele-Bodger’s XV play Cambridge University at Grange Road. David Duckham was in imperious form for the visitors. Who had the wonderful Frenchman Denis Charvet of Stade Toulousain  playing in the centre. Or is that a false memory ?

During our years in Lyon  I went regularly to see Bourgoin-Jallieu play at the Stade Pierre Rajon. Bourgoin is a small, one horse town and the team was bank-rolled by a businessman who had made his money from boxed, supermarket salads. For historic reasons the team played in Aston Villa colours. Bourgoin were not a glamorous side and they played attritional rugby. But during my years there they produced a clutch of French internationals, mainly forwards: Julien Bonnaire, Sébastien Chabal, Olivier Millou, Lionel Nallet, and Pascal Papé. As well as scrum half Morgan Parra. The big name and most-capped player at Bourgoin was Marc Cécillon, the number 8 and flanker, after whom the stand was named. But in the summer of 2004 when he shot his wife dead after a drunken row at a party there was some rapid rebranding. He was subsequently found guilty of murder, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. But was freed on parole in 2011.

Bourgoin-Jallieu, at the Stade Pierre Rajon

Scotland and France are my preferred Six Nations teams. Our decade in Duns in the Scottish Borders was ideal for Melrose, the birthplace in 1883 and spiritual home of rugby sevens. My first trip there was in 1979 with my father-in-law, George Malloch. The winners were Stewart’s Melville, whose seven consisted largely of Calder brothers. Or so it seemed. In the following decade Kelso were most often finalists and winners. But in the 1990s the title was often won by glamorous guest teams from the southern hemisphere, Randwick, Manly, and Bay of Plenty. The Greenyards remains my favourite ground in the world, though now it is a difficult bus journey from Edinburgh. It involves changing buses in Galashiels. And on Sevens Days the buses no longer go down into the centre of Melrose.

Melrose Sevens, The Greenyards, 2016

I might resist the temptation to pick a Favourite/Best Ever team from players that  I have seen. But candidates would certainly include J.P.R. Williams and Serge Blanco at full back. Gerald Davies and David Duckham and [the late] Jack Cantoni on the wings. Denis Charvet and Jeremy Guscott [after whom our border collie was named] as silky, peerless centres.

Jeremy Guscott, Bath, England, and British Lions

Gareth Edwards partnered by Barry John or Phil Bennett at half back. Fran Cotton and Mike Burton, David Sole, Iain Milne, Robert Paparemborde in the front row. Almost any hooker would do. And the Scottish back row of their 1990 Triple Crown and Grand Slam team: Fin Calder, John Jeffrey, and Derek White. But I would also want to make room for the imperious French back-row player Olivier Magne. Known to his admirers as Charlemagne. And the fearless Scottish back-row forward David Leslie. I first saw him play in one of those January Scottish trials when he was playing for Dundee HSFP. He missed a couple of tournaments with injuries, including a broken leg, but he was subsequently a stalwart and captain at Gala, and practised as an architect in the Borders. And I’ve left out the great, long-haired Andy Ripley, of Rosslyn Park and England, who died all too young.

Scotland Grand Slam 1990

PostScript

It is easy for old farts to think that all the important things in life get steadily worse: sausages, standards in public life, the quality of Sunday preaching, and international rugby. But I was hugely encouraged, at least in part, by the first round of this year’s Six Nations. Yes, Wales are hitting a new low, short of players, money, ideas, and leadership. Yes, Scotland were dire against Italy, a good team on paper woefully under-performing. And confirming that Gregor Townsend will have to go. But Italy were excellent in atrocious conditions in Rome. England with a vast pool of high class players continued their winning ways. And France in Paris, at least for the first half, played some of the best rugby I have seen in years. France v. England in Paris on Saturday, March 14th,  could be a tumultuous climax to the tournament. 

Roll on Le Crunch !

February 2026