Not Broken, but Distracted

Radio 4, late Saturday night. I knew that voice; couldn’t place it. Talking a lot of a sense whoever it was. Ah, gottit! Frank Field, that was it. The distinguished and courageous sometime rebel Labour MP. contributing his Lenten meditation to their series. Its probably still available on BBC iPlayer. If you missed him, and you do nothing else before you die, search him out and listen.

The school holidays have begun. This I know for sure because the crowd of youngsters who inhabit the churchyard has swelled, and now there is a window broken in the Lady Chapel wall. We do not have the first lawn mower of Spring around here. We have the first broken window. Must have been last night, some time. I wait for the local police to call me back with an incident number, and then I will have to wait again for a crime number. Not that it will make any difference. No one will investigate; and the replacement cost, though it will be more than £100, is too small to be worth claiming on the insurance. It is not atheism or the Church’s sad preoccupation with incomprehensible divisions over women bishops or gay people being ordained that will erase the Church of England. These disrespectful young vandals are doing it quite successfully, all by themselves. Eating us away, piece by piece - while, it seems hardly anyone notices, and even fewer people seem to care.

I wonder what would be the public response if they had put in the windows of an Hindu Temple or of a Mosque? How would that be interpreted? Whatever, apparently if its only a Christian Church it raises no issues of respect, of religious prejudice, or of racism. Hmm. Rum one that. I don't myself believe the police will even try to enforce the legislation they could use to protect our building. They have strained resources, and anyway it seems its just no big deal. Even when there are photos and witnesses - I've lost count of the number of times kindly police officers have told me that my evidence or photographs are irrelevant, mere 'hearsay' evidence. The prevailng wisdom appears to be that "we can only prosecute them if we catch them in the act". New one on me, that. The English Courts will only accept evidence from police officers...?? Really?

But still, that reminds me why I had Frank Field in mind. I knew there was a reason. His lovely understanding of how the English need to fall in love again, as once they did before, with the idea of cherishing marriage, discipline in personal and family life, and our children. For a couple of generations, we have forgotten how that is a thing you have to work at. The result is the kind of distracted society we now inhabit. Social measures imposed by central government, like trying to use schools as social hospitals, or increasing university attendance to fill an employment gap (and hide the real size of unemployment?).... these are helpless before the kind of disarray we now have.

In fact if anything they make things worse. They have brought higher education into disrepute and hamstrung teachers with syllabus demands and a loss of disciplinary power which make their work close to impossible. Our daughter wants to teach and I am glad of that, for even today it is a decent, noble aspiration. But I so wish I could persuade her to choose primary school work, for there is, it seems to me, no longer any point in wasting one’s time with the older schools in their frankly hopeless condition.

We have taken too many things for granted. We’ve lived with the illusion that the background of English life has always been ‘Merrie Olde England’, when in fact it was anything but. English society has not always been nice and peaceful. More often it has been violent and decidedly unpleasant. Two, maybe three generations of laissez faire and imagined liberalism have not made us more tolerant and fair. They have seen us slip back into the sort of divided society where crime is common, where (though better concealed and in new forms) prejudice abounds, too many of the young are unmanageable, and many of the rest are simply disillusioned with all things.

There is a cure, but Frank Field is right. It will only begin if, as a nation we start to fall in love again with the idea of cherishing our children, accepting responsibility in personal life, in marriage and family life - instead of vainly imagining that things like schools or social services or child protection laws can do it for us. They aren't given things. We have to work at them ourselves. No one, to coin a phrase, can do it for us.