A Tiny Bit of a Silver Lining

            A few days ago, I was looking through a checklist of things that need to be in place if an organisation wants to hold a summer playscheme for children. This is something that I used to do in the nineteen eighties when I was a vicar in Doncaster. Reading the new instuctions brought me out in a cold sweat. All the adults on the scheme must have a CRB check. Well - I would have fallen at the first hurdle.
           Why?
           Well, in the Doncaster scheme I mentioned we had a local playing field, which was secure. It had a chain-link fence which was secure, and it had one gate. One person at the gate could monitor everyone who came in and out. But the field was huge. An adult in one part of the field could not monitor what was going on in another part of the field.
           So we needed a lot of adults to supervise the kids. There were about forty kids, and I wanted to make sure that there were five or six adults there all the time. The trouble was that as always there weren't enough volunteers. At this point I hit upon a clever wheeze.
            This was all happening during the Miners' Strike. Part of the reason we were holding the playscheme was to help out miners' families, by simply tiring their kids out so that they weren't hanging around the house getting under their parens' feet. But at the same time there used to be weekly confrontations between the miners and police outside the local pits. During these confrontations, there would ususally be one or two fights, and a young miner or two would be hauled off and charged with affray. The penalty for this would be, let's say, forty hours of community service.
           Now the trouble was that the usual way of service this kind of sentence would be to help out at a youth club or after school club which took place once or twice a week. But doing this would 'burn off' the hours incredibly slowly. Twenty weeks in most cases. I approached the local police and made the suggestion that if three or four of these lads came to help us at the playscheme, it meant that the individuals could burn off their hours in a week, and it would unclog the community srvice scheem which was being inundated with bored and disaffected young miners.
           This was a marriage made in heaven. We got our adult helpers, They got their hours burnt off quickly, and the kids had local heroes looking after them.
            Of course this was the kind of thing that would have sent a SafeGuarding officer running off screaming. The helpers on our scheme were there precisely because they were criminal offenders. All of them had criminal records.
            The trouble is that it was all born of tragedy. The Miners' Strike was a disaster for the miners. Within a year of the end of the strike those self same community service lads had been made redundant, and the villages and towns of South Yorkshire had their culture and traditions stripped away. The kids at the playscheme loved having the equivalent of their big brothers looking after them, and I think that the lads themselves got something more out of looking after the kids. It prepared them in some small measure for life beyond the pits, a different set of values from those of the macho men bringing out the coal. A tiny bit of a silver lining.

Criminal Activity

            Yesterday I was in church as part of our 'Open June' season. I was sat by our inner doors which look out over towards the vicarage and the bit of Ponsonby Road between the church and the vicarage. A car then drew up containing two lads - late teens, early twenties- who were bobbing around listening to the music on the radio. Oddly, though, they did not turn the engine off nor did they get out of the car. Strange. One or two ideas were forming in my mind as I watched them, but then the puzzle was answered.
            A woman, 30ish, approached the car, and then suddenly, and I would have missed it if I hadn't been looking directly at them, she handed the man in the driving seat something, he gave her something. She put whatever it was down the front of her teeshirt, and walked straight off. The car then drove off immediately.
            In all the whole business couldn't have taken more than thirty seconds, and the hand-over less than two seconds. I knew that we had drug dealers operating around here, but I had never seen an exchange before. Mobile phones have changed the dealing business. You don't really need a 'drug den' or 'crack house' nowadays. All you need is a car and a mobile phone.
           I find it a tiny bit amusing that despite all their precautions - choosing a nice quiet street, doing everything with speed and forethought - I was able to see everything they were up to. They couldn't see into church because of the light differential, and assumed that no one would be there. Why should anyone be in church?

A Lesser Splash

On Wednesday evening we had our Poetry Evening. We hadn't advertised the 'do' very well, but we reached seventeen folk by the end of the evening. It was great fun. We had some original poetry and some old favourites.

For my turn, I read from W. H. Auden, a poem called 'Musee des Beaux Arts'. It is about a painting by Pieter Bruegel called 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. The painting is a sly take on the ancient myth about Icarus and his father Daedalus who try to escape from captivity by making two pairs of false wings. These are feathers sealed together with wax. At first they fly off with no trouble, but the exhilirated Icarus flies higher and higher, but too close to the sun, which melts the wax and disintegrates his wings. The poor lad then crashes to earth.  This is it:



In some ways there is a comic element to this. All you can see of Icarus is his two legs splashing about in an ungainly fashion as he sinks beneath the water. This is down towards the bottom right hand corner of the painting. And the point is that no-one is looking. No-one notices. Even the closest figure to him, the fisherman, is concentrating on his line rather than the tragedy taking place before him.

Auden's poem is a bit more po-faced than the painting. He turns the image into a meditation on suffering:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

But there are some lovely touches:

some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree

We don't know what sort of life dogs have so Auden simply refers to 'their doggy life'. The dog in the picture is looking up in the same direction as his dreamy master, the shepherd, but he is in his own thoughts or what passes for thoughts. The horse in the picture has a large behind, and you can just imagine him backing up to a tree and having a good scratch.

The reason that this poem speaks to me as a Christian is that it is true - most suffering in this world goes on out of sight. We don't notice it. It's over there somewhere. We can't do anything about it, or so we think. But we have no excuse to be ignorant. When Jesus talked about the Rich Man and Lazarus, it was the Rich man's ignorance of the poor Lazarus at his gate that most annoyed him.

Our intercessions during our Sunday and weeday services are and expression of our concern for the world, but also an education into where so much suffering takes place. Suffering cannot ever be ignored, it must be addressed, prayed about, prepared for and tackled wherever it is possible. The tackling is the most difficult issue, but we have no hope unless we address, pray and prepare beforehand.

Yawn Tennis

I had to go down the road to Wimbledon yesterday. After hunting around for some bits of shopping, I found myself in the Centre Court Mall next to the station. As I came out of a shop and saw the sign, the awful realisation hit me - just a week to go until the b***** tennis.

It isn't just that the media will be saturated with the sport, it is also that the roads around here will be one massive traffick jam. It is absolute murder trying to get from A to B around here as all the side streets and main roads get clogged by people coming hither and thither swarming like flies around the All England Club on Wimbledon Park Road .

There used to be a visual joke about a crowd of people in a stand moving their heads in unison from right to left and back again as they watched the ball going shuttle between the two players on the court in front of them. Much fun was made of this phenomenon as humourists  ran ever more surreal scenarios as to what the crowd might be watching. That joke has largely disappeared. The reason? Well, there is very little of the ball going backwards and forwards between players these days. The ralley has become a thing of the past. (Some people might not know even what a ralley is.) I think that this is the reason I dislike modern tennis so much. In all of sport I do not think that there is anything quite so exciting as an acrobatic, fling yourself around the court, slam after slam ralley. I can remember them reaching fourteen or fifteen knocks before weariness or mischance sent the ball skying out of the playing area.

But now we seem never to see such prowess and agility in action. It is there all right. These are fine athetes. Well, yes, you might see a little bit of a ralley of up to five hits, but never what we saw in the past.

Is this just nostalgia for a slower, gentler age? Possibly. But the prime mover in the change has been technology. The materials that go into the manufacture of rackets and the string have made the rackets move the ball faster and with greater accuracy. There are far more aces now than there ever used to be. And now the ability to blast the ball has become an end in itself. They even have a speedometer calibrating every serve.
So what we are left with is a dreary blast, counter-blast of a game where amazingly fit, but otherwise (it has to be admitted) desperately dull young people fire balls at each other. Eventually in an hour or two, one will wear the other down, and will emerge the victor or victoria. I can't be doing with it. Dull. Dull. Dull.

How can the administrators of the game have let it get to such a pass? They could change the rules a bit to encourage more rallies - a softer ball? They could shorten the matches. Do we really want to see hours of just two sweaty twenty year olds slugging it out on television? Why so long? Boxing matches are just minutes, fencing matches are seconds, ping-pong - just minutes again. But there is a nasty great big fix going on. The All England (???!!?) Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (all of 375 members! I suspect Barnsley Tennis Club has more members.), the BBC, the equipment manufacturers, the corporate sponsors all have a massive vested interest in keeping things just the same.

Apart from getting duller, Wimbledon hasn't changed since John McKenroe foul-mouthed his way into the tennis establishment thirty years ago. All the other great sports have transformed themselves in the last twenty years. More action, more strategy, more zest, more unpredictablity. In Wimbledon everything stays the same. It has painted it self into a corner. A very lucrative corner where the punters turn up in droves, hoodwinked into believing what they are seeing is something to do with fun and spontanaeity. No it is all just a great big money making machine. I have no worries about the money making. But it is the machine that I object to.

Henman Hill will turn into Murray Hill, and in twenty years their clones will be doing exactly the same, year in year out.