Marcus Walker has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Christmas came early this year. No, I’m not moaning about the carols that my local café started piping at the beginning of September (although that’s enough to enrage any priest). This year my first proper Christmas moment occurred two weeks early when a lovely couple chose to have not one but two Christmas carols for their wedding. We hadn’t even hit December before I found myself in the curmudgeonly position of muttering ‘Except Easter’ as a full church belted out the line ‘This holy tide of Christmas all other doth efface’. It was all very jolly, even if I felt momentarily Scroogelike.
Not that this was the most amusing of the winter weddings that we’ve held at my church, St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield. One year the whole church was – rather to our surprise and without an enormous amount of warning – transformed into a winter wonderland, which was fine until the elaborate decorations proved too large for the bride’s dress to get down the nave accompanied by the groom. One would have to walk a few paces behind the other and, this not being Afghanistan, in the event it was the groom.
‘Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics,’ say the generals. Logistics are essential for St Bart’s at Christmas time, with more than 25 carol services being hosted between now and Epiphany. Sometimes it’s the absolute basics that let you down. Last year during our American carol service the lights went out. All of them. Just as the Ninth Lesson was about to be read. My colleague Taylor was about to launch into ‘In the beginning was the Word’ when the Word could no longer be seen. Luckily ‘in him was light’, and he remembered it word for word.
The electricity failing at this particular service would have been of great interest to Benjamin Franklin. The 300th anniversary of his arrival in London, aged 18, falls on 24 December. He lived in the parish, on a street called Little Britain, and he worked in St Bartholomew’s former Lady Chapel, which by then had been turned into a printer’s workshop called Palmer’s Prints (it was bought back by the Church in 1885 and restored for worship, I’m glad to say). As 24 December is already a little busy, we are marking the anniversary the night before, with a specially themed American carols. We are also getting in a working printing press for February as part of the anniversary celebrations, which should be fun – and of particular interest to readers of The Spectator as its first editions, created by Addison and Steele in 1711, were also printed in Little Britain. The Spectator was, Franklin said, the publication that taught him ‘to write, talk and argue’.
There are wonderful quirks to a City parish. The butchers’ market in Smithfield holds an annual Christmas auction, where astonishing amounts of meat can be bought extremely reasonably – something which any sensible local authority should be pointing people to as the cost of living really starts biting. Sadly, not the City. This may be the last such auction. Despite there being butchers in Smithfield since at least ad 975 (when a record relates that ‘in the Ward of Farringdon Without there are divers slaughterhouses and a Butchers’ Hall where the craftsmen meet’), the City has decided to shut them down. ‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’
There are no prisons or workhouses in the parish any more. In fact, our solidly Tory forebears objected so fervently to the Liberal imposition of a parish workhouse that they shut it down and imposed a voluntary poor rate on the parish instead, which wasn’t entirely popular. But there is a hospital and that is a salutary reminder that for many, Christmas is not the season of joy but one of fear and pain. The days of the surgeon carving a Christmas turkey in the ward are long gone, but at least we can pop round to administer Communion. At one hospital bed I was there on Christmas Eve and I’d just administered Communion to a man and his family and we were singing some carols when I noticed the special box in which I had transported the Blessed Sacrament was propped up next to a curious cardboard tube. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘It’s my pisspot!’ he explained. I leapt, as if scalded, and then reflected that if Christ wasn’t too precious to touch lepers, or to be dragged through the streets of Jerusalem sweating blood, he would probably be OK in the messy reality of a hospital. And although singing ‘Hark!’ 20 million times over December may feel a little like a chore, it’s at moments like those in the hospital when these words really bite:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see:
Hail the incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with man to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel.
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