I'd had this idea before, but thought it might be in poor taste. But maybe it's slightly more appropriate now.
The great Victorian love of installing pitch pine pews - uncomfortable to keep you awake, fixed to the ground to keep you facing forward - has been in retreat for many years now. Old chapels and inner-city have closed, and some churches have received faculties, and replaced pews with trendy chairs. And they tend to get sold off.
We've never paid much attention to pews here at the Beaker Folk before. After all, they're not really our style. We like to sit people round in a circle so they have to make eye contact whether they like it or not. And some of our more meditative events can merge into a doze quite easily. So we went for bean bags.
And in any case, the pews went to the pubs. There was nothing that could give a pub a dose of instant authenticity quite so much as a few pitch pine pews. So there was a lovely ready market in our other remaining local institution from the Middle Ages - at least until the Black Death comes back.
But now it's not the churches closing, it's the pubs. 40 or 50 a week. Losing people who presumably argue to themselves that they are drinkers, but they don't see why they have to drink in a pub. I blame the smoking ban myself, others blame the supermarkets, and we all blame Drayton Parslow. He's particularly smug, thinking that a decline in public drinking in this country proves that we are steadily becoming a nation of teetotallers.
But now my guilt has been removed. Suddenly the pews are ex-pub rather than ex-church. And there's pine tables and all sorts to go with them. So I've decided: what with them being effectively endless in supply, cheap and short-term carbon. I'm installing a pew-burning stove.
Health and safety notice: varnished pews may give off carcinogens when burnt in a domestic heating apparatus, and leave your flue in a right old state. We do these things so you don't have to.
Archdruid,
ReplyDeleteI regret the passing of pews. I find that laying full length on them, preferably with a couple of kneelers for pillows is conducive to concentrate while resting your eys during sermons.
At other times, they are good for hurdling competitions from front to back, with the slower racers using those in the shorter side aisles to give them a chance.
Pews fill the space and stop it being used for inconvenient stuff such as community use, setting up shops, kindergartens and even dancing. The remind us of the continuity of the church since the victorian reformers introduced them and who are we to gainsay their earnest endevours to retain a puritanical strain within the church.
Also, they are ideal for small boys with their pen knives to be distracted during services keeping them quiet, while carving their names into the wood as their forefathers did before them.
Having taken the pledge, I do not often frequent public places of ill-repute as these dens of debauchery place sin to readily before me, so I have not had the experience of seeing them filled with redundant pews. But I do note with some horror that the church is shortly to ordain someone who currently operates one of these establishments in Kent. What is the church coming to?
Pitch pine is not easy to burn (every time I try to burn a church down, I have trouble with the pews).
ReplyDeleteHow about using old Advent or Easter candles and some Baptismal/Confirmation oil to get it started.
Then you could have sleeping bags for really long sermons.
I'm so full of good ideas.