Dinton and Cuddington share future

A wonderful Sunday in Dinton, inaugurating the new Cuddington & Dinton C of E Primary School, along with the Revds Eric Chamberlain, who pastors Cuddington as part of Haddenham benefice, and Nancy Wallace from Dinton. With leadership from an able head, Pam Talbot, and Chris Blumer, chair of governors, two village schools with over 100 years of history apiece have merged into one new one on both sites:

• keeping the school lights on in both villages
  
• producing the critical mass to sustain future staffing and teaching excellence
  
• making effective use of a head teacher, rather than retaining all the paraphernalia of being a complete school times two

I suppose the logical alternative would be some kind of Darwinian shakeout, with one of the villages losing out. This has happened elsewhere — a bit of a bureaucratic dream and community nightmare.

People seem really positive about the future here — I couldn’t see the joins. The children themselves were brilliant — they really enjoyed their singing, including a new school song. After the service in Church, there was a pig roast on the School Field, with entertainment by the children, and (haven’t seen one for years) punch and judy. All this, and a beautiful sunny day...

Cows Come Home Shock Horror

Glorous afternoon at Bolter End Farm, near Lane End. There are only four proper working farms left now between Stokenchurch and Marlow. The Lacey family have been farming here over 7 generations. There’s a fine herd of 120 Guernseys, some chickens and around 400 acres.
The situation of tenants, which the Laceys used to be, is often even more desperate. It’s hard work, but brothers Gideon and Daniel have stuck together and got on with it through thick and thin.

Interestingly, 18 months ago they took the incredible risk on bringing everything back home onto their farm. There are no food miles involved now. From bull to birth, from the field to the bottle, everything is done on the farm. This has involved significant borrowings, and the need to go out and market their own produce locally.

The scriptures picture farming as a picture of faith. Church people talk about faith as what you believe in your mind. But, as the man said, faith without works is dead. It’s is about life as much as religion; patience as much as politics. Here’s real faith, staking your whole family future on a vision for working the land, and a way of life that’s becoming more and more unsustainable in this country.

In France, is quelque different. There are far more small farmers, and the supermarkets and banks are less greedy. Any connerie and ten thousand small farmers drive up the champs elysées and deposit several tonnes of Merde on the Minister of Agriculture’s desk. In the UK, with the best will in the world, we don’t even have a proper minister of agriculture any more! The government’s rural policy feels to many farmers like “go out and get a proper job.” And they thought this was a proper job.

The grim fact is that UK supermarkets and banks have beggared thousands of English dairy farms into extinction over the past ten years. Like all world food prices ours are rising now, but fuel, energy and feed costs are soaring. There may be one or two corn barons in East Anglia, but, as with other media lost causes, beware stereotypes about farmers.

Let’s zoom in on the dirty truth about dairy. The Blue is the farm gate price. The Purple is the distributor/ processor element. The Cream, in every sense, is Lord Tesco’s Cut. In 1995, the farmer got about 24 pence a litre, the distributors got about 18, and Lord Tesco and chums got 1 and a bit. That may sound low, but of course he sold many litres compared to the farmer, so he wasn’t exactly short of a few bob. Can you believe it, but these days the farmer gets a bit less, and the distributor much the same, whilst UK supermarkets are taking a huge cut — 10 times as much as back then! The argument for going local is to try and bring some of that margin back to the people who actually do the work. Otherwise some are actually being paid less than 10 years ago. Cut out supermarket Shareholders and for roughly the same price, the farmer gets a living wage. So why doesn’t everyone go local? Well it’s a hell of a risk, but the Laceys are going for it. They had no option when the costs of fuel and feed started soaring. It was that or bust. As consumers we have more options to go local than we might think — They’re doing it in Totnes, our diocese has been pushing the idea of going local, and all sorts of people are beginning to do it here in the Thames Valley.

It was gratifying to be told that during the awful foot and mouth outbreaks of recent years, many farmers found it was the church that was there for them as a solid network and support. I know Linda Hillier did fantastic work in Slough during last year’s government induced foot and mouth cockup. Glyn Evans is deeply involved with Farm Crisis network and a host of other rural causes. Unless and until we turn the whole country into a theme park, farmers are the backbone who sustain the basic fabric of our rural communities as employers, councillors, and churchwardens. Here’s thanking them.

As Daniel and I put the world to rights, standing on the hillside, I realised nobody would do this for the money, but it’s a way of life that blesses all of us. Like the lady walking on corn starch, it’s real faith in action— not sabre rattling with your student union chums, but getting out there and taking risks in the real world; staking the farm, literally, on weather and land and hard work. Beautiful as they are, the chiltern hills are too chalky to be bountiful — it was the installation of piped water that transformed them for cow farming. That and hard graft. Throwing it all away for short-term bank and supermarket profits would be a crime and a waste.

Gatehangers of Ashendon, unite!

I have sung the praises of John Boughton, of Ashendon before round here. He’s been a churchwarden 55 years, as have members of his family over several generations. John made my pastoral staff, having farmed sheep in these parts a while ago. Therefore I couldn’t refuse the offer of speaking at the annual Ashendon Gate Hangers Dinner. Back in the late fifties the village allotments needed a new gate. John made it, but it took a few years to hang, along the lines of this old story:

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it,
but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that
because it was Everybody's job.
Everybody thought that Anybody could do it,
but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody
when Nobody did what Anybody could have done...

Anyway, after much discussion in the pub over a few years, by 1962 the gate was hung. A celebration dinner was organised in the Red Lion. There hadn't been that much by way of village feasts since George VI’s coronation in 1937. That night, John made a gate to present to the person who had done the noble deed.

And every year since, a dinner has been held in the Red Lion, and a presentation made to the man who has done something special for the village, practically speaking, during the year. This tradition is now in its 46th year, and in the eighties the name of the pub was changed to the Gate Hangers — the only one in the country; and now you know where it got its unusual name. I was proud and delighted to turn up and tell a few jokes to the 50-ish people at this year’s dinner.

All very English, you may say. People talk about hi-concept ideas like social capital. This story demonstrates how churchwardens can bring people together in a village and, in the process, get a gate fixed for the allotments...

Holy joy in a (nameless) holy place

Easter Day this year ended up for me celebrating Christ’s resurrection with a couple of dozen people in what I’m told is the smallest Church in Bucks — Little Hampden. For just over 800 years it has served what is now a few scattered houses up a valley high in the Chilterns. Historically it went with Hartwell, miles away, but it’s now in with Great Missenden, most ably served by Rosie Harper, and Tricia Neale. It’s so small that it’s hard not to feel very much connected and part of things. Worship included the world’s most adorable baby, about eighteen months old, who pootled up and down throughout proceedings smiling at everything and commenting in a surprisingly quiet and gentle, stream of consciousness, kind of way. A tangerine is certainly not a small orange.

It’s all split levels, with a beautiful simple altar table from the fourteenth century. There’s a parvis room over the porch, but nobody knew the way in any more! This church has no certain dedication, but a lot of Saint Christopher, in the glass, and in an unusually tall 13th century wall painting that originally greeted you as you entered the Church from the other side.

It has a lot of wall painting, including this doom in an usual position on the South wall — St Michael weighing souls, whilst the Devil jumps up and down on the bad side, trying (unsuccessfully) to outweigh Our Lady on the good side! I also noticed a 12th century Bishop, wearing exactly the gear I’d just had on at Coleshill for the big service earlier that morning. It’s always moving to stand in the place where hundreds of years of Christians have worshipped, especially in the very intimate setting of Little Hampden, with us all jammed together closely in a holy place the size of a living room.

Somebody said to me how disappointed they are by Fleet Street dwindling congregations, so we looked in the book which went back sixty years, and discovered that in general more people go to Church there now than did sixty years ago! I have had exactly this conversation followed by the same revelation of reality three times already this year. It’s strange how Flat Earth News becomes part of people’s consciousness, regardless of reality...

Unity and Community in Marsh Gibbon

I was really delighted to lead parish communion at Marsh Gibbon this morning. People and attitudes there reflected the meticulous and caring ministry of the Rector, David Hiscock. The epistle was Romans 5, which sometimes ties people in knots, but the reader had obviously bothered to work through it beforehand in a version he understood, and something really powerful came through. The Gospel reader had obviously prepared, too. Sometimes “reading the lesson” is the job people assume any idiot can do without any preparation. It just isn’t, and it was great enrichment to our worship to have lessons read intelligently and feelingly, so that we were all drawn in.

St Mary’s is a fairly straightforward 13th century Church, although I think of tower pinnacles as more West Country than Bucks. What caught my eye were wonderful banners laid up in the Church from the Marsh Gibbon Friendly Society. This was started in 1788 by some bell ringers, and provided sickness and death benefits, along with an annual Oak Apple Day service and feast in the village. It still has over 200 members, and brings all sorts of people together.

The Friendly Society is a great story about ordinary people doing something together to improve life for everybody, 200 years before all the jargon about social capital and capacity build. More worrying is the fact that this village which had 25 farms in 1945, and 11 in 2000. Today it has 4 working farms — a striking sign, whatever Lord Tesco may claim to the contrary, of the way he and his chums have been devastating rural England over the past 8 years. Hmm.