AN OUTSIDE VIEW

RT2240 , originally uploaded by jon jon be good . Some things can not be improved. One example is the RT bus. Introduced in London in 1939, and the standard London bus after the war, the type remained in service until 1979. A perfect marriage of form and function, there is nothing about it that could be added or taken away which would make it any better. It looks good from every angle. Faultless detailing and clean lines are enhanced by the simple livery and the LONDON TRANSPORT logotype on the side, in gold letters in the special Johnston typeface. The same can be said of the Tridentine Mass. In comparison, the Novus Ordo Mass is like one of those clumsy rear-engine jobs which weighs over half as much again, but without a corresponding increase in the number of seats, and with a fuel consumption to match its bloated weight.

fUnnerstal-preview , a photo by Nerammah on Flickr. Mass this morning looked more or less like this. Thanks to Pope Benedict and his document Summorum Pontificum , and thanks to our parish priest who took the initiative, we can, and do, have an Extraordinary Form Mass every Sunday, unfortunately at 8.00 am, which is hard when the mornings are dark and cold, and a difficult time for working people with families. There were about a couple of dozen people in the church, some of them regular weekday attenders. Unfortunately too, there was no opportunity for coffee afterwards so everyone just went straight home without talking to each other. The Mass was accompanied by discreet organ playing, though looking around at who was present, it could with preparation have been sung instead of said. There is a different atmosphere in the church. The action is simple and uncluttered. The sense of flow is smooth and quiet There is a stronger sense of presence. One is not straining to hear words ...

In Elizabethan England, a stubborn minority refused to convert to the Protestant religion but remained Catholics. One of these was the famous composer William Byrd, who nevertheless somehow managed to hold on to his position as Court composer. Many were tried and executed. Others fled to the continent or suffered a persecution as severe as many in twentieth-century communist regimes. Another composer, who became a refugee, was Peter Philips, who in 1593 found himself imprisoned in the Hague under allegations of being involved in a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth. He was one of the great Tudor composers of keyboard music and vocal polyphony. It sometimes feels as if contemporary Catholics are in a similar situation. It is not through persecution outside the church, from which point it is largely regarded as an irrelevancy, but from the inside, from the clergy and hierarchy. I have just resigned from the parish choir because a stubborn and not very perceptive new choir master got it int...

Demolition job Soon after Fr Dickerson retired, the other priest were moved away. If I recall correctly, Fr van der Most and Fr Benyon had gone by then and Fr Mark Elvins was curate. He went to St Mary Magdalen's, Brighton and Fr Michael Reynell was brought in to St Peter's from West Byfleet, where he had imposed the full panoply of changes following the Second Vatican Council. He was accompanied by an elderly priest as curate. The first thing to go was the Ad Orientem celebration of Mass (true east at St Peters), followed by most of the Latin - ie the responses and the Canon. This left just the Ordinary and the Proper in Latin. By the standards of today, that would be considered a respectable proportion of Latin, but the changes annoyed the congregration and it annoyed the choir, partly because the liturgy kept swapping languages in a messy way. The parish shed about one-third of its members pretty much immediately. Presumably some of them migrated to the neighbouring pari...

July 1978 saw me back in Hove and singing with the choir at St Peter's, Portland Road. It was a stable choir in a stable situation. Most of the time was necessarily spent learning the music for the following Sunday High Mass, which was all in Latin apart from the sermon and readings. There were three priests, the ageing Fr Dickerson and his two curates, the Dutchman Fr van der Most and the young Fr Chris Benyon. The latter had encouraged the setting up of a folk group which sang at the 12 o'clock Mass, accompanied by guitars. I think Fr Dickerson gritted his teeth but the ruling principle was live-and-let-live. We slowly increased our repertoire with some polyphony, including pieces by Palestrina. A few people left when they moved away from the area, and a few joined when they arrived from somewhere else. The music consisted mostly of the Gregorian Chant Ordinaries and the Propers, sung to psalm tones. The choirmistress tried to vary these from the usual tone 8g which it is t...

Lincoln College organ , a photo by Elmar Eye on Flickr. Music in the chapel at Lincoln College, Oxford used to be supplied by this modest organ by Harrison and Harrison of Durham, but was replaced in 2010 by a new one by William Drake. The old one was a bit undersized and the sound would die from lack of air if too many of the stops were pulled. When I was a student at the college I used to enjoy listening to my friend playing Bach. He was a chemistry student from Shipley and a really good player. Our own parish church acquired a second-hand organ that was probably originally in a much larger building. It can sound impressive. It can also be a hazard, especially for the choir if it is played too loud when they are trying to sing, which unfortunately it often is. Then they can't compete and end up with sore throats. Worse still, the sound levels can exceed the recommended safety limits. 7 Hz weapon The organist also has a taste for discords, especially in the bass register...

I have been thinking a bit about funerals these last few days. I was asked to prepare the Requiem Mass for Anne Furse, a member of my old parish in Brighton, who died a couple of weeks ago. By chance (?) I had a couple of her drawings on my computer, one of which was of Mary Magdalen with her pot of ointment, anointing the feet of Jesus with her hair, and the other was an illustration of the Holy Spirit. They were perfectly suited for the service sheets and much admired by her relatives. She had never realised her potential "in the world", due to epilepsy and other conditions, but she was in a way the spiritual heart of parish. I would have liked to have been present in the choir to sing, though she would probably have preferred for me to be serving at the Mass. Ann used to compliment me by saying how nicely I served Mass at funerals. Tomorrow, 13 April, is the eighth anniversary of my mother's death; the funeral took place on the following day. Next week is Margaret T...

Canary Wharf Station , originally uploaded by Elmar Eye . The Docklands Light Railway is a curious legacy of the Thatcher period, when London Docklands was designated as an Enterprise Zone. These Zones were a brainchild of planning minister Michael Heseltine and offered planning and tax concessions. The DLR opened as a Y-shaped route from Tower Hill to Island Gardens, at the north end of Greenwich foot tunnel, and to Stratford, mostly on long-closed railway alignments. Extensions were built first to the Bank, giving it an interchange to the London underground system, and then to Lewisham on the south side of the river, to Beckton to the east and to Woolwich, again on the south side of the Thames. The Lewisham extension was expensive for what it was, involving a long viaduct, diversion of the river Ravensbourne, and burrowing under the railway embankments at Lewisham, to a terminus on the wrong side of a busy roundabout separating it from the main town centre. Standard overhead electrif...

Pope Francis seems to be sorting out the real Catholic traddie men from the boys. If you are a real Catholic traddie, you do not criticise the Holy Father because you do not like his liturgical style.

I wish people would stop knocking the Pope, now for bringing out the ugly ferula that was used by Paul VI and John Paul II. He has only been in office a few weeks. We should bear in mind that the Catholic church has always had many tasks in the world, many things to say, and many different ways of saying them. Personally I would like to see the wretched object melted down for scrap. But why don't we all wait a couple of years, or decades, before passing judgement? For those of us who are in favour of a traditionalist approach to liturgy, the initial reaction must be one of disappointment. His style is not my cup of tea. What really counts, however, is what goes on in our own patches where we can do something about it. Benedict has made his contribution and it is up to us to continue get on with putting those ideas into practice. He unlocked the Tridentine Mass, which we should be thankful for, and now we should be doing our best to encourage the clergy to bring it to the wider...

No such thing as society Thatcher's exact words, I am told were "There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people and people must look after themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves, and then, also, to look after our neighbours." 1979 There is everything wrong with that statement by Thatcher and you see its evil consequences the instant you step into Britain. There is a such a thing as society and consequently a public realm. In Britain, this public realm is not valued as it is in other countries, and it is noticeable, down to the minutest triviae. People don't generally drop litter in Scandinavia. The pavements are not spotted with chewing gum. If you travel in a train you will find a brush and paper towels in the toilet. That is only possible when everyone is recognises that there is such a thing as society. Duties of government There i...

Toddington - Gloucester and Warwickshire Railway , originally uploaded by Elmar Eye . An article in this month's Steam Railway discusses the standard fleet of British Railways steam locomotives built to new designs between 1951 and 1960. There were 999 of them, and all were out of service by 1968, so they were not good value for money. Were British Railways' engineers to blame? The story is long forgotten, but, as the article reminds us, the British Transport Commission had a sudden change of plan in the mid-1950s and diesel locomotive types which were on order in small numbers for comparative trials were ordered in large numbers before the test locomotives had even been delivered. This change of plan was imposed on the horrified engineers. Whole fleets of the diesel locomotives were effectively prototypes and the engineers were saddled with the task of resolving the teething troubles. In the case of some of the classes, the teething troubles were never resolved and the expensi...

The economic case against HS2 has scarcely featured in public debate, which has mostly focussed on the harm it will do to well-heeled residents in Chiltern villages. One explanation is now surfacing. A lobbying firm employed by the government to promote the case for the High Speed 2 railway line is at the centre of a row after its founder, a Tory-supporting peer, was accused of painting opponents of the scheme as posh nimbys worried about their hunting rights. Read more in this Guardian article here .

St Ignatius' Church, Stamford Hill , a photo by Fin Fahey on Flickr. London interlude In January 1978 I moved to Crouch End in North London. The nearest Catholic church was in Muswell Hill, and I discovered that a woman was starting a choir. She explained that she was trying to get together a group to sing the English liturgy. It was not quite what I had expected, which was that it would be a choir for singing Gregorian chant. Nevertheless I was willing to give it a go. It turned out that we would be singing in English, and so I assumed that we would be singing music from the Anglican repertoire - which has no shortage of good quality material from the Tudor period onwards. But there was another agenda. We were introduced to a young man by the name of Paul Inwood, who handed out sheets of music he had composed himself. It was difficult to sing and sounded awful. I stopped after a couple of weeks and never discovered if the attempt to start a choir came to anything. After tha...

Easter Sunday Mass , a photo by Lawrence OP on Flickr. The Catholic church has inherited many buildings of this type. It is nice to see it full, but I wonder if I am unusual in finding that going to Mass in such an architectural setting is not an uplifting experience.