Battles lost; battles joined; battles won.
I’ve no idea why I choose military metaphors for this post other than for the very obvious reason that I’ve long been a lost cause.
The last few weeks I’ve been struggling with my health. I’ve also been privileged to be away in Norfolk for a few days where I saw some of the most stunning English churches one of which was in Salle ( pronounced Sawl). It is not only extraordinary in its own right but had all sorts of odd survivals from a ruined medieval past. There are still lower sections of the rood screen. There are still some wall paintings. In the nave is buried the grandfather of that most tudor knave, Sir Thomas Boleyn – no more than a poor villein made good in a family of villains who did bad.
There are wonderful vibrant medieval carvings on the misericords. At once so alive we are left only with these oak hints of a lost world. Out there, one is struck by the cultural annihilation unleashed by the crude iconoclasm of the Protestant reformers. In Norfolk the force of the tsunami of Reformation petered-out as it reached these distant parishes. These communities of faithful were parted reluctantly from their rood screens; their vibrant wall paintings and their stained glass windows. The smash and grab of the rapacious Tudors and later the military and cultural nihilism of the Cromwellian roundheads was less complete in these forgotten islands of faith far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. Left within these cold, flint beauties are pastel echoes, faded figures, ghosting the walls. These artistic skeletons are all that survives of a civilisation dead as the dinosaurs. Not that we’ve learned too much from our distant Christian past. Post Vatican II, in the recently present, religious ideologues have once more indulged in an orgy of destructiveness in the name religious renewal. Once again they cast aside art and ornament as valueless baubles. Beware the Zealots – men and women who have all the answers have seldom posed the right questions.
I also managed to be shriven in good medieval tradition at the pilgrim shrine at Walsingham. Perhaps more surprising on a religious note was the fact that Richard at the grand old age of however many years he’d rather forget decided to make his first confession at the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. I’d never been to Walsingham before and I must admit it was both a strange and a beautiful experience. The old abbey is a ruin with nothing left beyond the east end and a gatehouse and bits of the monastic house incorporated into the very nice Georgian house of the family who inherited the lands in Henry VIII’s fire-sale of England’s unique spiritual patrimony – a crude privatisation of a thousand years of medieval art and culture. That anything so obviously catastrophic for a people’s cultural identity might be regarded as in some sense beneficial shows what arrant nonsense historians can pipe. No doubt these same wise men will opine on the good that came from the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. I merely observe that when we wantonly destroy art and beauty we make ourselves less than we are and should be as men and women: it certainly is not pleasing to God.
I have been waging another battle with the Department of Work and Pensions governed by another ambitious politician formed in the same soulless mould as Thomas Cromwell, Mr Ian Duncan Smith. Mr Duncan Smith you may remember was found unfit to lead the Conservative Party but this self-styled quiet man is still somehow perfectly fit for high office – an office from which he finds others fit for duties he himself probably would not find fitting to perform.
My physical health has long been impaired by experimental medicated drug therapies I helped trial in the 1990’s. It turned out their bad side effects were the price I paid for the relative good of being kept alive. I have long regarded myself as a lucky survivor. After surviving surgery and cancer I succumed finally to firey depression fuelled by managing multiple conditions resulting from physical disease.
Like many hapless victims of Mr Duncan Smith’s cold genius I was reassessed by ATOS – the company that funds the Conservative Party from UK taxes; the company that had the gaul to sponsor the paralympics with the same UK government funded income; the company that trialled many of the methods it employs here in the UK in the US; the company with whom the US federal and state governments parted company because their methods were too unscrupulous. Like many more hapless victims I was found fit for work without them even taking up a single medical reference from any of the five consultants who manage my care.
Unlike most hapless victims I fought back with the help of my consultant Dr Laura Waters and of my MP Kate Hoey. I have waged a lone battle and won against the odds. In these battles with the masters of the Universe who govern us for better or worse the odds are always stacked against you which makes any meagre success especially gratifying. As I have had to wage many a similar battle on Richard’s behalf on more than one occasion since the middle of the 1990’s I feel like an old campaigner these days. I remember also fighting for others in the 1980’s and 1990’s when our cause was unfashionable and gay men and women were deemed by the great and the good unfit for life insurance; unfit company for children; unfit for equality under the law; unfit for marriage; unfit to touch.
What a singular grace I’ve had to have a family and also so many friends who were proud of me just as I was – even if they worried over what others would say or do to me.
In Life battles won are always evenly matched by battles lost. Though the house is currently under offer, it is blighted by Lambeth Planning Department’s unreason. It means that having lost one sale we will probably now loose both a second and a third. I cannot give you any reason because unreasonably the planning department have for 9 weeks resolutely refused to give me one. I live in the looking glass world of being told to do something and then being told I never should have done it. As ever is such matters, when you are left holding a baby it always turns out to be a bastard no one wants to acknowledge rather than the one Madonna and half the world of celebrity wishes to adopt. Similarly when speed is of the essence bureaucracy moves at a snail’s pace but when mature reflection might make most sense, the sense of the urgent overtakes wise restraint. And so it is with 64 Clapham Road. Yet for all these difficulties this house is a special place; a place I love; a place in which I live happily but a place for many reasons I must love and leave.
Strangely as we considered moving on when we went back under offer a wonderful house came up in Maidenhead – in fact part of the the Old Vicarage attached to All Saints Church which is a true Anglo-Catholic architectural gem of purest ray serene on the westward side of Maidenhead. All Saints and its vicarage were built in 1857 by architect G. E. Street. Street is responsible for many churches and also notably the Law Courts in London, just by Chancery Lane. Richard and I went to look at it with my sister a week or so ago. richard was very excited by it and wanted very much to buy it.
As we drove my sister home down by Castle Hill she commented that she could never drive passed this spot without remembering him. At first I couldn’t think who she meant or what indeed she was talking about. Then it came back to me – the spot in question was where a young gay man was set upon by a group of thugs and knifed. He died in the road. His brave murderers were never caught. I recall this incident because at the time I was in University in Leeds and when I came home and went down with mum to mass I recall some of the flower ladies commenting on the incident – along the lines that he brought it on himself and it probably served as a good lesson to discourage others. The toilet on Castle Hill had an unsavoury reputation as a cruising area for gay men. Not only does this small anecdote speak to the big scale of the social changes through which we’ve lived it also reminded me of the unsung heroes and heroines of this struggle for equality.
My mum, my many wonderful friends, my sister and my brother and their friends; their spouses’ families and friends, these all became part of a circle of acquaintance who helped shape a cultural change in the way gay men and women were regarded. My fight was also their fight. My battles were their battles; so too my victoires are theirs to share and to enjoy. My family like thousands of other families also lived with us through the storm of hate; endured the fear of reprisals; agonised with us in our uncertain Gethsemane and stood with us under the cross of AIDS.
We are so focused on our extraordinary lives in these extraordinary times that we are apt to forget that others stood with us. They hurt for us. They fought prejudice in their circles of friends and acquaintance; in a profound sense they too came out with us. For these were the very ordinary heroes who already had lived through the dreadful want of the depression; the privations of war; the austerity of victory and who emerged unwearied by trouble and built a better world than anything imagined before – or sadly since. They stood with us for no better reason than family, loyalty and love; solidarity; a sense of right and above all shared common decency.
Old age has taken many of them & wreaths many more in its dependant frailties. But even in their glorious sunset at life’s end they fight on for a better world and for the dignity of all. Like the 800 saints made recently by Pope Francis – we may not know their names but we may honour them for their labour. Know them by their fruits it is written. Well we have this harvest in; its wine is golden and the vintage is good.