Being a fifth Sunday it was the Group Service this week, and it was the turn of Rothwell. In theory this is the service people from all the parishes in the group attend; in practice it isn't. On the way Joe and I were making a list of who would and wouldn't be there - we are pretty cynical about this and were very nearly right: one couple from Swallow we thought was still on holiday had returned, and another couple from Nettleton was either away or having a Methodist week (he is both a Methodist Lay Preacher and an Anglican Church Warden - she's an Anglican).
What is perennially true is that people from the smaller villages (which we call the three Cs as they all begin with the same letter) make no attempt to be part of the group: they attend their monthly services (BCP) in their own little churches and don't for the most part even go to Christmas and Easter services outside their own parishes - this includes the Group Lay Chairman who likes telling other people that we should be more of a group and pull together better. (By the way, in this group of parishes small village = less than 100 people, large village = more than 100 people. 7 villages add up to just under 1,000 people.)
After church somebody mentioned that the Sir Joseph Nickerson Memorial Art Gallery was having one of its occasional openings in the afternoon, so I went back after lunch to have a look expecting to see a small collection of twentieth century art.
No, whoever it was said 'Art' to me was misinformed: this was a collection of photographs of Sir Joe, his family, his employees, the famous people he met, and the animals and birds he had shot. Sir Joseph, in case you want to know, was a local land-owner whose Cherry Valley ducks have cornered the market the same way that Bernard Matthews' turkeys have; his agricultural research and innovations are of major importance, and he hit the news in 1984 when Willie Whitelaw tripped while holding a loaded gun and peppered Sir Joseph in the backside.
This was not at all what I was expecting. My interest in shooting is rather less than nothing, in agriculture I care that a balance of efficient farming and healthy wildlife is maintained, and as for the cult of celebrity . . . well we all have pictures of the time we met (or almost met) a member of the royal family, tales of how we sat next to someone famous on the number 7 bus in 1973, and a couple of names we can drop with a resounding clang; all these may be of very minor interest to our friends and family the first and even the second time of telling, but paying £2.50 to see somebody's collection of snaps is, in my considered opinion, daylight robbery!
By the way, there was a very, very small collection of modern art - some watercolours by Sir Joe's mother which were in a style so naive and crudely drawn that they appeared to be the work of a young child, and some fairly run of the mill oil portraits.
