sydenham life 10 oct19

Sydenham Life 1 October 2019

The Uncertainty Principle

A travel brochure with next year’s holidays clattered through our letterbox. ‘Travel with certainty’ was emblazoned on its cover. Yet the same day a national newspaper featured a problem page with the most frequent uncertainties that had been experienced by this year’s travellers. Diffi culties over fl ight delays and cancellations, expensive add-ons by car rental companies, accommodation falling short of the pictures in the brochure, travel insurance not paying out and buck-passing by travel agents when trips go wrong were the most frequent worries. Perhaps Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, had a point when he wrote, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”.

“If only I could be certain…” is a phrase we frequently use when faced with a range of options about what to do next. Uncertainty can lead to indecision, worry and mental paralysis. We don’t function at our best when different possible courses of action are nagging

away in our brain. When we do decide, the relief can be palpable. But doubt can often follow, “Have I really done the right thing...?” Often, we will never know because it’s diffi cult to compare the result of an action we do take with the outcome of a different one we might have followed. This seems to strike a chord with the researches of the German physicist Werner Heisenberg who in 1927 developed his uncertainty principle. This apparently states in the world of quantum physics that both the position and velocity of an object cannot be measured with precision at the same time. The more that is known of one, the less is known of the other, and uncertainty is inherent in the nature of things.

Uncertainty envelops us as individuals and has always been part of our national life. Think of the times our country has either been invaded or threatened with invasion. In historical times, there were the Romans in BC 55 & 54 and AD 43, the Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Vikings in the 9th and 10th centuries and the Normans in 1066. There was a threatened invasion from the Spanish in 1588, invasion by the Dutch in 1688, threatened invasions by the French in the 19th and the Nazis in the 20th centuries. There was the Black Death that halved the population in 1348/49, and the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 when nuclear war looked imminent.

Now we have 31st October. On that day the UK might say farewell to the EU, but St Bartholomew’s will say hello to its new vicar, the Reverend Jim Perry. We will welcome him and his family. But how will the parish react to the changes this will bring? How will Jim and his family settle in a different church and a new life in Sydenham?

Sydenham LifeOctober 2019In and around the parish of St Bartholomewwww.stbartschurchsydenham.org

Comment p.3From the EditorThe Camino – pilgrimage or diversion? p.4by Nigel RalphWelcome, Jim Perry p.5by Pete M WyerThe Irish Backstop:a personal perspective p.6by David RobertsMemories of Autumn and Harvest Time p.7by Lilian Johnson

continued on Page 3

Robert Louis Stevensonby John Stringer Sargent (1887)

Sydenham Life_10_Oct19.indd 1 18/09/2019 21:49


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On my way to Forest Hill Pools in Dartmouth Road, I pass Sydenham Girls School. The first thing you notice about the school from the outside is how well maintained the premises are. There are two main buildings from the Dartmouth Road aspect; one is the old original building and rest has been built recently.

During term time regardless of the weather a teacher greets the students. It does not matter whether it is cold or grey and damp. One day I told a teacher on duty that I thought it was a great idea that she was there to meet the students in this way. She said that it was one of her favourite parts of the day. I think the students must feel welcomed and valued by such a policy.

In addition, I think that the teachers get to know a wide spectrum of students who might not appear in their classes. Possibly, if a child looked unhappy for a period, action could be taken to see if something was wrong. I think that it shows a care for the welfare of the students and It is a great way to start the day’s work.

One thing I notice is that the pupils often stand around in little groups, but rather than chatting with one another they are almost always looking at their smart phones. I do not know if this continues inside the school, but I hope not. We all learn from each other by interaction and talking.

The school would appear to have consistently good ratings from Ofsted. Wikipedia notes that they have some famous alumni who have contributed to the arts, science and sport. According to Wikipedia the actress, singer and musician probably best known to her friends as Katie Burke was a pupil there. In the school’s previous incarnation as Sydenham County Grammar School for girls there was Elsie Widdowson who contributed to ground-breaking research in nutrition in wartime and nutrition with infant formula.

I am sure that there must be more recent examples and I invite any of our readers to write in.

Geoffrey Cave, Sydenham Life Editor.

From the Editor

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in 1789 that in this world nothing could be said to be certain except death and taxes. Jesus had something to say about both. In the first century AD his country was occupied by the Romans just as England was. When his enemies tried to trap him they asked him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the Roman emperor, Caesar. If he said ‘yes’, his Jewish compatriots would view him as a traitor; and if he said ‘no’ he could be denounced to the Romans as a rebel. He asked for a coin and enquired whose head was on it. When told ‘Caesar’s’ he commented, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” He was also certain about death, “Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”

Stuart Forbes

continued from Page 1

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The Camino – pilgrimage or diversion?

Earlier in the year I wrote about pilgrimages, and more specifically the Camino or path to Santiago in North West Spain. I had intended to follow this up with a little more detail for those who might be tempted to pack their bags. The great thing about pilgrimages is that they help you to connect with the country, the people, the physical (your own body) and the spiritual which takes you beyond the physical. While the goal remains constant and unwavering, they may lead you in different directions to unexpected discoveries.

So last May I was inexorably drawn back to the Camino in Spain, not on foot, but on a bicycle. This time we were covering part of the Camino Frances between Logrono and Burgos. There is still over 500 kilometres of path to cover before you get to Santiago! The track takes you right through the heart of one of the most renowned wine growing regions of Spain and Europe - the Rioja. If you look at the map, the Camino follows the course of the river Ebro heading upstream, as this great river meanders through the red alluvial soils typical of the region. Although the river is heavily dammed further upstream, there is still plenty of water flowing to irrigate the vines and other root crops growing in the broad alley. Before visiting this part of Spain, I had visions of the vast dry plains of the Meseta. But in fact here the country is quite undulating, and many of the towns and villages are strategically placed right on top of the hills. And if you venture further afield, there are some imposing mountain ranges that flank each side of the great Ebro valley. Our cycle route took us away from the main Camino, towards the Sierra de la Demanda, on the Ebro Camino. It is here where the river Oja (Rio Oja) finds its source. Even at this time of year there was still plenty of snow at 2000

metres. Nestled in the foothills are the two monasteries of Yuso and Suso (above and below). Suso was operating as early as the 6th Century well before Spain claimed its own identity as a country. The lower one is still run by a small number of Augustinian monks and the upper older monastery is unoccupied but open for visits. The monasteries have an important historical significance for it is here that the first written words of Castillian or Spanish were recorded in the 11th Century by a monk as he ‘glossed’ or annotated the Latin text of the bible. So it took the best part of a thousand years for Latin to morph into the Spanish language that is recognisable today. It’s a popular place for the Spanish visitors, and there was literally no room in the inn or monastery which serves as a hotel. Our own accommodation was another kilometre up the valley. With no sign of a bar or place to eat, we hitched a lift down the valley to a camping site which served up some welcome platos combinados (fried egg, chips and sausage), a pleasing alternative to the ubiquitous tapas. Although the campsite was far from luxurious we were told that the queen of Spain loves to eat there when in town (there is literally nowhere else to go).

I forgot to mention that the weather on the way up the mountain had been unseasonably cold and wet. The next morning the sun came out to light up a beautiful valley, with snow peaks glistening in the distance and the cuckoo calling in the woods. An idyllic mountain scene. From here it was back downhill all the way to Santo Domingo de la Calzada. This is an iconic stop on the Camino, and it is no surprise it is named after the Camino (Calzada is another word for Camino). Santo Domingo has a magnificent cathedral and a separate impressive bell tower which can be seen for miles around. The city is packed with 16th and

17th century private palaces some of which serve as lodgings for the weary pilgrims. The best placed is the ancient pilgrim’s inn next to the cathedral which has been converted into an upmarket hotel or parador (for upmarket pilgrims). It was a Sunday morning but strangely the only religious ceremony in sight was a group of ‘locals’ dressed in colourful feathers of an Inca style dancing and singing to pre Colombian drums and windpipes and heavily scented smoke. What would Saint James make of that? It was enough to send us on our way with an extra push in our pedals.

Off we headed across the flat river valley sown with barley, rapeseed, and beans (not a vine in site) and the occasional piggery, heading towards the Cantabrian mountain range which stretched all the way from Asturias. We stopped in a small bar for lunch (more tapas) a rather dimly lit place with 19th century sepia photographs of nudes, mostly ignored by the young families occupying the A space ship has just landed in the vineyard



tables. From here it was a short hike to Haro where we were lodged in a former Augustinian convent. Since its foundation it had been a prison, a barracks and you could still make out the bullet marks from the Carlist war in the mid 19th century. This was our base for the next couple of days as we explored a number of medieval hilltop villages in the vicinity.

The big draw are the numerous bodegas, some of which have developed elaborate visitor centres. One of the more prestigious is the Marques de Riscal, where the head office has been transformed into a five star hotel, designed by Frank Gehry (he who had designed the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao). An extraordinary kaleidoscope of burnished copper, gleaming titanium and glass, looking more like a space ship that had just landed in the middle of a vineyard. The tour of the winery was cheaper than staying the night, and we certainly felt a lot better after tasting a glass of oak casked Reserva Rioja from this cathedral of the wine industry.

Our next stop took us past the impressive hilltop San Vicente with its Roman bridge crossing the Ebro and onto La Guardia, a pretty medieval city with more impressive views after a strength sapping uphill climb even with some battery assisted power from our (highly recommended ) electric bikes. The town is famous for a warren of underground tunnels some of which are used for storage of vintage wines and others have been converted into bars where you can taste the local produce.

Admittedly this was not a pilgrimage in the purest sense of the word. There was no wine industry here when the medieval pilgrims trekked towards Santiago and certainly no five star hotels or vast acres of neatly planted vineyards. There are however plenty of churches and several monasteries that are not directly sited on the Camino. So if you do set out on the road to the destination of your spiritual dreams, don’t ignore the treasures that are waiting to be explored and tempting you along the way.

Nigel Ralph

Welcome, Jim Perry

Dear Jim,

I’m not a part of the church but anything the reminds us that we’re part of a community and to be kind to one another is fine by me. So, even though I’m not a part of things I wanted to extend a welcome from someone in the community.

Cats, metal, Strangers Things, we evidently have good times ahead!

Best wishes for the position

Pete M Wyer

PS. As you’re a music person, here’s a little project we did some years back. It wasn’t part of the church but St. Bart’s school participated and we managed to get a fair number of the community to turn up (though if you play it to Tiyane who was 9 when she wrote it and is now 16 you get very dirty looks):

Oh Santa, I Just Wanna See Ya (2015): Christmas song written and by Tiyane and Kaydian, originally written in 2012, featuring members of Crystal Palace and Sydenham community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB_JV5B1Xc4

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The Irish Backstop: a personal perspective

This article was written in August, just after Boris Johnson wrote to Mr Tusk, the chairman of the European Council asking for the provisions on the” Irish Backstop” to be deleted from the agreement on the terms of the UK exit from the EU. By the time the article is published, it will probably be known whether Mr Johnson’s energetic diplomacy to follow up that letter has succeeded, so I won’t speculate on the outcome. What I will do is dig into a few memories of incidents in my career that illustrate horrors of “the troubles” in Ireland and the links between the introduction of the EU Single Market in 1993 and the Good Friday Agreement that brought the troubles to an end. These memories may help to illustrate the reasons why the Republic of Ireland and the EU as a whole has been so resistant to dropping this part of the Brexit Agreement.

Memory one. I am accompanying the Minister of Agriculture on a visit to Northern Ireland in 1976. The troubles are at their height, so the army provides security. We use a helicopter to make a series of visits to farms and then take cars into Dublin for a meeting at Stormont. For some reason I travel in the security car, not the one that takes the Minister, so I have a ringside, and rather frightening, seat on the ways in which it tries to check for possible ambushes or assassination attempts. But what strikes me most of all is the surreal contrast between the way we seem at one moment to be driving through a typical British city, with houses that could be in Leeds or Manchester, red pillar boxes and Morris Minors being driven peacefully along the roads and the next we are passing guard posts made of sandbags at junctions and, here and there, streets barricaded with corrugated iron, reminiscent of TV pictures of a war torn area in the Middle East.

Memory two. It is now 1977 and I am the head of the EEC Divisions of the Ministry of Agriculture where one of the subjects I cover is the “agrimonetary system”. This had come into being in 1972 when the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates which existed when the Common Agricultural Policy was set up finally broke down and a means had to be found of reconciling common and stable support prices with fluctuating exchange rates. It worked by having special exchange rates for converting common prices with “MCAs (levies or subsidies) on the imports and exports of member countries whose real exchange rates diverged from their agricultural (or “green”) exchange states. Because of the weakness of sterling, this system required levies on UK exports of agricultural products and subsidies on imports. It was reported that there was a racket in Ireland involving cattle being smuggled across the border, thereby avoiding the MCA levies and then returning “legally” and obtaining the MCA subsidy. At the time there was a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland with customs posts on roads across the border. These had become symbols of the division of Ireland and were therefore subject to attack by the IRA. But

cattle could simply be walked across the border on open fields and therefore did not need to move along roads to customs posts. There were also suggestions that the IRA, who were strong in the border area, effectively controlled and benefitted from the profits of this scam. I came to the conclusion that the only solution was to exclude live cattle from the MCA system. I found that my colleagues in London and in Northern Ireland had privately also come to this conclusion but had not proposed it because they thought that the Commission would never accept it but I knew the responsible Commission official to be a model international civil servant, always ready to listen courteously even to outlandish ideas and to consider them on their merits, so I went to see him and, once I had explained the problem, he was quickly convinced that this solution should be adopted. Once convinced, he obtained authority to propose the necessary regulation to member states, who accepted it. Of course, this didn’t solve all the problems of smuggling but it did deal with its most flagrant manifestation.

Memory three. It is now 1979 and I have been loaned to HM Treasury, where I have an office looking out over the end of Whitehall, next to Parliament Square. One day my windows are shaken by a violent explosion, which I subsequently learn was a car bomb that had killed the Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and world war II hero, Airey Neave. I cannot help wondering whether part of the finance for that fatal bomb had come from MCA scams, like the one on live cattle.

Memory four. It is 1990 and I have become a European Commission official and am responsible for the common agricultural price support system. The Commission’s number one priority is the legislative programme which should be adopted by the end of 1992, so that the Single Market could come into being in 1993. The leader of the initiative is the British Commissioner, Lord Cockfield. His mandate is to eliminate border controls on goods within the European Community. The Community already had a Customs Union, so there were no tariffs on intra Community trade but there were still border controls to check that when a good was exported from one member state to another it met the product standards of the importing country, to apply animal and plant health controls and, of course, the famous MCAs. From the foundation of the Community, there had been effort to harmonise standards but progress was painfully slow, in part because there was always a political cost when member states had to change an individual standard but, on its own, harmonising one standard did not achieve the object of freeing up trade. Lord Cockfield produced a report that detailed all essential standards that would have to be harmonised and all other policies that would have to be changed to produce the situation that anything that could be legally placed on the market in any member state, whether produced within the EU or imported from third counters, could legally be sold in any other member state,



Memories of Autumn and Harvest Time

Autumn is my favourite season. Everything comes to fruition – the blackberries, apples and plums; the vibrant colours of the chrysanthemums, dahlias, sunflowers Michaelmas daisies, the stunning lavender fields and the changing colours of the trees fill me with joy. The children in Sherwood used to borrow my ladder and climb the mulberry tree to get the berries; some to eat and some to take home, their little mouths and fingers told the story.

Once, when I used to help with Brownies, I made some pumpkin pies for them to eat after their walk round the Nature Reserve at Devonshire Road. I had never made pumpkin pie before but undeterred I did what I thought was right: my mother made me think I could do anything and unfortunately, I believed her! (It came with being an only child.) I packed the pies in the shopper and set off. I had never been to the Nature Reserve before and I got lost. When I looked at the pies, I was glad – because I had not reduced the water in the pumpkin, and they were swimming! So, if you make pumpkin pie remember to

reduce the water before filling the pie – most people follow a recipe!!!

I used to love taking children blackberrying and going on treasure hunts in the woods using the tracking signs in the Brownie Handbook. Singing songs around the campfire at Brownie camp is a lovely memory.

There is a beautiful red maple tree outside the Princess of Wales House at Kew. It’s a wonderful sight in the autumn with its red and gold leaves in full light of autumn sunshine. My friend and I once tried to paint it.

I remember the lovely church harvest suppers with homemade food and homemade entertainment. In the church of the Holy Redeemer, Sidcup, they dressed in farmers’ smocks, played instruments and recited poetry; all this and the smell of fresh bread and vegetables at the harvest festival service in the morning.

Lilian Johnson

thereby creating a “Single Market” that would make border controls on intra Community trade unnecessary. This report set a target date, the end on 1992, for this programme to be achieved. There were those in the Commission who doubted whether such a programme could pass because they thought member states would not be ready to accept such a wide-ranging replacement of national legislation with Community legislation. But in the end their doubts were assuaged by the fact that the UK, which was seen to the member state most obsessed by national sovereignty, was the member state that was most enthusiastically in favour of the establishment of a Single Market and that it was a British Commissioner who had drawn up the plan to achieve it. The result was a triumph for Lord Cockfield. Almost the whole of his legislative programme was passed by the end of 1992, the one exception being the establishment of a common import regime for bananas on which political agreement was reached at the end of 1992 but which was passed into law at the first Agriculture Council meeting of 1993.

The establishment of the Single Market was a vital building block in the process that led to the Good Friday Agreement that re-established peace in Northern Ireland, first, and most obviously, because it allowed for the elimination of the controversial customs posts along the border with the Republic and second because it allowed ever increasing cross border collaboration. “Two countries one system” one might say. This, arising as it did from both countries being members of the EU, was a vital component of the Agreement, as was acknowledged in part of the preamble to the Anglo Irish Agreement which forms part of the Good Friday Agreement. This says “Wishing to develop still further the unique relationship between their peoples and the close co-operation between their

countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union;”.

During the campaign before the 2016 referendum, John Major and Tony Blair, both of whom had worked on the process that led to the Good Friday Agreement, warned that Brexit would put that Agreement at risk but their intervention was largely ignored for obvious reasons by the campaigners for “leave” and, presumably, for tactical reasons by the campaigners for “remain”. But ignoring the issue did not solve it and it had to be confronted in the negotiations on UK exit from the EU. Two “back stop” solutions were considered in the Brexit negotiations, which would apply if the post Brexit negotiations on the future trading relationship between the UK and the EU did not themselves resolve the problem of the NI/Republic of Ireland border. Under the first version of the back stop, Northern Ireland would remain part of the EU Customs Union and would apply the essential features of the Single Market. This was totally unacceptable to the DUP upon whose support the Government depends for its slender majority and to the many Conservative MPs, because it would have required a customs barrier between GB and Northern Ireland. Under the second, which Mrs May signed up on, the UK as a whole would remain part of the EU Customs area. This proved to be equally unacceptable to the DUP and many members of the Conservative party and, as the agreement as a whole was unacceptable to Labour and the other opposition parties for other reasons, it was repeatedly rejected by Parliament. Will Mr Johnson come up with a solution which he, our Parliament and the EU can accept? By the time this article is published we will probably know

David Roberts



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