Well, Saturday was my first night in my new room. It's unfurnished, so it was just a sleeping bag on a housemate's extra mattress on the floor, in the striped light from the ratty rattan blinds of my predecessor. Imagine my surprise next morning on peering out of the sleeping bag and seeing a church! I knew St. Jude's Anglican was across the street, but never expected it would try to lodge itself in my window. (No worries, I'm getting Venetian blinds today.) "For heavens sake don't go there!" said the folks at St. Peter's Eastern Hill, the Anglo-Catholic church I've been attending, when I told them. I gather St. Jude's is closer in approach to what the vicar of St. Peter's calls "darkest Sydney," the stridently evangelical part of the Anglican Church of Australia.Finding a church (and one called Jude!) looking in my window took me back to 1986-87, the last time I shared a house with someone. That was in Jericho, a working class part of Oxford, and it was my last year of college, and out the window of my second-storey room was the dirty brick wall of St. Barnabas Church. (You can see the edge of the house I lived in on the left in the watercolor at www.sbarnabas.org.uk, the red brick one, though the facade was painted.) St. Barnabas is a leading Anglo-Catholic parish but I didn't know what Anglo-Catholic meant at the time; I didn't even know what the Oxford Movement was! I think I looked into St. Barnabas once, and thought it looked neo-Byzantine. I kept clear not just because I was (Roman) Catholic, but also because I knew that St. Barnabas was where the grim final scenes of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure took place.
My experience of St. Barnabas was confined to the brick wall out my window, with a cross in the tan colored brick, and the gappy melody of its automatic carillon - gappy because pigeons roosted in the belfry, and must occasionally have got stuck in one or other of the bells. You'd hear not the ecdg...gdec familar from Big Ben (and Japanese schools) but, say, e..dg...gde.. or ec..g...g..ec!
