On Loyalty

Loyalty: noun Late Middle English. Origin: Old French.  The fact or condition of being loyal; faithfulness to duty or in love, friendship, etc; faithful allegiance to the legitimate monarch or government of one's country.  (OED)

What are the entities to which one might feel or express loyalty? I am (among other things and in the order they occur to me but no other): a Christian, an Anglican, an Englishman, a Briton, a Londoner, a European, a companion, a friend, a son, a brother, a cousin, a godfather, a godson, a priest and a deacon.  Each of these identities inspires in me a different sense of loyalty to something or someone; and if I had to put them in order of the strength of the loyalty engendered, I would be hard put to it in some instances.  This is perhaps partly because loyalty is not just a matter of unforced feeling or affection; it is sometimes a matter of perceived duty.  It is easy to be loyal to (say) my brother because he is a human being in respect of whom my loyalty is a subset of my love, an outworking of our personal relationship. Loyalty to (say) my country is different because, although I certainly also love it, I also have a stronger sense that my loyalty is something I owe it.

But what about religious identity?  I feel a strong loyalty to the Christian faith.  I hope this means I will be faithful to it and to the truth of the gospel to the end of my days; that I will advance its cause when I can and defend it when attacked.  I am also loyal to my Church: to the Anglican tradition, to my bishop and parish, to my brothers and sisters in the faith.  I recognise that this is of a different order of loyalty to that which I owe to the wider Christian faith and Church; though in truth the two are hard for me to separate.  Within Anglicanism, tribal loyalty to the CofE is a slightly awkward thing, because of its established status and the (perhaps consequent) lazy, hazy public view of it as a quasi-official entity in the same broad category as the BBC and the NHS.  It's just there, part of the landscape: criticise it and mock it by all means, even if you work in it - that is your birthright.  But loyalty to it is not required.

Yet loyalty to it is what I feel.  I am in it and of it; I could not think of leaving it.  To turn from the Church in which I was baptised, confirmed and ordained, which has nurtured my faith and vocation, and supported me in distress and weakness would be like abandoning my own mother.  I feel pain when it is traduced, and anger when it is misrepresented and abused.  That, you may say, is a cross I carry.

But there is more.  I am an Anglo-Catholic. I stand in an ancient and continuous tradition of English Christianity, revived and emboldened by the Oxford Movement of the 19th century, and which lives on in the modern Church of England.  This tradition places the Incarnation at the centre of the Christian understanding of the faith and the world; insists on the centrality of the sacraments (especially the Eucharist) in the life of faith; regards the Church on earth as having been founded by Christ himself, and as being unbreakably united to the Church in heaven and the communion of saints; and holds to a proper ordering of its structure and life according to ancient wisdom and practice.

This little summary, you may have noticed, would be endorsed by most Roman Catholics (and certainly officially by their Church) but rejected to a greater or lesser extent by evangelical Christians, including many who worship in the Church of England. When the evangelical view is in the ascendancy, and when wider public assent to traditional Church structures is simultaneously fading, the tendency is for conservative Anglo-Catholics to move further into their comfort zone, away from what has apparently become "mainstream" Anglicanism and towards Roman Catholicism.  In this way, they can find themselves in a liminal, intermediate place between Canterbury and Rome, sometimes with a stronger sense of loyalty to the latter than to the former. This can manifest itself in small things like the use of the Roman Rite and the inclusion of prayers for the Pope at mass; but also in overt and damaging public criticism of the Church of England from the pulpit and in the media. This can be taken to the point where an Anglican becomes a sort of pretend Roman Catholic: still in fact a part of the Church of England (and in the case of stipendiary clergy, still paid and housed by it) but in spirit a citizen of the Roman household of faith.  It is this little constituency for whom the so-called Ordinariate was designed by some bright spark in the Vatican. When you are desperate for priests and you know of some alienated, sympathetic Protestants, it is simple, pragmatic common sense to help them take that final step.

Yet it needs to be said that not all Anglo-Catholics inhabit this no-man's-land.  Most, while having a proper regard for the Pope and Catholic tradition and teaching, are quite clear about and comfortable in their Anglican identity.  For them, calling the Eucharist "mass" and the priest "Father"; invoking the prayers of the saints as a natural part of worship; instinctive awareness and celebration of the incarnational in ordinary life - none of these or associated "marks" of Catholicism translate into an ecclesiastical identity crisis.  Clergy in this situation might well describe themselves as "Catholic" within their own context; but are conscious that to do so indiscriminately and without qualification can cause confusion - both among those to whom they are called to be shepherds and in the community at large. And an important pastoral responsibility of the priest is to strive to hold confusion at bay.  Their Catholicism is dispositional, not institutional.

Also, they are aware that, as enfeebled a movement as it now seems, Anglo-Catholicism changed the Church.  The battles which it fought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - to restore the Eucharist to its proper centrality and to increase the frequency of its celebration and in an identifiably Catholic authorised rite; to restore recognition of the ancient threefold order of ordained ministry; even to be able to wear vestments and to make the sign of the cross - these battles were won. They were not won as comprehensively as some had wanted (and still want); and reunion with Rome is undoubtedly as distant as ever. But, given the history of the Church of England, they were won as far as they could be; and to an extent that the Anglo-Catholic can usually worship comfortably and unapologetically somewhere within reach of his home.  And if he is averse to women priests and bishops - and not all are by any means - he can avoid them without too much effort.

Loyalty is a state of mind - or perhaps a state of the heart.  As virtues go, it is one that has a rather old-fashioned ring.  But, for the Christian, "faithfulness to duty or in love, friendship, etc" is second nature; it is, in its highest form, what binds God and man, the essence of the covenant.  It binds us to others, whether by love or by duty.  We need it to flourish; to interact wholesomely with each other.  It is a kind of currency.  And it is of God.

Apologia Pro Sua Ecclesia

In my dumbed-down, over-simplified, rule-of-thumb grasp of Church history and theology, I associate the term via media with John Henry Newman.  He it was, I think, who, long before kicking the dust of Anglicanism from his Oxford brogues, used the term to describe the "middle way" between Puritan Protestantism and Roman Catholicism which was the Church of England's inheritance from the Elizabethan Settlement onwards.  Newman himself believed - at that stage, anyway - that the Church had, during the 18th century, forgotten its ancient Catholic heritage enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer, and had in the process become a dull department of a Hanoverian Protestant state.  He and his fellow Tractarians - who were to become the founding fathers of the Oxford Movement - fretted about Erastianism (the idea that the state should have authority over the Church in ecclesiastical matters) and worried that the Church of England was in danger of losing its identity, squeezed as it was between a newly restored and growing Roman Catholic Church and the vigorous Protestant sects that had grown during the evangelical revival of the previous century.  With reference to the Early Fathers and the Elizabethan and Caroline divines, the Tractarians re-imagined the true English Church.  This Church looked quite a bit more Catholic than it had done (and indeed than many were comfortable with) and effectively began what some regard as the recatholicisation of Anglicanism.  The Oxford Movement begat Anglo-Catholicism - a term I believe also coined by Newman, and a movement which survived his defection to Rome and which profoundly influenced subsequent Church of England life and polity.

But Tractarianism did not want England to revert to Rome; it wanted the Church to recover what it had lost or deprecated but which was there in black and white in the pages of the 1662 Prayer Book - its liturgical and ecclesiological authority. This, they believed, envisaged much more frequent access to the sacraments (Newman's "keys and spells"), the most radical expression of which was perhaps their espousal of the restoration of auricular confession in the Church of England.  But the "excesses" of Rome were not on the agenda, any more than were the radical claims and uncanonical practices of evangelical Protestantism.  The Church of England was not a confessional denomination like Lutheranism; it was the liberated and reformed catholic (ie universal) Church of England.  Seen from this perspective, the via media was not just a matter of advocating a moderate Christianity: it had been the Church's calling from the beginning.

If I were a fundamentalist evangelical I would be expected to believe in some or all of the following: the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of God; the claim that He created the world in six days about 6000 years ago; that ordained priesthood is at best unnecessary (and that when the Bishop put his hands on my head, nothing happened beyond his spoiling my hair-do); that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are merely symbolic; that the dead are dead and beyond my prayers; that some are predestined for salvation and that the rest are irretrievably doomed; and that the Church on earth is no more than a convenient way of organising Christians.

If I were a Roman Catholic I would be obliged to believe: the notion that a human being, however wise and holy he might be, is infallible (when speaking ex cathedra but not otherwise); that it is possible for that same person to arrange for me to spend less time in purgatory in return for my attendance at a service or event; that belief in the "immaculate" conception and bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary are necessary to my salvation; that a prayer to a native Canadian woman who died in 1680 recently and miraculously cured a little boy of a fatal disease, warranting her canonisation last year; and for good measure, that my church is not a church at all, and that my holy orders are "absolutely null and utterly void". 

As it is, I am free to believe any or all of these things - but not obliged to.  (It would actually be rather odd if I believed the last of them, but some Anglican priests are doing just that in respect of the so-called "Ordinariate".)  It is probably good for me to make my confession to a priest, but my salvation does not depend upon it.  If I believe that the substance of the bread and wine of the Eucharist is changed by their consecration, I may so believe entirely legitimately, but may not insist on the same belief on the part of my fellow-worshipper.

For occupying this middle ground, and notwithstanding my decidedly illiberal credal orthodoxy, some will accuse me of being a wishy-washy fence-sitter, and/or a milk-and-water relativist. Others will conclude simply (and perhaps sadly) that I am going to hell in a handcart and that there is no help for me unless I repent of my wilful rejection of the truth. Well, they may or may not be right.  As it is, I count myself rather fortunate not to be obliged to adhere to dogma which I find ridiculous while keeping it to myself.  I belong to a Church and Communion which does not invite people to sign up to any theological propositions beyond those "uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds", but which says to them merely: "We are your church. This is what we do. Can you worship with us?"

Times and Tides

I have watched many Parliamentary debates.  Some I have watched from the officials' box (one of that little row of faces to the left of the Speaker's chair as you face it), some from upper galleries out of sight to TV viewers, and some - like yesterday's - from the privacy of my own home.  They have been, on and off, a part of my professional life.  I have rarely enjoyed them.  This is partly because, for me, they have been work.  When, in my civil service career, I sat in the officials' box, I was usually there to produce information that would enable my minister to provide immediate answers to unforeseen questions raised in debate. When, nowadays, I sit in one of the galleries in the House of Lords, I do so to hear contributions on subjects on which my bishop speaks for the Church and, when he is participating, to tweet a sound-bite or two.  Yesterday's debate on the same-sex marriage bill I watched at home on TV for sheer pleasure (if that is the word).  I say "if that is the word" because I know enough about myself to realise that I dislike conflict and that I am prone to become personally involved to an extent that militates against the impartiality required of a Government official.  And although I no longer occupy that role, I can't get out of the habit.

There was little great oratory yesterday.  But there were some courageous and moving speeches.  I found myself marvelling that Tories like Nick Herbert and Mike Freer were able to stand in the Commons and on national TV and be open about themselves and their support for this gloriously unconservative bill.  Could they have done this 20, even 10, years ago?  I doubt it.  The old Tory dogs were still there behind them, yapping and snapping at their heels; but the earth has turned another quarter-turn, and for Herbert, Freer and a host of others, it is moving perceptibly from darkness into light.  To his credit, David Cameron understands this; I don't think his opponents do.  Not really.

If I had to pick an "anti" speech for special mention it would have to be Edward Leigh's.  Leigh is a proudly devout old-style Roman Catholic and gave an elegant and poetic (and accurate) account of the traditional Christian understanding of marriage.  Towards the end, in response to the claim that the world had "moved on" (from the civil partnerships debate), he replied: "The worry that some of us have is that the world...could move on again".  Yes. It could and it will.

The same theme was picked up by Sir Menzies Campbell (a supporter of the bill) who began his remarks by saying: "there is a kind of inevitability about what many of us are hoping will be decided here this evening".  He saw gay marriage as the next step along the road towards the full inclusion and equal treatment of all outcasts: a destination that we know we will reach eventually.  There is something profoundly Christian about this.

And inevitability is the point.  I expect this bill, which still has a good few parliamentary hurdles to jump, to become law in due course.  But even it if doesn't, a future Labour government will introduce a similar one which certainly will.  One way or another, sooner or later, we will have gay marriage.  And we all know it. Isn't the honest (and brave) thing to do to accept that, and to focus on introducing it in a way that commands the widest possible assent and calms the greatest number of fears?

It's been noted that this is a huge gamble for David Cameron; that he has betrayed Conservative principles and will lose "core" votes without gaining any others.  I wonder if his motivation rests upon his honest assessment that he will not, probably, in any event, be Prime Minister after 2015: that the times are simply against him.  Given that, perhaps he wants to be remembered for something other than austerity and benefit cuts and rising debt. Something that's not coloured grey. Something that makes us more human. Something lasting.  Perhaps this is the thing. Perhaps now is the time.

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

(Brutus, from Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3)

The Friendship of Dorothy

I blogged recently about the ordinariness of my suburban parish. Such places can be the context for the extraordinary.  Exactly 50 years ago this Saturday, on another snowy January day, died Dorothy Kerin, visionary, mystic and healer, who received the stigmata (the marks on her own body of Christ's wounds on the cross) in the vicarage of the parish I serve as assistant priest.

Here is a piece I wrote for the Bishop of London, who recently preached about her at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, central London.

✜

Perhaps within the pantheon of the ancient Church, Dorothy Kerin might have been viewed as a great saint. Within the Anglican tradition, during her own lifetime, she was considered a pioneer in the recovery of the Church’s healing ministry.

Aged 22, she suffered from tuberculosis and its complications. After two weeks of very considerable poor health, she was, it seems, miraculously healed. She claimed to have not only seen the Risen Lord but to have actually met him. In this meeting, she was given a commission: to go into the world and perform an important work for Him.

‘I seemed to be going somewhere with a definite purpose.  For me it was a time of indescribable joy and bliss in a place and environment of exquisite harmony, when suddenly I was aware of a lovely form in dazzling white. He was coming towards me and I knew it was Jesus. He said “Dorothy, will you go back and do something for me”, to which I answered “Yes, Lord”. Then I was told to get up and walk.’

In 1915 Dorothy began a period of spiritual direction under Dr Richard Langford James, vicar of St Mark’s, Bush Hill Park in north London. He was well versed in mystical and ascetical theology particularly in the Carmelite school; and Dorothy lived in the vicarage through the London bombings of WW1 and beyond. Her faith was informed by the mystical tradition, with a clear Anglican sense of appropriateness and dignity.

During this period, and while in extended prayer in St Mark’s vicarage, she experienced the manifestation of the marks of the wounds of Christ on her own body, her hands, feet and side.  She is thus one of the few attested Anglican stigmatics.

In a letter to Dr Langford James she says: “Is it not splendid of Our Blessed Lord to accept tiny gifts of sacrifice that we can give to Him, when His gifts to us are so great and glorious? His love makes one ashamed.”

In 1929 she left Bush Hill Park and opened her first residential home of healing (St Raphael’s, a rented house in Ealing, west London).  It was to become a place “to strengthen the weak hands and to confirm the feeble knees of many suffering souls”.

Dorothy emphasized through her long ministry that although physical healing may occur through prayer, most important are the healings of mind and spirit, in which the recipient of grace is reconciled or drawn closer to God.

Like the compassionate St John of the Cross, whose writings she had studied at Bush Hill Park, her appearance often was marked by simplicity of externals, and her great love for souls. She would eschew her own comfort to go the extra mile with those in need, by giving them ‘lovely clothes’ and drives in the country.

Dorothy understood that while we struggle and suffer, God sees every life from the perspective of eternity.  She emphasized that healings often were not dramatic but were gradual and always with a movement towards God.

Dorothy’s personal experience of the living Christ turned her life around and set her on a course of wanting to share with others the wonders of God’s transforming love, and she wanted to share this by setting aside a place where others could come and find the same transforming touch.  Her life was a continuous sacrifice of self.

With her dedicated band of followers she established successively three homes of prayer and healing in the south.  In 1948 she was able to develop the land and buildings that make up the core of the present-day Burrswood.  Here, medicine and the church could work together.

Dorothy espoused a ‘resting theology’… in which the individual is encouraged to identify with the will of God, not in a simple, “if it be according to thy will” sense; but one in which the individual soul places itself entirely at the disposal of God: more like “into thy hands, I commend myself”. For her, the seeing of God’s Kingdom was foremost.

Dorothy Kerin’s own words about Burrswood in a speech she gave in London in 1958:

“As the making of physical fire was one of the great milestones in the rise of man, so also, I believe, was his discovery of prayer as a means of kindling and fanning a flame he found within him; a flame which, like a spiritual engine, has brought him to higher things. Let him not throw it away.  It seems to me that a glorious bonfire - if you will - has been erected at Burrswood. We have watched it growing and growing, with thanksgiving and blessings and wonders, as it has built up over the years. And now it has been ignited with a flame - that living flame –that burns with love and power. It has flamed up; and now so long as this world lasts that flame will not go out. It is an eternal fire glowing on earth with the love of God…”

A week after her death on 26 January 1963, Bishop Cuthbert Bardsley (who was Bishop Warden of Burrswood) wrote in the Times: “At the centre of this dynamic work [Burrswood] was a fragile, gifted and inspired woman, Dorothy Kerin.”

Perhaps here there is a clue to the character of the woman. In her fragility, her weakness, lay her strength. It brought her to a real encounter with the eternal beauty of God. It enabled her to see beyond ill health and to go out in compassion towards others.

A prayer from Dorothy Kerin’s own note book:

By the bruising of

my whole life,

strengthen me with

sympathy for every wounded soul, and

let my prayers be as

balm for the wounds

of thy children, that

they may be healed.

Dorothy Kerin is one of 29 new commemorations in the Kalender for London, which complements the Common Worship national calendar of saints and other holy men and women, and which can be found here:

http://www.london.anglican.org/resources/Blocks/17289/London-Kalendar-v1.0.pdf

I Am A Parish

I'm a town in Carolina, I'm a detour on a ride 

For a phone call and a soda, I'm a blur from the driver's side
I'm the last gas for an hour if you're going twenty-five
I am Texaco and tobacco, I am dust you leave behind

I am peaches in September, and corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives, I'm a cadence and a drawl
I'm the pines behind the graveyard, and the cool beneath their shade, 

where the boys have left their beer cans
I am weeds between the graves.

My porches sag and lean with old black men and children
Their sleep is filled with dreams, I never can fulfill them
I am a town.

I am a church beside the highway where the ditches never drain
I'm a Baptist like my daddy, and Jesus knows my name
I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age; 

I am not your destination
I am clinging to my ways
I am a town.

I'm a town in Carolina, I am billboards in the fields 
I'm an old truck up on cinder blocks, missing all my wheels

I am Pabst Blue Ribbon, American, and "Southern Serves the South"
I am tucked behind the Jaycees sign, on the rural route
I am a town
Southbound.

Transpose, if imagination will allow, from the southern American to the British suburban context the insignificance of the town which country singer Mary Chapin Carpenter describes in this lovely song I Am A Town, and you have a feel of the parish in which I am pleased to serve as assistant priest.  

You might pass through our parish on your way in or out of London on the A10 - one of the dual-carriageway trunk roads built in the 1930s and quickly lined with light industrial plants, predominantly manufacturing electrical appliances.  These have been replaced by car showrooms, furniture warehouses with permanent sales, and supermarkets of various stripes - the whole a nice microcosm of the shift from making things to simply selling them.  Recently, a cheap hotel has - apparently pointlessly - sprung up on the site of one of the old factories. You might have passed through, but you probably won't have stopped.  You will have pressed on into London or towards Hertford or Cambridge. I'm a blur from the driver's side.

We are a small and undistinguished triangle of outer suburbia, carved out of the much larger, ancient neighbouring parish at the turn of the last century; and consisting almost entirely of housing speculatively built around a station on a new railway line north from central London into leafy Middlesex.  Almost overnight, it became possible to work in the Big Smoke and live in the countryside, and this London suburb - like others at every compass-point - was born.  Bylaw terraces and railway cottages for the teeming workers; some larger houses for the management.  A parade of shops, a few pubs, a school, and of course - this being the 1890s - a church.  In fact, since you could not expect everyone to submit to the Anglo-Catholicism supposedly favoured by the urban working-class, two churches. Ours - bells, smells, solemn high masses, and Father Surname-Only in full vestments.  A neat example of what writer A N Wilson has called the Church of England's  "bricky slum shrines", its head in a cloud of incense and its hands and feet in the mire of poverty, midway between Canterbury and Rome.  And, a matter of yards away yet within a stone's throw of Geneva, the Congregationalists: unbending in their devotion to the unmediated Word of God, a life of plain obedience to the same, and a simplicity of worship (Sundays only).

120 years on, most of the shops have gone and all but one of the pubs.  The school - a stern but kind, imposing but rambling, confection in Edwardian terracotta - now educates mainly Muslim children.  The old families, generation after generation living in the same house, have gone: parents and grandparents buried with due ceremony (High or Low, according to conviction), children moved to Hertfordshire dormitory towns.  The railway station still does its job - a 25-minute commute to the City (and, by London standards, relatively affordable property) makes this fertile first-home territory.  But few stay for long.  I am not your destination.

Yet the church is still here.  It still does what it did, except differently.  The people for whom, and to whom, it does it are different.  Compared to 50 years ago, they are of highly diverse ethnic origin, religious background, and personal lifestyle.  For the most part, they will not live in their present homes for the rest of their lives; their children will certainly live elsewhere. They are passing through.  They are less disposed than their forebears to do what Father says without question; and, for the most part, Father is not disposed to lead so unassailably from the front.

Importantly, these people do not come because it is the proper (or only) thing to do on Sunday morning.  They come because something draws them.  They come with hugely various spiritual and moral baggage; and with, perhaps, some heterodox doctrinal understanding.  My very favourite thing about the Church of England is that we do not say: "Will you sign up to this set of theological propositions?"  We say rather, "Can you worship with us in this way?"  Given the combination of factors which seem to compromise the Church's calling - it warms the heart to see how many still can.

How do I sound?

It seems to me that "how I sound" is made up of the following three elements:

The timbre of my voice.  This is its pitch, tone and "colour".  Of all three this must be the most difficult to alter, dependent as it is on my gender, the length of my vocal chords, and countless genetically inherited physical factors (I'm often struck by how different my father, my brother and I look, but how similar we sound).

My accent.  This is of course another matter.  It is the product of the geographical locus of my early years, my upbringing, education and other influences.  I can alter my accent if I want to: I remember a boy who used to talk dead ordinary when we were at school in north-east London but who, when I met him again in our 20s, sounded as if he'd been to Eton.

My speech patterns and vocabulary.  While these, too, were formed by my familial, social and educational background, they have developed and changed over the years, shaped by my occupation, my reading, those with whom I share my life and spend my time, and countless other subtle influences.

I speak (and sing) in public a lot - mainly in church.  I am used to projecting my voice, and am conscious that this sometimes makes the volume of my non-public speech a touch higher than it needs to be.  My colleague and I often say to each other in ordinary conversation: "You don't need to shout - I'm standing right next to you".  This may be an occupational hazard.  But when I hear myself on voicemail, I am dismayed.  In my head, my accent is Received Pronunciation ("the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England" - OED) but in reality what I think is my "unaccented" southern pronunciation is corrupted by flat Estuary vowels and glottal stops.  The timbre of my voice seems mealy-mouthed and slack: its "colour" a sort of light brown.  Awful.

I was drawn to consideration of this by a recent experience in an airport departure lounge.  I was sitting in one of those rows of seats which has an identical row behind it facing the other way - so that someone sitting immediately behind you is as close as someone sitting next to you.  Because the person sitting behind you can't see you, he or she feels no need to lower the volume of their conversation - which you cannot easily ignore.  The person behind me on this occasion was an youngish-sounding American woman; and were it not for the fact that I was also mesmerised by it, I was so irritated by her voice that I would have pointed my wheeled cabin-bag to the other end of the lounge and removed it and myself thereto pretty sharpish.

The timbre of her voice was unattractive but unexceptional - no worse than mine - and she sounded reasonably educated.  It was the verbal tics she employed that did for me.  In conversation with her neighbour, she must have used the word "like" - both in the now-familiar sense of reporting conversation ("I'm like - you can't be serious!") and for general emphasis ("She was, like, so not listening to me") about 1000 times in the space of 20 minutes. Secondly, she made liberal use of Questioning Intonation - that habit of going up at the end of a statement so that it sounds like a question?  And thirdly, she employed what is called vocal fry - a way of pitching the voice below its normal register so that it becomes hoarse, rasping and possibly, supposedly, sexy.

I know what it is about departure lounges.  Once you're airside, you're formally in no-man's-land; you are in a notional interstice between countries and their jurisdictions; your bearings have been removed and you are sort of weightless.  The sense of disorientation this generates is exacerbated by windows of tinted glass which lend an unreality to the outside world (a strange, unpeopled place called Greater Airport) and depressingly pointless shops selling things that you could have bought for half the price outside.  They are not places where I generally feel buoyant.  Otherwise, I might not have taken against this (probably charming) lady as I did.  But it made me realise the extent to which I dislike these aberrations of speech, and resent their insidious spread.

They, and perhaps others, may have originated in the affluent young female population of the San Fernando Valley - essentially a sprawling suburb of Los Angeles - and disseminated via the powerful media industries of that vast city.  These "Valley Girls" with their "Valleyspeak" are, when you come to think of it, an extraordinary phenomenon - their "likes" and rising inflections now as much part of ordinary speech in Burford as in Burbank.  I do not have children - and if I had, they would probably be grown up by now - but I remember how strict our father was about unacceptable speech patterns my brother and I brought home from school, and wonder how I would prevent their modern equivalents taking root in my own offspring.  Maybe make them listen to themselves on voicemail.

Under African Skies

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s when South Africa was never out of the news.  Bulletins featured black heroes and martyrs called Tutu, Mandela and Biko, snarling right-wing white politicians with Dutch names and off-putting accents, apartheid (which term our geography teacher, in a tone heavy with meaning, explained was pronounced apart-hate), sanctions, and things called townships where black people lived in shacks.  We - the UN, the civilised world - were unequivocally, righteously hostile in our view of the regime: we signed petitions, demonstrated, and refused to play cricket with them or buy their oranges.  If you went there (which you were not encouraged to do for fear of "legitimising" it by your visit) it took hours longer than it needed to because of overflying restrictions.

The issue was, emphatically, race - the anti-apartheid struggle perhaps the biggest race-based conflict since the American Civil War - and Britain in those years was a country coming to terms with its own recently acquired multi-racial character. Collectively, we were not at all sure of where we stood on this highly ethical, super-sensitive, profoundly human subject; and South Africa was at once an awful warning and a beacon of hope.  In our uncertainty, we relocated our anger and fear, our doubts and hopes, to the far south - partly, I suspect, so that we did not have to look at ourselves too closely.  This led to some extraordinary expressions of bigotry and self-righteousness, and also some of true heroism and towering humility.  For a good 25 years, it was impossible for the ordinary Briton not to have a view about South Africa - and there was really only one respectable view.  With strong competition from the Vietnam war, it became the political cause célèbre for a whole generation of young Westerners.

This, and what has happened there since those dark years, has inevitably coloured my view of this huge, complicated country.  I have recently returned from a 10-day holiday in the Western Cape - which some will tell you is not the "real" South Africa (let alone the "real" Africa) at all.  Its Mediterranean climate and its Western social attitudes - not to mention its extraordinary beauty - provide a highly sympathetic point of entry for the urban liberal. And if you can contrive not to take in the glimpses of the townships that rise along the motorway from the airport into Cape Town, if you restrict your subsequent range to your ocean-view apartment, city-centre restaurants and beauty spots, you can pretty much avoid contemplation of recent history and its legacy.  You can eat very well and very cheaply.  You can (if you're the type) surf and paraglide in idyllic surroundings.  You can visit pristine vineyards, admire their contemporary art installations, and taste the very fine and varied wines of Constantia and Stellenbosch.  You can wander the exquisite Kirstenbosch botanical gardens which nestle into the side of Table Mountain.  You can bathe in the warmth of these smiling, hospitable people - who will switch without missing a beat to English from their native isiXhosa or Afrikaans to welcome or help you.  You can go to church - this is still a very religious country - in large, often racially and linguistically mixed Anglican congregations, and feel entirely at home.  If you want, you can ignore the other stuff.

Except you can't, really.  You can't ignore a train platform populated entirely by black people (out-of-town whites commute by car).  You can't ignore people toiling along hard shoulders miles from anywhere, hitching lifts if they can (I am mildly haunted by the sight of young men lying impassively on piles of timber or furniture in the back of pick-up trucks); you can't ignore the vast, dense, tumbling shanty settlements of the Cape Flats, with their dodgy-looking electricity poles and kids playing football on waste ground.  You can't ignore the men who appear from nowhere to help you park your car in the hope of small "donation".  Most of all, you can't ignore people standing, sitting, eating, even sleeping, at every crossroads and motorway junction, waiting for God knows what or whom.  And, on the flipside, you can't ignore the gated security, and the bars at every window of the smart houses of the leafy, silent white suburbs, patrolled in police fashion by ubiquitous ADT vans.

It's too easy to slip into a bleeding-heart guilt-trip about all this - especially on the basis of a short visit to what is probably one of the most affluent corners of the entire African continent.  But it is salutary (and perhaps simply human) to be aware of the inequalities, and of how little income disparity has changed since the abolition of apartheid (in fact it has increased).  And it's clear that the poor are generally black and the rich are generally white. That's not unique to South Africa, of course; but it is certainly more graphically obvious there than it is in the UK.  As far as I could judge, nobody much expects this to change in a hurry: there is much cynicism about the present ANC government, which many - of all races - believe to be riven with corruption and nepotism; and the economy of this country - fertile, resource-rich, and bursting with potential - is flatlining. But the visiting, well-wishing foreigner finds it hard not to be hopeful.  It's simply a lovely place, and its people so damned nice that it's hard to regard it as anything but blessed.

Post script.  On the day I got back, the BBC ran a TV programme documenting the hot water that American singer-songwriter Paul Simon had got into over his landmark album Graceland.  Simon had rather stumbled into the South African controversy in 1986 when he went there to record songs for the album, breaking the "cultural boycott" of South Africa which was by then in place.  He collaborated with the then exiled and since deceased black South African singer Miriam Makeba ("Mama Africa") but, most famously and controversially, with the indigenous male-voice group Ladyship Black Mambazo.

I vaguely remember the fuss at the time; and I also remember largely ignoring it.  This was partly because, by the mid-80s, boycotting South Africa had become reduced to a sort of background noise; but mainly because I regarded (and still regard) Simon as a poetic genius and Graceland as a work of musical art.  Its fusion of African tribal rhythms and harmonies with Simon's lonely urban mysticism is a - possibly timeless - triumph and, as far as I know, a truly unique undertaking.

So I had not realised how badly affected Simon - an apparently liberal and humane man - had been by the criticism which he had attracted by his unwitting "legitimisation" of the Pretoria regime. The programme suggested that, 26 years on, his album caused offence that has only just been forgiven by some former anti-apartheid activists.  This made me smile: in the Cape Town department stores, restaurants, bars, souvenir shops and airport lounges in which I had found myself days before, I could not escape the strains of Paul Simon's poignant celebration of Africa, and of human memory:

Joseph's face was as black as night;
the pale yellow moon shone in his eyes.
His path was marked 
by the stars of the southern hemisphere
and he walked his days under African skies.

This is the story of how we begin to remember.
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein.
After the dream of falling and calling your name out,
these are the roots of rhythm
and the roots of rhythm remain.

Listen here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDg6YHjN72A