...and, specifically, his plan for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Read here for an update. Last night another fund-raiser, this time in Croydon where the vicar and a good number of parishioners from St Michael's Church are Ordinariate-bound. The church is a magnificent great red-brick mountain of Victoriana in the otherwise quite ghastly tower-block-and-concrete ugliness of Croydon. I don't know what will happen to the building in the long term: the area is very Islamic now.
We had a wonderful evening, and it was lateish as I went to catch the tram home. Croydon draws in people from all the neighbouring suburbs for Saturday nights. Girls were tottering out of the clubs on the six-inch high platform shoes that are currently a fashion obligation, along with very tiny shorts, tights, and lots of bling. They find it hard to walk - the shoes are like the pattens worn long ago by people who had to work near muddy rivers, but they don't work well on smooth sloping pavements and amid busy traffic. The girls shriek and cling on to one another, cursing and swearing with sexual expletives - their vocabulary is rather limited - trying to sort out arrangements about buses or taxi-rides home while staying upright and talking on mobile phones.
The trams leave from Reeves Corner - a confusing area at present because it was all destroyed in the summer's riots and is still being rebuilt. There is a Baptist chapel nearby with the date, 1861, nobly carved into its stone frontage - I wonder what its founders would have made of modern Croydon? There's still a whole biggish section of the Reeves shop which is thriving. A tram was waiting nearby and it was warm inside and I settled with book, the funds raised from the Ordinariate evening safely tucked somewhere way down inside my backback.
There is talk of London hosting World Youth Day - looking ahead to beyond 2013. Let's do it. We need it.
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