Ysenda Maxtone Graham is an author and feature writer for newspapers and magazines including Country Life, the Spectator and the book-lovers' quarterly Slightly Foxed. Her - very readable and entertaining publications include Terms & Conditions: Life In Girls' Boarding-Schools, 1939 to 1979; British Summer Time Begins: The School Summer Holidays 1930-1980; and Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age. She loves the psalms./ / / / / /Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpoleThe official website of James Delingpole: https://jamesdelingpole.co.ukx
O rensa, meia, is let trium is let trium tata nois.
Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Dellingpole.
And I'm very excited to introduce my special guest, Isenda Maxton Graham.
This is going to be a general Psalms chat.
Isenda, I've read lots of your really good articles on, well, Cathedral choirs on on the the history of English hymns, and maybe we're going to digress into some of that as well, but um Let's talk about about our experience of the psalms.
I suspect that your experience of the psalms is Similar to mine in that I went to one of those traditional English prep schools and and the public schools Where we had?
Well, I mean we had seven We went to chapel seven days a week and twice on Sundays and we would have to sing the hymns obviously but we'd also have psalms and I remember thinking that they were these dreary dirges that I didn't make sense.
I mean I would have been eight or nine at the time when I started seeing them.
Didn't make any sense.
I mean I remember some phrases that are stuck in my brain like the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea.
Was that your experience too?
Actually I think I came across them rather later because I came across them when I went to, in the sixth form, when I went to King's Canterbury where I met, first of all I'd met boys who'd been choristers at cathedrals and they introduced me to the world of psalms and then I started singing in the school choir and we sang psalms 126 to 131, that little cluster short Psalms when the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion and that's when I I sort of fell madly in love quite late so I didn't have your awful years of hating them
actually I came straight to fresh and felt fell in love at the age of 18 and have been in love with Psalms ever since oh okay okay I I'm glad.
I mean, as you know, I'm on a mission to revive interest in the Psalms because I think they've been slightly forgotten.
I mean, unless you say you go to a cathedral.
Well, you're the first person that's ever let me talk about them.
I've asked, please can I write about Psalms for my beloved Slightly Fox?
Oh, really?
They let me write about hymns, but psalms just didn't, you know, they just weren't interested enough.
And I think they're some of the most beautiful language.
I mean, the Coverdell version that we were talking about, we are talking about perhaps, is one of the most beautiful bits of writing in the English language.
And yes, the boys I went to school with had themselves detested psalms or sort of found them a bit of a chore, rather like the sandwiches before the cake in a service, the cake being the anthem.
And the psalms were the bread and butter you had to get through first in order to earn your lovely Victorian anthem.
found them they had found a bit of a chore but then they had grown to love them and they yeah the the the tunes i mean i do you know even now i'm still not i know that psalms are meant to be sung so my treating them as poetry rather than as as songs is is actually denying them their full that their full majesty
But even now, you know, even now though I'm familiar with, I mean this is a terrible confession, Even though I'm familiar with the words now, I still, where does, where does the music to which Psalms are sung now, when, when, when was that, when did that come about?
When was that written?
Anglican chant, which is almost one of my favorite art forms, which is this very miniature thing of four chords, then six, then four, then six, just four quarters.
Purcell did write some, and some very, very good ones, but I think they came to the absolute four in sort of late 18th and mid 19th century.
And Some of the greatest psalm chants were written.
And I think they match the words so beautifully.
And they're often by very, they're often rather unknown, unfamous composers.
I mean, just for example, I would call things like Arnold and Atkins and Parrot and Goss and Crotch and my favorite, Camage.
Camage, who was an organist at York Minster, wrote the psalm chant to Psalm 22, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
La da da da.
La da da da da da.
So I mean just absolutely simple as that and somehow the incantatory feeling of them being sung again and again, that being sung again and again, verse after verse, I find very very powerful.
I like the sound, even on that brief snippet, I like the sound of that psalm.
Psalm 22 is one of the key ones because as you know Christ quoted it on the cross.
My God, my God, I see, yes.
It's one of the pathetic songs.
Oh, wow, that is incredible, isn't it?
My heart in the midst of my body is even like melting wax.
I mean, what a depiction of despair.
And I feel that Coverdell himself was every man, really, every man.
I know he translated the songs.
I'm sure he put his character into them.
I feel that so much of the language has an extra injection of sort of almost a mini Shakespeare in his way of using vocabulary so simply and so vividly.
I'm totally with you.
And I'm biased towards things that are older.
I just think that as As Christianity has moved away from the original events, so it has been corrupted by the liturgy and the texts have been interfered with.
Politics has strayed into religion and I just think that Coverdale, who I learned from a previous podcast with Alex Thompson, was around In the time of Henry VIII, it has the edge.
Yes, exactly.
The 1611 Committee.
Yes, let alone the dreadful Common Worship one, which is this century, which somehow just watered down.
It's all right, but every single verse is just a little bit taken from it, a bit of the absolute majesty taken from it.
I was talking to a vicar the other day who said he used to do the morning office every morning in his cathedrals where he was a canon, and they read the Common Worship, which is a new version, and it's just utterly unmemorable.
In the cathedrals now, I can't remember when I last went to a cathedral service, which version do they sing?
They sing the Coverdell, the proper Book of Common Prayer psalms.
This very day, on a rainy, very rainy Thursday, Psalm 108 is being sung in York Minster this afternoon and in Westminster Abbey.
108 being, I think it contains that marvellous verse, Duda is my lawgiver, Moab is my washpot, over Edom will I cast out my shoe.
That is being sung today.
Typical, ordinary weekday afternoon.
I mean, that's one of the gems.
It is one of the gems of Britain, I feel.
It's not happening in other countries.
They might have Sunday psalms, but this happens every day of the week.
It's sung chorally to that beautiful language.
Moab is my washpot.
Yes.
Was used by Stephen Fry, of all people, as the title of one of his memoirs.
Autobiography.
Yes.
He's not a Christian.
He's an anti-Christian.
Yeah, but he loves the words.
And one can love the words and not be Christian.
I'm full of doubt.
I mean, I do go to church, but I'm riddled with doubt.
But again, so is the psalmist.
He loses his faith all the time, the psalmist.
So the psalmist is so in touch with our real feelings of despair, of futility, nihilism sometimes, and then just sometimes swinging into absolute gratitude and belief.
That's what we love about them.
Yes, I've noticed this.
And in fact, C.S.
Lewis, It's all my bugbears.
It's a recurring theme of my sound podcast.
C.S.
Lewis.
It shows himself to me to be suspect with his book on the Psalms, a terrible book where he clearly did not warm to them or understand them.
He apologizes for them and he apologizes for their, for example, that wonderful technique they have where they repeat a concept in a slightly different way.
Yes.
Just cast new light on it.
Yes, so that the sun shall not burn thee by day, neither the moon by night.
My mouth is dried up like a pot's herd, my tongue cleaveth to the roof of my gums.
So exactly, just repeating either with a bit of an opposite or repeating the same thing in two verses.
So he didn't like that.
He thought it was repetitive and boring.
Yeah, he thought it was one of those things that made them difficult or sort of boring even.
Because it is true that sometimes in some literature repetition is boring, isn't it?
But somehow like Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he.
You could say it's quite boring repetition.
It doesn't add much to it.
But somewhere in the Psalms that incantatory feeling just makes one go into a trance Yeah, yeah.
And as you say, there's a psalm for every occasion.
Despair, gratitude, exultancy.
Yeah.
I mean, every single thing we have to do now has to be put in the context of, for me, has to be put in the context of Auschwitz.
People there were in utter despair.
Were the Psalms helping them?
Will the Psalms help you in the absolute depths of unbelievable misery?
I mean, of course, they didn't actually save people in Auschwitz who got murdered nonetheless, but my God, my God, why has self-forsaken me?
I mean, they speak more deeply than any other part of the Bible, surely.
Yes, and there's The martyrs are particularly fond of the Psalms as they go to their martyrdom.
Apparently Psalm 43 I've seen described as the martyrs psalm and I was thinking well... Yes.
I mean, A, it's one of the classics, but B, it's quite short.
And I imagine if you were going off to be martyred, you wouldn't have time to do 119.
That's true, you really wouldn't.
Nor would you want to harper on about the law for a million verses.
But exactly, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
I was thinking about that.
So he could have covered, or could have written, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death, couldn't he?
Which would have been less good.
Or he could have written, though I walk Well, he's definitely got the rhythm.
It's that sort of incantatory quality that it's great to speak out loud.
Yes, and also simplicity of words and simplicity of language, the valley of the shadow of death.
I mean, I'm sure Shakespeare must have got his eyes being inspired.
So, Shakespeare was born on 1564, 30 years after Myles Coverdell published his Book of Common Prayer translation.
So, Shakespeare would have grown up with that.
And I just feel it must have educated him in the art of simplicity.
Well, you and I are slightly different on Shakespeare.
I don't believe that the man from Stratford wrote any of this stuff.
I think he was written by a scriptorium headed by the other ones.
But I take your point.
These are all These are all church going.
I mean you had to go to church then.
It was kind of against the law.
And I disagree because I feel Shakespeare does have a character that comes through in all the plays.
And I feel that Coverdell has a character because he didn't like dogs clearly because dogs come across very badly in the Psalms.
I mean, they don't come across very well in the Bible actually.
Yes, yes.
Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.
Yes.
And gogs that grin and grin about the city and horrible things.
So I just feel it has got this sort of curmudgeonly character about it.
Surely there were dogs in the original Hebrew?
Yes, I suppose there probably were.
But I really need a Hebrew scholar to tell me to what extent Coverdale sort of embellished and put his own amazing vocabulary in.
I mean, the hills are full of goats and the refuge for the goats and the stony rocks for the cones.
Marvellous.
Ah, I'm glad you mentioned that.
So Psalm 104, yeah?
Yes, that's right.
Yes.
I'm trying to work out.
Yes.
I've learned so far, I've learned about 20 psalms and I've just more or less nailed Psalm 51.
Thou shalt cleanse me with hyssop and I shall be clean.
Thou shalt wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
I mean, that's an absolute example of the parallel half verses that just sort of echo each other, but just enhance each other.
So well done.
You've got that under your belt.
Very good.
So I've got that one.
Well, you see, OK, so it's a difficult one.
I was wondering about whether to do Psalm 110, which is the sister psalm to Psalm 2.
I was also thinking of doing Psalm 82, which is an interesting one because it's about the Divine Council, which Michael S. Heiser has been very interesting on, the late Michael S. Heiser.
People speak highly of Psalm 103, but I'm thinking I love Psalm 104 because it's got all the animals in it.
Well, it's got all the lovely stony rocks of the Cones, and exactly, it has, it is marvellous.
Oh, but what about the bit where the lions, you know, the lions go hunting at night, and then they go to their dens in the day, and then you've got man rising to do his work.
I just love this sort of, it's like if David Attenborough were good, this would be the sort of stuff that you'd, if he weren't an agent of evil.
Exactly.
To me, the idea that seven-year-olds are singing this stuff every day, every morning, is a hugely enriching thing for society.
They're growing up with these extraordinary images in their minds.
So please, please, that's why I care passionately about it.
That's one of the many reasons why I care about choirs.
It helps any young singer to grow up with this incredible vocabulary swirling in their head.
And I know they might find it boring, but I mean, and my friend Tim at school used to change, my heart is inviting of a good matter to my fart is igniting with a loud clatter.
That's what schoolboys did.
My fart is igniting with what?
A loud clatter.
It's meant to be a loud clatter.
It's meant that my heart is indicting of a good matter.
Of course they mucked around with the words.
Of course they would.
At the time I felt sorry for the choristers at my, well certainly at my prep school because we had a A choir master who used to fiddle with the boys, you know, probably not the only prep school that had that problem.
Yeah, sure.
He had all his pretty boy favorites and stuff.
Yeah, horrible.
But they used to have this incredibly demanding... I mean, this is the nature of being a chorister, isn't it?
You work like a dog.
Coverdale, I'm sure, would be concerned about that.
Coverdale would like that, yes.
But you work like a dog.
You have to take all this time out.
Early mornings, always early mornings, yep.
It's like being an oarsman, actually, at Oxford.
Again, you have to go and train when everyone else is having fun.
I suppose you do.
But now, I think how wonderful to have had your voice trained from that age.
When you go to church, even if it's only at Christmas, you can actually sing properly.
The harmonies, exactly.
And you can sight read, which is an incredible skill for life.
And you have this absolute bank of stuff.
If you did go to prison, you'd have so much to live on that you know by heart, both music and words, that you'd be set up for.
It's funny you say that, Ascenda.
From what you said earlier, it sounds like I'm sort of deeper and further down the Christian rabbit hole than you are, in that I do think that we are approaching end times.
And I do think that Christians are going to be persecuted as never before.
And I do think we're going to get rounded up and executed.
And I do think about maybe the reason I've been sort of picked to learn some of these psalms.
I don't want to sound depressing, but it's so that I can kind of remember them in prison.
In jail.
Yes, I see.
My goodness.
Well, that's what I can't bear the Church of England shooting itself in the foot by putting itself in prison, as it were, by sort of dumbing down the amount of psalms they sing and avoiding the tricky ones and having a sort of cherry picking the gentle, sweet little psalms rather than going through the whole book and I mean, there are some tricky verses.
End of Psalm 137, by the waters of Babylon, has something terrible about throwing children against the stones.
And that, I think, was put in brackets in 1928 edition of the Psalms.
That was put as a possible due omit, if you like.
Right.
Yes.
Yes, well, I mean, yes, remember the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem, how they said, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it, down with it
LP of Psalms, which I used to be addicted to.
Then they went to their Bible studies, these little choristers.
There's a lot of vindictiveness, actually, there is in Psalms, isn't there?
A lot of, I hate my enemies and make them suffer.
Well, there is.
But it's kind of all in the future, isn't it?
Yes.
You never get the feeling that it's happening now.
No, and I love the self-pity.
I love the self-pity.
It's not sort of me, me, me self-pity in the social media way.
It's sort of we're all in this veil of misery together and there's something marvelously purging about it and cathartic about that.
We're all in this veil.
Have you given any thought to The trickiness of the imprecatory psalms and the dodgy line that you quote from Psalm 137.
I do understand that some are tactfully dropped but apparently there's something called the pillar lectionary where the Church of England does cherry-pick the nice gentle bits from the Bible and the psalms and so they don't sing the proper psalm on the The 15th evening, of course, is my favourite evening of the month where Psalm 78 is sung.
But I think some cathedrals are slightly avoiding that and doing slightly shorter, easier ones and safer ones, just in order not to frighten off Japanese tourists on a Thursday afternoon in Canterbury Cathedral.
That seems to me a slippery slope.
Well, that's a slippery slope.
Yeah, it's a bit like rewriting Roald Dahl, so that you take out all the spiky bits.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't like that.
You have to take the rough with the smooth, surely.
So that's a current trend.
I mean look, either the Psalms were written by prophetic visionaries.
I mean obviously David being the main author of them.
If you're going to respond to the bits that you find comfortable, then it seems wrong to me that you're going to edit out the bits that you don't quite understand because culturally you've been encouraged to think that we now live in this wonderful touchy-feely There's one wonderful song that just ends, and by the way, God, while you're at it, just slay my enemies and get rid of the ones that hate me.
I mean, just tucked away at the end of a lovely song.
It's human experience in an amazing way.
So they were sung in plain song, of course, weren't they, by the medieval, and still very much sung in plain song, A, in monasteries, B, on days when Because the boys or the girls, because they're mixed choirs now, are on holiday and just the lower voices sing.
And that will be happening, for example, today in Westminster Abbey, Thursday, probably half-term.
They'll be sung to plainsong, which is also absolutely beautiful.
And somebody said to me, yes, but, Lord, when Israel came out of Egypt and the house from among the strange people, that particular chant might have got to go back all the way to Jerusalem in BC and then was sung in plain song and now it's become a part of the Anglican chant.
So there's an incredible thread of music going back.
That's really interesting because I've often wondered this.
How can we possibly know how people sang them?
1,000 or 2,000, well, longer.
I mean, some of them are 1,000 BC, aren't they?
Yes, I'd love to know that.
Or 800 BC.
I don't know that.
I'd love to know about that.
I suppose we just can't know.
I suppose from the very early days of medieval playing song, we can know.
I mean, to me, I love that.
And of course, they have that strange thing of having, so between the end of the verse and the beginning of the next verse is quite a short gap, but in the middle of the verse, there's a long gap.
So, there's a four-second gap in the middle of verses in plain song, which is somehow, again, very beautiful.
I don't quite understand why, but go to any Benedictine monastery and you'll hear that.
So, what happens in the four second gap?
There's just a silence?
Yes, exactly.
Yes.
Which is part of the monastic way of doing things.
I think, is it time to say a Hail Mary in the middle of that?
I really would like to know the reason for that, because I find that fascinating and really rather beautiful too.
Whereas in the Anglican chant, there's just a little colon, isn't there?
And then you just go straight over to the next half.
Okay, so what do you know about plain song, plain chant?
I mean, I just know that it's set to these four-line staves, isn't it, rather than five lines, with little diamond-shaped square notes.
And they are very, very old, very old, and probably less or less, and they're not sung in harmony, they're just sung in unison.
So they don't have that lovely, what we love about Anglican Chant is it's in four parts, so you have that delicious harmony, where, nevertheless, can be just strung, strung, it feels like it feels elastic being pulled out, filling in spoken word.
I mean, I suppose, yeah, they're both very good methods for singing the non-scanning words, aren't they?
That's the whole point of the psalms, they don't scan.
But you can set it to music by sort of just elongating or staying on the same note for longer if there's a long verse.
If per adventure, the darkness shall cover me.
If, yes, is that how it goes?
If perfect, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Then shall my night return to day.
Yes, they stay on the same, they might stay on the same.
Yeah, the darkness is in the darkness with thee.
Yes, oh, delicious.
So that's what the whole idea is, unlike hymns.
So the Scottish people wrote the metrical sort of, didn't they?
The metrical psalms, like, so the Lord is my shepherd, I'll not want, is a metrical version of the Lord is my shepherd.
And the Scottish people, the Scottish Christians in the 18th, 17th, 18th century wanted them to be scanned so they were all set metrically.
And some of them were so bad when they were metrically set that they came out just really appalling, doggered really.
Some worked well, but some came out as just terrible dog roll.
So McGonagall, but they were translated by William McGonagall.
McGonagall into dog roll so I know that the Calvinists I want to do do a podcast with it with a with an American Calvinist whose name I've totally forgotten but but um I've gone down my list I I think we're going to do some, 20.
Some put their trust in chariots and some in horses.
Yes.
Which I like because I like horses.
But they're really into what they call, they pronounce it storms.
And they do, presumably, they do the Scottish chant, do you think?
Well, I don't know.
I don't think so.
I won't ask them, actually.
I just somehow don't think they will.
I think those are rather sort of hymnbook-y.
You see them in hymnbooks now.
It would be very good to know if they do.
I think they might just sing a rather modern translation of them.
That's my guess.
Because they're quite probably more fundamentalist, they want the meaning, they really want to wrinkle the meaning out of every verse, whereas we just let the, in a way, let the meaning somehow wash over us in this wonderful poetry.
Do you know what one of my pet hates?
Yes, tell me.
Oh, sorry.
No, go on.
I'll tell you my pet hate at the moment.
Tell me what you want to say.
Well, my pet love is when the 15th evening is sung on BBC Radio 3 on a Wednesday, in term time, when all the choir is singing.
So the stars have to be aligned for the 15th evening, which is Psalm 78, my favourite psalm, really, because it's the second longest.
And so, it happened in Hereford, I think, in December, that amazing thing.
It being a Wednesday, it being Radio 3, it being all the choir, it being Psalm 78.
And it takes 20 minutes to sing.
So, the whole rest of the service has to be short.
I mean, it takes 20 minutes to sing that psalm.
And it has four different chants.
It changes chants.
It's just an incredible experience to listen to it.
And it has a whole story of, and then God awoke like one out of sleep and like a giant refresh with wine.
He smoked his enemies in the hinder parts and put them to perpetual shame.
So that's a great sort of change of chant and off you go to the triumph of God over the heathen.
It's marvellous.
He smoked his enemies?
In the hinder parts.
You can imagine how much the boys loved that when they were singing in 1970, 1975, the ones I knew.
So he sort of zaps them in the bottoms?
He zaps them, he does, yeah.
Yes, exactly, isn't it marvellous?
So that's what you want.
Can you tell me your pet hate now, if you told me your pet love?
Oh, well, one of my pet hates is the version of Psalm 23, the tune that's called Crimmond.
Yes.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because?
It's twi.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's an absolute example of the metrical psalms, the Scottish metrical psalms.
That's an absolute prime example.
Yeah.
It's always good, you know, One has an instinct.
I knew instinctively I hated it, but I didn't know why I hated it.
Tell me more.
You could say that's one of the better versions.
I wish I had it to hand.
I'll tell you for your next podcast, so you can quote it, that's an example of a really bad, really, really bad bit of metrical psalm translating.
But the Lord's my shepherd, he makes me down to lie in pastures, where he sets me the quiet waters by.
I mean, I don't hate it as much as you do, but it is a bit of an emasculation.
Whereas the King of Love, My Shepherd Is, the hymn, is more of a reimagining of Psalm 23 rather than a translating of it.
And to me, that's absolutely beautiful.
That was spread to… Wait a second.
Yes.
Thou spread'st a table in my sight, my ransom graceful spreads, and oh, what transport of delight from thy pure chalice floweth.
To me, that's a reimagining of Psalm 23, rather than your one, sung to Crimmond, which is a doggerel translation of it, I think.
Doggerel translation.
I want to just go back a second to that Psalm that you love.
Psalm 78, you say?
Yes.
Why is it so good, apart from being the second longest?
Yes, it does go through the whole story.
Yes.
Hear my law, O my people.
Incline your ears unto the words of my mouth.
I will open my mouth in a parable.
I will declare hard sentences of old.
And then it just goes through the forefathers.
And he brought the waters out of the stony rock that he gutted out of the rivers.
And then when the Lord heard this, he was wroth.
Yes, he's wroth about us doing bad things.
And so the fire was kindled in Jacob and there came out heavy displeasure upon Israel.
Because they believe not in God.
And then he comes and smites them in the hinder parts.
And it just goes from sort of fury to triumph.
And the vocabulary is just, I mean, it's no better than any other of the marvelous Coverdale.
It's just a particularly stirring 20 minutes.
I would say it's not my favorite.
My favorite songs, I have different favorite songs really.
I mean, I think, Oh My God, Lord, Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice.
Oh, let mine ear consider well.
Let thine ear consider well the voice of my complaint.
I think that's 130.
That's one of my absolute favorites.
It's simple.
In a way, I prefer some of the shorter ones.
But it's a great Anglican experience going on the 15th evening to a cathedral.
Yes, the idea of learning a psalm that takes 20 minutes to go through.
Yeah, that's going to be hard for you at our age.
I mean, it's okay when we were little, but exactly.
I learnt Psalm 42, that like as the heart desires the water brooks.
I mean, again, what a beautiful bit of language that is.
Like as the heart desires the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
I did learn that one once when I was about 25, but that's not too long.
But Psalm 51 is not too long either.
No, Psalm 51's easy.
That's the Allegro Miserere, isn't it?
That's the Allegro Miserere words.
Is that right?
Tell me.
Yes, it is.
Yeah, so the Allegro Miserere is sung on Ash Wednesday always in cathedrals and I always go along to hear it because some people don't like it, but I think it's the most beautiful bit of music.
It's normally sung in Latin actually, but it is Psalm 51.
Have mercy on me, oh God, after thy great goodness.
As your forehead gets ashed, this music is swelling in the background and it's got that incredibly high note.
Is it top C?
Can I tell you a funny story, Isenda?
Yes.
So my brother and sister are also Christians and on Ash Wednesday, I gathered from my brother's social media posts that he was going to go on some kind of fast.
And so I thought, well, because, you know, the Bible's quite big on, the New Testament is quite big on prayer and fasting.
And you know, fasting is as important as prayer.
And also, I mean, there are health benefits as well.
And I thought, well, you know, maybe I should fast on Ash Wednesday.
So I started this.
What was going to be a 36-hour fast?
And I looked at my brother's posts and he posted a picture of himself with the ash cross on it.
You know, he'd been to Worcester Cathedral to get ashed.
And I thought, oh, I'm going to get out pious by my brother.
Yes.
So I didn't mention that I was going to go on a fast.
And by the way, I don't think 36 hours is a big deal at all.
Somebody in my gym told me that he's been on a 40-day fast twice.
Crikey.
Now that must be pretty trippy.
That really must be.
Yeah.
So what happened to your 36?
So at five o'clock, I sort of texted him saying something like, you know, because actually the first day is almost the hardest.
You get just grumpy and, you know, I think you settle in after a while.
But I was saying, how's your fast going?
And he said, oh, it's OK.
I had a few bits of dried bread and three slices of cheese for lunch.
And I was thinking, what?
So I didn't say anything.
I carried on fasting to the next day.
And I sent him this message saying, Dick, what was all this about your fast yesterday?
When does cheese and dry bread come into it?
And he said, oh, the Anglican fasts are much less demanding than the Catholic ones.
So, it didn't really count.
Goodness, yes, no, that's quite, that is true probably.
So, I've been out to lunch with Catholics on Ash Wednesday and regretted it because I've stuck into a croque monsieur and they have nothing or a banana at their absolute most.
So, don't go out to lunch with Catholics on Ash Wednesday.
How much fasting do you have to do as a Catholic and as an observant Catholic?
Well, exactly.
So, I asked my friend Marie in France.
She said, honestly, none of her friends do it.
They eat one less Mars bar perhaps or whatever the equivalent in France is.
But yes, I just think that observant Catholics perhaps really do try to eat nothing or just two bananas on Ash Wednesday.
And they have fish on Fridays, of course, very much fish on Fridays in Lent.
And apparently Sunday is a feast day.
Yes, exactly.
And St.
Patrick's Day always happens in the middle of Lent as well, always, which is quite tough for Irish people giving up the booze, apparently.
That's very annoying.
And perhaps they let themselves off on St.
Patrick's Day.
Well, I mean, they could probably say, well, he's a saint, and if it's good enough for him.
Anyway, so do you love the hymns as much as you love the psalms, or do you love Anglican?
Did you sing a lot?
Yeah.
No, funnily enough, I got haunted recently by a a hymn that I'd forgotten that we used to sing when I was at prep school.
And I couldn't make head nor tail of it.
And I came across it again when I was reading this fascinating, um, critical biography of the works of George Herbert.
And, uh, it's the one that goes, who sweeps the room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.
Yes, yes, exactly, who sweeps the room as for by laws, exactly that kind of thing that made us think, what on earth, what's all that about?
Yeah.
It was a very, it was a very weird hymn, but actually.
Herbert's poetry is quite condensed and quite… I mean, he's brilliant.
Yeah, he's brilliant.
He's a bit like Carvidell in terms of that use of monosyllables.
I mean, look, just single syllable words.
I'm just trying to think of examples, but yeah.
Yeah, sorry, my mind's gone blank, but yes.
So, that was one of your non-favourites.
Then when you were young.
It was weird.
It had a sort of jauntiness to it.
The tune that it's sung to is very jaunty.
Jauntiness combined with light incomprehensibility.
Yes.
It wasn't one of my faves.
No, no.
I'm basically a product of that classic English public school ethos where, I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this, my favourites would be probably I vow to thee my country.
Because, well, it's got a great tune written by Holst, hasn't it?
It has.
Holst, yeah.
It is extraordinary.
And Mark, it is great.
Those are great words.
And it's in a minor key.
Which is always a good thing, I think.
Yes, I think so.
Whereas, so I would prefer that.
Why does one like things in minor keys?
Because, you know, I think I don't feel the same excitement about all things bright and beautiful, which was presumably written in a major key.
No, exactly.
And I don't particularly like the psalms where they have the first half in the minor key and then halfway through they all change, the chant changes into a lovely major key.
And actually I'm afraid a bit of an anti-climax.
We do like our, we love our minor things.
It chimes with our mood of woe and fear and Sadness and despair that the song taps into and I don't want it all to turn into jolly.
Is that an English thing?
I mean, Pink Floyd say that quiet desperation is the English way, but I wonder whether this is, I've been thinking about this and I was wondering whether this is a recent phenomenon because the 20th century was essentially
A cultural invitation to accepting our role as a kind of diminished power, trying to encourage us to sort of believe that the best was past and that, you know, you could have been a contender, you were great once, but now...
Accept it your country's finished and I'm not sure that that that attitude was prevalent in the 19th century when we had a massive Empire and we were we were going places.
So I'm just wondering whether this is a relatively recent phenomenon.
I wonder whether Victorians actually preferred those really marvellous triumphant king psalms all about opening the gates and lift up your heads all your gates and be you lift up you everlasting and the king of glory shall come in.
Perhaps that's what they loved in those days and perhaps we in our post-war state grew to love the minor key ones and I think they just jostled along brilliantly side by side.
On that note, what do you make of that hymn lift up your gates the everlasting doors and the king of glory shall come in?
Who is the king of glory, even the Lord strong and mighty, even the Lord mighty in battle?
I mean, I do love it, but I'd rather give me a Meineke one any day because I just find those chimes so fully with one's experience.
But yes, pretty good.
There are these kingly psalms, aren't there?
Glory, glory, king.
The reason that I'm interested in that psalm, I mean apart from the fact that it is sort of one of the classics, is that the thing I didn't realise when I was at school, or half realised, because I used to say my prayers and stuff, so that must have put me in good, so I must have been praying to somebody, but I hadn't realised the degree
And I don't know whether you have or not yet, or will, the degree to which all this stuff is real.
This is not just sort of made up crazy stuff written by weird guys centuries, millennia ago.
This is actually an accurate description of the nature of our relationship with God who is real and made us.
I'm really going down the rabbit hole here but I did a...
I did a podcast, which I haven't put on general release because it's so disturbing and it's very interesting, with a woman who was a mother of darkness.
She was one of the kind of the priestesses of Satanism and it's quite interesting because she got out of it and because she She was lucky enough to have Christian relatives who I think whose blessing, when she was younger, sort of kind of protected from this.
But she was giving me these insights into the... She certainly claims, anyway, to have been able to communicate with the forces of darkness and, you know, about how our relationship with God works, what heaven is, how it looks.
And she, I think it was, she told me that one of the things that God really, really likes, he likes being praised.
Aha, I like that.
It's an important part of the deal.
You know, you can't you don't just you don't just whine about stuff and ask him for his help.
Yes.
Part of the deal is that you also also praise him.
But the stuff about the the gates, the everlasting doors are actually real.
There are these parts of the world where these portals to the other realm and that praising God opens them.
I see.
I like that idea that he likes to be praised.
Make of that what you will.
Yeah, exactly.
Because I'm reading this fascinating book about a nun who was in a Carmelite community.
I'm just reviewing it.
And they sing, of course, they sing Psalms.
I think they have a sort of monthly cycle where they get through the whole Sorta in a month.
Sometimes even a week, I think, in the early Benedictine rule, you got through the whole Sorta.
So you just sing, I suppose if you're singing six opuses a day from Lourdes to Compline, you would have time to get through a whole cycle of Psalms in a very short time.
And again, I feel that's an absolute prop for people who are giving up their whole selves, giving up their own will to go and live in these communities.
It's an extraordinary thing to do.
And I would have thought that I think the Psalms just keep you sane almost because they do touch one's joy and despair.
I think they are protective.
I love the idea that God likes to be praised.
This poor nun is not allowed to be praised.
They're not allowed to ever say nice to each other or be nice to each other in this Catholic Carmelite monastery.
So that's interesting.
God's allowed to be praised, but they're not poor darlings.
I mean, I can't bear it.
It's unbelievable loneliness that this woman's going through.
It's called Cloistered by Katherine Coldstream.
I recommend it.
Lucky God, he's allowed to be praised, whereas the Reverend Mother hardly ever says a nice thing to you for decades of your life because you're not allowed to be puffed up.
That's interesting.
You're allowed to tickle God's tummy, are you?
I do wonder about this, that what the scriptural evidence is, that God actually wants us to retreat from the world.
Because after all, if he made us in his image and he created this world for our delectation and to give us dominion over it, did he really want to... when you retreat from the world, Aren't you in a way shirking your duty to your fellow man?
I just don't understand.
I think there is such a thing as a vocation to go into the religious life, a very, very strong calling to retreat and to pray for the world.
And these places are, at their best, incredible powerhouses of prayer, which I do feel add to the general, sort of give something to the world, incredible.
If you're awake in the middle of the night, there's some monk somewhere, three in the morning, praying the night office for you.
You make a very good point there, actually, and you think about, you think about the kings, for example, who was it, Henry the Sixth, who endowed these monasteries, where they were sort of chantries, where people would, people would pray continually for their, for their souls.
I mean, if you believe, and I think any Christian should, if you believe that prayer has a real effect, and the stuff about this in Daniel, for example, about the prayers sort of reaching reaching heaven and enabling the heavenly heavenly forces to do their thing if you believe that the prayer is real um then it does make sense that that there should be um dedicated people singing yes and also isn't it
isn't it a sign of of the ongoing war against christianity that little by little psalms and you know religious services of any kind have been taken out of our educational system I think it is, yeah.
I find that terrifying, the secularization of... I mean, you know, Oxbridge College is even where I just think that there's such a secular sort of force in Oxford's colleges that they don't really treasure this gem that they have in their chapels.
I mean, in Cambridge there's Kings and Johns, in Oxford there's New College, Christchurch and Magdalene that have retained the proper choral foundation and services every day, every weekday.
And I just feel that needs to be treasured because if it's gone, it'll never come back as it hasn't, as it's gone in Italy and France.
There's just none of that tradition of singing.
Is that right?
Oh, yeah.
If you go to a mass on Sunday morning in an Italian cathedral, you'll get a pre-singing to a microphone.
I mean, you might get some very, very good organists in France still.
But the choral tradition has died out, really.
I mean, that's a bit mean because I think some people are trying to bring it back.
There's nothing like what we have here.
Nothing like that.
That's interesting because We think.
We can let it, we'll let us go tomorrow, overnight if we're not careful.
Yeah.
I'd sort of imagined that, because you go into...
Churches in Italy or France, the Catholic countries generally, and you see these pious old ladies and there's a sort of, you know, the whiff of incense and all this kind of Baroque kitsch.
That's all happening, yes.
And you imagine that with that would be a A choral tradition?
Yeah, no, there really isn't.
You're saying it's not there?
No, no, they might sing one very short psalm to a nasty little responsorial psalm where you just repeat, repeat, the congregation repeats one verse from it again and again and someone sings into a microphone.
I mean, it really is, it's very, very rare to have anything touching a choral tradition in France or Italy, I'm afraid.
Whereas, I went on a trip to Bulgaria, a A couple of years ago.
And I went into Sophia Cathedral.
Yes.
And I don't know what I was witnessing, but in part of the church there was a kind of lectern type thing.
And these people who were not dressed in ecclesiastical garb, they were priests, they were kind of members of the public, were taking turns to sing Something immeasurably beautiful.
I don't know what it was, but it was really, really lovely.
What would that have been?
Do you know?
Probably it might have been psalms or canticles.
Was it an orthodoxish kind of It wasn't a church service.
It was just going on.
And it was very, very lovely.
How wonderful.
I'm so glad to hear that.
And I think that the organ tradition in France is very, very strong.
So I'm just hoping and it's just having the core foundations where cathedrals To subsidize the fees of choristers to keep up this incredible tradition is something that just doesn't happen.
In America, there's one, St.
Thomas's Fifth Avenue.
It's the one church in the whole of the United States, I think, that has a row of young choristers who go to a proper choir school.
And they're singing psalms to our standards, our required standards.
Okay.
So, sorry, you explained and I didn't really take it in.
Who funds the choral tradition?
Yes.
Okay.
Well, I was getting a bit cross in the spectator piece, actually, when I wrote about what's happening in a school supplement, writing about the fact that Canterbury Cathedral has now stopped subsidising its choral tradition.
They used to go to the local, this is very niche, but used to go to the local prep school where you got half or three quarters off the fees for your son to give his all to sing in the choir for five years.
I mean, it's amazing.
It's a two-way thing.
The son gives his time, and sometimes daughters at some schools, up to Salisbury, and the child sings.
And it's an amazing two-way thing.
But Canterbury's decided that they're going to stop that because they can't afford it.
They save £400,000 a year.
I think it is a lot because No, it's centre, it's not.
Well, I don't know.
And then all the children... Yeah, I know, it isn't really.
Canterbury was originally the prime cathedral, wasn't it?
When it worked, it was the number one cathedral, as they call themselves on Twitter.
Well, they used to.
So instead of that, all the children get picked from all the local primary schools round about.
They come in for no... They try and make a tiny bit of pocket money, but basically there's no financial... No money changes hands.
And they just come in from all the local primary schools, which sounds very good.
But do they really get that rigorous training they do if they sort of live in and get up at eight o'clock in the morning, they're all together singing and now all the children sing three services a week each, the boys and girls, which is sometimes just not enough to maintain that absolute momentum and high standard that they have at Westminster Abbey where they still sing eight services a week or is it seven?
Eight.
So, it's just keeping up that professional standard of brilliance, which I suppose you get in gymnasts, gymnasts learning, you know, or ballet, ballet, ballet, royal ballet schools, you know, where you just, you're professional at such a young age.
And that takes massive training.
Of course it does, and I think you do need a financial incentive.
It seems to be quite wrong.
This is King's Canterbury.
Actually, no, St Edmund's was the school they went to.
St Edmund's was the school the choristers went to.
St Edmund's was suddenly rung up and told that that arrangement is now over and they're not going to Fund places for any more.
So that if you want your child to go to sing in Canterbury, they can still go to any school they like, but they just have to come in and there's no money off the fees if they go there.
And So, yeah, it's just a new ratio.
It's happening a lot in England.
Some people say it's okay and great.
And I get some very cross messages saying it happens fine in St Albans and that you come in from local primary schools.
It really can work, but we just have to keep that rigour.
And what worries me is that it could be in danger of losing that.
And that means singing the psalms regularly so the language swirls around in your head and don't make mistakes.
It's just that, yeah.
I know, one hears horror stories of the way that cathedrals around the country are being secularised, they're having all sorts of… Oh, I know, with the Sanctuary, I'm very cross with them, because they had the silent disco last week, didn't they?
And then they had the… on Ash Wednesday, happened to be Valentine's Day, you'd come in for a day about chatting about romantic poetry, rather than about Ash Wednesday.
They prioritised Valentine's Day over Ash Wednesday, which was on the same day.
And I just feel what is going on in our top cathedral.
What is going on?
They're desperate to get the young people in, but I feel they're going to lose everyone if they start coming down in that way.
Of course they are.
And they have no funding from the government.
I do see they need to make their... Some people say it costs thousands of pounds a day to run a cathedral.
They've got to get that money from somewhere.
I do see.
So that's the whole question of charging people for entry.
It is an agonised world where they need that money.
But the idea that there's been a silent disco in that very nave where you're just about to sing, somehow it sort of infects the air of the cathedral to me, to know that there's been a disco in there the night before.
I don't think we're a Christian country anymore.
Famously, before he became king, Prince Charles would say, I don't want to be defender of the faith, I want to be defender of faith.
And by faith he meant the lot.
He meant Islam, he meant everything else.
But he's back down from there.
And I love the church for being inclusive and welcoming people of other faiths, unlike the Catholics who really don't.
For example, as an Anglican, I'm not allowed to take communion in a Catholic church.
I kind of respect that.
You know, in the same way, I quite like the fact that I can't go into a mosque.
No, I suppose so.
Anyway, that's getting a bit too theological for me.
If you were born in India, you would be a Hindu or Buddhist or Muslim.
It's an accident of birth that we happen to be Christians.
I can't believe it's the only one true Yeah, I used to think that but I'm afraid I've become more hardcore.
but I'm afraid I've become more hardcore. - More fundamentalist, yes, yeah. - So tell me about, I'm sure I read a piece of yours on boy choristers.
Oh yes, I did.
I was getting cross because one by one, they're just biting the dust, these boys only top lines.
And since then, quite a lot of others have gone down that route.
So there are very few left now that only have boys.
My feeling was that if, I mean, I know it does work and I can be persuaded that there are very good things about it.
You know, as a young girl, I would have loved to be able to sing in a cathedral choir.
And I wasn't because I was a girl and now it's marvellous that girls can as much as boys and I do think at its best it can work very well.
I think in Salisbury Cathedral there are days when the girls sing, days when the boys sing.
It's much more complicated to run because you have to run two top lines so you almost have to have two directors of music.
It's a big undertaking to run and at its best it can work.
I just think the model, just the great model for me is Westminster Abbey, where there's a little choir school.
The boys only live there.
They sing all the time.
The standard is top notch because they sing, I think it is seven services a week, and it's just them.
And They make an incredible sound.
I mean, I do know that if you put someone behind a grill, couldn't tell whether it was girls or boys singing, I think that they can blend well.
But I think, again, it's gone now.
I think St Paul's are taking first, girls.
I mean, I don't want to be anti-girl choristers.
I'm not.
No, I feel you're apologising too much.
I'm anti any dilution of excellence.
And I just worry that excellence gets a bit diluted if people share out the time.
Instead of one lot singing beautifully, two lots sing jolly well.
But do they retain that absolute excellence?
In their song singing.
Surely also, you know, I've got sons and daughters and my daughter sang and my sons didn't sing.
So I'm sympathetic to the cause of girls singing and they sing beautifully.
But surely there was an order of difference between, part of the fragility of the boy chorister's voice is the fact that It's gonna break at some stage.
There must be physiological differences between a young female voice and a young male voice.
Tell me about that.
Yes, I think that is part of the issue, that boys just don't get that chance.
So girls' choristers, and there are lots of choirs such as Winchester, do have girls singing, also with their teens.
So I think when they decide to take girls, make a decision, either they're going to have the prep school age girls, or they're going to have from 11 to 18, in which case you get teenagers in leggings, you know, turning up for rehearsals, and that's a whole different thing.
Whereas boys, there is this fragility and the fact that their voices break at 11.
There is, for me, something particularly beautiful about an 11-and-a-half-year-old boy's voice because it has got that fragility.
And then, of course, they don't have a chance to sing in their teens.
They've only got a five-year window when they can sing in cathedral choirs.
Do you reckon you could hear a difference between a boy choir Well, I mean, I really, it's rather like Coke and Pepsi.
I mean, I really think you could be, I could be proved wrong.
And apparently, you know, very, very good musicians have been, have got it wrong when they've heard Behind a Closed Door and they can't tell.
So, you know, I just like to feel that, like, you know, one can tell that King's College Cambridge has got that incredible boy sound, which is amazing.
and saying, "It's a cathedral, the best Catholic choir." - Which are the ones left?
Because I imagine they're dropping like flies.
St.
Paul's is about to take girls, I think, so it was St.
Paul's and Westminster Abbey, and I think just Westminster Abbey, so don't put pressure on them to change.
They all feel so pressurised.
King's Cambridge, there's terrible pressure.
Every Christmas they say, and then someone writes, why can't girls sing in King's College Choir?
So they've done everything they can to start a girls' choir in another chaplain or church in Cambridge.
Westminster has started a girls' choir in St.
Margaret's Westminster now.
Which is a clever, very clever, good idea to make a choir for girls.
It doesn't actually take any of the absolute excellence of the Abbey. - No.
Hang on, how do I?
I have a real aversion to people phoning me on my mobile phone out of the blue.
Oh, do you?
Oh, God, thank God I didn't do that.
I switched the volume off for mine, but it might go off on my computer, so exactly, you never know.
So, that's, and then, you know, Hereford also have taken girls, and they were one of the last bastions.
I think Chichester maybe still has just boys, but I might be wrong.
I mean, yeah, if it gets a new dean, a new dean is that, no, that's the floodgates, because it's the old deans that have been around for 20 years that will cling on to the old ways.
Oh goodness, so we just have to be a bit nervous.
The Church of England, like the Catholic Church, has been so heavily infiltrated by the forces of progressivism.
I do see that they need to live in the modern age but I really don't No, they don't.
Lucy, this is where you and I disagree.
They really, really don't.
The tradition and the Bible are not things that need improving.
They're really not.
And to me, the best hymns are the Victorian ones, and the worship songs just don't.
Okay, so here's another of my particular bugbears.
Obviously, one of the things that this predatory gay music teacher did at my prep school when he wasn't molesting boys.
was he introduced this horrible new service book with a yellow cover.
Uh-huh.
Yes.
I don't know whether you came across this.
I think it was the alternative service book or something.
Yes, I think so.
Yes.
Yeah.
Where everything, all the language was just dumbed down.
Yeah, so tell me what it was like.
Okay, so you had this horrible, horrible liturgy.
Yes.
And also you had the Thoroughly ghastly, jaunty, modern hymns.
A hundred hymns for today.
I think many... Were they written in the 1970s?
Was there a sort of rash of... I think, yes.
I mean, it was... Shine, Jesus, shine.
I mean, exactly.
That was absolute classic sort of first worship song.
It really got going, I think, in the 70s.
Yeah.
I think in the 70s.
Yeah. - I'm not even sure I like Lord of the Dance.
No, exactly.
That was number 42 in 100 Hymns for Today, which you might have had that little paperback with sort of blood corpuscles down the front.
And yeah, that was exactly, it was a popular one, wasn't it?
But I didn't like it.
My grandmother's hymns in that, which was Lord of All Hopefulness.
My grandmother wrote two famous hymns, Lord of All Hopefulness and When the Night Won His Spurs in the Stories of Old.
Did she?
Yes, she did.
I cling to those being rather good.
But those are good ones.
They're good.
She was good.
She was brilliant, actually.
I'm not embarrassed to be speaking to the granddaughter of the woman who wrote those hymns.
No.
When did she write those?
Exactly.
Percy Dearmore was writing his new Songs of Praise hymn book in the early 1930s, and she sat down in her Chelsea flat or house in 1931 and wrote Lord of All Hopefulness, Lord of All Joy, whose trust of a child like no cares could destroy.
Absolutely stunning hymn, I think.
Which is in a minor key, I think.
Yes.
I think it's a major.
I think it's major.
Being a tomboy, she wrote When a Night One Is Spurs because I think she'd been broad stiff in church as a child and she wanted to write a really good hymn for tomboys.
So, When a Night One Is Spurs and the Stories of Old.
Yeah.
So, that's great.
Yeah.
And so, it can be done in the modern age.
That's what I'm saying.
She's just gone out of copyright, sadly.
1930s is only just in the modern age, I think.
Yes.
I mean, it's not the 1970s.
No, no.
She died exactly 70 years ago, so sadly.
Because I've gone quite well out of those hymns, actually.
I've got quite a decent royalties twice a year from Lord of All Hopefulness, particularly, which is hugely popular all over the world and published in American hymn books the whole time.
But that's all ending now.
You get royalties?
Oh, yeah.
Just until now, I'm afraid.
It's just dried up because she's 70 years.
She died in 1953.
Three.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
What's the mechanism for paying out royalties on hymns?
Yes.
I mean, OUP, Oxford Union Press, every twice a year, we get a lovely statement.
And some of her less well-known hymns, such as When Stephen, Full of Power and Grace, gets £1.79.
And Lord of All Hopefulness gets, you know, £5,682, which we share out among a few of her grandchildren.
Yeah, that's all over now.
They're free beneficiaries, so it really helps at Christmas.
It really helps at Christmas.
It comes out the 11th of December, this lovely... Thank you, Jan.
Thank you for your morning of inspiration in 1931, because that really has helped us.
Oh, well, good on her.
So, when was the...?
The way that hymn just goes through a day, Lord, at the morn of the day, at the noon of the day, at the eve of the day, at the end of the day, it's kind of a metaphor for life.
It's an incredible bit of poetry, really, and verse.
And she was a poet, actually.
And some say that the best hymns are written by by poets.
Some say that hymns mustn't be written by poets because they try too hard, and that the best hymns are written by ordinary Anglican thinkers on rainy Sunday afternoons in 1871, sitting in their study, who just wrote some of the most sublime, casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Just wrote them for their own flock.
Not too lofty, not too airy-fairy.
Casting down their golden crowns.
That's Whittier.
Or is that the tune?
Around the glassy sea.
Yes.
Holy, holy, holy.
Yeah, exactly.
Lord God Almighty.
Is it Whittier?
What?
Is that the name of the tune?
No, the author, Whittier.
Oh, it might be, actually.
I don't actually know off my heart who wrote those words.
But there's usually some unheard of vicar who gave that, often free of charge, handed it over to the new 100 hymns, ancient and modern, to be for the glory of God.
And could they believe that those words are getting around in our heads 150 years later?
The reason that I may be right is that, you remember, when you're singing these hymns, you're kind of singing them again and again and again, and your eyes are drawn to, yeah, you just sort of, you take it in.
You do in a way.
And during the sermon, there's nothing else to do.
You have to just flip through the hymn book endlessly, don't you?
And read through everything.
And yeah, you do.
You just have to endlessly flip through the hymn book.
And you have to read, A man may not marry his father's sisters.
Do you remember that bit?
There's always that amazing list of who a man may not marry and a woman may not marry her husband's father's brother's sister.
That was past the time during the sermon.
But yes, I'm not surprised.
What's your favourite?
What are your favourite hymns?
Well, I think the King of Love might...
The King of Love, my shepherd is, whose goodness faileth never, which is one I mentioned, that is one of my favourites.
I quite like I Bound Unto Myself Today, which is a good minor tune, minor key one.
Don't hear that one, nor do I. And I Have to Choose My Grandmothers, of course, is Lord of Hopefulness, is absolute must have at any wedding and funeral.
Yeah.
So that plus Choice of Favourite Psalms.
And the Nunc Dimittis, of course, is one of my favourite bits of, one of the favourite canticles, Lord, now let us know thy servant depart in peace.
What are your favourite hymns?
Well, you know, so I'm, I had an insight the other day that when you start learning the Psalms, when you become familiar with them, you realise how much of the liturgy and how many you realise how much of the liturgy and how many hymns are basically rip-offs.
Rip-offs of the Psalms.
They just cherry-pick the Psalms.
They've taken out these attractive lines.
Exactly, like Handel's Messiah is all Psalm 2, isn't it?
Why do the nations so furiously raise together?
I mean, Handel's a snake.
Well, people imagine a vain thing.
Yeah.
The kings of the earth stand up and the rulers take counsel against the world.
We know it all from the Messiah.
Yeah, exactly.
So I think yes, perhaps the hymn writers probably did get their inspiration from Psalms.
Yeah.
Which can be a bit, and then make them too scanning for your liking.
There's a line from I Vow to Thee, My Country, which we've established, obviously, the reason it's so good is really the cheering by Holst.
There's a line he's ripped off.
That's not too cruel a way of putting it.
From Proverbs 3.
Now, what is it?
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.
And in the original, it's a different word.
Yes.
And it's a better word.
And I'm trying to remember what that word is.
Yes, I see.
But that has got that slightly psalm-like, psalm-like parallelism, hasn't it?
Ways of gentleness and all her palms are peaked.
That's got that psalm-like first half echoing the second half.
Second half echoing the first half.
You know what?
I'm going to have to look it up now.
Yes, OK.
- Yes, okay. - Because, hang on, Proverbs 3, KJV, 'cause obviously that's... - Oh, KJV, Love you.
Yeah.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all have paths of peace.
Now, I think that pleasantness is a better word.
I think he's opted for the wrong word, gentleness.
It's like lambs.
Yes, I know.
As my grandmother said, mildness would never have become one of the Christian virtues if hymn writers had not been at a loss for a rhyme to child.
That's a good point.
Yeah, so that's a danger.
Although it wasn't for the sake of the rhyme that he was putting gentleness in, I agree.
So that was a strange choice, to put gentleness and take pissiness out.
Yeah, did Mary want to be a mother mild?
When was that part of the deal?
I quite agree, that's just what Jan Strother, my grandmother, said.
So we have to be careful with rhymes.
So I like, just to continue this, this, this theme, I like, um, uh, Vatini in my country.
I also quite like the sort of the martial nature of, um, oh, valiant hearts to their glory came, but looking, I've had a shift in my, I mean, you may have gathered from some of the hints I've, I've offered that I've had a complete shift in my understanding of the world at my school.
And I think it was not untypical of English.
Public schools.
The key service of the year was not Easter.
Well, it wouldn't be Easter because Easter takes place in the school holidays.
What was it?
It was the remembrance day.
Oh, I see.
Remembrance day.
Yeah.
And solemnly commemorated with the The bugle blowing on top of the big school and the minute silence and all that.
And I thought at the time, it was about honoring the dead, which, you know, they deserve to be honored.
But actually, I also think now, it was the celebration of a kind of death cult that we were being instilled in the state of mind whereby you thought it was a good thing to go and die in a war organized for your benefit by old people.
We're willing to sacrifice you in either Flanders or you know in Singapore or wherever.
I've become completely cynical.
Yeah about what war generally the origins of wars who they really who they're really arranged for and they're definitely not arranged for the interests of brave young men at private schools or elsewhere that we are just the blood sacrifice.
We are that I think it's So, I feel awkward now praising hymns which I think actually were sort of part of the brainwashing thing.
I'll tell you my favourite.
I'll tell you my favourite, Zander.
Obviously, you can probably guess because it's every Englishman's, of a certain class's, favourite hymn.
Yeah.
You know, because we sing it and it's got a tune by Parry.
Wait a second.
Tell me, just give me one word from the first line.
And.
Another word.
And.
Did.
Those feet.
So that's the end of term hymn.
End of term.
Yep.
End of summer term.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And then people singing... So it's end of term but it's... People singing Chariots of Fire because the film had just come out and I still listen out for that mistake, don't you?
And luckily we've gone back to Chariot now.
But there was a terrible time when people used to sing Chariots of Fire when that film came out.
That's interesting.
Probably that the film was designed to subvert the hymn, as everything is in popular culture.
Yes, maybe it was.
Exactly.
Yeah, and it's amazing.
And there has that difference.
And the second verse starts with the long minim rather than and.
Exactly.
It is fantastic.
So exactly, pairing and Blake.
Yeah.
I mean, what an amazing pairing.
It's a good combination.
It's kind of trippy.
The atmosphere of end of term, after exams, doors opening.
I think my book, British Summertime Begins, which is all about the school summer holidays, opens with the end of summer term sort of euphoria when people started painting the headmistresses west side in white pink.
People started doing really naughty things.
And they're sort of singing that hymn on the final day, you just got your report and you had to Of course, going through your report with your house tutor, whatever it was, and then you sang that to him and then you were out, out, and that amazing sense of freedom.
Exactly.
It is absolutely like the most glorious tonic of life.
Yes, I'm not surprised that that has very good associations for you.
But I like Forty Days and Forty Nights, and Forty Days and Forty Nights, Thou Wast Tempted in the Wild.
I love that one.
Forty Days and Forty Nights, Thou Wast Fasting in the Wild.
Yes, Thou Wast Fasting in the Wild.
Forty Days and Forty Nights, Tempted and Yet Undefiled.
Tempted and Yet Reconciled.
Yes, Undefiled.
Was it Undefiled?
Yes, yes.
You see, good old Lenten hymns are just so beautiful because they're just plain brown bread with no jam.
Just going back to you, I think you've put your finger on something there about that end of term thing.
Do you think that this is an experience just of people who've been privately educated?
Because I mean, not that I'm looking down on state schools, but They didn't have the experience of being incarcerated away from their parents for three or four week stretches without seeing them.
They did used to sing.
They used to sing hymns in assembly every day, but I really feel that's gone.
And that again is a real loss.
Not so much of the Christianity, although that is a loss, but it's the vocabulary.
They're just not learning those Amazing, amazing words, 40 days and 40 nights, which just, again, sing in one's head and enrich one's vocabulary and teach one the art of using words well.
So that does seem sad.
I think they do have a family, don't they?
But I think they might just sing a song or I don't think they sing what we call a hymn.
I can't imagine them singing Jerusalem.
No, I really can't.
At the state schools.
I mean, they have to be one of those kind of That one that, like the one that Katharine Berbalsingh runs, I imagine they might do Jerusalem as an act of defiance.
The other thing I like about Jerusalem is that you know the story, you know the legend that inspired it.
Tell me.
Well, Joseph of Arimathea, was Jesus' great-uncle and he was the richest man, or one of the richest men, he was a shipping magnate and he was in charge of the copper trade so he would send out, I think he had a palace in Ramallah and he sent out his fleets to Cornwall which was where the Sorry, did I say copper?
I meant tin.
Tin mining.
Tin mining trade.
And Blake is riffing on this rumor, whatever you want to call it, that Jesus as a young man may have gone out to Cornwall with his uncle's fleets and actually did those fiends and ancient walk upon England's mountains green, probably Glastonbury tall.
And I kind of like that.
Gosh, that's amazing, because I thought, oh yes, that hymn begins with four questions, all of which have the answer no, is what I thought.
No, he didn't.
But now I'm saying, yeah, maybe.
Yes, he might have.
He might have.
He really might have gone to Blastonbury.
He really might have done.
In his beardy way.
With his sandals on.
Yeah, no, I think it's, I was going to do this, I was tempted to write, I just couldn't get around to doing it.
Kind of like a children's TV series but like Merlin but with Jesus.
Yes.
And it would be called And Did Those Feet where it would be about Jesus' early adventures and there'd be dragons and be forces of Satan.
There's a terrible gap.
There's a terrible 30-year gap isn't there between presentation at the temple and don't see him for 30 years.
I mean it's a real loss.
No sense of what we did in this.
It's really frustrating.
I would love to.
How can you lose him?
How can they lose him for 30 years?
I mean it's like Harry Potter going to live with the Dursleys.
I read the Gospels every evening and I just kind of, I wish there were more of it.
Just please tell us more Mark, you know, just exactly put more in there.
Yeah, there didn't occur to them we needed to know that.
So that's another example why we have to, we do have to write things down because people will want to know probably.
It's the small details.
There's not enough there.
It's too thin.
Yeah.
So, before we go, I love your essays in The Spectator and in Slightly Fox, which is one of my favourite.
I think Slightly Fox is almost my favourite It is.
It's incredible.
It's been going for 20 years now.
Yes, and it is marvellous.
And it's a place where you can write about things like hymns that, you know, where else could I have written that piece?
I wrote about Angela Brazil, Girl's School Stories, and writing that sparked me to write Times and Conditions, the book about girls boarding schools, and which they took on and published as one of their little slightly foxed editions.
Do they sell these books, by the way?
They do, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
Terms and Conditions really took off.
Did it?
And so did Mr. Tibbett's Catholic School, which is the one I wrote first, actually, a little history of a boy's Catholic prep school in London, which, again, they took on completely on spec.
I sent them a few chapters.
They said, we'd love it.
We'd love to publish it.
And it did really well.
And then because of that, they started their plain foxed editions, which is where they reprint because they only do a limited edition of 2,000 copies of any book they publish.
They officially do a limited edition of 2,000.
But that was a runaway success and they had to find a way of making more permanent editions which they could reprint and reprint.
So I know they're marvellous and Gail Park is a very good editor, very strict, absolutely says no she doesn't want it and yes if she does.
So I'm glad you're a subscriber, that's good to know.
I'm going to have to… it's one of my ambitions, oddly enough, to write a piece for Slightly Foxed, which we haven't explained.
It's this quarterly magazine where people write little essays on books that have fallen out of fashion.
Not always, but sometimes you get I've got a book in mind.
Oh, good.
Well, do get in touch with them and do it.
Yeah, I must do that.
Well, if you don't mention it, somebody else will.
succinct about how you sort of how you came to love it and what one and what it's like yeah and you never thought it would do well actually i've got a book in mind oh good well do get in touch with them and do it and would like yeah i i i i must do that well you can't mention it somebody else would i would actually wait no no no um Keep it quiet.
It's an amazing thing.
Who would have thought 20 years later it's still going huge success.
And we've just been to the 20th anniversary party of this founding quarterly magazine, which has followers all over the world, subscribers all over the world who love it.
It's succinct, elegant essays.
So it's a good thing.
But I just wanted to mine whatever remains of that rich scene from your book on these chaps, mainly chaps, apart from your grandmother being an exception, who wrote these hymns.
Yes.
I mean, did they make any money out of it?
Well, I think that they often really didn't.
They had quite good lives, those clergy.
They weren't as poor as today's clergy.
They really had a jolly nice rectory to live in and a good living.
So, I think lots of them did give either the words or the tunes and gave them to the proprietors who then made quite a lot of money out of it.
But I think they did sell millions of copies.
But I don't think there was a huge greediness from the writers about wanting their cut.
I think they'd often just gave the hymns or got a tiny amount for the small lump sum and never heard any more.
And the hymns took off and went into the bloodstream of the whole world.
And I love the fact that they were highly educated.
They were steeped in Latin from Mary R.J.
That's why their verse was so good because their classical education made them very good at keeping vocabulary in check and not splurging out on words.
You can tell that.
And often they were writing hymns exactly as part of their part of their parish life.
The Hymns Ancient of Autumn was invented on a train journey.
A few vicars got together and decided they wanted to make a hymn book that just got all the best hymns together in one volume.
And they put an advertisement in the Guardian, apparently, asking for vicars to submit ideas.
And they accepted some and rejected others.
And when was this?
I think it was 1850s.
I think that's when it first started.
Yeah.
Actually, there's all sorts of things I want to ask you.
By the way, I seem to remember that the Archdeacon in the Barchester Chronicles, he gets 5,000 a year They're quite well off I think.
Do you think they'll be about half a million now?
God, it must have been actually.
They really did not need the money from those hymns.
They really didn't.
No, no, no, I see.
Yeah, well, no, but yeah, but not everyone got to be Archdeacon, but obviously that was, that was, you know, I don't know how much bishops got paid, but they seem to, the Anglican clergy seem to get pretty richly rewarded in the 19th century.
And now they get so badly rewarded, and that does make me also another, another subject of conversation, because, you know, who'd want to do it now?
Who don't really have to run 12 parishes?
Well, just, just people who are no good.
Yeah, well that's, I mean, poor sayings.
I mean, they want to be good, and I just think it has become a much, much tougher world.
So that's another reason why things are… Yeah, but they want to be good in a different way.
They want to be good by the standards of the 21st century, not the standards of Christian orthodoxy.
That's the difference.
Well, there are still some good ones left, thank goodness, and some very sound ones.
But I agree… Well, there are, but they're rare though, as you say.
We need to nurture those ones, definitely.
So yeah, so Hymns Ancient and Modern came out in the 1850s.
Yes.
And the question I wanted to ask you was, I think that we in the Anglican, in the Church of England, have some pretty good hymns.
You know, Wesley wrote a few classics and, you know, we've mentioned a few of the others.
When I've been to Catholic services, is it just because I don't know the hymns that I find them a bit rubbish, or is it because they haven't got any decent hymns?
Yes, I think they haven't got that hymn tradition.
If you go to a Catholic church, often the congregation does not sing.
They stand there with their mouth shut.
They don't sing out like we do.
There's a whole different tradition, I think.
And I go to the London Oratory quite a lot, which I love, because I love the whole world of it, and I love the liturgy and the choirs.
They have beautiful senior choir and junior choir.
These other hymns are often slightly watered down versions of our tunes set to different, rather Catholic-y words.
Of course, Cardinal, the one who wrote Lead, Kindly, Light.
Yes, there were some very good Victorian hymn writers who were Catholics, but I know they didn't seem to have quite the same tradition.
They're very strong on psalms and singing in Latin.
Singing, yeah.
Well, I don't mind that.
I think Latin Masses is a good thing.
The best Catholics are the ones who go to the... Is the Pope clamping down on that?
I think there's Catholics clamping down on Latin Masses.
Well, the Pope isn't Catholic.
He's an infiltrator.
He's just, he's something else.
Yes, that's a bit worrying.
Okay, well, just bringing it back full circle before we close.
The Catholics, do they, when they sing the Psalms, Are they any good?
Yes, actually.
Yes.
My favourite Catholic song singing is definitely Plain Song.
And the worst kind is Responsorial, where they sing a sort of watered down, slightly dog-willy version of it.
Yes.
Not to Anglican chant, just to a different, rather pathetic little tune.
So I'm afraid that's going on as well in Catholic Church.
So I say, no, the Anglican tradition is by far the most robust and the best in terms of culture.
And it's just an accident of history or what?
Yes, I don't know what made the Catholics.
I mean, I still think in monasteries, the Catholic monasteries, it's still going on to a very high standard.
My son's the organist at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, where the monks still sing the proper cycle of psalms into plain song every single day of the week.
And that's still going on.
But in Catholic parishes- You dropped that in randomly.
Yeah.
He's the organist at Buckfast Abbey?
He is, yeah.
He is.
He was the organist.
Is he a Catholic?
No, he's not actually.
No, he's Anglican.
He was the organist at Westminster Abbey before that and now he's gone to Buckfast and he loves the Catholic liturgy because he loves the authenticity of monks singing Divine Office.
It's something incredibly authentic about the fact that they're not doing it for any kind of money or they're just doing it purely for God as part of their calling.
So to be steeped in that… But I didn't realize that plainchant required an organ.
You see, the accompaniment of plainchant on the organ is beautiful because it's very soft.
Just change the note, just gently change the note in the middle of the verse.
It's a beautiful, beautiful incantatory sound.
That's what he's doing.
Not much requirement for organ skills.
Exactly.
No, it's a very subtle, wonderful thing.
And then, of course, they do have proper masses on Sundays with choirs and things.
So there's enough for him to do that.
So, yeah, it's goodbye to the Anglican world for him at the moment.
It's been great talking to you.
This is the point where you are free to advertise all the wonderful books you've written and if you have a blog or anything.
Tell us about Well, I mean, my latest book was called Jobs for the Girls.
It came out in September.
It's the third in my trilogy, really.
I say it started with terms and conditions about girls boarding schools, British summertime begins, which begins with singing, singing Jerusalem and all about summer holidays and what we did in our neglected, wonderfully neglected summers when our parents had no idea where we were.
And then I wrote Doves for the Girls, all about what happened to girls when they were tipped out of those hopeless schools they went to and expected to make their way in the world of secretarial colleges and cordon bleu courses and chalet girling.
And did they manage to become doctors and or nurses?
It's a lovely look into that world of the 1960s, 70s, 50s, 60s and 70s.
So that's it.
Plus writing for The Lovely Spectator, of course, which I do love.
I mean this, Zender, when I say that when I see your byline, I will always read a piece by you.
I think you are absolutely, you have a wonderful lightness of touch.
I'm always interested by what you're writing, even if it's on a subject that I didn't think I was interested in.
So I commend you to my viewers and listeners.
Thank you very, very much, James.
And of course, I love your television reviews and watched one day because of you.
Oh, right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, and thank you very much for my delightful viewers and listeners.
If you enjoy my Psalms podcast, please spread the word.
And, you know, yeah, obviously watch my other podcast too, but I think the Psalms series has a special place in my heart.
