When Fear Goes Viral: Responding to Coronavirus

Coronavirus is so-called because the virus resembles a corona, a crown or garland. Or maybe a wreath, a word with haunting connotations of mortality. In the image it looks like a thing of beauty. But it would be wise not to get too close. 

As we all know by now, the Chinese city of Wuhan is the epicentre of this virus, its Ground Zero. Today, the ophthalmologist who tried to warn of the virus and its likely consequences has died of it. Dr Li Wenliang was reprimanded by the police in late December for “rumour-mongering” and raising alarm needlessly. He was a prophet not honoured in his own country. He acted courageously. But by the time he was listened to it was too late. Since then the Chinese authorities have taken drastic action. But the spread of the virus across the world now seems unstoppable.

What its effects may be is anyone’s guess. The World Health Organisation doesn’t know the precise reason the virus originally jumped from animal or bird species to humans, nor does it understand in detail how it is transmitted between humans. There is as yet no vaccine to prevent infections nor antibiotics to treat patients who develop bacterial pneumonia. Scientists worldwide are throwing all their efforts into addressing these known unknowns (and some unknown ones), but it takes time. 

Memories of the SARS outbreak (“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”) in 2003 have been rekindled - that was a coronavirus too. The question was, and still is, why does a virus that usually does nothing worse than inconvenience us by giving us a common cold dramatically turn malign and start killing people? A century ago the world was getting over the catastrophic Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more people than the Great War had done. In 2003, worldwide panic over the outbreak of SARS proved short-lived. But it taught the world how new diseases could threaten to have devastating impacts in highly mobile, interconnected societies. And how nothing short of global collaboration would be needed to combat them.

The metaphor of warfare is never far away when disease knocks on the door. Thomas Abraham, in his book of 2005 Twenty-First Century Plague: the Story of SARS struck a chilling tone. “This was an attack by an unseen invader to which nations had to respond as they would to any other attack - by mobilising the resources to repel the invader. For many countries it became clear that the real threat to security would come not from invading armies but from unknown microbes.” 

Perhaps nothing instils atavistic dread as much as disease. The rider of the white horse of the Apocalypse (the first of the so-called Four Horsemen in Revelation 6) wears a corona or crown. While his identity - is he a symbol of good or evil? - is disputed by interpreters, popular culture imagines him as the bringer of sickness and plague, a cataclysmic expression of divine judgment on a corrupt world along with famine, war and bloodshed, images of universal terror and destruction. 

These are powerful metaphors that continue to haunt the imagination, even in an age that understands the processes by which diseases are transmitted. If we thought that modernity had done away with archaic ways of responding to infection or the threat of it, consider what has happened in Newcastle this week. The Chinese community there is reporting episodes of discrimination and hate crime because of the virus. One woman, a student, posted on social media that she had been spat on while walking back to her dormitory. Others have spoken of abusive comments and people covering their faces when walking past them in the street. One owner of a Chinese take-away, who has never been to China, said he had heard of people being beaten up and bullied, and is frightened of coughing in public in case he is thought to carry the virus. The knowledge that two of the three cases so far diagnosed in the UK are being treated in Newcastle is no doubt fuelling the panic. 

We’re right to be appalled. But we need to understand what’s going on when fear goes viral. Prejudice and hatred are fed by “othering” people who are perceived to be different. And when it’s examined, othering often turns out to be driven by fear. I say “often” but I have a hunch that it’s probably always the case at the unconscious level. The leper in the Bible is a familiar image of how the feared were banished to ghettos on the margins of society where rigorously enforced isolation, permanent quarantine, put them beyond reach of the community and the risk to it of contamination. Those words leper and ghetto still carry powerful resonances as figures of speech. And when the collective psyche projects on to (in this case) Chinese people because of our terror of infection, we are reaching back into very primitive states of mind indeed.

In one of the greatest twentieth century novels, Albert Camus charts the impact of an epidemic. The Plague (La Peste) is a profound exploration of how the contagion of fear spreads through a society and paralyses it; how panicky self-interest, the survival instinct dominates all else, how preachers try to make sense of the catastrophe that is happening. This epidemic set in a North African town was fictional, but it stood for an important truth. Writing in Vichy France during the 2nd World War, Camus meant it as a metaphor of enemy invasion and occupation, and how a terrorised society reacts. But we can see in it a metaphor of another occupying power that holds sway over humanity: the effect of fear on ordinary people's lives, the corruption of motives by self-concern, putting ourselves first, protecting ourselves from harm at all costs. In an important way, it is fear that spreads a spiritual plague, not because it’s unnatural or wrong to be afraid, but because of how we respond when it takes hold of us. Camus seems to be saying that while the sickness is a terrible thing, it’s not the worst kind of disease we can be afflicted by.

I say “us” deliberately. Like viruses, fear doesn’t discriminate. We are all at risk of being infected by both of them. There’s plenty of good advice telling us what to do in the face of this virus. A lot of it is common sense. Managing fear is more tricky because of its visceral character: how do you get a handle on what we’re most afraid of and why? Getting risk in perspective is one way of telling ourselves not to get things out of proportion. We are right to be afraid of a global pandemic, and if this particular virus is not going to cause it, the next one could: epidemiologists tell us it’s not a question of whether but of when. But we are right to be afraid of lots of other hazards too, that are the price of being alive in a universe of risk and that are almost all beyond our power to control. 

Perhaps modernity over-protects us in the first world from feeling the fragility of our existence too keenly. If so, the coronavirus can help make us more aware, not least of the fears most of the human race carry with them all the time. It can give us a better sense of our solidarity with those who suffer because we know that it could be us too. To think of ourselves as “citizens of the world” is to understand our primary identity as being human beings in all the “joy and woe” that, says William Blake, we were made for, “woven fine” in the tapestry of life. Is this how we learn to build solidarities of compassion and care, tenderness and love that transfigure fear by giving us the courage and dignity to look adversity squarely in the face and resolve that our inmost selves, our souls if you like, will not be brought down by it? 

The power of love is the greatest force for good the world knows. My faith tells me that my capacity to love, feeble though it often is, reflects the image of a God whose nature and whose name is Love. Which is why the words of so many biblical messengers across the centuries, “do not be afraid!”, carry such conviction. Dealing with fear is fundamentally a spiritual task. I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be. We don’t know what the coming months will bring. But whatever ordeals lie ahead for us and for people in other parts of the world, it’s immensely heartening to remind ourselves that we are not alone. 

Meanwhile, the people of China are in our thoughts and prayers, together with all whose lives have been directly affected  by the coronavirus. In Albert Schweitzer’s words, we belong to the community of all who bear the marks of pain. This is our privilege now, and always will be.

The Election - thoughts at Grey’s Monument

This is a bit longer than usual. You’ll understand.

For the first time for decades, I didn't stay up all night to watch the election results. By the small hours of the night the outcome was as clear as the day. Perhaps I should have been on my knees during the watches (I blogged about praying for the election last time). Instead, I went to bed. And slept quite well in the circumstances. I woke early and for an instant thought I heard someone say "behold, it was a dream". But it wasn't. It was the morning of 24 June 2016 all over again.

What do I say about this election result, I asked myself as dawn broke. Today is St Lucy’s Day, 13 December. It used to be the shortest, darkest day of the year in the unreformed Julian Calendar of John Donne’s times, inspiring his famous Nocturnal about “the year’s midnight”. How apt! Was Boris Johnson teasing us when he chose this particular date? He is, after all, a lover of classical antiquity.

But Lucy was the Roman girl-martyr who brought light into dark places, hence her lovely name. The play on darkness obscuring light and light penetrating darkness fascinated Donne. Light and dark come into things in elections, I thought to myself. Altruism dragged down by naked self-interest, narrow tribal loyalties pierced in our best moments by an awakened conscience and a deeper feeling for humanity - there’s a real dark-and-light chiaroscuro in our thoughts, emotions, speeches and behaviour at election times. It’s what we should expect at liminal times like these, but the strength of my own feelings never fails to take me by surprise.

Here’s what I posted on social media from my bed. 

So the UK is going into exile. I must accept Brexit & live with it. It will be bitter for me personally & I think, taking a long view, for the nation collectively. The biggest mistake made by Labour & the LibDems? Agreeing to a General Election at all. That decision was a disastrous misreading of the signs of the times. And of the capacity of both party leaders to win trust on the nation’s doorsteps. Good people of all faiths & political views must now come together for the sake of the planet, for the sake of peace & for the sake of the poor. We must keep hope alive.

I chose those words carefully. And felt better for writing them. Yes, it will be bitter, I thought, not just because of Brexit, but for all the other reasons so many of us feared a landslide like today’s, especially on account of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our nation. Yet there’s a difference between feeling what we feel and acting out those feelings. I’ve consistently campaigned in this blog on the foundation that the clear command is to love our neighbour, and indeed, our enemy. Perhaps today poses precisely that challenge, not to harbour resentments and hatreds towards those for whom this has been a day to rejoice while some of us feel like strangers in a landscape we barely recognise as our political and cultural home.

It would have been easy to gaze at the TV news all day. But we decided instead to get out of the house and go into Newcastle to look for Christmas gifts for the family. We walked up from the station along Grainger Street. There, ahead of us, presiding over the city’s Christmas market, was the statue of the 2nd Earl Grey on top of his Monument. I felt a surge of admiration for this man, one of Northumberland’s greatest, who was Prime Minister from 1830-1834. In times as fractious and turbulent as our own (read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set in the early 1830s - I blogged about her recently), Lord Grey championed and saw enacted the Great Reform Act of 1832 that abolished rotten boroughs and launched the long, fitful journey towards universal suffrage. 

What would this lover of civil and political liberty have made of today, I wondered? I’ll leave experts to comment on an unreformed electoral system that (among other oddities) gives us an outcome in which a Tory landslide of 365 seats can result from the votes of a few hundreds of thousands of voters in swing constituencies while in total, more people across the UK have voted against the Tories than for them. I think the good Earl would say that electoral reform is still a work in progress. There’s no hope of progressing it in the next 5 years, but I believe election results will lack firm credibility and ownership for as long as Parliament fails to address this fundamental problem. 

But wandering among the Christmas shoppers, I didn’t want to dwell on these challenges. Nor did I want to engage in a long post-mortem or play the blame game about the failure of Remainers to get our act together. Later, certainly, we need to think very hard about what went wrong. But not now. What was needed today was to reflect, ponder, and pray about how to manage disappointment and bitterness, and live with a result many of us had feared, yet dared to hope might be averted. Maybe I should have practised disappointment more, like Diogenes famously exploring futility by praying to a lump of rock. All of life, we have to learn to “live with”. It’s a mark of being adult that we make some progress along the path of graceful acceptance when things don’t go our way.

The Grey Monument bears witness to a man who, despite endless frustrations and discouragements, channelled his energies into what would help the nation flourish. In our time, this has to mean rebuilding the sense of being one nation again. As I said to begin with, we owe it to the planet, to world peace, and to the poor who are always with us, to come together with all people of good will to renew ourselves to pursue what is just and right and good. And to keep our hope alive.

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Maybe one way in which we do this is by learning to act more out of trust. Or (to paraphrase something Bishop Michael Ramsey once said about prayer), if it’s too soon to start trusting people again after these political storms of the last three years, at least to want to. And if even that’s too much to contemplate, to want to want to. 

Yes, there’s so much that’s wrong with our politics, both the decisions we are making and the way we are making them. We are right to challenge falsehood, mendacity and the casual disregard for careful process when we see them. We are right to be angry for the sake what’s good and true. But we must examine our motives, and make sure we’re not feeding self-righteousness. Nurturing blame and bitterness gets us nowhere. What’s needed is to help a grown-up public conversation to begin again on the basis of our common humanity. We need to make a presumption that our conversation partner wants the best for others, not the worst, that they care for their fellow human beings, for the needs of others, and for the future of the world just as we do. 

Anglicans call this the “charitable assumption”. It undergirds good pastoral practice. Yes, it strains credibility sometimes, when we wonder if others are as honourable as we’d like to think they are, yet I do believe it’s a vital principle of courteous, graceful, good-neighbourly behaviour. It entails, for example, attentive listening in the spirit of “maybe I can learn to see it your way; and is it possible that you could come to see it mine?” That’s not to equivocate about our hard-won principles, only to understand them in the context of the bigger picture which is always more complex than the simple binaries we love so much. As Bishop John Habgood once said, it’s all very well “being prophetic”, as long as you see all sides of a question. Or try to.

I was touched and moved by something my daughter wrote today to our family WhatsApp group. She’s allowed me to share it here. We had been in touch with our children to ask how they were feeling about the election. She replied:

I feel ok - perhaps that it is my role to promote a sense of steady-ness for those around me who are very upset. But you know, I am a super-rational pragmatist. 

I also feel that I too learned a lot from watching the Tory victories through the 80s and early 90s, something about coping with the disappointment, even tho I didn’t understand it. 

I feel relieved that the waiting and dreading and liminal is over. That in itself releases new energies eventually. And on that we do need to be out of this Brexit impasse so that attention can be spend on domestic agenda. So I understand that vote.

And I feel that it is better to know what you don’t understand about your country than not know. Not that we, in our liberal bubbles  know now, but we need to learn. 

And we need to be kind to ourselves and to everyone we meet, especially those whose opinions we don’t understand and especially those who are marginalised. And we need to listen to those people whose opinions we don’t understand and expand our bubbles. 

That’s what I think. But yes. Obviously awful, but we don’t know what this will mean. And we do know that there are a lot of young activists coming up, that the generation emerging is not like the generations before it so things will shift. we need to learn and to listen, to mentor and to work in whatever way we can to generate communities in which people can listen to and learn from those with whom they might fundamentally disagree. And we need to borrow coping strategies from those places for whom this kind of political marginalisation is the norm - who can ONLY rely on the state to frustrate and disempower them, which is still probably most places in the world . 

Perhaps it is denial, but I am still just grateful to have a vote and a state that provides any protection or health care at all. 

So we also need to be grateful. Not least because we are not the people who will be most marginalised by this decision. And maybe that sounds a bit selfish, but we need to try to appreciate what we have, and have a good Christmas together and emotionally nurture and sustain each other.

I will never lose faith in the power of love, of community, of relationship and of the collective. Aluta continua! Weep today. And the work of rebuilding starts again tomorrow.

So well said. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Methodist Church have also found just the right words for today. They have published an Open Letter to the Prime Minister following his return to office. This is church leadership at its best. They speak for me.

More to come (if you can bear it) as we go on trying to understand where we now find ourselves after the election. 

The Ten-Fifty to Newcastle: Clergy and the Railways

It's every schoolboy's dream, at least it was when I was that age - living by a railway. A few years ago we retired to Haydon Bridge, a village in South Tynedale midway between the North Sea and the Irish. In the 1830s, the first east-west railway line in Britain was constructed between Newcastle and Carlisle and brought trains into the valley. On 28 June 1836 Haydon Bridge station was opened. It is still open (unstaffed) and we are lucky enough to live opposite, near the level crossing. The original station-master's house survives as a private home.

You will have heard a lot about Northern Rail in the past few months. It runs a service every hour or so in each direction. Two-coach sprinters, or if you are unlucky, cordially disliked Pacer trains, get you to either end of the line in about three-quarters of an hour. There are even a few direct services that will take you to exotic destinations like Dumfries, Glasgow (thanks to Scotrail), Middlesbrough or Whitby. The railway passes through lovely valley and upland landscapes and runs close to the Roman Wall for most of its length (so it’s now marketed as the Hadrian's Wall Line).

Sometimes the East Coast or West Coast Main Lines through Newcastle or Carlisle are closed for engineering work, and then Inter-City 125s power along our railway, and even East Coast electrics ignominiously hauled by diesels. Steam specials bring sightseers and photographers to the lineside. When Flying Scotsman and Tornado (above) came through, the platforms were as thronged as a tube station in rush hour. The last train to stop at Haydon Bridge every weekday is the 22.50 to Newcastle. The roar of the Pacer as it sets out eastwards can clearly be heard from our house. That’s my signal for bedtime. It’s strangely reassuring to hear freight trains rumble through at night.

I blogged about the Line in 2017 so I won't repeat myself. What prompts me to write now is an assignment that is coming up next month. I have to speak to a local railway circle about why the clergy, or many of us, are famously fascinated by railways. It's been debated in church circles from time to time. "What draws clerics to railways?" asked David Self in the Church Times ten years ago or so. He discusses Bishop Eric Treacy, the distinguished railway photographer who died in 1978 on Appleby station photographing a steam special on the Settle to Carlisle line. I've yet to discover if the Bishop ever spoke or wrote about why he loved railways. I'd be surprised if he hadn't reflected on it.

The Reverend Wilbert Vere Audrey features of course, the begetter of Thomas the Tank Engine et al. I've got to know these stories all over again as a granddad, not just from the books but now from hundreds of YouTube videos. I have just read his biography by Brian Sibley. He draws attention to the moral world presided over by the Fat Controller where right and wrong are clearly delineated. Unlike our world, on the Island of Sodor there are no grey areas. On the last page he records a conversation with the author in which he asks how far these stories about railway engines are a statement of his personal philosophy. He quotes Audrey's reply. "This world is God's world. He makes the rules. We have a free choice, we can obey him or disobey him, but we cannot choose to disobey him and live happily our way....Like us humans, they go their own way and inevitably come to a sticky end. Then the offender has to show that he is sorry and accept his punishment. But the point is they are punished but they are NEVER scrapped." Sibley adds that "in the world depicted in the Railway Series, there is always redemption and forgiveness, another opportunity to try harder to become a Really Useful Engine". So Pelagianism is avoided. Just.

David Self's article is kind enough to see off the assumption that rail-loving clergy are necessarily anoraks, pedants, juvenile fantasists or just plain cranks (moi?). He does think that railways represent an ordered world that runs to schedule, and this appeals to clergy whose daily experience of the parish is of  setting where little if anything is predictable. And if railway modelling is their thing, as it was for The Reverend Teddy Boston, a friend of Audrey whose remarkable garden railway is described in Font to Footplate, then the satisfaction of creating and presiding over such an environment no doubt reflects a theology of creation. This theme is explored by Canon Bill Vanstone in his book Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense where precisely because of the infinite care the Creator invests in his creation, he becomes vulnerable to anything that would damage or spoil it. I well recall that feeling from childhood. Our oversized cat (Jupiter by name) trampled all over my beloved OOO layout and left a trail of destruction across my handiwork. I must have been ten or eleven and wept copiously.

I'm not sure I've yet answered the question of clergy and railways to my satisfaction. It's true that a proud moment in my time as Dean of Durham was when an East Coast Class 91 Electric was named Durham Cathedral. In its latest incarnation, 91114 still has my name on the driver door. But why should that bring immense pleasure? Perhaps the big railway stations are a bit like cathedrals. Yes, they are of course grand, imposing and often beautiful. St Pancras, King's Cross, Paddington, Liverpool Street, Bristol Temple Meads, York, Newcastle are among the great stations of England, cathedrals of the industrial era. I recall Euston being the best of them all until it was ignominiously demolished by wicked modernisers in the 1960s.

But architecture isn't all. It's what goes on in railway stations from the grandest to the humblest where the analogies are perhaps strongest. Stations are places of comings and goings, journeys begun, journeys ended, journeys that are still in progress. They are points of connection. They are liminal - locations where temporary communities come into being and thresholds are crossed. Here, people have to wait, surrender themselves to forms of control beyond themselves, embark on or conclude journeys that may bring them to unknown places or new experiences. They are places where the “other” is inchoate in the here and now, whether anticipated, hoped for or feared. That makes them suggestive of transcendence.

And they are also places of ceremony where rituals of greeting and farewell take place, where trains arrive and depart in accordance with well rehearsed rules and passengers (a much more suggestive word theologically than customers) understand the rules of engagement in relation to the rituals of buying tickets, negotiating barriers, locating the correct platform and time to catch a train. All this, I think, appeals to people who inhabit ceremonial worlds as clergy do when we preside at the liturgy and at the occasional offices, those rites of passage that mark the human journey and offer it to God.

Perhaps too, power comes into things. One of my tutors at theological college, Dr Jim Packer, a west country man, loved his native GWR and cheerfully joined in praise of "God's Wonderful Railway". My protestations in defence of the North Eastern Railway, its successor the LNER, Flying Scotsman and Mallard fell on deaf ears. I once heard him say that a steam locomotive was the quintessential expression of how enormous power is put to work through the discipline of its own engineering and of the rails that constrain it. Power that is purposeful was to him a way of speaking about God, an eloquent image of teleology, that which has direction and strives toward a clear end or telos. He put it more subtly than that, but you get the point.

I suspect that the precision with which railways have to operate carries an eschatological message for those who think in such ways. Divine order in which everything knows its place is what people of faith look for in the new creation that the gospel proclaims. A well-run railway could, perhaps, be a metaphor of what humanity longs for as the goal of creation. Could we call it the kingdom of God? I'm not talking about cold perfection, a chiselled, mechanised (and now digitised) but impersonal efficiency that cares nothing for flesh and blood. Rather, I mean that because railways at their best are a demonstration of how human beings flourish in a symbiotic relationship with their environment, they seem to epitomise a state of order that is both elegant and humane - beautiful even.

These analogies are far from perfect. But maybe they are worth exploring in a playful kind of way. Playfulness is a good quality to cultivate when we do theology. "The kingdom of heaven is like...the happiness of passengers when the trains run on time." Amen. Amen.

The Great Exhibition of the North

The Great Exhibition of the North opens on 22 June in Newcastle-Gateshead. It lasts until 9 September. It's a "summer-long celebration of the North of England's pioneering spirit and the impact of our inventors, artists and designers", says the exhibition website. "It's a chance to show how our innovative spirit has shaped the world and is building the economy of tomorrow." To mark the launch of the Exhibition I've put together a selection of some of my favourite images of the North East that I've taken down the years.

I'm sure everyone at this end of England welcomes this opportunity to put the North back on the map. Having worked in the northern Province of the Church of England for exactly two-thirds of my working life in public ministry, I've seen how the large parts of the North can fall into despondency at the decline of its traditional industries, its economic challenges and how far away it can feel from the centres of decision-making in London. For example, the North East receives only one tenth of London's share of the nation's investment in public transport infrastructure. During the Great Exhibition, we shall continue to watch Pacer trains rumble in and out of Newcastle Central Station and squeal round the curves on the Gateshead loop across the river. Our southern guests might be intrigued to see these archaic trains still running up here, a phenomenon to make them wonder whether the Northern Powerhouse is reality or fantasy.

I believe it can and must be a reality. We should be glad that throughout the summer, the North of England will be girding up its loins to accentuate the positive. It will present itself to the nation and the world as a forward-looking place of enterprise, originality and innovation where people love living and working in its resilient, lively and colourful communities. When we consider how the North has influenced, changed and enriched the world's industry, enterprise, heritage and arts, it is out of all proportion to the narrow geography on which we sit here in England. Its achievements are truly astonishing - and let me emphasise the tense - it's not that these achievements were once astonishing, it's that they still are today. Newcastle and Gateshead will demonstrate this in abundance this year in all kinds of ways. It's good news that heralds a great summer of celebration.

However (there was bound to be a but), I hope this ambitious vision of a Great Exhibition of the North is big enough. Let me explain.

First, I hope that words like "innovation" and "enterprise" are understood as referring to a history that long predates the twentieth and twenty first centuries, indeed the industrial revolution whose cradle this part of England largely was. For instance, the Roman Wall that runs right across the far north of what we now call England was in its time (and still would be today, Mr Trump) a huge project that called for topographical, engineering and construction skills of the highest order. Antiquity has left its visible mark on our northern landscapes in a way that is unique on this island. I hope many of our visitors find their way into Tynedale to admire the Wall and thereby set modernity into a larger context. Every generation has made its contribution and left its imprint on our landscapes, towns and cities. It's good that history puts us in our place.

Secondly, Northumbria's "Golden Age" of Christian civilisation in the seventh and eighth centuries is an essential part of the North's heritage. You can't really "get" the North's rich character and identity if you airbrush out of its legacy the profound Christian influences that shaped it and gave it the strong sense of place that endures today. Spirituality comes into things. In 2013, when I was Dean at Durham Cathedral, we welcomed back to the city the Lindisfarne Gospels for the first residency of what is hoped to be a regular cycle of visits to the peninsula where that "Great North Book" once lived. That summer, we all learned a great deal about how precious this Christian inheritance from Saxon times still is, and how it has the power to inspire and motivate people of faith even to this day. Will all this feature in this summer's activities? I hope so. Once again, I hope our guests will find their way to Lindisfarne, the "cradle of English Christianity", or if that's too far from Tyneside, venture inside our cathedrals at Newcastle and Durham, or Bede's churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow, or Wilfrid's at Hexham Abbey. They are full of design innovation, full of spiritual enterprise. All this belongs to the North's spiritual and cultural capital.

Thirdly, I hope that the many poor and marginalised communities of the North will feel that this Exhibition is for them too. The North East has some of the most needy and deprived communities in the country, many of them within a stone's throw of the beautifully developed Tyneside waterfront. Parts of Tyneside and Wearside, as well as South East Northumberland and East Durham, are severely challenged in terms of economic growth, public services, housing, education, community facilities and, less tangibly but no less importantly, in their sense of collective wellbeing, confidence and hope.

These places of poverty and need, where people are "just about managing" or not managing at all, are often hidden from public sight and attention. These are the worlds of the TV series Broken, and films like I Daniel Blake, Billy Eliot, Purely Belter, Brassed Off and The Full Monty - all set in the North of England. I am sure that the Great Exhibition is intended to be a genuinely popular event, a ten week celebration for all the people of the North. Tyneside knows how to party like nowhere else in the country! The question is, how to take the Great Exhibition out into these communities and create events that affirm the local and the particular, that say loudly and clearly: this is for us all?

You can't do everything of course. But unless there's a strong sense of inclusion, even the best of intentions can have the effect of reinforcing the perception, no the experience, of disadvantaged people that they are on the edge of developments that are not really for them. I want to believe that this summer's events could be a wonderful way of invigorating and empowering fragile communities by offering visions of a better future. What will count is how the Great Exhibition of the North is followed up, what its long-term legacy turns out to be. It could be hugely positive. But it needs to be more than midsummer feel-good if it's to make a real and lasting difference to human lives.

Let me conclude on a personal note. I first came to live and work in the North more than half my lifetime ago when I became the vicar of a Northumberland market town in my early thirties. It was challenging to find myself in a culture so different from the one I'd been brought up in, that of suburban north London. But how enriching it was! It shaped me in ways beyond my imagining at the time. And when I went south again for a few years, I couldn't shake off my newly acquired feeling for "North". And didn't want to. I took groups annually up to Holy Island to introduce them to Northern Christianity. In due course, I returned - first to Sheffield for eight years, and then to Durham for nearly thirteen.

Now my wife and I live in retirement in rural Northumberland once more. I wouldn't live anywhere else now. I shall always be a Londoner, of course, and recognise that however much I want to "go native", we are always children of our origins. But the North has been extraordinarily good to me. Which is why I'm delighted that the Great Exhibition of the North will display the best of the North to people who may never have ventured into these (to them) far-distant lands. In today's Guardian a travel feature suggests some of the best places in the North East to enjoy a day out during the Exhibition. When I read it, I felt proud and glad to have lived and worked in this great region, and still to be a part of it. I've come to care deeply for it in all its variety. I want to champion it if I can. Hence my tribute in photographs. Hence this blog.

Come and see us. Discover the riches of the North. Bring your friends and make new ones. Experience living in a different way. Celebrate. Share our life for a while. Be inspired!

The North East in Twelve Favourite Places 9: The Tyne Valley Railway

This month I’ve chosen, not a place but a railway line – ours. As someone who’s loved railways since I was little, I couldn’t ignore this aspect of the North East. I’ve already written about the museum at Shildon, the “cradle of the railways”. But what about the living, working railway that runs through our own village? The Tyne Valley Railway is a daily part of our life in this community – and aren’t we fortunate to have a working railway station, however basic, in our midst? But how many of us have taken in the long history of this line, or some of its fine lineside features?

Our railway is both one of the prettiest in England, and also one of the earliest. Planning began in the 1820s (the legendary Stockton and Darlington Railway began carrying passengers in 1825). While sections of the line were running earlier, the entire length of the route between Carlisle and Newcastle was opened in 1838. And although Haydon Bridge station is now only a shadow of its former self, it’s nice to think that in its way it is the village’s monument to the pioneering spirit that inspired the construction of railways across the country in those first few decades.

You can see why the railway has been branded the “Hadrian’s Wall Line”, though in fact the Roman Wall is visible from only a very few locations along the route. But the Tyne is a different matter. The railway hugs it closely all the way from its eastern terminus at Newcastle Central to Haltwhistle; even then the former Alston branch, now partly reopened as a narrow gauge railway, continues the marriage of river and railway up into the North Pennines not far from its source. (I say the Tyne, but of course I mean the South Tyne. The North Tyne had its own railway, the Border Counties that diverged from the Tyne Valley line just west of Hexham. You can still see the piers of the original bridge that crossed the river at that point.)

As I am focusing on North East England, I won’t linger on the part of the line west of the Pennine watershed around Gilsland (where there is an active campaign to reopen the station, and who’s to say there isn’t a good case for it?). Up here you get marvellous views eastwards along the whin sill crags that carry the Roman Wall, northwards to the Bewcastle fells, and westwards across the Solway and beyond, the hills of Galloway. 

Haltwhistle station has some of the line’s best buildings. My wife and I visited them recently on a heritage open day. We were able to climb up into the splendid signal box and admire the restored ticket office (the cardboard railway ticket as we used to know it was invented on this very line by an enterprising station master at Brampton called Thomas Edmondson). The water tank on its three arches is another fine feature, as is the footbridge in a design you find repeated along the length of the line.

Hexham station always seems well looked after with its air of tidiness and hanging flower baskets. The signal box, poised over the rails themselves, is one of the best on the line. Riding Mill and Stocksfield stations both have their original station-masters’ houses, as does Wylam, another station of great charm. Opened in 1835, it is said to be one of the earliest stations in the world that is still in daily use, an achievement of which the great engineer George Stephenson, born in the village, would no doubt be proud. It even features in Simon Jenkins' recent book Britain's Hundred Best Railway Stations.

Wylam marks the Tyne’s tidal limit. Downstream you leave Northumberland and enter the tangle of industrial wastelands, new commercial buildings, baffling road networks and riverside developments. The urban townscape of Tyne and Wear has created huge spaces for retail on an industrial scale. The Metro Centre, cathedral of consumerism, has its own useful but unlovely interchange where every train on the line is destined to stop. I wonder why?

Our journey has two last hurrahs. The first is the long climb up through Gateshead to join the East Coast Main Line. There’s a breath-taking climax when you realise that you are high up on the south bank of the river perched on the edge of a gorge. From here you cross it either on the King Edward Bridge or the older and more venerable High Level Bridge. This outstanding monument to North East engineering was designed by Robert Stephenson and opened in 1849. If you have never walked along its lower deck, you have a treat in store. Both bridges offer magnificent views up and down the river, and if your train is halted in mid-passage as it often is, you have an unrivalled photo opportunity too. Is there a city in Europe with such a majestic river frontage as Newcastle-Gateshead?

The second hurrah is Newcastle Central Station itself. The river crossing has already created a great sense of arrival, and it required a station to match it. Newcastle architect John Dobson rose to the challenge by creating one of the grandest stations in the country (it merits 5ive stars in Simon Jenkins' book). The vast porch (called a porte-clochère) where passengers would disembark from their horse-drawn carriages is now a pedestrian concourse. The train shed is a beautiful piece of ironwork in its own right, perfectly set off by the curve of the railway line as it comes off one of the bridges at either end and sweeps grandly alongside the platforms.

The Tyne bridges, Newcastle Central Station, the two Cathedrals, Anglican and Roman Catholic, and the (new) Castle make up an outstanding ensemble of historic buildings. Here at the heart of one of England’s great cities, we are a world away from the Pennine reaches of the Tyne in its remote upland valley. But each is a foil for the other. There aren’t many railway journeys that offer so much to enjoy. And all from our own doorsteps here in Haydon Village.

**The Tyne Valley Rail Users’ Group is well worth supporting. Its purpose is to develop relationships between the line and its principal train operator Northern, and the communities they serve. This includes campaigning for better services and facilities. Go to www.tvrug.org.uk.  

Bearing Witness to Europe: a day in Newcastle

Yesterday I got on the train and went to join the North East March for Europe in Newcastle. For a couple of hours I stood with a crowd of several hundred at the Monument in the city-centre. There was a home-spun party atmosphere with banners, flag-waving and singing. I felt a bit underdressed, not sporting the celebratory attire of yellow stars on blue. Even a well-dressed canine looked better suited for the part than I did. But it didn't matter. I was glad to be there.

"Celebratory?" you ask. Hang on, who actually won the EU referendum? No-one was denying the way the vote went. But far from rendering everyone despondent, it seemed to have had the opposite effect. This was a crowd that was energised and enthusiastic, eager to do our best for Britain and Europe, and confident in affirming all that we valued in the EU. Yes, and determined to try to win hearts and minds in the aftermath of the Brexit vote by urging our country to look again at its consequences and prevent lasting damage not only to ourselves but to our European friends and neighbours.

I'd decided to go for two reasons. The first was simply to show solidarity with the millions across the land who voted to remain in the EU. At a time when the momentum of Brexit seems unstoppable, there's a lot to be said for turning out on the streets en masse in order to show our political leaders that they can't assume that Britain has given them an "overwhelming" or even a "clear" mandate to drive us to the cliff-edge. And even if we had, we would still have the right to change our minds as a nation. That's what democracy means.

In the vocabulary of Christian faith, I call this kind of public activity "bearing witness": telling our story, sharing our experience, and inviting others to make it their own and become part of it. Getting out there is to become active rather than passive, not to be a bystander but to do something. And that changes for good the consciousness not only of those who take part but of the many more who watch or listen or read news reports and social media. Becoming participants makes a difference. Maybe a bigger difference than we can know at the time. Standing at the heart of Newcastle, this great cosmopolitan city that voted to remain in the EU, I think we all felt empowered.

The other reason for going was that I wanted to hear the speeches. An impressive line-up of speakers represented the worlds of politics, education, the unions, health, and business and commerce. I don't suppose many of us learned much that was new. But it was the conviction with which they spoke that impressed and even moved me. They were clear that our country had made a disastrous mistake. They were clear that the electorate had been misled and lied to. They were clear that the values of Europeanism were still alive and well across our nation. They were clear that it wasn't too late to row back from our decision. They were clear that the UK still had a future in the EU provided enough people believed in it with conviction.

In their different ways, the speakers underlined a simple message. "We want our country back. We want our continent back too. Being in the EU isn't only about the economy. It's about the values we share. We stand up not only for ourselves but for the next generation. We love Europe. We are Europeans. We shall fight for a second referendum on the negotiated Brexit deal with the option Remain in the EU on the ballot paper."

At the end, Professor A. C. Grayling spoke, one of the most intelligent and ardent champions of Britain's membership of the EU. In a long series of writings and tweets he has mercilessly exposed Brexit for what it is, the non-sense of "this crazy, absurd, damaging project". We must lobby our MPs, he told us. Too many Remainer parliamentarians are going along with Brexit because, as the cry has it, "the people have spoken". This needs challenging by rigorous argument. And maybe our elected representatives who, presumably, haven't stopped believing that EU membership is a good thing need a little encouragement to stand up for that belief. (It's a pity that there were no North East MPs among the speakers - had they been invited and refused, I wonder?) And as for the electorate as a whole, we should raise the morale of despondent Remainers while continuing to challenge those who voted to leave. In other words, the debate is far from concluded. It's more urgent than ever. We need to keep it alive.

It wasn't lost on me that we were gathered at the foot of  a monument that celebrates the great Charles Earl Grey. His fame rests, not on the scented tea named after him but his achievement as a courageous, pioneering, forward-looking politician. He was Prime Minister from 1830 to 1834, and it was under his government that slavery was finally abolished in the British Empire. More than that, he was the principal advocate of the Great Reform Act of 1832 that did so much to ensure the proper representation of the people in Parliament. His memory as a champion of democracy is treasured in his native North East. It's dangerous to claim the great men and women of the past as supporters of present-day causes, but I couldn't help thinking that he would have approved of our act of witness by his monument.

But the name of Grey sounds a warning note too. Someone responded to one of my tweets by pointing out that it was Earl Grey's descendant Sir Edward Grey who famously said in 1914, on the eve of the Great War, that the lights were "going out all over Europe". A few yards away from the monument, a small but noisy group of counter-protesters, some wearing Trump masks, were displaying a large banner that read: "Refugees Not Welcome. We Are Full". A sign that the lights could well go out across Europe if we are not vigilant for democracy, decency and peace-making, for justice, inclusion and equality, all the values that the European vision at its noblest represents. At a time when we do not know what will become of the West in the era of an unpredictable US president, and when Alt-Right movements are springing up across our own continent, we would be wise to be vigilant. And keep our European alliances in good repair.

The Joy of Pacers: Our Trains in the North

I am sitting in Costa on Newcastle Central Station, looking out at the noble curve of John Dobson's great train shed. It is lost in the darkness but all who know this station will agree that it's a glorious achievement of nineteenth century industrial architecture.  

But it is a filthy night. The tail end of Storm Angus has alighted over North East England. A fierce rain borne on a north east wind is driving across the exposed platform in the distance. Even on the concourse a light drizzle drifts down from a not-quite-weatherproof canopy. There is a bitter cold that I can feel on the glass that contains this capsule of a cafe. The brightly lit interiors of Virgin East Coast trains passing through suggest warmth and comfort, or maybe that's just the effect of their brilliant red livery. 

I love railway stations, but there's something forlorn about them at this time of night. I've been to Leeds to see my children and grandchildren. We've had an enjoyable day. But the return train journey has not been the most pleasant of experiences. Everything at Leeds seems to be running late. It may have been owing to the poor weather. Well, there's no point in railing against the elements. Stuff happens. I am going to miss my Newcastle connection, I realise with a sigh. And that means a nearly two hour wait for the next train up the Tyne Valley to home. It's the last train of the day. No room for mistakes then.

But as so often, my late running TransPennine Express is made up of a three-car diesel multiple unit. It's rush hour. Hoards of commuters travel this east-west route that connects Liverpool and Manchester with Leeds, York and Newcastle. So it's standing room only. I'm told this is normal. The cheerful Scouse voice of TPE apologises for the delay, but warns that because we are following a stopping train, we can expect to be even later into York. I think wistfully of the Carlisle train at Newcastle that I won't get to catch. Then our conductor says pleasantly with a touch of regret, "Fingers crossed, after York there shouldn't be any more problems." On the whole they are nice people, train conductors. They are doing their best and hate it when things go wrong.

I like that "fingers crossed" because it feels honest. It seems to sum up how, once you get off the main lines, the North of England's railways seem to be run. It is ridiculous that services connecting the major cities of the North are served by such tiny trains. Investment in new rolling stock to increase capacity is an urgent priority, to say nothing about the need for the lines themselves to be upgraded to take high(er) speed trains. We are promised that TPE has already committed to launching longer trains and that is welcome. But how long, O Lord, how long? Will we ever see our northern east-west rails electrified? Or will HS2 see off any further investment in the North?

As another example, take the Tyne Valley line that I live on. (I mean this almost literally as our home is within sight of the level crossing a full 50 yards from the station - a bit further if you are crossing the line to the up platform.) The Newcastle and Carlisle is the oldest east-west route in England, running for its entire length parallel to Hadrian's Wall a few miles to the north. It's an important artery that not only connects the East Coast Main Line with the West, but gives tourist access to the Wall, the Northumberland National Park and the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The operator is Northern Railways, a new Arriva franchise. 

On this line run two species of train, both two-car diesel units: Sprinters and Pacers. These, too, rapidly fill up with commuters, schoolchildren, tourists and shoppers by the score getting on and off at the stop for the Metro Centre. It's good to see how well this line is used. Like cinemas, trains have surprised us in the past few decades. When it was once confidently predicted that both risked becoming obsolete, they have seen a remarkable and welcome revival of fortunes.

Let me say something about Sprinters and Pacers. Sprinters are respectable trains, pleasant enough to travel on even if they are showing their age (up to 30 years old). Pacers are quite another matter. If you live in London or the south of England, you may never have heard of them, though you may have seen a recent Panorama programme that mercilessly exposed these ageing four-wheelers that lurch and squeal their way across our northern rails. They are unaffectionately known as "Nodding Donkeys" by longsuffering passengers. They are not real trains at all, but buses fitted with flanged wheels, made in their hundreds on the cheap in British Rail days in the 1980s. BR tried very hard to export them. Only the Iranians were interested, and theirs, once used on local services around Tehran until 2005, now lie rusting and abandoned in the middle of some desert - a very proper place for Pacers. (The wrecked hulk of Shelley's Ozymandias comes to mind: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!") I can confidently say that southern commuters would not tolerate these trains for an instant. The Panorama presenter believed that if anything symbolised the North-south divide, it was the unloved Pacers we are forced to ride up here. That's a telling comment. They are a disgrace to a modern railway.

When George Osborne was in office, he spoke with some warmth about creating a "Northern Powerhouse". Central to the development of the North was, he rightly said, vastly improving its infrastructure and transport links, especially its railways. That aspiration remains on the table, notionally at least, of government thinking. Our leaders in politics, industry and commerce in the North have been banging this drum for all the years I have lived and worked in this part of England. There's not been much progress. But until there is the will to get something done, we shall be living with indifferent rail services for many years to come. The train operating companies are only free to invest in new rolling stock on the Government's say-so. Keeping our fingers crossed will be a good policy. And saying our prayers.

We should all remember where the railways were born. Here in the pioneering land of the Stephensons where the industrial revolution would make the North East the most productive and prosperous region in the kingdom, we shall be celebrating the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 2025. What state will our northern rails will be in by then? Will the Northern Powerhouse have begun to be a reality?

I must soon cross the tracks to platform 7 where my Pacer will, fingers crossed, convey me up the Tyne Valley and home. Note on surviving Pacer travel: never, ever, sit above the wheels. Not only will it be a rough ride, but you will experience fierce freezing updraughts and downdraughts from poorly fitting doors. Aim for the middle of the bus and lose yourself in nice music through the earphones (if you can hear it above the ambient roar). And think longingly of your nice warm bed. We need eschatology and hope to keep us going at times.

********

PS Things looked up on platform 7. To my surprise, the last train up the Tyne Valley wasn't a Pacer but a Sprinter, bedecked with imagery that suggested it had strayed from its usual tracks on the Settle and Carlisle line. So the railway had the last laugh after all.