‘Oh, they are, Rector, they must have been put in around 1960′.

‘Thank you’, I smiled, ‘I was born in 1960; that is not old!’

‘Ah, Rector’, he said, ‘don’t worry. You’ve a while yet before you catch up with me’.

At least a generation older than me, fresh-faced and with a great head of wavy, white hair, he is still farming. To be as young as him at his age will be a challenge.

The exchange brought thoughts of lines from a passage in the opening chapter of Milan Kundera’s Immortality, lines to which I have often returned, lines which capture that sense of timelessness that many of us have:

‘She passed the lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly coloured ball to her lover. That smile and that gesture had charm and elegance, while the face and the body no longer had any charm. It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body. But the woman, though she must of course have realized that she was no longer beautiful, forgot that for the moment. There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard (who couldn’t control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved.’

While the laughter of the young lifeguard in the story points at the ridiculousness of trying to pretend one is not one’s age, the woman’s action must find resonance with many people who feel that their outward appearance is not a reflection of their inner age, that what people see is not the whole story.

‘I was strangely’, moved says the narrator in Kundera’s story; he seems almost to feel a sense of pathos at this woman of advancing years behaving as if she were twenty.

Perhaps, age is external, but the exceptional moments when it is noticeable seem to come more frequently.

I spent ten days at Saint George’s House in Windsor Castle five years ago. It was a time filled with a sense of history, a sense of beauty, and a sense of wonder at how someone could live their entire life in public gaze.

Saint George’s Chapel, the cathedral-sized place of worship in the castle with its own bishop as dean,  is a place steeped in history, tracing itself back to the 13th Century; it is filled with the graves of English monarchs. One morning, I stood at the grave of Edward IV of England, 1442-1483. I didn’t suppose there were many who now grieve Edward’s passing.

But not far from Edward’s grave was the grave of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and their daughter Princess Margaret, there were plenty of people left to grieve their loss. At the time, I wondered if the Queen of England, who was then over 80, stood at the grave of her parents and sister and remembered happier times. I wondered if there was a moment for saying a few words and for shedding a tear, I wondered if she was ever given space and peace and quiet?

I don’t understand the relationship of the English with the Royal Family, on the one hand they declare themselves avid supporters of the monarchy; on the other hand, they seize upon every piece of gossip and rumour carried by the tabloid press. If people did not read such stories, the press would very quickly cease to run them, yet the slightest story sparks flurries of excitement on the front pages and on the television and radio news. Does the Queen ever have recourse to the press complaints body, or the broadcasting standards authorities, over the stories that are distortions and the others that are simply lies?

It is confusing, if you respect someone, then you respect their right to privacy and their right to having their own inner life; you can’t claim to respect someone if you splash every piece of tittle tattle all over the newspapers.

To have remained in office for sixty years must have demanded incredible powers of perseverance. If I had been in the Queen’s place, I would have called it a day a long time ago. I would have taken my family money and told the State that they could take what was theirs and I would have gone to live in Paris, where they at least have respect for style.

Sixty years, it’s some achievement.

Wherever Jesus went. the people sought him. It asks questions of us: do we seek Jesus where he is? Or do we expect Jesus come to where we are? Of course, we would claim that we attempt the former, but, if you are like me, it’s more like that we prefer the idea of Jesus being with us where we are, where we feel comfortable.

The place where I feel comfortable is in the sort of church described by poet John Betjeman who wrote the following lines in aid of a public subscription for Saint Katherine’s Church at Chiselhampton in Oxfordshire:

Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.

It calls the choirboys from their tea
And villagers, the two or three,
Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire.

The pictures that Betjeman brings to mind are of a world that is constant, a world where the old certainties remain, a world where the country priest celebrates the liturgy in honour of an unchanging God.

This is the world of Evensong and picture postcard villages and a stable society where there is no crime and no fear and where no-one locks their door and where you play skittles at the village pub and where you buy jam and chutney at the church fete. I’m sure you could add lots of details to the picture.

Like John Betjeman, I am very fond of Evensong. The words of Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 service sung by a boys’ choir create a sense of the God who is the same yesterday, today and forever. If I had to name my favourite service, it would be the 16th Century service of Evening Prayer.When I ask myself why I have that preference, it is not so comforting.

It is essentially a retreat from the world around, an attempt to escape from the realties that are not so pleasant. Evensong makes no demands upon me.In many places, the choir sings everything, so there is no need to really participate. At the end of the service, it is easy to slip away and avoid engaging even in passing pleasantries with anyone else.

It is not meant to be like that. If you read the words of the service, it is quite clear that Cranmer meant it to be a service that challenged individuals, but it is possible to go to Evensong and be undisturbed. Everything is nice and pleasant and reassuring; nothing grates, nothing annoys, there are no irritations; often there is not even a sermon.

Isn’t there a danger of expecting Jesus to meet us where we are, instead of us being like people in the Gospel reading who seek Jesus where he is? Is worship meant to be an experience of being gently reassured? Is it not also meant to disturb us?

When we are confronted with the greatness and wonder and glory of God, when we think of the reality of God, is not there an impulse not to be just gently reassured, but to actually go to seek out this God, in the way that the people sought out Jesus?

Jesus confronts people with disturbing realities about themselves. He comes into Galilee in the opening chapter of Saint Mark’s Gospel proclaiming the Good News and bringing disturbance into the lives of those whom he meets.

The life and the drive of the Church in its early years came from the fact that it was radically new and different. People were touched by their experience of God and allowed themselves to be so disturbed in their old way of life that they gave up their former ways and began to follow Jesus.

I love the world of John Betjeman’s poetry. I love medieval churches built in mellow sandstone. I love cream teas in white marquees. I love the sound of willow against leather on summer afternoons. I love stripy deck chairs and brass bands and village pubs. The problem is that God demands a great deal more from us than just preserving the things we like.

To be God’s people, we must be disturbed.The Christian life is not about staying still or staying in the past; it s a pilgrim life, it is about moving on.

If we are not disturbed, then the church will die. John Betjeman wrote those lines about an Oxfordshire church in 1952. Even then, only two or three went to the evening service. The church is now redundant and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust – like many other churches, a monument to a past age that future generations will probably fail to understand.

It is not nice being disturbed, but like the people who sought out Jesus in the lonely places, we are challenged to find Jesus where he is – not where we would like him to be.

Bus Éireann seemed always a rather half-hearted attempt at a name for a bus company, though given the failed attempts at rebranding public companies in Britain (remember Consignia?), perhaps something dull and predictable was advisable. For a Sasanach, Bus Éireann never had the full-blooded Gaelic feel of  Córas Iompair Éireann, nor would it ever have the same memories.

CIE was at the heart of my introduction to Ireland. Arriving at the end of August 1981 and buying a fifteen day travel pass, the CIE buses brought us to a place very different from the England from which we had travelled.

A CIE bus took us to Kildare, where we found the cathedral closed and the Japanese Garden an uninteresting prospect, and caught the next bus back. A CIE bus took us from Cork to an unspoiled Kinsale and back to Cork, having stayed in Summer Cove. A CIE bus took us from Cork to Killarney over roads the like of which is now a fading memory. A CIE bus took us out the Cahirciveen road and dropped us at the road for Aghadoe, where a wasp sting at a youth hostel brought a journey back to the hospital in Killarney and an invitation from a group of young women to abandon our planned itinerary and instead travel westward with them.

A CIE bus travelling west on the Ring of Kerry lulled an anti-histamine dosed, twenty-year old student to sleep, while his companions chatted and enjoyed the beauty of the landscape, only to be woken when the bus reached Cahirciveen and the group left it to walk to the ferry for Valentia.

A CIE bus returned the party to Killarney, and another took them to Cork, and one the following day took them to Kinsale; the two young Englishmen presenting themselves a seasoned experts on the ancient town.

Two days later, a CIE bus would take the Englishmen away to Cork for the train to Dublin, from where they would travel to Dun Laoghaire for the ferry that would take them away from Ireland. The departure from Kinsale would be as the end of a story, a long since lost photograph pictured a dejected-looking Englishman sitting with his back pack on a wall in the Co Cork town.

But it was not to be the end and there would be many encounters with CIE in the years that followed, and even the beauty of the Irish Setter used as a logo by Bus Éireann cannot match the dull CIE wheel for the romance of its memories.

It was the sort of optimism found in ”P Tang Yang Kipperbang,” Jack Rosenthal’s 1982 television film set in the Post-War Britain of 1948.”Quack Quack” Duckworth, the shy and awkward fourteen year old who loves the prettiest girl in the school, walks along with Tommy, the school groundsman as Tommy marks the boundary of a cricket pitch. He believes Tommy has been a soldier serving in battle after battle, not knowing he is wanted for desertion. Quack Quack tells Tommy that the soldiers have brought in a new age:

“From now on, there’ll never be any more wars, never again, for the simple raison d’etre that the United Nations will insist there’s no more wars. Any country wanting to invade another, well, hard cheddar . . the United Nations will vote against them, QED”

The belief that the world would be one without war proved to be unfounded; the belief that the United Nations would usher in a new age, even less so. The Cold War era had begun before the hostilities in 1945 had ceased and the United Nations’ Security Council evolved into the confrontation of the monoliths of West and East.

The fall of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s ushered in a new era, but after the mid 1990s, it seems astonishing, in the light of the United Nations’ record in Srebrenica and in Rwanda, that anyone should still believe that the United Nations could, or would,do anything to protect people, unless there were some major economic interest being threatened.

The veto of a Security Council resolution against Syria by Russia and China stands in a long tradition of the United Nations failing to protect innocent lives. What is surprising is that anyone would expect the Russian oligarchy and the Chinese dictatorship to do anything to promote liberal values.

The ideal world is inhabited by Quack Quack Duckworth and Sergeant Milner; it’s not inhabited by the people of Syria, or by the countless millions of others whom the United Nations have failed over the past six decades.

In a former age, the progress would have been monitored by the stations passed. There would have been the halt at Alford and the stations at Keinton Mandeville and Charlton Mackrell. In the daylight, the crossing of Somerton Viaduct would have been obvious, before passing the town’s station and going into the long tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel there would have been the little station serving Long Sutton and Pitney, then Langport East station, before Langport Viaduct and the flat moorland leading to Athelney. The cuttings after Athelney were passed and the train ran beside the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal before reaching Creech Saint Michael’ followed by the train’s arrival in the county town.

Such a possible marking of the journey was long past, no station remained between Castle Cary and Taunton. The only certain landmark was the tunnel at Somerton; the noise of the train reverberating from the walls. Beyond that point, progress was hard to judge.

Not wearing a watch in those days and finding the passing of time hard to judge, there was a feeling that it was time to move my book-filled suitcase to the door. The 1970s BR carriage was sparsely filled; it was not as though there was a crowd to  negotiate, but there was always an irrational fear of still being aboard the train when it pulled out of the destination station.

Clearly, judgement of time and distance was awry, for having slid back the door to the seating area to reach the open area at the carriage doors, and half carried, half slid the suitcase through, there seemed an interminable wait before Taunton was reached. Feeling faintly ridiculous at having moved so early, and fearing that someone might wonder what had prompted such strange behaviour, I stared earnestly out into the impenetrable darkness, as if knowing something unknown to anyone else on the train.

Since that time, the tendency has been to be the last rather than the first to move; the Ryanair queue, the 21st century equivalent to those 1970s train journeys, has to be down to two or three people before I move from my seat.

A fear of missing Taunton station would have served well today. Sitting on the Luas as it headed south from Saint Stephen’s Green, a moment’s reverie meant completely missing the stop at Beechwood and having to get off at Cowper, the next stop, and walk back along Palmserston Road; at least there was no suitcase to carry.

He must have caught sight of me screwing up my nose at the thought of tea in a particular house, for he told of taking tea and sandwiches with an old countrywoman.

‘She cooked on an open fire; not even a range. The old kettle hung above the flames. She would have been sat with a cat, or maybe even a chicken in her hands. She offered me tea one day and picked up the teapot from the ashes at the edge of the hearth. Then she picked up the tea caddy and, never washing the hands, took out fingerfuls of tea, sniffed them,  and put them in the pot. She then put the teapot back down on the hearth and got hold of the kettle. She poured the water into the pot while still standing; half of it missed the pot and sent clouds of ash flying in the air’.

‘Anyway, the tea was left to brew and she got a couple of old cups and put a drop of milk in them both; then she poured the tea into both cups. She put a spoon of sugar into one of them, gave it a stir and then tasted the spoon. It was not good enough, so she put another spoon of sugar in. She tasted it again and must have thought the cup of tea was all right, for she then handed it to me to drink’.

‘Then there was the bread. She had this old apron that might have been blue at one time, but with the cats and the chickens and the years of dirt, you wouldn’t be sure and it could have stood up by itself. Anyway, we had to have something to eat with the tea, so she takes a loaf of bread and puts it under her arm and saws off big slices with a knife. She takes one of these slices and hands it to me. There was a big sooty thumb print in the middle of it.’

‘She would have been in her early-90s at that time. She lived until the age of 98. I would never have been rude and refused anything’.

Mental arithmetic suggested that the woman might have reached adulthood before the death of Queen Victoria; the story was a first hand account of a figure that might have appeared in a storybook. More than that though, it spoke of an old Ireland where hospitality was a duty and where acceptance of that hospitality, however humble it might have been, was a recognition of the dignity of the person.

The story, and the many more he tells, should be recorded, not as oral history, but as a reminder of the ways of kindness and respect that are so easily lost.

‘So they say’, she said, ‘but I think there is still some winter to come. It’s cold out there this morning’.

‘But it’s not about the weather, is it? It’s about the light – the darkest season of the year is over’. The lady gave me the sort of  look she might have given to a strange eccentric. To try to have explained what I meant would probably have only added to the sense that she had been confronted by someone very odd.

Met Eireann, the Irish weather service, would agree with the lady about there still being winter weather to come. Their definition of the seasons uses calendar months: winter is December to February; spring, from March to May; summer, June to August; and autumn, September to November.

Using the definition of the seasons we were taught at our primary school, there is not just a month, but a full seven weeks of winter remaining.  We were taught the astronomical seasons, which fell into four neat quarters – winter ran from the solstice until the spring equinox; spring from the equinox until the summer solstice; summer from the solstice until the vernal equinox; and autumn from the equinox until the winter solstice.

So, if Met Eireann have spring starting on 1st March and astronomers have it starting a further three weeks later, how does the Celtic calendar have spring beginning today?

It’s about the light. The shortest day is usually 21st/22nd December. The quarter beginning on 1st November and ending on 31st January has the shortest day at its middle. It is the darkest quarter; it is winter. The quarter beginning on 1st May and ending on 31st July, with the longest day around 21st/22nd June, is the lightest quarter; it is summer.  The Celtic festivals of Imbolc on 1st February, Bealtaine on 1st May, Lughnasa on 1st August, and Samhain on 1st November, may mark seasons of weather, but they are much more seasons of light and darkness.

The lady lived in the city, in that land of permalight where the lengthening and the shortening of the days sometimes passes without notice. Move deep into rural Ireland, and it becomes clear how today is the beginning of spring. The difference light  makes can only be appreciated when it is not there.

The diner seemed to epitomize that age of optimism.  There was nothing in Britain to match the brightness and the brashness of the American eating place.  The traditional British café, with its menu of fish and chips and a pot of tea, had none of the glamour and excitement that seemed to imbue the chrome, glass and plastic of the diners.

Even Americans seem to perceive that period as a golden age; the chain of Lori’s Diners in San Francisco are fitted out in retro 1950s decor and reproduction artifacts. Not only are the interiors reproduced, there is a recovery of the atmosphere: good service, good food and good prices. Lori’s is the only place where I have seen people queueing in the street to wait for a table in order to have breakfast on a Sunday morning.

The diner seemed to capture a sense of the best values of small town America: community and courtesy and companionship. In Garrison Keillor’s descriptions of 21st Century Lake Wobegon, his fictional town out on the edge of the Prairies in Minnesota, the Chatterbox Café, the local diner, is still at the heart of the life of the town.

To English eyes looking from across the Atlantic, the diner stood for more than small town values; it was a reminder of the things Americans had that we lacked.

They had money. They wore clothes that made ours look drab, and they had plenty of them. They drove massive, extravagant, overstated cars; loud colours and tailfins, chrome and bright lights. Their houses were spacious, with refrigerators you could hide in and kitchens that lacked nothing you could imagine.

More than money, they seemed to have a sophistication which was absent from the England depicted on our two television channels where ‘Coronation Street’ seemed an expression of national life.

Of course, the appearance were deceptive and the realities very different. Nevertheless, the Americans were, and remain, far better at optimism and exuberance, not such bad qualities with which to approach daily life.

Eating breakfast in Lori’s Diner

Sitting at our weekly Tuesday morning parish staff meeting, the saintly, long-suffering Rector under whom I served, inquired as to where I would be taking my wife for our wedding anniversary, which fell the next day. ‘To be honest’, I said,’we’re not going anywhere – the money is a bit tight this month; we’ll go some other time’. He passed no comment.

While making lunch in the kitchen of the curate’s house later that day, there was a rattling sound from the letter box. Walking up the hall, there was a glimpse of the Rector stepping into his car and driving off. There was a brown envelope on the floor with ‘Ian’ written on it in his unmistakable hand. I had only left his house half an hour previously, something must have been forgotten, but why couldn’t he just have phoned?

Opening the envelope, it contained £15, a sum equivalent to one-sixth of my weekly pay, enough to go out for an evening. It was a gesture that has remained a vivid memory – unnecessary and unmerited kindness.

Going to an ATM at lunchtime today outside the AIB branch in Grafton Street, the screen declared it temporarily out of service. Stepping inside, there were three ATMs and a handful of people waiting. At the middle of the machines, a young woman who seemed probably a student from nearby Trinity College had tapped the keys to inquire as to her bank balance – €77.31 declared the screen in digits so large that it was easy to read from a distance. The young woman paused before proceeding to tap further keys to withdraw cash, obviously pondering how much she might afford.

The memory of my Rector suddenly returned. I stepped forward to withdraw cash. I could hand her €20 of it and would not even notice, but the machine seemed to take an inordinate time to issue the notes and by the time I stepped outside she had disappeared into the crowds on Grafton Street.

The recession has frightened us into spending less and saving more. As prices have fallen, it has left those with secure incomes and paid mortgages with more money in their pockets. As prices have fallen, it has led to fewer jobs and fewer opportunities for people to earn money. While I have more, the young woman at the next cashtill has less.  Handing her cash would not even have been an act of kindness, it would simply have been a matter of justice; and it would have made one small corner of the world seem a happier place.