The Elastic Band

YOUNG people in rural villages have many advantages, I am sure, but the opportunity to make live music in a band, and at the same time find that church does not have to be deadly boring, is not usually one of them.

Twenty years ago, Ros Oswald set out to give young people living in Wiltshire villages just that opportunity. Two years ago, she followed up many of them with a questionnaire to try to discover whether this had been a passing enthusiasm, both musically and spiritually, or an experience that had genuinely opened new horizons for them.

Now she has put together the story - and the results of that research - in a book, The Elastic Band (Pen Press), which was the name that she adopted for this enterprise.

Elastic stretches - it likes to be inclusive. It also tends to hold in what it embraces, which is very much what the Elastic Band was intended to do. It seemed to me not a bad model for a gentle, creative kind of evangelism.

From jingles to carols

AS USUAL, among my Christmas cards came one from the hymn-writer Timothy Dudley-Smith; and, once again, it featured a brand new carol, which can be sung to the tune Surrey. It includes a typical couplet: "The love of God to earth come down, Who chose the cross before the crown."

For some odd reason (geriatric memory is like this) I recalled some of the advertising jingles TDS (as we knew him) used to write for the magazine Crusade long ago. One that leapt to mind included his description of the day's post: "Everlasting as the hills A smallish pile of largish bills." And, yes, literary scholars can trace in it a particular way of shaping verse which is now immortalised in some of our finest modern hymns.

On high alert

MY DAUGHTER is Rector of Aldermaston, a charming Berkshire village, which also gives its name to a huge complex just up the road, the Atomic Weapons Establishment, where 6000 people work to manufacture and maintain Britain's nuclear arsenal.

My generation were familiar with the annual Aldermaston march of protest, led every Easter by such luminaries as Canon Collins, Bruce Kent, and Tony Benn. This Christmas, my daughter was invited to preach at the annual carol service on the base. She needed her passport, no less, to gain entrance, and the congregation were welcomed with a short guide to the various warning signals that might sound.

Sure enough, two sentences into her address the dreaded siren interrupted proceedings. The congregation were used to that sort of thing, but the preacher was not. Was this the one calling for the evacuation of the building, or was it the signal to take cover under the seats?

In fact, it was nothing serious (so far, it never has been), and the gathered throng could return to visions of a time "When peace shall over all the earth Its ancient splendours fling". In the mean time, perhaps they wondered what the consequences might be of trying to beat a nuclear missile into a ploughshare.

The show must go on

ALDERMASTON is not only the home of modern weaponry. In the Norman church, the nativity play from the 14th-century York Mystery Cycle has been performed in Advent by local people for 56 consecutive years. Each of its six performances, with medieval music, tableaux, special lighting effects, and ingenious use of the church's architecture, fills the church to overflowing.

Since 1957, Pat Eastop has been its producer and director, and some of the local people have played the same parts for decades. "Joseph" is retiring this year, and "Gabriel" is threatening to do the same; but there seems to be no shortage of volunteers to take their places. It is a sort of mini-Oberammergau, in the Thames valley.
 

Peace on the buses

I WAS on the last bus from Reading one evening in November. At a stop on the outskirts of the town, among a crowd getting on to the bus, were two young men who simply found seats and sat down. When all the others had paid, the driver called the pair to come forward and buy tickets.

They then embarked on a long, rambling, and slightly alcoholic explanation, which seemed to involve their getting on the wrong bus, discovering their error, and now hoping to put it right. "Can I see your tickets for the other bus?" the driver asked, but they had not got any. "Right," he said, "you're off, or I'm phoning the police."

OTHER STORIES

Diary

John Pridmore:  IT IS 2014, and we cannot but remember. Each of us will be observing the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in his or her own way. I dwell on a diary, the tiny 1916 Boy Scouts Diary that, 16 years ago, I picked up from a stall at a Salvation Army fête.

Many of the passengers began to bridle. "Come on," they called, "we want to get home." There were even suggestions from some passengers that they would be willing to escort them off the bus if they declined to pay up. "We've got no money," the young men claimed. Impasse.

We sat there for a few tense minutes, until a well-spoken man near the front asked the driver where the men wanted to go. "Theale", he said.

"And what's the single fare to Theale from here?"

"Three pounds," was the reply.

The passenger then produced £6, the tickets were printed, and to a half-hearted cheer from the seated ranks, and "You're a star, mate," from the young men, we resumed our journey.

I used that true story to introduce my Remembrance Day sermon. Peace comes at a price: £6, that evening. Lost lives, by peace-keepers. And, of course, a cross, for the Saviour of the world.

The Revd David Winter is a retired cleric living in Oxford diocese.