BEDROOM BANKSY

If you saw me this week, you’d be forgiven for asking why I’ve dressed up like Banksy. Currently I’m wearing old jeans, a hoodie with the hood up, and a face mask.

Well, Sammy’s got Covid. She’s okay (better than last time) and her main occupation at the moment seems to be collecting cups and glasses in the bedroom, while I sleep downstairs in the hope that I won’t get it.

It means that I’m also her butler this week. I don’t mind this at all, other than the necessity of dressing like a guerrilla graffiti artist with a tray of peppermint tea, hot squash and water glasses, and carrying those things upstairs every now and again.

“I didn’t even know people still tested!” wrote my HR manager on Slack.

“I think teachers have to,” I wrote back. She didn’t respond. I get the feeling most people are way beyond caring about Covid these days. Three years ago, this disease was causing panic everywhere; nowadays no-one seems especially bothered whether people have it or not. I guess it’s still pretty horrible. And the long-term effects of it are still worryingly unknowable.

Hence Bedroom Banksy. I’m negative still, so the isolation is working. Plus we live in a bigger place now and it’s much easier to distance - though it isn’t exactly the nicest setup.

You know, I don’t think the world is as nice as it used to be. I wonder sometimes whether we all raced back into normality and in doing so, somehow forgot about each other. Or perhaps the two crises that have happened since (Ukraine and the Cost Of Living Crisis) have blinded us to how much we need each other, and focused our minds on staying warm, and possibly alive in the wake of trigger-happy Russians.

I don’t want to be cynical though. And I don’t much feel like being a subversive preacher of woe and injustice in the face of an ever-deteriorating society. No. One Banksy’s probably enough.

PROFILING EXERCISE

Anyone who’s worked in any kind of office for a while will have done some sort of personality assessment at one point or other. I think the idea is that people end up communicating better with each other, working and understanding their colleagues more fluently.

I feel like I’ve done this a lot. There was Myers-Briggs, a system which divides everyone into one of sixteen personality types. My memory of that afternoon is standing at one end of the room with the introverts, wondering what in the world was wrong with needing to carefully plan a shopping list, as opposed to the prevailing ‘Just wing it’ attitude of my colleagues.

Then there was Lion, Otter, Beaver, Retriever - a questionnaire that acts like a sorting hat, putting you in with either the alphas, the socialisers, the hard-workers or the faithfuls. I longed so much to be an otter (creative, fun, social) that I did the test twice. Golden Retriever every time.

Enneagram’s popular too. I think there are nine categories, though I always get confused about the numbers. I came out of that one as a ‘creative with an analytic wing’ which I remember thinking to be a good summary. I quite like the idea of being driven by the idea of being able to build something but never getting past the planning stage. Though, that does explain why I’ve never written any of these books I keep going on about.

So to today’s. Or rather, the survey I barrelled through on the last afternoon before the Easter holidays. This one’s called DISC, and I think the idea is that you end up with lots of statistics about whether your personal need is to be ‘Dominating’ (No thanks), ‘Influencing’ (No), ‘Steady’ (Perhaps), or ‘Correct’ (Yes). I tumbled out of it as a ‘Precisionist’  a systematic thinker, requiring accuracy, who doesn’t like confrontation and needs a stable environment. 

We get to ‘discuss’ it all in workgroups on Monday. I hope it’s useful, and not just a big labelling debate. But then, I would wouldn’t I.

BLEUGH

It all feels a bit bleugh at the moment. Look at that word: bleugh. It’s the sound of vomit and helplessness. Sorry to have used it. Though it does convey a little about how everything just feels.

I hate cancer.

It’s got hold of a friend of mine. He beat it two and a half years ago, and now, unbelievably, after he got married and had a baby, it’s back, and it is spreading through his body. His last hope (this side of a miracle) is expensive treatment in the States. It’s horrid isn’t it? You wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but still it seems to grip the nicest, bravest, kindest people. Paul deserves a better future.

It’s a huge challenge to our faith. Why doesn’t God step in and do something? Why do prayers seem to fall so silent, unanswered like autumn leaves in spring? How can it be just and merciful to have the power to heal someone but then refuse to do it? I know. These are gigantic questions. Paul too, lost Heather to cancer in 2018, a year and a half before his own battle began. He had to face those questions then. He still has to face them, with his new family. I can’t imagine.

My wife understands this better. She went through it with her Mum. It’s a meteor crater in her history, a catastrophe too big to grasp through these starless skies. And now, there’s Paul and everyone who loves him, staring up, up and up, wondering those same gigantic things. Why? Why God? Why?

I guess there are a few responses we take. One is that we ignore the question and go on singing and praying like we always do. It is safe, faithful, familiar.

Another is that we steadily let the tinkling bell of atheism sound in our ears until we eventually find ourselves concluding that God must either be monstrous, or simply not there. Hideous, we know, chime the Dawkinses and the Gervaises and the Hitchenses - but inarguably true.

Both options seem like a shrug of the shoulders to me. Nothing we can do, old chap, get back to the jolly worship service; or, that cheery old nihilism at the bottom of the glass. It’s bitter dregs but boy the whisky was good while it lasted.

I hate cancer. No, specifically, I hate its shadow - the fear of it, the grief of it, the cost and the consequence. It just brings suffering.

But maybe that in itself is a bit of a key between the shoulder shrugs. Jesus, the one who left Heaven in favour of a smelly feeding trough, is described as the ‘man of sorrows’ in the New Testament. He knows this suffering. He knows the shadow and the grief. He’s with us.

I don’t know what will happen to my friend Paul. It is bleugh - all helplessness and vomit. I hope he makes it through, raises enough, gets the treatment. I also hope that God does a miracle so extraordinary that every newspaper in the land runs the story. But more than that, I think my hope is that the Man of Sorrows is with him, weeping and wiping tears, clutching white knuckles by hospital beds, asking the Father to rip open the sky and burst through. And while we wait for that glorious day, either the miracle or the end, my best prayer, the only one I have really, is for Jesus to be Immanuel - God with us.

GOOD FRIDAY

Easter weekend! Cool. Hmm, Where to start? How about here?

We polished off

The hot cross buns

And washed them down with tea

And then we made

Rice Krispie cakes

And built our Easter Tree

We played piano

Bathed in sun

That set upon its wood

And I maintain

As Fridays go:

This one was pretty good

That was yesterday, Good Friday. We also went into the Forbury Gardens for our church’s annual Good Friday service. That was so nice - buds on the leafless trees, a sky as blue as ever its been, and brilliant white daisies sprouting from luscious green grass. The warm sun cast dappled shadow on the trees as we sang about Jesus into the open air.

I thought a lot about the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem. I was there on a warm February evening, but I wondered what it would be like on days like these. Would that same light cast shadows on those old gnarly olive trees? Would the splashes of colour sing from the flowerbeds around the stone benches as they did in the Forbury? I hoped so.

Lots to do today - eggs to drop round, Easter cards to write, things to pack, and lists of lists to think about. I always think of this Saturday as ‘Silent Saturday’, profound in its quietness, but of course, it, like the days around it, is filled with life and light.

I like this time of year. I like the blossom and the colours, and when the sun beams through crystal blue skies, and you realise you can leave your coat at home; it’s a wonderful feeling. It’s hopeful.

COLLAPSED VIADUCT

“Yeah so what you need to do,” he sighed from behind the plastic screen, “…is take the 7:27 to Bristol via Didcot, then catch the X32 or X33 rail replacement bus that’ll take you to Oxford. Sorry mate. It’s the only way. Viaduct collapse. Yeah next please?”

I sighed too. I imagined an old Victorian viaduct, one arch given way to a gap for cold grey sky. I pictured a mound of crumbling bricks bending and twisting the rails and sleepers into weird, cruel angles, and an old man in a flat cap scratching his head and saying something like, “I ‘ent seen nuffing quite like this n’all me years,” while serious men in Network Rail high-vis jackets and hard hats dart around the mess.

That’s what I imagined. What I realised, even before the fleeced man behind the information desk had finished explaining, was that I wouldn’t get the Bristol train and venture onto the dreaded rail replacement bus service. The line would not be fixed by the evening - my journey home would, if anything, be worse. I was abandoning that plan and working from home.

It’s not a Victorian viaduct, at least not the handsome red-bricked kind I was imagining. I googled it. It’s a two-arched iron bridge over the Thames. The pillars are bricked, but the bridge itself is rusty grey, a kind of British Rail bridge circa 1976, now marked with decades of faded graffiti and river slime. And it’s not collapsed - it looks like it just moved a bit, and the surveyors are worried about it. It’s probably down to all that rain we’ve been having.

So no Oxford for me today. Instead I got the enormous privilege of hunting for the Post Office Warehouse in my lunch break. Now, I’ve been there and I still don’t know where it is. Nevertheless they were holding a parcel I missed last week and got into trouble for not receiving.

I don’t know if it’s like Brigadoon or something, but the Post Office Warehouse is just never where you think it is. I followed the sat nav, parked up and scanned my eyes across the industrial state I was in. Plumbing and heating, mechanics, Land Rover specialists, burly men carrying boxes, the sound of a welder somewhere, a distant shout, the smell of engine oil on the breeze. The car park was packed with white vans. No sign of the Post Office Warehouse.

It’s things like this that get me really stressed out. I phoned Sammy. She knew where it was. I was in a flap.

“I just wish I were the person who could treat everything as some sort of fun adventure,” I said to myself on the way back to the car. Instead I just get into a bucket of stress and panic about getting lost, and I really don’t like it. It was all fine, but I’d run out of time for lunch and came back home to my laptop.

On the way home, I was driving and remembering what learning to drive was like back in the 90s. I used to go to pieces if I made a mistake, and then made a dozen more in most lessons. My instructor once asked me what I was playing at and called me something rude. He wasn’t a great instructor. But that is how I feel often these days - one small mistake and I lose confidence in myself.

“Right mess, in’t it?” says the old man, still observing. “Still, bridge like this - ’n, you chaps’ll have it back op in nah time ’tall, eh.” He laughs at the men in hard hats while they set up instruments and exchange furtive glances.