Stop all the clocks.....

My mum died recently. She was 83 and had been ill for some time but it was still a terrible shock when it happened. My dad died eleven years ago so suddenly I am a member of the oldest generation in our family which feels a bit scary. There feels a great sense of finality about it all. The house that I’ve regarded as the family home for forty years will now be sold and with it will go so many reminders of my childhood. The big garden where I used to play as a boy, the greenhouse where my dad would sit and drink tea and smoke, the lounge where mum would sit reading with one of her cats on her knee.   I am currently researching my family history and now there will be no-one left to talk to about Mum and Dad’s generation, a link with my past and with who I am has gone.

Mum had suffered from Dementia for the last eight years or so and what a terrible experience that was for her and for all of us. I sometimes think that people who have never experienced Dementia at first hand assume that the person with it just goes delightfully dotty but the reality is very different. Mum was always conscious of the fact that she was losing her faculties and it was very distressing for her, she used to say to me “I’ve lost my marbles haven’t I?” And life became very confusing for her as her short term memory worsened. She couldn’t understand why she was in the house on her own and why dad wasn’t home yet for his tea. And she became very obsessive about things and would ring me about them every couple of minutes which got really wearing. Her favourite phrase (which we were tempted to put on her gravestone) was “Can someone tell me what the hell is going on!” It was heartbreaking to see the constant state of agitation and distress she lived in.

The other heartbreaking thing was watching mum lose her memory of who had been near and dear to her. For the last few years of her life she had no memory at all of my dad who she had been married to for over fifty years before he died. Nor did she recognise me or my brothers or my children which was very upsetting for all of us. It seems a particular shame that she wasn’t able to enjoy watching her grandchildren grow up and share the special time with them that so many grandparents revel in. I feel like we were all robbed of those last few years of her life. And unfortunately my main memories of my mum at the moment are of those last few years and I really hope that in time I will be able to recover happier memories of when she was still the lively, vibrant and roguish person that was Jean.

Like many parents, Mum always retained that marvellous ability to embarrass me in public. I was the youngest of her four children and even when I was in my thirties she would still introduce me to people as “my baby”. And she continued embarrassing me right up to a few months ago when she was taken along to a church service in the care home where she lived and she heckled the vicar (she was a confirmed atheist!) But she was also kind and loving and we shared a love of history and visiting historic places. And I know that she influenced for the good the lives of many young people that she worked with over the years as a secondary school teacher. Mum was a real old fashioned character and I miss her every day. 

Rest in peace Jean.

Rembrance Sunday Sermon

In my teenage years I went to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School for Boys in Mansfield.  One thing that was very important at our school was remembering.  You see the school was not named after Queen Elizabeth the second but after the first Queen Elizabeth. Our school was over four hundred years old and that sense of history was very important to the school.

Every morning the whole school gathered for assembly in the oak panelled Great Hall. Engraved in gold leaf around the hall were the names of all the school head boys since its founding as well as the names of boys who had gone up to Oxford and Cambridge. The houses in the school were all named after old boys, two of whom had become Archbishops of York. As we went through the school we came to appreciate the importance of all this remembering. Because the boys and staff who had gone before us had made the school what it was today. That remembering of those who had gone before us gave us our sense of identity as a school and as pupils at that school.

On the playing fields of the school was a cricket pavilion that had been erected as a memorial to the Old boys of the school who had died in the two world wars. I can remember as a young boy reading the list of names and the words that were written underneath them which were:

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them”

I had never come across these words before and I did not realise then that they come from the famous poem by Laurence Binyon. Of course I have heard these words countless times since at Remembrance Sunday services and seen them engraved on War memorials all over the country.  But as a young boy they fascinated me and led me to find out about the wars that these men had fought and died in. And when I grew up I visited some of the battlefields where those men had died and learnt about the terrible suffering that they had endured.

And when I was growing up the names on the war memorials at my school and in our town were very real to me. Because they were the names of family members such as my great uncle James Sparkes who had been killed during the Battle of the Somme during the first world war. They were the names of relatives of friends who I grew up with. And the wars themselves were remembered by family members who lived through them, like my granddad who fought on the Somme and my dad who was a radio operator in the RAF in the second world war, whose only experience of going up in a plane was in a Wellington Bomber over Chesterfield which was enough to scare the life out of him.

But now I suspect that for many of us the names on the war memorial across the road which we will gather around later this morning are just names. Those names may of course bring back memories of lost loved ones to some of you here but for the majority of people who pass by that memorial every day they are just names carved in stone. And that is a great shame because I think that it is important to remember the people that they were, where they fought and died and what they fought and died for. Because I feel that remembering them as individuals is the true meaning of remembrance.

When we go across the road the first name that we will see on the memorial is that of George Brown. George lived on the green here in Romanby and he sang for many years in the church choir at this church. Picture him stood behind me in the choir stalls. He served in the Durham Light Infantry in the First World War and died during the Battle of the Somme on 29^th September 1916. He was only twenty.

A bit further down the memorial is the name of Harold Senior who used to live with his wife Maud at Orchard House in Romanby and used to be a member of  Romanby Cricket Club. He died of mustard gas poisoning in France less than a month before the end of the first world war.

Just above him on the memorial is listed the name of William Morrison who has the unfortunate distinction of being the last local man to be killed in action before the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918.

Although William Morrison was the last local soldier to be killed before the armistice he wasn’t the last local soldier to die in the first world war. Commemorated on our War Memorial is Sydney Weighell who served with the Yorkshire regiment. Sydney was taken prisoner of war in March 1918 and after the war had finished he was killed on 20^th November 1918 as he was making his way home through France.

When we get onto the names from the second world war we come across that of John Leslie Mackintosh. He lived in Hambleton Avenue which is just the other side of Boroughbridge road from here. He went to the Grammar School here in Northallerton and he was a good footballer and cricketer. As soon as he was old enough he joined the local squadron of the Air Training Corps. That squadron is still going and the cadets came to All Saints last Wednesday and we had an act of Remembrance during which we remembered Leslie. After he left school Leslie went to work as a clerk at County Hall and in December 1941 he volunteered for the RAF where he trained as a wireless mechanic. In June 1944 he took part in the Normandy landings and he lost his life in Normandy on 16^th August 1944. He was just 21 years old.

The last person from the war memorial that I want to tell you about is Frank Catchpole. He used to live in the railway cottages here in Romanby. On leaving school he went to work for a farmer at Hutton Bonville where he learned how to plough with two shire horses, now a long forgotten skill. Later on he worked with his father as a linesmen for the LNER at Darlington.  He volunteered for the army when he was 17 but was turned down because he was too young. He was finally allowed into the army on 21^st January 1939 and joined the Royal Army Service Corps. In May 1940 he was caught up in what was known as the Blitzkreig when the German army swept through France and the low countries. He was killed on 17^th May 1940 defending the Neuport Bridge near Ostende in Belgium. He was 23 years old.

Those men are some of the real people behind the names on our war memorial. They were just like us, they went to school, they played cricket and football, they had ambition and hope for the future. John McCrae captured that notion beautifully in his famous World War One poem In Flanders Field when he wrote:

“ We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.”

And it is right that we should remember those men who are listed on our war memorial as well as all those men and women who have died in conflicts since, because they fought for important values. They fought to defend freedom and democracy. They stood up against the bullies for those who were being oppressed. They recognised the evil of fascism and were willing to lay down their lives to stop it. We are who we are today because of those men and women, we enjoy the freedom and peace that we have today because of those men and women. We remember them as real living, breathing individuals not merely as names on a memorial.

And that idea of remembering a real individual is at the heart of our Christian faith. In Jesus we do not remember an abstract theological concept but we remember a real person who was flesh and blood and went about amongst us on this earth. And at the Eucharist we do not indulge in some empty ritual dreamed up by people many years ago but instead we remember the actual acts of Jesus, how he took bread and wine and gave it to his disciples and how he asked us to do the same and remember him when ever we do it.

And Jesus stood up for important values. He taught us to love God and to love our neighbour. He taught us to work for peace, to look after those who were in need and to stand up for those who are being marginalised or oppressed. If the people and leaders of the world followed Jesus’ teaching there would be no new names to remember because wars would come to an end and there would be peace and justice throughout the world.

In a short while we will leave this church and cross the road to our war memorial to give thanks for those from our community who gave their lives so that we might enjoy peace and freedom. And as we do so let us remember that they were real people just like us. Let us remember them as the individuals they were, let us pray for those individuals who are still risking their lives for us in places such as Afghanistan and let us thank God for the peace and freedom that we enjoy.

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them”

Coast to Coast Bike Ride Reflections

 

A couple of weeks ago  I did a coast to coast bike ride with three friends (Stewart Ridley, Nick Marshall and David Taylor) to raise money for the Evolving All Saints project at our church. I have done coast to coast rides before but this time I had the changed the route in some places to compensate for the fact that I’m getting older and can’t get up the hills as well as I used to.

We started off from Happy Mount Park in Morecambe on the west coast. This brought back very happy memories for me as I was living in Morecambe at the time that my eldest son was born and I can remember pushing him around Happy Mount Park in his pushchair. I have a great affection for Morecambe and I think that it’s one of those really underrated places. It is of course a long time since Morecambe was one of England’s premier seaside resorts and these days it has an air of faded former glories. It is famous for its art deco Midland Hotel which has recently been restored and is now once again a top flight hotel. There are beautiful views from the promenade across the bay towards the mountains of the Lake District and the views are particularly nice in winter when there is snow on the mountains. It’s a place with real soul and I love it.

From Morecambe we headed off through the Lancashire countryside towards Kirby Lonsdale. The first hills came after about four miles and were quite hard going, a lot harder than they looked when we had driven the route in the car! We stopped for lunch in a lovely spot by the river in Kirby Lonsdale and from there we headed across through Sedbergh to Hawes. I had forgotten how stunning the countryside is in that area and the beauty of the countryside offset some of the pain in my legs as we climbed up to Gardale Head before having a fantastically fast downhill run into Hawes. After Hawes it was just a few miles across to Askrigg where we spent the night having covered 50 miles on our first day. 

Askrigg is a lovely village and it's famous as the village used for Darrowby in the TV series All Creatures Great and Small. We stayed at a really good B&B (Thornleigh House) and had a great evening at the pub next door (The Crown) where I had a very welcome steak pie and chips. 

The next morning we set out on the second leg of our journey and almost immediately encountered a steep hill up out of Askrigg. Nick and I decided that as we were not warmed up yet discretion was the better part of valour and we decided to walk up the hill (see picture). David however breezed up the hill as though it wasn’t there. After that we had a beautiful ride along Wensleydale past Bolton Castle and through Redmire before a brief stop in Leyburn which is one of my favourite market towns.  From there we headed across through some more beautiful villages before lunching outside Bedale church. Lunch was provided by Stewart’s wife Sally from the back of their camper van for which we were all very grateful.

After lunch we had a gentle run across to Northallerton and, after stopping briefly at our home church of All Saints, we headed back out into the country lanes. This leg was a lot hillier with some difficult climbs including one up to the appropriately names village of Upsall. Towards the end of the afternoon we went through the lovely village of Coxwold and passed the majestic ruins of the old Cistercian monastery of Byland Abbey before arriving at our final climb of the day Wass Bank. Wass Bank is an incredibly steep hill (about 25%) and I have only ever once succeeded in climbing it on a bike and that was twenty years ago when I was much younger and fitter. Stewart wisely abandoned his bike in favour of the camper van before the start of the climb but David, Nick and myself valiantly set off to try and conquer it. I only managed about to get about a third of the way up it, Nick got a bit further and David rescued our collective honour by getting to the top.

Our overnight halt for the second night was at the top of Wass Bank in some delightful pine lodges in the grounds of Stanbrook Abbey. The Abbey is home to an order of Benedictine nuns who moved to Wass in 2009 from their previous home in Worcestershire. So far only a small part of their new monastery has been completed but they have ambitious plans for the site. It really is a very beautiful and peaceful spot.

In the evening we enjoyed a good meal at a pub in Helmsley and the following morning we set off on our final leg to Scarborough. It was another beautiful day and if anything it was a bit too hot as we headed out towards the coast. The day started with a lovely long and fast downhill section into Helmsley and from there we passed through Kirbymoorside and Pickering before lunching, courtesy of Sally again, in the picturesque village of Thornton le Dale. One of the great attractions of Thornton le Dale for me is a garage that sells classic cars. I can never resist stopping and looking at what they have got in and it’s a good job that I haven’t got any spare cash or I would spend a fortune there whenever I visit!

After lunch we tackled the last 20 miles across to Scarborough and it was when we stopped for a regroup in a layby 2 miles outside Scarborough that we had our only injury of the ride. We were just about to set off and I had clipped my right foot back into my pedal when I suddenly felt myself falling to the right. I couldn’t get myself out of my pedal and I put a hand out to try and stop myself falling which promptly grasped the door of Sally and Stewart’s campervan which I then fell onto crushing my fingers in the door. To put it mildly it was rather painful not helped by the fact that Sally then plunged my fingers into a bowl of freezing cold water which she assured me was for my own good. Fortunately nothing was broken and I was able to complete the last two miles to the finish at the north bay in Scarborough. It was a lovely afternoon in Scarborough and the promenade and the beach were packed.

So we had made it! The four of us with an average age of 60 had completed the 145 mile three day journey from coast to coast. And, as is always the case with events like these, it is not the pain of the hills that I will remember but the beautiful countryside that we passed through and the wonderful camaraderie I enjoyed with my fellow riders. And the really good news is that our ride raised over £900 for our Evolving All Saints appeal.

To see a full selection of photoes from the ride visit the All Saints Flickr pages at:
All Saints Flickr pages 

Am I still doing this for fun?

I remember one day around twenty years ago I was out cycling in the Peak District with my brother in law Paul.  As we both struggled up a very long and steep climb called the Snake Pass, Paul pulled alongside me and said “Remember Danny lad, we’re doing this for fun!”

And that comment of Paul’s has been coming back to me a lot over the last few weeks as I’ve been training for a Coast to Coast Ride that I’m doing in September. I’ve been up in Teesdale training and the problem with that area is that you never seem to be able to go more than half a mile in any direction without the road starting to go steeply upwards. And a  number of times as I’ve struggled up difficult climbs it really hasn’t felt like fun and I’ve been increasingly asking myself why I keep on putting myself through such pain.

Don’t get me wrong I still love cycling but it’s the long hours of training for long distance rides that I’m really not enjoying anymore. I’ve done a number of these long distance events over the years, I’ve cycled Coast to Coast a number of times and I’ve even done London to Paris twice. But lately they seem more of a pain than a pleasure so why can’t I just stop doing them?

I suspect the truth is that it’s all linked in with not wanting to admit that I’m getting older. Admitting that I don’t feel up to long rides anymore feels a bit like the start of a slippery slope. Before I know it I’ll be shopping at Greenwoods and taking Saga holidays. And I’m really not sure that I’m ready for all of that just yet.

So for the time being I’ll continue dragging my poor ageing body over the climbs but don’t expect me to say that I’m enjoying it!