Always Hope

Jolly Pagans source Last week the antennae of some minor imp at the Daily Mail were twitched by the news that Cornwall's Religious Education syllabus is to include paganism for the first time.  Not a huge story for the Mail, but just enough of a hint of "political correctness gone mad" for the paper to generate a bit of indignation. This was soon picked up by the kind of Christian organisations that respond to the same stimuli as the Mail, the Christian Institute reporting it with suitably pursed lips. And the Church Times duly arrived at the story on Friday. Except, of course, being the Church Times, the last bastion of responsible journalism in this country, it obtained a series of quotes from people in Cornwall who actually know something about it, and turned it into something quite uncontroversial.  David Hampshire is absolutely right. Cornwall has both a huge pile of ancient pagan sites, and a whole load of people who like doing religious or quasi-re...

Always Hope is equally fascinated and appalled at the workings of the bureaucratic mind. The world according to petty officialdom is a wonderful place, where words have alternative meaning, reality is determined by flow charts drawn up in airless offices, and nothing happens unless a form is filled out 3 months in advance. Anyone who shares my fascination will thank BBC Cornwall for publishing this in full on their website: Residents living in the former North Cornwall, Caradon and Restormel district areas should get a complete set of three new reusable sacks and a black box to replace the coloured disposable plastic sacks they currently use. But former Carrick district householders, who already have a black box, a red sack and a yellow sack can expect a new orange reusable sack for recycling cardboard. Households in the former Kerrier district will also get an orange reusable sack, a blue reusable sack for paper, but no box as they already have a blue box. Whereas residents ...

source: This is Cornwall http://bit.ly/HnxnAN A good crust and a trusty hand! A faithful heart and true! George Osborne's men shall understand what Cornish food can do! And have they fixed the budget yet? Shall pasties be served cold? Here's twenty percent VAT before it's even sold! And is your pasty warm? And was it when it sold? Here's twenty thousand Cornish men don't like to eat it cold! With apologies to R. S. Hawker

I'm sorry, but it's Friday after a serious week for Parish and Nation.  A proper post on St Paul's should be on stream tomorrow, but tonight I'm stuck on the local news and Cornwall Council's latest cunning plan to save money.  The Council maintains 247 public toilets, we are told, and being no longer flush, plans to dump responsibility for 113 of them.  The precision of this figure has been achieved by the Public Conveniences Informal Working Group, which has left no stone unturned, "visiting different parts of the county" to see for themselves what toilets look like, and preparing "a document for the cabinet", which is not a piece of furniture next to the loo where reading material can be left, but a senior body of councillors whose time is never better spent than poring over the roll of Cornwall's conveniences. The wonderful world of local government has always baffled me.  I understand that local authorities are facing vicious budget c...

Yesterday I took a funeral.  This is not unusual, although in our slightly smaller than average parish, we get fewer than most.  When I first came here, after being the curate in a large seaside parish which we affectionately termed "the death zone", that was quite a relief.  But after a suitable time to recover, I realised that actually I don't dislike funerals at all.  I know some of my colleagues are a little jaded with the funeral business, and sad to say some are downright snooty about taking the funerals of those who only think of coming to church feet first, while others suffer terrible angst about what to say in the sermon on such occasions.  But for me, when they work well, as it did yesterday, there's really nowhere I'd rather be. Admittedly this was an unusual one.  Not least because when someone has reached 100, there's really little left to regret, and a great deal to celebrate, as I said in the sermon.  Many funerals are much harder, ...

It was nice out there this morning! I'm not getting great picture quality with my phone, but you get the idea.

Time to tidy up a few loose ends, relating to the last three posts on Always Hope. Last night's post on religion and the BBC seems to have attracted a lot of interest (I say a lot, but it's all relative), although the general thrust of opinion seems to be in the opposite direction - Bishop Nick Baines and LankyAnglican make the point on their blogs. I think the case is well made but still believe that this is not a drum we should be beating, for the reasons I attempted to set out in my post. Meanwhile, I need to clarify something I wrote in Cameron's Cornish connection . When I referred to "the Duchy", I was of course describing the ancient and Royal Duchy of Cornwall itself, not the private hospital which is situated adjacent to Treliske, for the convenience of Doctors who need to fit in their NHS jobs between private consultations. One or two cynics have suggested that Samantha Cameron might quietly move across the road in the next day or two, to which Alwa...

Always Hope congratulates David and Samantha Cameron on the birth of their daughter (un-named, presumably on a temporary basis) and notes with pleasure that BBC Cornwall are able to make the story their online headline today, beating unusual plants and fish-related stories further down the page than they normally are. This is, of course, because Cameron petite , coming a bit earlier than expected, interrupted the family holiday and was delivered at our very own Royal Cornwall Hospital (Treliske). This news will raise a few chuckles here in the Duchy. Everyone in Cornwall wishes nothing but the best to the RCH, which provides so many lifesaving services and is one of our biggest employers (the biggest?). However, it's no secret that the hospital has had its problems in recent years. Dogged by persistent criticisms and management difficulties, in many people's minds it is labelled with the tag "could do better". Perhaps, now, the new-forged connection with the hear...

A brief news update, largely for my own amusement. First, a couple of local interest stories of a botanical kind, demonstrating as much as anything how good the Cornish climate is for moisture-loving plants. This morning, readers of BBC Cornwall's website were greeted by the headline "plant growth shocks holidaymakers", now abbreviated to " plant shocks holidaymakers ", which sounds quite sinister. Mr and Mrs Godfrey of St Merryn were amazed to find their Agave had grown to 26 feet high in their absence. This is the kind of story that makes you wish that local news could leave their site blank on days when nothing happens, especially when you realise that the Godfreys had been away, not for a week or two, but two months. If I left the the Vicarage garden for that long in the summer, it would generate enough biomass to fuel a small town for a year. More interesting, but only to a very small number of people, is the news that the rare Many-Fruited Beardless Mo...

I'm very happy to admit that any suggestions that Truro Cathedral might be crumbling a bit can now be laid to rest. Watching the local news last night, I was pleased to hear that restoration will soon be complete, and to see this wonderful clip of the Dean and his lieutenants doing their bit for the appeal profile, and ensuring the sanctity of their new weathervane. "Breathless but exilharated" would be one way of describing the demeanor of the Very Reverend Mr Dean at the top of his climb, while his colleague Peter Walker looks entirely unruffled. But was anybody else alarmed to see fully three-quarters of the Cathedral Chapter making the perilous ascent together? One freak gust or loose scaffolding clip could have spelled disaster, and plunged the Cathedral into liturgical anarchy. Don't the people there know there are protocols for these things? The Prime Minister and his Deputy don't travel in the same car. The various heirs to the throne fly in separate pl...

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the completion of Truro Cathedral, Britain's only purpose-built Cathedral of post-medieval times. So, happy birthday to you, St Mary's. Curiously, the Cathedral is so old that it seems to have forgotten its own birthday, with no mention of the anniversary on its website. It falls to the Church Times to alert us to this milestone. Perhaps the Cathedral prefer to celebrate the anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone, which surprisingly was back in 1880, meaning that the construction took 30 years, a slow build by Victorian standards. Or perhaps they prefer not to draw attention to the fact that it's already falling down and they've started all over again.