A Pilgrimage to Basildon

My day began early, writing a fundraising letter for a church in a nearby village. It is a Grade I listed building, nearly a thousand years old, but has more or less been abandoned by the village it once served. A few friends and I are trying to keep it going.

I am still very involved with my own church. The previous day I had read a tremendous passage from St Paul to a packed congregation at the farewell service for a much-loved vicar. My acting training is useful on such occasions, particularly with St Paul's Epistle to the Romans. The passage tells us that we do not need to follow the law, or ascend into heaven in search of Christ. We need only look into our own hearts.

After lunch I went to the produce show in the neighbouring village, where I am acting churchwarden. As I still don't know many people there, I had entered my prize squash, weighing an impressive three kilograms. When I delivered it earlier in the day it had attracted general admiration. In the judging, however, it managed only second prize.

The village is a wonderfully close-knit agricultural community, though sadly not very interested in its beautiful little church. I sat quietly in a corner with a very good piece of cake while life teemed around me. Then home, to endless watering.

Apart from my dear wife's lovely, quiet sense of humour, and her more or less unruffled acceptance of my multifarious activities, one of my greatest solaces is walking down our densely wooded lane. It is probably more than a thousand years old and runs beside the manor park, shaded by some magnificent trees.

Another refuge, particularly during sleepless nights, is reciting French and Italian poetry.

Last night it was Le Manchy by Leconte de Lisle, a Romantic account of a beautiful young woman on the tropical island of Réunion, then a French colony in the Indian Ocean. Strangely enough, my brother went there for his honeymoon.

The manchy is a sedan chair in which the young woman is carried down from the mountains to Mass on a Sunday morning. The sights and sounds of a tropical paradise are exquisitely described in a wonderful lilting metre, which seems to evoke the rocking of the chair as it is carried:

au pas rythmé de ses Hindous.

The regular metre and rhyme, sustained over 44 lines, are also a great help when trying to remember missing words and phrases.

It is a poem very much of its period, presenting an idealised colonial world: old Creoles smoke their pipes on verandas, Africans sing Madagascan songs, and the elegant Hindu bearers carry the manchy through groves of lychees,

au fruit moins pourpré que ta bouche.

But the poem ends in death. We discover that the beautiful young woman now lies

sous les chiendents, au bruit des mers

among the beloved dead.

Perhaps thoughts of age, memory and loss were already accompanying me when, later that day, I set out on my own rather different journey.

After travelling to London by train, I walked across the City to catch another train into Essex. The contrast was extraordinary. I passed immense new buildings, sculpted, gleaming and powerful, and every so often a lovely little church, still surrounded by its graveyard. These seemed like oases of calm and beauty amid all that thrusting dynamism and energy.

After the teeming streets of London, the Essex train was almost empty. We sailed peacefully across wide, fertile plains, still with plenty of trees, and eventually arrived in Basildon, a modern town of broad roads and low buildings.

I had arranged to meet Tim, an old friend from university days. Together we were going to visit another old friend, John, who had fallen on hard times.

Tim had been a communist at Cambridge and, in his youth, was said to resemble Michelangelo's young Bacchus. He studied Arabic and spent much of his life in the Middle East. He has since converted to Islam, so we needed to find somewhere halal for lunch.

This proved remarkably easy. Google directed us to Market Square, which turned out to be a vast, immaculate, enclosed shopping centre. Not a leaf or blade of grass was visible, nor even a glimpse of the sky. Upstairs, among the restaurants, we chose an Indonesian one. The handsome young waiter seemed rather surprised by our question but assured us, with a pleasant smile, that everything was halal.

We had been asked not to arrive at John's flat before two by his Ghanaian partner, Robert, who has been with him for forty years and is now his carer.

John was a brilliant philosopher in his youth. He published his thesis, written under A. J. Ayer, the celebrated Oxford philosopher, under the title In Touch with the Real World. This was always something of a joke among his friends, since John was spectacularly not in touch with ordinary life.

He had a wonderfully clear, kind and precise voice.

"Now, now, why exactly did you say that?" I can still hear him asking.

Once, many years ago, he was stopped by the police while driving. They had noticed that his progress was rather... unusual. After twenty minutes of questioning John, and being rigorously questioned back by him, they apparently leapt into their car and drove away as fast as they could.

John has been unwell for some time and ran out of money long ago. When we arrived, he was asleep in bed.

"He stays awake all night and sleeps all day," Robert told us.

John recognised Tim, who had been at school with him.

"Oh! I thought you had died," he said in that lovely voice, which was still exactly the same.

Sadly, he could neither hear nor see very well and soon drifted back to sleep. We sat with him for an hour or so. Occasionally he would wake and say our names, though unfortunately he confused me with another Andrew.

Robert joined us for a while and told us of his struggles with bureaucracy. Three times he had been refused a carer's allowance. Each time he appealed and won, yet still they refused to pay him. Eventually, he told us, a judge said he was ashamed to be British because of the way Robert had been treated.

Now, at last, the state seems to be taking care of them. Thank goodness.

While dear John slept in front of us, Tim and I filled the time reminiscing happily about travels in the Himalayas and the Middle East. There was something both sad and comforting about it: three old friends together again, although one of us now hovered only intermittently in the conversation.

By the time I returned to London I had missed my off-peak train, so I spent a happy hour in the Courtauld Gallery, my favourite place in London.

The collection, formed by Samuel Courtauld, is comparatively small but extraordinarily rich. He had a wonderful eye and collected the Impressionists very early. There are famous images everywhere.

I find myself rather tired of the Impressionists these days, though I stopped at a lovely Normandy scene by Monet, showing a church perched on a cliff above the sea. After a mistily beautiful Lorraine, I made my way to my favourite part of the gallery: the early Florentine rooms.

Such beauty, simplicity and holiness.

It seemed a fitting end to the day. I had begun with an ancient church, travelled through poetry and memory, crossed a city where old churches stand beneath towers of glass, and gone to Basildon to sit beside a sleeping friend.

And finally I found myself among those quiet Florentine paintings, where faith and mortality, sorrow and beauty seem to exist quite naturally together.