B A R B I C A N L I F E


A View from St Giles’


Katharine Rumens Rector, St Giles’ Cripplegate


I


start with a disclaimer: this is a view from the Rector still on sabbatical, not from St Giles’. Some people I have met on my journeys have assumed that a sabbatical is for a


year. A friend took two years out from his day job to set up an art gallery so knows about creative interludes. Clergy sabbaticals are on the scanty side – three months – barely time to launch a new range of cosmetics or join the marines. This is the final month. Way back in the first days of June I


got to Wales in spite of all those road signs in Welsh. I met the English- speaking neighbours. There were the tricky matters of the person in the end house with an untidy verge (although careless wild-garden-ungardening is trendy at Chelsea), the hemlock which was everywhere and the magpies which were multiplying. To crown it all the cows got out onto the cliff path. There was a payphone by the cross roads for wider-reaching conversations but you needed the right change. A pagan lived opposite. At the


solstice she was out and about visiting the local dolmen with her hatgear and staff tied with red and yellow ribbons. She had hung a smiley sun in her front window which she maintained bewildered the neighbours. You would have thought what with the hemlock and the cows they had no time for bewilderment. She invited me in for a celebratory cup of tea. I asked if there were a pagan community here; she didn’t know – she chose to be a hermit pagan. Do pagans also have Sales of Work and Quiz Nights like the rest of us?


I read in the press of the slightly


more animated goings on of non- hermit pagans flocking to Stonehenge and Avebury. It has to be only a matter of time before the Welsh Assembly catches on to this and petitions for the return of the stones to the Presili hills from whence they were plundered. There was a jolly nice place along


the cliff path for fish and chips. Locally it was viewed with respect as ‘people from London’ came to eat there. In my ancient jeans and wellington boots I


38


was clearly not to be confused with those sophisticates. I booked a table but they were not fussed when you turned up.


It’s called the


‘Pembrokeshire promise’ – a sitting lightly to any difference between when you say you will do something and when you actually get round to doing it.


I was part of a visit to Caldey Island;


a Cistercian monk was waiting for us on the jetty. Other people are met off boats and planes by reps in natty jackets with epaulettes. Clergy invariably arrive in groups met by a religious. Father Gilgal mapped out the lives of generally prickly and impossible saints of the early church in the West and we slid down a cliff face to get into a hermit’s cave (Christian not a pagan.) The diet that day included wild samphire from the cliffs and ice cream to cheer us up on the walk back to the boat. I never did get the hang of that ride


on mower. It packed up the first time I tried it out. Brian from the garage came and mended it with a bit of tin foil. He likes mowing, not having a lawn of his own, and cut all the grass. Nor did I get to see that promising local production: ‘King Lear the Man whose Mother was a Pirate.’ Next stop was very hot northern Portugal. I can point you in the right direction to wayside crosses marking the lesser-known pilgrim routes from this part of the coast to Santiago de Compostela, but this pilgrim made the journey on wheels. Outside the Cathedral who could


tell? Some were hot and bothered and some were hot and exhausted. Pilgrims or trippers? Nor were staff and cockle shell a sign of the true walker as these could be purchased from the stalls outside the north transept. A couple of weary-looking men were sitting on a pew clearly glad to be there. I thought they’d walked. Otherwise inside the Cathedral it was non-stop photos. I read a pilgrim’s journal but she didn’t record her arrival. Did she also snarl at the snappers? She focussed more on domestic details like the state of her


blisters and sending home inessentials like tennis shoes and hair conditioner. Back in Portugal we sat in a church


where one Sunday in May each year they drive a cow three times round the outside. The notice at the back advertised a car-blessing service at Fatima. The friend I was with found none of this particularly note-worthy. The Fatima service was merely an updating of the blessing of the ox carts; nothing to get excited about. Roman Catholicism can be so colourful. In France I was met on a wayside


station (three trains a day) by a Benedictine nun in her summer habit. I was in Bec which produced rather than received its saints. I’d planned to be in silence so was invited to eat with the community. I couldn’t work out why we were being read a report on the Belgian beer industry until I realised the lunchtime reading was the daily paper. I saw I was the only one not eating my stewed apple with a knife and fork. This Protestant used her spoon; even so I could barely keep up with the speed eating around me. Further international news was whispered to me in the silence before the Eucharist one day. ‘Cat a un garcon.’ I had a clue what she was on about; the nun persisted, ‘Cat, Cat William et Cat.’ The next day a passer- by asked what the baby’s name was. ‘Il s’appelle Andre après le Murray.’ Not really. As all roads lead to Rome I will


shortly resume my pilgrim route in Italy - the concluding part of my sabbatical. Pilgrims depend upon hospitality: there have been oranges outside the window and bat droppings in the bedroom. I’ve drunk tea with pagans and cider with nuns, eaten ham sandwiches with monks and ice cream with clergy. All in all, I’d say it’s been pretty colourful.


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