Fairfield Church...

After an unnaturally warm start to November, the temperature has dropped. I stayed the night in Lydd, on Romney Marsh; the air was so clear, as I walked back from the pub, that I felt I could reach out and touch the red ‘stop’ sign 100 yards away, at the end of the street. The clarity was almost painful.

I played the first few minutes of Fanny and Elvis, to see if it was as bad as I remembered. It was… with the characters gurning their way through the improbable script. The fight in the pub was over in seconds - one punch from Ray Winstone was all it took - and my ‘character’ was on screen for all of five seconds. So much for fame. If I watch the film the whole way through it will probably be with chums from Hebden Bridge, to see how many locals we can spot.

After that I listened to a scientist being interviewed on the radio. He was trying to explain the beginnings of the universe for a lay audience, and not doing a very convincing job of it. The trouble is - for me, at any rate - that the big bang theory sounds no more credible than Genesis. Something infinitesimally small being transformed into something infinitely large, in a nanosecond: really? “In the beginning was the word” doesn’t sound so very different, apart from suggesting, in the next few verses, that there was a hand on the tiller…

The church at Fairfield, Romney Marsh. The village disappeared, but the church is still here, marooned by watercourses..