My web server got fried the other day and I lost some old images, which I'm trying to rebuild. Sorry that there's so many missing images in the archives, but I'll try and sort it before long.

the swans are swimming uniformly,

in sepia colours, past a boat.

a tree beyond them wobbles slowly,

and with the current, on they float.

their cygnets enter right of picture,

ripples start and multiply;

light refracted and reflected,

and I watch those ripples die.

curtain twitches on the boat,

an eye or two is looking through;

ripples hit a yacht beside it

and paint it an ephemeral blue.

t.v. aerial point beyond

and seems to offer new direction;

curtain is released, and silence

hides its falling, and its friction.

swans and cygnets leave the frame,

water flattens out a bit.

lamp's switched off beyond the curtain;

the tree remains, and there I sit.

Tagged: poetry, original, wilshere, andrewwilshere, swans, cygnets, water, nature, boat,and.

Labels: poetry

We're singing at Southwell Minster in August; here are the details if anyone wishes to come. It should be a really good event. (Dove's 'Seek him that maketh the seven stars' was commissioned in 1995, and you can hear a live recording of it on BBC Radio 3 'Listen Again' on Choral Evensong until next Wednesday.)

Tagged: southwellminster, southwell, music, dove, composer, concert, bishopsconsort.

Labels: music

Tagged: stockport, socialhousing, councilflats.

• Normblog has a good post on the ethics of this Israel-Lebanon war.

Tagged: lebanon, israel, war.

We've been making blackcurrant jam today, using berries from our garden and the following very simple method!

6 cups black currants
4 cups water
6 cups granulated sugar

Place currants and water in a large, heavy-bottomed non-reactive pot. Bring to boil over high heat. Reduce heat; simmer for 15 minutes or until softened, stirring occasionally. Use a potato masher to crush, if desired.

Stir in sugar over medium heat until dissolved. Increase heat to high; bring to full boil, stirring constantly. Boil rapidly for 6 to 10 minutes until jam thickens, stirring constantly. Test for setting point.

Remove from heat; skim off any foam.

Ladle into sterilized jars to within 1/4-inch of rim; wipe. Apply lids and rings. Process BWB 5 minutes. (Alternatively, ladle into hot, clean jars and BWB 10 minutes.)

Let rest at room temp until set. Check seals. Refrigerate any unsealed jars for up to three weeks.

It was a lot of fun and tastes great! Here are some photos:

More over on Flickr.

Tagged: blackcurrant, jam, blackcurrantjam, jammaking, preserve, preserves, recipe, food, gardening, organic, cooking.

During the recent bombardment of Lebanon, a number of people have directly emailed me photographs of, variously, dead, dismembered, maimed and burnt bodies of Lebanese adults and children; it's also not too hard to find them on Flickr. I'm not quite sure how to react to this: presumably those who send or distribute them are trying to arouse emotions of anger towards Israel and sympathy towards Lebanon. But there is no evidence, as far as I am concerned, that vulnerable civilians are being targeted deliberately by Israel, at least to no greater an extent than civilians are ever directly or collaterally targeted in any military operations (sure — it's supposed to be a war crime — but I'm simply too cynical to believe that countries either belligerent or angry enough to bomb a country in the first place could ever give a toss about its civilians). In short, I'm sure you could find similar images from any conflict and any terrorist attack. Why don't I receive these in emails too?

Don't get me wrong — I'm completely against this war. But simply distributing photos of the devastation is not the same as arguing a political position, and the failure to do the latter often, it seems to me, reflects some kind of schizophrenia on the part of lefty anti-war types, and comes disgustingly close, it seems to me, to endorsing terrorism in the middle east. People who are in this position can consider themselves equally responsible for perpetuating the tit-for-tat battle going on between Israel and its neighbours for the last thirty years. The 'war on terror' is a fallacy, and one which has gone some way in causing this new war, but so are the acts of terrorism conducted by Hamas and Hizb' Allah. The political hegemony of the West over Arab states means that the onus is on the West to ameliorate political and socio-economic conditions, as well as diplomatic relations, with Muslim countries in the region; but this is never done by military means. Quite the reverse. There was a window of opportunity this year to establish the international political legitimacy of Hamas in Palestine and to bring the entire conflict into the parameters of international diplomacy. But sadly the opportunity was missed, because the U.S.A. has no true interest, at the moment, in seeing the situation resolved.

Tagged: hamas, palestine, lebanon, israel, images, pictures, diplomacy, war, usa.

Pregnant blue-grey clouds

Threaten rain a second time.

The bitter winter yields to fairer weather,

Two hundred tearful, frigid nights

Undone by you in one embrace:

Your skin, your hair, your eyes conspire

And I am lost again,

Seduced, and wantonly, by perfume

And the touch of leather.

Labels: poetry

I prefer to write in fountain pen,

Because, as all good writers know,

Not one good word was writ in Biro.

Tagged: poetry, original, biro, wilshere.

Labels: poetry

I think the journal has more or less hit the shelves now, so I proudly reproduce my first published book review, which appeared in this month's edition of Crucible, a theology periodical which this month ran a special on theology and popular culture. Again, if anyone is interested in having a copy, let me know.

The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture, by Kelton Cobb (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2005, 355pp. ISBN 1-4051-0702-2)

Understanding Theology and Popular Culture, by Gordon Lynch (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2005, 236pp. ISBN 1-4051-1748-6)

Both of these books attempt, in their different ways, to provide readers with a set of theoretical tools and case studies for approaching the emerging research area of theology and popular culture. The self-set task of Kelton Cobb's Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture is to 'undertake a theological analysis of ordinary cultural phenomena,' (4) supported in Matthew's gospel by the familiar maxim to 'read the signs of the times,' (8) and by Cobb's contention that there are serious and intelligent creative minds at work in popular culture which demand theology's attention. The author begins by probing the terms of debate, deploying the critiques of the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) to highlight the value-load of popular culture and therefore its necessity for an engaged theology. However, and criticising 'a reductionist tendency' (70) in cultural studies, Cobb argues that a person's agency and ability to discriminate must not be underplayed; a position he supports with a fairly substantial discussion of 'subcultures,' in which the images and commodities of consumer culture are reclaimed, manipulated and often put to political use.

Turning to theology, Cobb gives church father Tertullian as an early voice of oppositional cultural criticism, and Augustine as one of cultural engagement. Perhaps the most stimulating and original figure in Cobb's theological toolbox, however, is Paul Tillich, in turning to whom the author helps connect this contemporary discussion with previous theological threads, and thus establish a possible genealogy for an interdisciplinary research area which at times struggles for identity. Cobb builds a vocabulary, substantially drawn from Tillich, consisting of 'ultimate concern,' 'the holy,' 'myth,' 'liminality,' and a differentiated concept of 'religion', which he then uses systematically to embark on a series of analyses of popular cultural artefacts. There emerges a recurring notion that popular culture is 'sorting through' theological issues, including the existence and nature of God, sin, salvation, and eternity. One of Cobb's stronger analyses argues that popular psychotherapy, an industry worth $69bn a year in the USA (252), is a form of secularised confessionalism, comprising its own doctrines of original sin, absolution and salvation, all of which focus around individual happiness as an end-in-itself rather than a communal good — a position which inverts most theological outlooks and clearly attracts the author's criticism.

The Blackwell Guide attempts a synthesis of theology and popular culture which the author argues should be characterised by a 'reciprocity of judgement.' (74) For the better part, Cobb is faithful to this principle; for the sake of theological reflection he highlights the 'religious impulses [that] might be active below the surfaces of popular culture,' but also, and for the sake of cultural reflection, he offers explicit theological criticisms of those impulses that are 'idolatrous dead-ends.' (292) The synthesis which Cobb undertakes is generally successful, but not completely so. Some sections offer inadequate critical engagement, in the sense that the tools which the author carefully assembles in the first part of the book are not always put to extensive or effective use. At times the sheer amount of cultural material Cobb addresses prevents thick and focused analysis. By the same token, the huge number of films, books, and musicians discussed by Cobb will provide an excellent set of starting-points for readers wishing to research the area further.

Gordon Lynch's Understanding Theology and Popular Culture opens by proposing the following definition of popular culture: 'the environment, practices, and resources of everyday life.' This definition issues from a Marxist framework in that Lynch explicitly encourages theologians to take more interest in the work of the CCCS and Frankfurt School, and particularly Theodor Adorno. As a result, this book is strongly coloured by an understanding of popular culture as substantially hegemonic. The author outlines four possible approaches to the study of theology and popular culture: religion in relation to everyday life; popular culture as serving religious functions in society; popular culture as a resource for mission; and cultural texts and practices as media for theological reflection. Lynch then narrates the history of Western society through the industrial revolution to the 'machine age' of mass production, and, drawing mainly on Adorno's critique of the 'culture industry' and Neil Postman's 1985 critique of the televisual medium, asks the question: 'can popular culture be bad for your health?' (69) to which the author's response is a resounding, if qualified, 'yes.' This position is grounded in Adorno's view that the 'immediate superficial gratification' offered by popular culture often masks a 'dehumanizing, entrapping, or morally dangerous' core. (90)

Lynch turns explicitly to theology a full 94 pages into a 194-page argument, and works with the following definition: 'Theology is the process of seeking normative answers to questions of truth/meaning, goodness/practice, evil, suffering, redemption, and beauty in specific contexts.' (94) Lynch stresses that theology involves reflection on existence in relation to an 'absolute reference point,' of which he offers Tillich's 'ultimate concern' as an example, although there is a conspicuous absence of this dimension in his self-imposed definition. Lynch argues for an approach to theological reflection on popular culture which takes seriously the lessons that popular culture can offer theology, and which engages in 'critical dialogue' along the 'two way street' of religion and culture (103-104). This he calls a 'revised correlational approach.' (105) Having established these parameters, Lynch conducts three case studies: author-based, which reflects on the life of white rapper Eminem; text-based, which discusses an episode of The Simpsons; and ethnographic, which explores club culture through first-hand ethnographic research. Lynch closes by proposing a 'theological aesthetics of popular culture.' Such an aesthetics, Lynch argues, is not focused on 'disinterested accounts of beauty,' but rather on the basis of human experience and relationships.

Understanding Theology and Popular Culture is a well-structured volume which competently deals with the work of a wide range of theologians, philosophers and cultural researchers. This will therefore be an extremely valuable book for students and other readers wishing to familiarise themselves with some of the key tools of a subject area which Lynch admits has struggled hitherto in finding a stable disciplinary home (iix). As a book offering theological reflections of its own, however, it is flawed. In particular, the discussion of Eminem in the 'author-based' chapter is heavy in narrative, light in critique, and contains minimal theological content. To a lesser extent this is true of the author's other case studies. Lynch is keen that theologians 'understand the "horizon" of popular culture on its own terms,' (111) but here this maxim is taken to an extreme which is unfaithful to the equitable dialogue Lynch argues for through his 'revised correlational approach' proposed only a few pages previously. A possible reason for these shortcomings may be that the definitions Lynch offers for both popular culture and theology are exceptionally broad, even to the extent that it is difficult to conduct any kind of focused or sustained analysis of cultural artefacts. Furthermore, all but one of Lynch's nine provisional criteria for a 'theological aesthetics of popular culture' could easily be conceived of without theology; the only exception being the criterion of 'a sense of encounter with "God," the transcendent, or the numinous,' which is, even then, vague.

Considered together, these two volumes raise some interesting issues for academics and students working in this subject area to reflect upon. First, both books refer extensively to the Marxist critiques of the Frankfurt School and the CCCS. There is an unresolved tension between viewing popular culture as an instrument of oppression and depoliticisation, and viewing it as a realm with genuinely critical capabilities. For both authors, this is a creative tension which demands people's agency, engagement, and judgement. Second, how does this theoretical preoccupation with Marxian cultural criticism impact upon the practices of theology and religion, particularly in the (British) context of engaging with third-way politics? Adorno struggled, throughout his career, to relate his academic work to a theory of political action, much to the frustration of his students. Cobb's volume does not set out to address questions of practice, but Lynch's 'ethnographic approach' perhaps represents the first steps in this teleological issue being addressed. Finally, how far can the analysis of popular culture be pushed, for theological purposes? Both authors take brave adventures into theologically opaque material: including Finding Nemo, Fight Club, and Eminem. Given that both books struggle in places to form coherent theological connections with such material, could it be that certain cultural artefacts simply do not offer a great deal to the discussion?

Each of these books offers a distinctive and constructive contribution to an emerging and developing research area. Each author shares some common ground with the other, most notably in their deployments of Tillich and their calls for an equitable and reciprocal critical exchange between popular culture and theology as a means of mutual enlightenment. The synthesis which Cobb achieves in The Blackwell Guide is, however, more successful than that of Understanding Theology and Popular Culture, and for that reason, the latter is probably best treated as a stimulating supplement to Cobb's volume.

Andrew Wilshere
University of Manchester

—Crucible, July 2005.

Tagged: crucible, journal, theology, philosophy, popularculture, popculture, popular, culture, wilshere, andrewwilshere, cobb, keltoncobb, gordonlynch, lynch, cccs, eminem, tillich, paultillich, theologian, church, god, christandculture, criticism, review, bookreview, kulturkritik, culturecriticism, adorno, theodoradorno, frankfurtschool, postman, neilpostman, religion, blackwell, marxism, capitalism, oxford.

For the first time in about 18 months I have just folded up neatly all of my clothes. Oh my God I have so many clothes. I feel like a woman, and not in the Shania Twain sense either. Must take some old ones down the charity shop, throw some really old ones out, and stick to a resolution not to buy any more clothes for at least 6 months.

Update

Less than three hours after this post, I bought a new Bench jumper in the sales in Stockport. Hopeless.

Tagged: clothes, clothing, shaniatwain.

A Sunday morning, mid-July;

No sleep, although I really tried;

The coffee pot is full to brimming;

Three scoops of illy, and I'm winning.

That wisdom tooth is back again,

Impacted, and a cause of pain,

Infected, by my lousy brushing,

Extracted, by some drowsy Russian.

I'm sitting on the garden bench.

It's fucking cold at 5am.

But bees are already up and doing.

That bloody Russian. Could I sue him?

This pint of coffee's mighty strong.

I think I brewed it far too long.

There's bits of cous-cous on this table.

And bits of pancake on the gable!

Good God, I'm tired, but wide awake.

I can't sleep now, for Jesus sake:

I'm off to church in three small hours,

And it's my turn to trim the flowers.

Now there's cocking ants here too!

The table does need waxing, true,

But this year's ants are pestilent;

They're holding rugby tournaments.

I fear this coffee's contaminated

By fair Fairy's washing-up liquid.

Remember, readers! One always must

Clean coffee pots with moth and rust.

'El Mundo En Tus Manos'

Reads my coffee cup of chaos.

(My mug, just tween you and me,

Has an ethical foreign policy.)

I stretch and yawn! It's still so cold.

A prize awaits though. Yes! Behold!

If you can solve this metric riddle,

You'll earn a toy with which to fiddle.

Tagged: poetry, wilshere, original, newfred, coffee, insomnia, sleepless.

Labels: poetry

The Mancubist has alerted us to the archaeology of the famous (among hundreds) Manchester graffiti stencil Gorton Girls Know All The Words To Songs By Chaka Khan. Turns out it's from a poem by local Mike Garry:

Gorton girls know all the words

To songs by Chaka Khan

They dance and sing

And point and grin

At all the boys covered in tattoos

Trainers gleaming

Faded denim

Twisting a sleeper in one ear

Driving XR3's and growing home-grown weed

Following the Kippax cheer

But only girls gyrate in Gorton

The boys are making plans

To rid themselves of the CSA

And move to Amsterdam

Tagged: mikegarry, garry, poem, gorton, gortongirlsknowallthewordstosongsbychakakhan, graffiti, manchester.

Updated today:

• Selected Posts (additions and layout)
• del.icio.us (general mess now rectified)
• About (more info)
• Feeds (new RSS feed added)
• Flickr (Reddish Vale and Manchester)

Real posts coming soon, promise. Just been to a piss-up in a brewery (kind of).

Today I went to visit a friend who is in hospital at the moment. I had been told visiting hours were 2-4pm, but because she was moved to a different ward overnight, visiting hours in fact began at 3pm, so there was a reasonable amount of waiting around outside while time passed. I contemplated going back to the car and reading a book, or going to the café on the ground floor, but just ended up loitering around the corridor and staring out of a window and on to an enclosed courtyard, which was completely unkept and obviously worked into the architectural plans only to allow a little more light into the wards. Incidentally, I hate hospitals, perhaps for special reasons, but I don't really see that anyone could feel especially fond of them. They are, of necessity, made to be clinical, to accept death, and occasionally procure it, without emotion or narrative. I was waiting outside this specially designated women's ward — and as I stood staring out of that window, while fellow visitors stood a little way down the corridor, I wondered what people assumed I was there for, who they imagined I was there to see. I thought perhaps they would construct my story as I was constructing theirs; perhaps I was seeing a mother with cancer, perhaps a sister donating eggs, perhaps even a fiancé preparing for a C-section. In spite of all this storytelling, I concluded there was a good chance that at least some of the people waiting were there to see the same lady as me, but the lack of certainty, and the annoying manner of the people present, prevented me from joining in the small talk.

3pm passed, and we went in. Indeed, three of the others were there to see my friend. She had just returned from a scan, so we were asked to wait by one of the empty beds. Introductions could be avoided no longer; we revealed our names and relationships to one other. There was a man and his wife, both from Blackpool, but the man had a strong Australian accent. And there was another bloke; I imagined without foundation the he had been single all his life. They were all in their sixties. The latter was a computer programmer and deemed it appropriate to launch into descriptions of all the algorithms he'd written to predict and calculate lottery outcomes. I was already in a shite mood, and this just made things worse. But within minutes the conversation (in which I had not yet played a part) had descended irredeemably, and we were already at the stage of hearing sentences like, "I'm not a racist, but...", whereupon both of these men proceeded to lament the fact that "it's not our country any more" (despite the fact that one of them had, as I suggested, either spent much time in Australia or was himself an Australian emmigrant) and that they'd "heard on the radio this morning that the HALF A MILLION HINDUS living in Britain claimed that they felt they're not treated right" before declaring that "*I* don't feel treated right." I'd not heard such a load of bullshit in a long time, and I felt like telling these two prickends so, especially since they were at this moment stood in North Manchester General Hospital, which was originally the Jewish Hospital and which was founded on the back of immigrant enterprise, and furthermore, that neither our friend nor them in their hour of need would be getting free healthcare if it weren't for the substantially immigrant hospital workforce. But I bit my tongue, because to have upset the atmosphere would have been bad for our mutual friend.

Should we bite our tongues in such situations? For the short term grief that may be caused by taking an oppositional stand in that particular moment, perhaps we would help heal a more lethal but completely invisible wound which is inflicted anew every day by thoughtless fuckwits without a brain cell to their collective names, and reinforced by the rest of us, who choose silence and passivity over moral courage.

Tagged: racism, britain, manchester, hospital, judaism, jewish, hindu, hinduism, nhs.

Revised 13.7.06

Labels: racism

This is a spare five minutes in a very hectic day so just thought I'd hop on the computer here in Leicester. Been in Derby most of the day playing for a wedding at St Barnabas' Church in Derby for which I have effectively (also amazingly, generously, and quite without precedent) been tipped 100% of my fee, bringing the day's earnings to a cool £180. (If I'd known this was going to happen, I'd have done more practice! Didn't play too badly though, all in all.) Decided to call in at Leicester for a recital by David Goode at St James, just to renew my sense of musical inadequacy, and after that I'll drive back to Manchester ready for tomorrow morning's service.

Tagged: organ, stbarnabas, barnabas, derby, radbournestreet, organist, music, church, leicester, davidgoode, manchester

Labels: music

You stand at a grave.

A Tuesday afternoon,

Haze descended on lofty earth,

Where this cemetery seems

To intercede with heaven.

You touch withered flowers,

Once placed, alive, in honour

Of the rotting dead,

For the left-behind;

Who mourns the flowers?

Too many a thought,

Too many the days,

Too long since your last visit;

No faith, no revelation comes,

Do not return, you say, Get over it.

Hard shoe on soft earth identifies

Fresh death of old flesh;

Matter whose own finitude

Becomes new life and air and food;

This is no time for mourning.

You turn and watch the power station,

View your Kingdom, imagine Jesus

Being tempted in the wilderness.

You cast your eyes away from death

And the headstone you drove here to venerate.

No prayer said?

Is he not dead? Just silence,

And more silence;

The line dead too, like him and me.

You're next, you think,

And all the earth, piled violently

Atop crude plastic sheets,

Which crushes grass and flower,

Will soon crush you,

And you will rot.

Who will visit then?

Labels: poetry

We're back in business at newfred.com and hopefully things will remain that way. I'm not entirely sure why my FTP refused to work for a couple of weeks, but whoever's fault it was, it seems to be fixed now. You can safely reset your feeds to the original newfred.com/atom.xml.

When I was a kid tea leaves were something of a theme. I presume we got them because they were cheaper than tea bags, and these were the days (in retrospect and now with knowledge of the poverty of which I was completely ignorant until the condition had passed) through which I am even today baffled as to how we were fed and sheltered. Tea leaves were everywhere. My mum went through a succession of cheap tea-pots, forever trying to find one which successfully filtered the leaves without clogging the flow. The sink was usually coated in tea leaves. The surfaces had a tea colour and often leaves of their own. Tea leaves got on the floor over time, and, of course, what seemed like hundreds of cups gathered around the house, all with the dregs of tea in. I imagine vividly my mum's reaction when, unthinkingly, she would down a cup of tea, and with it, the leaves. Perhaps I can also remember my dad's reaction; tea leaves 'go' with the slot in the day (usually about 6.55 until 7.20) when my dad would sit at the table and snooze after dinner, large brown mug sat in front of him, waiting for The Archers and then faithfully listening to it without fail, himself perhaps dreaming of the myths which structured his own village childhood. My mum must have had her tea elsewhere in the house; for some reason I don't recall; perhaps she was teaching by then. My dad complained about the 'bloody pupils' which polluted the peace of his evening after a day working at the shop. Tea was perhaps made at the shop; I spent several days there, every one of which I treasured and whose memory I treasure even more today. Rudely, but I believe with my dad's knowledge, I enjoyed rooting around all the nooks and crannies of the shop, investigating forgotten old boxes full of photocopies, pulling out filing cabinet drawers and tearing off the carbon paper from archived credit card receipts, playing with my dad's word processors and electric typewriters, making pointless photocopies, and not using the guillotine because it was forbidden. Not just tea — choc ices too. We would go across to the newsagent, which is still there, and have a choc ice each, a treat whose sheer irregularity negated the fact that these were the cheapest choc ices going. Before such excursions, my dad regularly affixed idiosyncratic "Back in 5 minutes" signs to the shop door. In fact, he had an assortment of them, written on scraps of different coloured paper and stuck to the underside of a metal shelf near the till. There was a choice of 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes; perhaps a "closed for stock-taking" sign; perhaps a "open at 1.30" notice; each one written hurriedly but preserved for years, chaotically but entirely systematically, under that shelf, in the mysterious configuration of The Shop.

My dad would return home about 5.30, I think; the first question was always, "How much money did you take at the shop today?" from my mum, always put in a mild and supportive tone, but behind which I was aware lingered monetary anxiety, an anxiety in which I shared no direct part, since I did not myself experience the worry of ensuring there were sufficient funds to pay for the food. Thinking of those moments — ephemeral now in that they can only ever exist in the future through my remembering them, gone in that my memory of them is, through memory's nature, polluted, contorted, distorted, and thereby transformed into something new — brings a tear to my eye; I was present in those moments, but a mute onlooker stood on the old, wearing, red carpet on the stairs whose touch and reassurance I miss when I go home these days to find the new grey one. Yes, it brings a tear to my eye, because in spite of my muteness, passivity, lack of agency and responsibility in those moments stood on the stairs, ready to assess whether the answer to my mother's question rated high or low on the mental scatter graph of daily takings at the shop, I was nevertheless so much more alive and real then than now, because the relationship which existed in that silence (which characterises the majority of our relationships) was a silence lived, known and experienced, while the silence foisted on us by death, particularly a sudden one, is an incontrovertible blackout through which the electricity sustaining the potential for communication is taken away, gone for ever, and from This Day On every time we pick up the receiver we listen for a voice we know we can never hear again. And we can only cry.

Today at home we use tea bags. I still don't drink tea. I reject the taste, in part because my mum made me drink a cup of sweet tea immediately after my pet rabbit died, which represented in a way the final death of my father, since there was a circularity in the threads which connected everything from childhood with that rabbit, my choir, and my father, and in the moment when that ended — the moment when I sat for several hours and watched my rabbit's heart gradually slow down and eventually stop beating, when I watched that creature's perception of the world end, and when we rejected the possibility of narcissistically extending its life with the use of steroids — I truly knew that the world had changed, that I could no longer guarantee life or a future, that the myths of childhood were over, God had gone for the time being, and the coffin lid had been replaced for the last time. I drank the tea, I think, and sat at the card table in the mess of the sitting room in the presence of that fleshy, dead, twitching body of a rabbit which seemed to contain in it the essence of Love and in whose death I had participated, and in whose witness I had substituted the participation in the death of my father which I lacked, resented, and still do. Every substitution for a lack is transitory and imperfect, a loose fit; and sooner or later the lack and the resentment and the guilt will return, though faded, and we will need to fill it anew. We all wish to be there when a parent dies, so we can own the event, say that We Were There, that we were the only ones there, that we saw their last breath and in that moment inherited everything they ever were, so that we can believe that perhaps we were even the ones that killed them, killed them in the most loving and most merciful way. Until we can feel a participant in the death of a loved one, their life is, for us, only suspended; it is not over. Will I ever be able to drink tea again?

The money I used to buy the rabbit in 1996, and all the equipment, food and materials I needed for him, was the revenue from my first professional solo singing engagement back in Leicester. I sat in the trailer with the rabbit and his hutch as we drove back. The last time my dad went to church was a few weeks before his death when he saw me installed as a head chorister at St James. The money was the first substantial sum over which I had been assigned the decision of expenditure, the money was expressly mine, and in buying the rabbit and setting it up in the garden I unwittingly, but no doubt deliberately, reproduced my dad's routine; a journey through the back garden which involved passing, stroking, perhaps feeding the rabbit, going to the weather station, taking the readings, measuring the rainfall, taking the temperature in the shade, and returning to the house. For a time I continued to keep the weather records and the cricket cuttings, something which thankfully none of my relatives interpreted as psychotic or unhealthy, since truncating its playing-out would undoubtedly have been a damaging intrusion on personal grief. For a day or two I even sat in the sitting room after dinner and listened to The Archers, completely confused about its plot, but content to hear familiar voices, and in particular the theme tune, whose comfortable cadences seemed to contain my dad whole and undivided; this still a time when memory had not faded; when I could still remember the last moment I saw him alive, the last words I said to him; when the eery knowledge that someone to whom I had spoken less than twelve hours ago no longer exists, has ceased to be, in whose new absence all and sundry must now adopt a tone altogether distinct from the sort of absence which the promise of his existence used to convey.

Even in the despair of death, the spiral on the edge of which we all eventually teeter, a configuration of tea leaves can bring a world back to life, and even for a transcendent moment resuscitate a person who was into a person who is; whose bitter flavour and unquenching aftertaste is also lozenge of pure, unmediated joy at having known again for just a second someone we thought gone forever.

• My dad's books are still available, just about.