Blog

“Christopher Whall completed two windows for St Martin’s Cathedral in Leicester. These were an East window and a West window in the inner South Aisle. The three-light window was installed in 1905 and has St Martin in the central light. The East window, dating to 1920, is a war memorial window. In “The Buildings of England. Leicestershire and Rutland” this window was described thus “In an Expressionist style with many Pre-Raphaelite memories”. The lower left-hand light features St Joan of Arc.” (List of Christopher Whall works in cathedrals and minsters)

“ Two windows were completed by Veronica for the Cathedral’s St Dunstan’s Chapel” (List of works by Veronica Whall)

Imagined conversation between Christopher and Veronica, any time between 1905 and 1920.

“Veronica, go and tidy up those glass splinters, there’s a good girl.”

“Dad, I’m busy. It won’t take you long. You do it, if it’s so important to you.”

“Veronica, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”

“You can’t order me about.”

“I’m not ordering you about. I’m asking you, as I would ask any apprentice of mine to tidy up after themselves.”

“Yeh but no but yeh but no but I’m not any old apprentice am I?”

“That’s besides the point. Just do as I ask.”

“You’re not my boss.”

“Yes, actually, I am.”

Look, I’ve got this window to finish. Just put a sock in it. If you’re stressed about a few pieces of glass, go and get a cleaner.”

“Veronica, I will not be talked to like that.”

“Whatevah.”

Plus ça change.

“What took you so long?”

A voice bounced around my head as I crossed the threshold of Thurning Village Hall in deepest Northamptonshire to look at the newspaper cuttings and memorabilia collected by the church warden and his family over the years commemorating one of the village’s most famous son, Christopher Whall: one of Britain’s leading stained glass artists from the turn of the last century.  His voice was on the irascible side; as if he’d been waiting in situ for the last century and was mightily impatient for someone from the family to turn up and genuflect at the altar of his birthplace.

‘What took me so long‘ I replied was that it had taken quite a while for my mum to tell me that the reason her first name was Veronica was because she was the God-child of Veronica Whall who happened to ‘do a bit of stained glass’.  Understatement doesn’t begin to describe that description.

Consequently,  it’s taken me some time to realise the extent to which both Veronica’s work – and her dad’s (that would be you Chris,  if you don’t mind me calling you that?) has had such an impact on stained glass across the world.

It then took me some time to find Thurning on the map, and even longer to realise that together with its nearest neighbour, Little Giddings, here was a geographical hotspot which would account for some of the world’s leading artistic creation.  T.S. Eliot for example composed the final part of the Four Quartets after he visited the area:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.

…seems an apt homage to how this mini-pilgrimage is developing.  Start at the end and work backwards to the beginning via the middle, Chris: that’s what I’ve been doing and what would account for how long it’s taken me.

It is funny how long it takes us to realise what’s on our genealogical door step so to speak.  TV programmes tap into that desire to find out who we think we are, who we really, really are and aren’t: and the questions of how on earth we got to be where we are, are never far away from those deliberations and which even Wikipedia is incapable of answering.

Some years ago, Talking Heads had a hit with their song, Once in a Lifetime: the opening  lines including ‘And you may ask yourself / Well, how did I get here?’  and the punch line eventually, over time , reveals itself as ‘And you may say to yourself, / My God What have I done?’

Chris, I’ll never know whether you and Veronica asked yourselves those questions, but rest assured your beings and doings,  comings and goings still live on, in the most surprising of places.  They just take some time to find.  As T.S. might have (and did) write:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Three-light window in St Catherine’s North Nave depicts the life and martyrdom of St Catherine (List of works by Veronica Whall).

It’s the first trip of the mini-pilgrimage to visit St. Catharine’s Church in Irchester, near Wellingborough, and to see Veronica Whall’s window which depicts the life and martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria.

I take an East Midlands Trains from Nottingham to Wellingborough, a walk into the town centre and finally collect the X47 Bus from Swangate Centre which takes me directly to Irchester, dropping me literally onto the doorstep of the Vicarage. The Revd. Caroline Lucas is up at the church at the time, holding a bible study class on the Beatitudes and when I get there, there’s a low murmuring discussion about the complexities of turning the other cheek in times of conflict.

The patron saint of the church, Catherine of Alexandria, would have been an exemplary model of turning the other cheek. She was was the daughter of Constus, the governor of Alexandrian Egypt during AD286 – 305. When the persecution began under Maxentius, she chastised him for his cruelty to Christians which led to her being condemned to death on a spinning wheel into which a load of knives were set (the origin of the Catherine Wheel firework) but miraculously she was spared this agony – only to be later beheaded by Maxentius who clearly knew nothing about turning the other cheek.

Caroline tells me she’s been nominated as a pioneer vicar. The town is in the process of building a new community in Wellingborough, Stanton Cross.  This will see homes for 10,000 people, three new schools and all the associated infrastructure being built: and her role is to offer pastoral and spiritual care for all the folk who would make Stanton Cross their community and new home.

She’s not going to have a church building to work from – and whether the new infrastructure will extend into providing stained glass window design lessons across the curriculum is debatable – but it will be interesting to come back later to see how Catherine and the Church have managed to build a sense of community and belonging in to what is currently a sprawling building site next to the railway station.

Let’s hope the planners don’t forget that roads and railways are one thing: but that it’s culture, diversity and mutual respect that binds people into community.

Whether it’s Mecca, Santiago di Compostela or the Old Bull and Bush down the High Street, a pilgrimage has a number of common elements. They’re walks with purpose, driven by a desire to reach an end point which will have emotional spiritual or psychological significance. Whilst the end point is the whole point of the pilgrimage, people will also remark on the journey they took to get there: it’s not just the product, they exclaim, but the process too! It’s about the journey as well as the destination! It’s as much about the anticipation of redemption as it is feeling redeemed.

It’s about recognising, as per all ancestral myths and good blockbuster films that you’re about to embark on a three act structure of your very own: the set up and getting there, the being there and then the final winding down and return from whence you came. You are about to become the hero in your very own heroic adventure. Joseph Campbell (he of The Hero with 1000 Faces) would be proud of you.

So what marks out a mini-pilgrimage from the high caffeine pilgrimage? The set up will be one distinguishing mark. If I want to travel to Santiago in order to experience the Way of St. James, then I will need to spend months planning an itinerary. I will need to book taxis, trains, boats and planes unless I’m a real stoic and undertake to make the whole journey by foot. Including the section that would involve crossing the English Channel.

This planning will take for ever and almost certainly eat up three year’s salary. It will involve informing the family, the neighbours, the cat and the dog that you are about to embark on a long perilous journey after which life will never be the same ever again. Whilst the family might just shrug this off as another middle life crisis fuelled by too many pints from the Old Bull and Bush which you’ll soon sober up from, the cat and the dog will look at you in complete disinterest (cat) and utterly distraught (dog).

The beauty of the mini-pilgrimage however is that it needs little in the way of planning apart from figuring out when the next bus leaves town. If you have a bus pass it will cost you nothing. If you have a loaf in the larder, you can even make your own sandwiches to take en route. You can, if you are so inclined, take the dog with you, leave enough in a bowl to feed the cat and tell the family that you’re just popping out for a bit and will be back soon. No-one will have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Assuming they heard you in the first place.

The second distinguishing mark of the mini-pilgrimage is the act of being there, once you’ve arrived at your ultimate destination. In the full fat, high caffeine pilgrimage, you will have travelled with hundreds and thousands of people of all different shapes and sizes. As you get nearer to your destination, you will become alarmed about how many more people had exactly the same idea as you all those years ago and experience that utterly devastating moment of realising that you are but an ant in the whole of human experience, not worth a micro-bean of any-ones’ attention, apart from the street vendor who is trying to sell you some inexplicable goods at exorbitant prices. You can be sure that on the proper pilgrimage, that not only you and thousands like you have crossed land, sea and air to get to this sacred place – but that hundreds of sellers of pop, trinkets and endearing slinky things that fall apart as soon as you put them in holy water have also found their way to the holy place that is your final destination.

The pilgrimage vendors know a good crowd when they see one and they will bask in the full knowledge that once your pilgrimage has been attained, they will count up their proceeds, plan for this year’s summer holiday for their whole family in the Maldives and feel safe in the knowledge that this has been secured for the best possible reason: your salvation.

The beauty of the mini-pilgrimage of course is that given its impromptu set up, the ignorance of your nearest and dearest (apart from the dog) and the fact that you can jump on a bus pretty much any time of day, means that no-one is there to meet you at the other end to greet you with trinkets, inhalers or funny little glow sticks that go bump in the night. You will be left alone with your sacred moment, able to share it just with the site itself; and of course your dog, should he or she have lasted the whole bus journey without crashing out due to heat exhaustion.

And finally, the act that differentiates the mini-pilgrimage from the full fat, high caffeine, full spiritual make over pilgrimage is the return home. Campbell calls this the return to the human world and it’s marked by various moments; a comic flight, a crashing down to earth, a huge sense of anti-climax and even bigger questions of what was it all about in the first place? Why did you ever consider that a five month walk to Santiago de Compostela would answer the questions that were gnawing away at your soul ever since you tipped over 40 and realised there were probably less birthdays still to have than you have had already?

These big existential questions of course lead to a mental climate in which another pilgrimage beckons: bigger, better and more authentic than the first one of course. That’s the main problem with the proper pilgrimage. It demands you ask even more questions which can only be answered by yet bigger pilgrimages. Knowing the answers of yesteryear are no use: what the next pilgrimage has to answer are the questions of tomorrow. So you set about your next journey, this time to the North Pole in January 2028.

The mini-pilgrimage is thankfully the antidote to this tendency for pilgrimage dependency. Given it only took you a few hours to get there; that you weren’t stripped of your goods and chattels by holiday-hungry vendors and their charming children and that your dog is still looking adoringly at you, the beauty of the return from the mini-pilgrimage is that you can be back home in time for tea, settle back down in front of the TV and thank your lucky stars that you’ll be ready for work in the morning without anyone noticing you’ve been away. If everything goes according to plan, you can be back in the Old Bull and Bush before closing time for one last swift one, before the questions of what on earth you thought you were doing earlier start flooding back in.

Whilst Mecca and Santiago de Compostela clearly have a lot going for them in terms of significant spiritual and psychological make-overs, there’s nothing quite like a mini-pilgrimage to the Old Bull and Bush to allay your thirst for spiritual satisfaction. Especially if it’s got ‘Single Malt’ on the side of the bottle.

Fundraising in the arts has frequently relied on some unfortunate individual in a corner churning out application after application, destined to cut and paste from one incomprehensible form to another day after day until its time to go home and continue his or her hobby of filling in forms in the safety of their own bedroom.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Fundraising and it’s associated activities is fundamentally a privileged role as it means that you’re involved in plotting out your own future, not having to rely on the whims and mercies of other fundraisers who may not have your best interests close to their hearts. The activity of fundraising should therefore be a much more joyous process involving not only your own heart, mind, body and soul, but those organs of your compatriots too.

Good – the best – fundraising – is  like playing in a band where you’re all making music  together in a spirit of collaboration, song making and making musical history.  This need not be only a solo or duo act – it can be a collective one, where the pleasure might come from the improvisation around the table, the sense of let’s create a whole new world together through the reading of guidelines, the wrestling with language and the joy of multiple script writing like the comic teams who work together to write Friends and all those other income generating concepts.  If they can do it with soaps, can we not do it with local authority contracts and tenders?

All you need is to know who’s playing what, who’s singing what and what to do with the drummer. Get that right, develop the right groove and your fundraising will become the most enlightening spiritual performance you will have encountered for a long time. Of course ‘artistic differences’ will surface once in a while – but if your income generating band got to make the equivalent of Pink Floyd’s  Dark Side of the Moon at least once in it’s existence, would that not be something worth living through? The only problem you’re left with is what to do with the unfortunate individual who’s still stuck in the corner.

Christopher and Veronica Whall were English stained glass artists who worked in the late 19th and early 20th Century and became recognised as two of the key figures in the modern history of stained glass.  They were also father and daughter; and, as it turns out, my great-great-Uncle and cousin.  They were perhaps, in our family, our earliest film makers given their ability to conjure up complex stories onto walls using, as Veronica herself said:  “glass, lead and light… for lead is our medium, and light is our colour.”

They were also widely recognised as great advocates for the arts for everyone and Veronica was also remarkable for crafting her career as a stained glass artist in the early 20th century when the tradition was heavily dominated by men. Consequently, they have both provided me with  inspiration over the years – even if I was unaware of their work and inspirational force at the time.

Their work can be seen across the UK and as far afield as New Zealand. So I thought it was about time to undertake a series of mini-pilgrimages to visit their works, record how the years have treated them, and to consider not just what’s on the walls in front of me, but what’s around and behind them, and what future they’re facing.

This blog will record those mini-pilgrimages, relay what stories the Whalls told to each other and the world on their walls: and imagine what stories we could be telling them, and how we would tell them,  if they were alive today.

I’m hoping it will turn into reflective and celebratory history of two English stained glass artists which at least honours Christopher’s mantra: “the design of the window must relate to the architecture of the frame” albeit written from the point of view of a distant family member as opposed to a stained glass expert: but time will tell on that one.  If you want a more authoritative account of their work, you can start by looking at a list of Veronica’s work here and a list of Christopher’s work here.

I start in Ilchester near Wellingborough on a cold, sunny Spring day. Where I end up, and how I get there? Just read on.

Have you ever fancied yourself as a book reviewer but not keen to spend a shed load of cash on buying books you don’t know whether you’re going to enjoy them or not?

Well, here’s an opportunity to get the best of all possible worlds: put in a request to read our work, send us your contact details and we’ll put a book in the post to you straight away! All you have to do is send us a review and we’ll waive the costs of the book and its postage. That’s right – loads of reading and writing opportunities and they won’t cost you a penny!

Just let us know which book(s) you’d like to review below and we’ll do the rest.

(And please don’t worry if your review is damning with faint, major or non-existent praise! All feedback is helpful, really it is!)

You can see our books here:

Start anywhere is a weekly blog/newsletter by writer and educator Jim Hall on writing, teaching, and keeping it all from vanishing. Each week Jim will share insight around an area of writing that currently feels most alive to him, and reflect on his ongoing journey as a creative writing educator.

He will also share a piece of writing that left him reeling (in a good way) that week, and offer a closing takeaway writing exercise for subscribers to try-out in their own time. 

You can sign up here if you’re interested!

Creativity is often referred to as means of ‘unlocking potential’. There’s a sense that it’s something of the future, a store of source of energy in reserve. It’s a always a lot – we don’t refer to unlocking someone’s low level of potential – but we think too that once unlocked, it will have significant, positive consequences for the individual and wider society. It is by definition, unexpressed, a ‘good thing’ and unlockable.

Frustration with children may come from adults who sense a child has ‘potential’ which is not being made visible, or expressed despite their best efforts to release it. Teachers, parents and the wider family all stare at the unfortunate kid, frustrated in their attempts to ‘unlock her potential’.. If we only could unlock it, she would perform better and we’d all be happy.

On a larger scale, we’re faced with hoards of young people across the country whose potential is locked up – and so the argument goes, if we develop their creativity and enhance their cultural education then their potential will be unlocked released and possibly fulfilled. So, just what is this magical elixir, ‘potential?’

An acorn might have the potential to become an oak tree with the right conditions: but do we have our morphology lying in wait for us, planned out from the blueprint of the embryo? If so, this ‘potential’ is of quite a limited kind – the acorn has no potential for becoming an elm tree. So is potential a kind of destiny / fate – and if so, is the educators job to help us accept our fate? By providing the conditions for us to develop along a genetically preordained route? Or is there role for educators to identify and provide other routes for development? Despite providing the right conditions, the acorn may not grow – or it may start and stop at 60’ or 160’ – it’s still an oak tree – and where its stopped, has it reached its potential? And is that the time for us to walk away and leave it alone?

Is there something about the self here and how we use and view our bodies and minds? On the one hand our bodies and minds are being encouraged, our potentials exhorted and our feeble bodies being pushed to excel. Once we’re able to merge our flesh and bone with the silicon and software of computers we’ll really be able to live our potentials out and exert all our powers – and become like supermen to deal with the voracious capitalist economic appetite (Oh come on, Jones, do keep up can’t you!). In one sense, Loris Malaguzzi’s 100 Languages of Creativity are the means to becoming supermen and superwomen – enhanced versions of our feeble bodies and feeble minds (which are facets of a culture of feebleness).

Potential is also synonymous with ‘unique capacities ‘ and is also used to suggest internal reserves which are untapped / neglected – much like oil wells or gold mines. So tapping potential, in this sense, means exploiting the resources of human – cf exploiting the resources of the planet- and so here, the self has become the site for capitalist economic endeavour.

Given that the education of the 19th century was useful for the industries of that time – now, in a new economic context, new skills and approaches are needed for the new industries – so instead of exploiting the planet since the onset of the industrial revolution, we’re now being urged to exploit the self for the purposes of economic deliverance of the 21st Century’s economic revolution.

So, in exhorting us to stop being feeble, and unleash our capacity to become superhuman, the calls for creativity aim to exploit the feeble self for its untapped power, energy and resources. Simultaneously despising the self, we secretly covet what it could yield up to us. We become both Jim Carrey and his observers in our very own Truman Show.

Writing a new book isn’t just about the physical act of writing (and believe me, writing is a very physical act, and not just a matter of tapping away at a computer keyboard) but also involves at its heart the more speculative acts of research, enquiry and fantasy.

I liken the act of fiction writing to the act of assembling a jigsaw: not only without the picture on the front of a box, but also without the very box itself which would give you a clue about what the subject of the fiction is all about. Sometimes you wonder whether what you’re writing about actually belongs to another box altogether and has nothing to do with what you’re writing now.

This week I’ll be exploring the act of writing my next publication, ‘Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater’ and hopefully will be providing some insights into what seems to be working and what seems to be a complete dead end. Sometimes those two things masquerade as each other: a reminder of William Goldman’s infamous aphorism, ‘No-one knows anything’.

Our catchphrase at NOP is ‘The Truth, The Whole Truth and Anything But the Truth’ and this is a useful permission to give yourself when working on your next blockbuster. Sure, your work has to come from your truths but it’s equally true that you don’t fully know what your truths are, especially if they involve other people with their own truths. Whether there can ever be a single source of truth is a moot point and is something that fiction writers will only be too well aware of.

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for more than a moment and you’ll realise there’s more to your life than meets your eye.