The Church is for everyone, so I’ve even blessed tadpoles

I was in Suffolk last Sunday and caught the end of one of the more distinctive Church of England liturgies. It was a pet blessing at Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, “the Cathedral of the Marshes”, a magnificently plain and spacious and light-filled parish church between the River Blyth and the A12. I say plain — its decoration was mostly destroyed by the dreadful Puritan “Smasher” Dowsing in the 1640s, but its roof was too high for him to ground the wonderful carved angels, which he particularly disliked. They soar above us today, and I like to think of them singing “Gloria in excelsis” over his wreckers just to annoy them.
On Sunday they were not the only feathered creatures, for there was squawking as well as barking and miaowing from the animals inside, and neighing from the churchyard too. Some find this sort of thing preposterous, others nauseating — Smasher Dowsing would probably have declared it idolatrous and shooed everyone away.
I have blessed a few animals in my time — everything from tadpoles to a shire horse — not to stoke controversy but because I like the idea of the parish church opening for the community it serves. I think our job is not to set a standard of orthodox belief that must be met before people may participate, but to invite them to step over the threshold and to share in a common life that is radiant with light, buoyant with hope and abounding in grace. In the Church of England now we seem to be more about closing doors than opening them, as if it were up to us to decide who gets invited and who does not.
I am fascinated by Raygun. I missed most of the Olympics while at a Ring cycle, quite enough exertion for me, so only got what was happening on social media after I came home. This was either ribald comment about the pole vaulter left to regret an attribute normally prized, which soon staled, or Raygun, who is much more interesting.
I was mesmerised by her routine, though I can see why someone trained in the conventions of breakdance who did not make the squad might think differently. Was it an attempt to do in her event what Torvill and Dean did with their Boléro at Sarajevo? Was it satire? Postmodernism? An awful mistake?
In a lamentable lapse of team spirit I confess I want it to be satire, as a corrective to the relentless whooping and chest-beating and podium-ing of the Olympics. And after a Ring cycle, the gleeful heaping of gold on gold raises questions.
After I got home from Blythburgh I went to play the piano and got a nasty surprise. I have recently become obsessed with the music of Federico Mompou, a shy Catalan who gave no concerts, wrote almost exclusively for the piano and died in the 1980s.
His music relies on the resonance of the modern instrument, with pedalled chords lasting far longer than they really should, taking us into new harmonic territory but also exposing any deficiencies in tuning. I have enough deficiencies in my playing to tolerate that, and when I played a G minor chord, it was so seriously out that I thought I had misread the score. I played on, but it was not only G minor that made me wince, and when I looked at the hygrometer it showed unusually high humidity.
Pianos hate this — it affects the wood that produces the resonance — so I called the technician. He had been all over his patch trying to fix pianos going wildly out for the same reason. The solution is a dehumidifier, which is now purring away next to the piano, looking as out of place as a defibrillator next to the Great Bed of Ware. My G minor now sounds more like G minor and — unexpected benefit — my blind and deaf dog loves curling up to sleep in its balmy draught.
I remember going to a flamenco show at Sadler’s Wells with a Spanish friend and being most impressed not by the music and dancing, which was wonderful, but by his unselfconscious shouts of “Olé!” at moments of high intensity. It made me feel very buttoned up and British, a product of a culture second only to Japan’s in the measuredness of its enthusiasms.
This is changing now, not only in sport and popular culture but also in me. I won’t shout “Olé” at flamenco, but I do shout “Bravo!” at the opera, not the reedy bravo of Continental audiences but a Millwall bellow, emphasis on the second syllable. Try it.