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Spirit of the Blitzed
First there was the water drought, then came petrol. My business partner called at lunchtime today to inform me that the government had recommended all motorists to fill up their cars and Jerry cans. I immediately joined the panic buying queue at our local station and was transported back 11 years to the last blockade; by chance Nelly Furtados 2001 hit ‘I’m Like a Bird’ was on my car stereo, nicely counterpointed by the beeping horns of angry motorists. At the time I was sure that Steve had misunderstood this government announcement and was amazed to find out later that it was actually true. Imagine if Winston Churchill had told the British public in 1939 - ‘No need to worry chaps, but might be a good idea if you stock up on canned foods, grain, potatoes, bread. Might also be a good idea to get a small pig and put it in your shed… Just in case!’
God, how depressing. The Unite union say the dispute, that hasn’t started yet, is not about money. Although, strangely, right at the heart of everything is a demand for a minimum wage of £36,000. (Incidentally, shouldn’t an industrial action that could destroy the country be, ah, discouraged?) Meanwhile, every car owner, myself included, is determined to keep on moving, come what may. I heard about this possibly mythical poster boy for the pre-strike who apparently, after filling up his Range Rover, bought up all the petrol cans in the garage shop and filled them up as well. My own wait was somewhat protracted as the woman in front of me decided to combine her panic buying with the weekly shop - this took about half an hour, during which time cars backed up down the road for several hundred yards, effectively closing it off.
That heavy feeling of concentrated self interest was deeply dispiriting. I looked around at the people waiting and all seemed blind. Nobody was looking at anybody else. Just an awful fixed staring into space. The look of people who had completely gone into themselves. This is how it was when your Jewish neighbours disappeared in Vichy France. Or when those nice Coptic Christians down the road stopped coming to your Cairo Bridge Club. I suppose true Spirituality is rising above… The Fear.
I live 62 miles away from where I work and had an empty tank. What’s your excuse?
This is the micro church of Lullington, East Sussex. Apparently it was normal sized about a thousand years ago, but depradations and lack of money have meant that it now exists in this truncated state. Instead of fixing that crumbling wall, sagging roof or vicious dry rot, the various incumbents simply shortened the building each time. Now there isn’t much left apart from the tower so I suppose it’s as small as it’s going to get.
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Old men and heavy objects
Had this weird little clearance in the East End last week. A basement church belonging to the Coverdale and Ebeneezer Congregational Church which was underneath a 1960s tower block. This had just been reclaimed by the Ebeneezers (based in Nottingham) from a renegade Minister who had taken over the church as his own personal business. Sort of Pay as You Pray, gullible parishioners a speciality. The basement in fact was about one fifth church, four fifths super-pub complete with multiple draught beers, stage, dance floor and original 60s disco ball. This was obviously a big part of Reverend NoGoods finance stream.The church, incidentally, was mostly full of gay erotic paintings, prints, sculptures and, er, collectables. I should add, not as part of the normal fabric of a Congregational church but because a tenant upstairs had died and they had to store this stuff somewhere.
The challenge was for the two of us to get the pictured church font up the stairs and onto our van. We tried to use the Stannah Stairlift but someone else had already burned that out. In the end we separated the half-tonnish bowl from the base and rolled it up a scaffold plank, one agonising facet at a time. The tricky bit was half way up when we started to run out of puff but were also aware that if we let go, the thing would tumble back down the stairs messing us up. And then no doubt smashing to pieces at the bottom. Anyway, we did get to the top, both of our middle aged hearts pounding like jack hammers. After the back slapping, male bonding moment had passed the thought occurred to me - am I still going to be doing this stuff in 10 years?
A Touching Sign
I’ve seen this picture elsewhere with the caption “Well, yes. I’m that good”.
Not sure this is the best way to drum up new business.
And after the thaw…
We knew the cold snap was over when we found a mains pipe spraying water wildly across our No.2 Warehouse. This had obviously been going on for a few hours as the water was ankle deep in places. Sigh. And we’re officially having a drought as well.
Photo reblogged from Desolate Places with 2 notes
Reblogged from DesolatePlaces.
Those empty American churches, more unwanted religious furniture than you could shake a stick at…
Source: desolateplacesphoto
Ordinary People Doing Good Things
This is Steve Bird who was kind enough to help us on our Shoreditch Baptist Church job. He’s standing beside what is their total immersion Baptist pool, covered for the moment with sheets of ply. Steve lent us tools, loosened the pews from the floor, helped us with parking and liasing with the builders who could have made our lives a High Vis regulation nightmare. He even cleaned up after us and let us dump some unwanted scrap wood. All this whilst trying to do his own building jobs in the back of the church.
When not doing stuff for the church, Steve runs two local initiatives. One to train unemployed mothers as plumbers, the other to train unemployed fathers as tilers. If all goes well then mums and dads might all get to work on the same job, providing a synchronistic useful package. As he pointed out, he could make more money and have an easier life just being a plumber and tiler by himself but this way he gets to feel good, really good about what he does. Steve’s enterprise is called Plush Team CIC. (CIC stands for Community Interest Company). If you have work for his team in or around East London then contact him on steve.bird94@yahoo.com or call him on 0794 324 3681.
The Cool Designery face of recycling
James Plumb are a design partnership / couple who are very on trend at moment with their elegantly wasted take on domestic and retail interiors. It seems to be about spaces and material which are so faded that they attain a certain purity. Anyway, the above picture shows part of a project they did using our stuff. The shop counter is made from an old oak pew frontal which had been sitting outside our warehouse on a pile of near firewood for at least 5 years. Now, hey presto! It’s a cutting edge North London Design Thang.
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The Stand - By Stephen King
My favourite book is Stephen King’s The Stand, the ultimate showdown between good and evil. Never mind C S Lewis, if you want Christian allegory this is the Big Boy - in all ways. My son created a few pictures to illustrate characters and places from the book which my daughter then turned into a moviette. Music is by Singapore Sling and fits as well as anything I can think of…
Paste link below into browser to view:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPyqAQZ5zwA&context=C3979ebbADOEgsToPDskKodU8Y5bsvgPgsJ7cUcYli
Photo reblogged from Desolate Places with 4 notes
Deserted American Church
Source: desolateplacesphoto
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Deserted mansions of the vanished rich
This was a job we did a while back. A clearance of a huge house in darkest Surrey - one of those rare parts of Surrey that are so remote it could be… Sussex. This place had allegedly been the property of a Turkish Millionaire and his family until they disappeared some 20 odd years ago. Someone said they had made their fortune out of hairbrushes which may have been speculation based on the fact that an outbuilding was filled with hundreds of boxes filled with same. Empty ever since, the house was a mausoleum of damp and decaying DFS style furniture on a grand scale. I’m not sure if the property had reverted to the State or whether some distant relative had turned up to claim it, either way it was all to be demolished. The old Daimler with its 1970s state of the Art TV system had a 3 digit registration that would have been worth £20,000 +: One of the contractors managed to snaffle that. My favourite part was the folly in the garden which did not look as though it had been visited for decades, it was impossible to enter because of the dense brambles inside.
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Dogs in a Car
A new record for a customer visiting us - 6 dogs in a reasonably priced family hatchback. Look out for the nearly invisible caged black Labrador behind the Westie. The little Yorkie on the right trembled the whole time; but then they seem to do that a lot. The lady owner wanted to take away 4 chapel chairs but this just wasn’t going to happen…
Maria Bambina
At Farnborough Abbey there is a small waiting room for visitors which is mostly taken up with what seems to be a glass coffin containing a waxen baby corpse. This is in fact a model of the Virgin Mary… as a baby. This is quite a specialised niche devotion for those who are not satisfied with statues of the adult Mary. The Mother Lode (as it were) of this particular worship originated in Milan at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity, a Franciscan order. They were the first ones to have a lifesize wax baby of Mary and over the last 300 years their baby has been in turn hidden, venerated, neglected and worshipped.
Its great heyday was at the end of the 19th Century when the infant was given to sick nuns on an overnight basis. I wasn’t there, but I would imagine it was prayed to, cared for, cuddled even. Several nuns miraculously recovered from debilitating illnesses as a result of this regime and somewhat spookily the baby itself began to regenerate, transforming from a rather beat up discoloured object to the hale and hearty specimen which can be visited to this day.
September 8th, which is the Nativity of Mary, is obviously the best time to visit the convent. You may be able to obtain a small sacramental piece of cotton which has been touched to the baby by the nuns. Miniature Baby Mary’s are also considered an excellent gift for newly weds.
Farnborough Abbey
We recently have been doing some business with Farnborough Abbey which is one of those places which would be a fantastic find for any movie location scout. Subterranean passageways, secret basement tomb chapels, ancient and priceless treasures; Harry Potter could have done stuff here. Ditto, the appalling Da Vinci Code. Only a stones throw from Farnborough Town Centre (twinned with Snoozeville) the commuters who populate this deeply inoffensive townlet would largely never guess what a remarkable gothic anachronism the Abbey is.
Set in acres of secluded real estate, worth who knows what, with flocks of trained tame sheep, a handful of Benedictine Monks and the tombs of the last Emperor Napoleon of France, his Empress wife and his Prince son. Allegedly, the French want the Emperor’s body back but the monks won’t let them. Yes, I know, it is bonkers.
Napoleon the Third, of Farnborough, whilst disparaged by some historians, is nonetheless a significant figure. If his schemes had gone differently, Mexico would have been a vassal state of France, slavery would have endured in the USA, Russia would have crumbled into nothingness and Germany as we know it (along with World War 1 and 2) would not have happened. However, pretty much everything he tried to do with his army failed. However, he did create modern France and re-design the whole of Paris. Exiled after losing the Franco Prussian War he died during a botched experimental kidney stone operation. His only child, Prince Louis Napoleon died soon after, speared 16 times whilst fighting for the British in the Zulu wars. Mum, the Empress, built the Abbey as a mausoleum in which to grieve for her dead menfolk and as a uber French home-from-home. She outlived her son by 41 years, which isn’t what you want. The last of the imported French monks, Dom Zerr, died in 1956.
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