Change of a dress

AUDIENCES are enjoying the novelty and reassurance of attending theatre in the open air. Warmed by the sunshine and ruffled by the gentlest breeze around our 13th-century church tower, they sit cabaret-style in their “bubbles”, relishing the invitation to roar when the “Heckle” sign goes up as Lord John Russell rails against the abuse of power and privilege by idle clergy enjoying the fruits of multiple livings.

The weather forecast in the run-up to the opening of my new play, The Reverend’s Rebuke, has predicted thunderstorms, but none materialise, and our replacement period costumes are thus safe. The consequences of the pandemic are never far away: a week earlier, arriving to collect the originally reserved and painstakingly measured costumes for our cast of 12, we had been met at the door by two heavies who invited us in no uncertain terms to leave, and escorted us off the premises before locking the gates behind us.

It turned out that the owners of the costume hire company had been unable to pay the rent because they hadn’t been able to trade. I wonder how many previously thriving small businesses have suffered the same fate, and fervently hope that they, too, will have a champion in Parliament in the months to come.

Don’t bank on it

I TAKE the cash element of our performance days — donations for refreshments, etc. — to pay in at my recently “refurbished” branch of HSBC. The counter area has disappeared, the space now filled with a tasteful mural of a sunset, which proves an appropriate metaphor when a bank clerk, perched on a bar stool, reveals that “refurbishment” is bank-speak for “digitisation”.

I can see that there’s a machine where I can pay in notes, but where do I pay in the coins, I ask? She swivels slightly on her island refuge, and chooses her words. “We don’t handle coins any more,” she says, adding helpfully that I can take them to the Post Office, “who have taken this on for us”. I think of all the raffles, fêtes, fairs, and fund-raising of English life, and despair.

Gold standard

AS THE debate around exam grades continues, I reflect that it was a whole lot easier to distinguish the sheep from the goats when you got a real mark for your paper. My grammar-school GCE results in far-off days ranged from 97 per cent (English; Prize) to 35 per cent (Mathematics; Fail), and I can’t recall that anyone ever scored top marks in every subject.

Later, a vacation job found me in the bowels of an exam-board building in London, employed to check the marking on every English O-level language paper taken in Hong Kong — thousands of them, in brown-paper packages. I had to check every ringed total for every section of the paper, to ensure that the final tally was correct and nobody had been either short-changed or over-rewarded. I came up for air only at lunchtime. Forget “grade boundaries”: that was how much a single mark was deemed to matter.

Light bearer

I AM researching John Whitehurst FRS: clockmaker, geologist, Lunar Society member, Christian. He studied the strata of the peaks and caverns in his beloved Derbyshire, struggling to reconcile his deductions with the account of the Creation in Genesis. His Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth, published in 1778, is hard going for a non-scientist ignorant of Newtonian physics, but it is a wondrous text.

He bravely concludes: “The new-formed globe was totally unfit for animal, or vegetable life; and therefore it would seem extremely absurd to suppose, that either the former or the latter were created during the chaotic state of the earth, or prior to its being formed into a habitable world: therefore, the presumption is great, that mankind were not created till the earth was become suitable to the nature of their existence.”

Whitehurst was a close friend of the painter Joseph Wright, who, while on a visit to Naples in 1774, witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. For dramatic purposes, I so want Whitehurst to be (as some believe he is) the figure of the lecturer in Wright’s famous painting A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a Lamp is put in Place of the Sun. It hangs in Derby Museum, and to sit in front of it is to be warmed by its glow. Enlightenment is a beautiful word.

Cupboard love

I AM ridiculously excited about the prospect of our first in-person choir practice, heralding a cautious return to singing in church. Will the moths have got to the robes cupboard in our prolonged absence from the vestry, I wonder, and might the cupboard itself be consigned to the past?

My mind does a Dave Walker, and I think of what’s inside the cupboard, apart from the robes. The bags stuffed with old hymn books and psalters; the dubious remnants of clothing; the odd bent brolly; the wedding orders of service; the stray collars and cuffs that someone is planning to take home and iron. Farewell to the rummage. Change is in the air.

Pat Ashworth is a journalist and playwright.