Article
Culture
Time
2 min read

Taking the train taught me about time travel

A delay gives time to think about time.
A airy and light station concourse in which people stand and look at a long set of travel information screen.
Waiting at New Street Station, Birmingham.

I like trains. 

Or rather, I like the idea of trains. I feel a sense of entirely false nostalgia for a railway age that I am far too young to have lived through. 

I have this picture postcard image of a time when trains puffed along through idyllic countryside scenes, trailing fluffy white clouds behind them. Each commuter railway service a kind of Hogwarts Express to a magical world in a time when trains were on-time, sheep grazed contentedly trackside and the journey was the destination. A time which probably never existed.  

The reality doesn’t quite live up to the fantasy. 

My picture postcard is a little different. Sweaty armpits. Stale air. Sardines in a can.  

Wish you were here. 

My journeys are slightly less magical. 

  

Or they are, at least, on the days when I am able to get anywhere at all.  

Today isn’t one of those days.  

My train is cancelled again, because of course it is. 

The other day it was a landslide across the tracks. In the Midlands, the flat Midlands.  

But today it’s something to do with strikes, continuing disruption and overtime working bans. 

The Hogwarts Express is cancelled due to a shortage of train crew.  

  

As much as I enjoy the concourse of Birmingham New Street station, I feel I spend entirely too much time there.  

Rather than admiring the countryside scenes of my imagination, instead I find myself with no choice but to spend an extended moment admiring the glowing amber of the station clock. 

Enthroned between destination boards, reigning supreme over the train travellers, is the clock – ticking digitally away.  

In its court I stand transfixed, not because I am hypnotised, captivated or held hostage, but because I have nowhere else to go.  

Of course, clocks, railways (steam or otherwise) and strike action are not incidental to the situation I find myself in.  

The truth is that the age of steam never lived up to my rose-tinted imaginings. In reality it was the genesis of a clockwork age. An age of factories and precision, where cards were punched, steam whistles sounded, and time was metered out. An age that we haven’t fully escaped. The station clock may be digital, but our lives are still clockwork. 

Ever since, people have continued to dance to uncomfortable mechanical rhythms. The striking workers have simply decided to stop dancing for a while.  

  

There was another Genesis of a different age before all the noise. An age of sea and sky and forests of trees. A garden age with a different tune to dance to: a rhythm of planting, of wind rustling the wheat, of harvest, of rest. A life-shaped rhythm of goodness and grace, where relationship – to one another, to the world – was central, rather than productivity. 

This Eden is at once the point of departure, as well as arrival. Appearing as a gardener, Jesus rises from the tomb with an open invitation to return to a life lived at God’s speed.  

As an alternative to the rush of commuters going nowhere very fast – the way of Jesus is a journey with a true destination. Life in all its fullness.  

Full – not overfilled. 

  

Daydreaming, time passes. My wait ends. 

As I board my train, and my nostrils fill once again with its stale air, I think about the wind through the trees.  

  

Article
Character
Culture
Film & TV
Music
4 min read

We want to feel the main character energy of each of the Beatles

But is love all we need?

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Four actors dressed in black stand together
The new cast.
Neal Street Productions.

One of the joys of moving into central London is the nostalgia. You can 'remember' anything in London, but for a Beatles fan like me (one year I was in the top one per cent of listeners globally on Spotify - impressive, I know - and it was before I had kids), the aesthetic of central London is deeply connected to the fab four. I'm aware it's not Liverpool but look what London has to offer fans of the fab four.  Abbey Road’s crossing, the rooftop performance in Savile Row, or the amount of time the fab four spent just here for the famous launch of Sgt Pepper. Walking around these streets with my headphones in, it's impossible not to smile at music that is faultlessly happy-making. 

Sir Sam Mendes, however, is taking the immersive Beatles experience to a whole new level. Four coordinated films will be released in 2028 in a stunning act of ambition and delayed gratification. Mendes' production company says it will be the first 'bingeable theatrical experience.' 

Now that the cast have been revealed, lots of questions remain: How long will the films be? Will they all be released at exactly the same time? Will there be Lord of the Rings viewing marathons? By the way - did you hear about the failed pitch for a Lord of the Rings film starring John as Gollum, Paul as Frodo, George as Gandalf and Ringo as Sam? We've missed that particular masterpiece, as Tolkien turned it down, as did Stanley Kubrick for that matter. The man it did fall to, Peter Jackson, recently also released a Beatles television experience in Get Back. Even for Beatles diehards like me I've not made it through all 468 minutes. But I saw enough to see Shakespeare being written. 

Screenwriter Peter Straughan (Wolf Hall, Conclave) said that the different script writers for the not-so-imminent upcoming four films were "firewalled off from each other", so we receive four takes truly inhabiting the shoes of each protagonist. Band members wanting their own 'main character energy'? Surely not! 

Only Mendes knows how the films will tie together. "Each one is told from the particular perspective of just one of the guys," Sir Sam told CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Monday. "They intersect in different ways - sometimes overlapping, sometimes not." 

"They're four very different human beings. Perhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply. But together, all four films will tell the story of the greatest band in history." 

An omnipresent director still has infinite attention for each one us within a grander narrative arc. 

Lennon and McCartney are undeniably geniuses. But with the Beatles, they were always greater than the sum of their parts. Even the songs that were solos were credited to Lennon/McCartney. Their solo works, no disrespect, never quite reached the dizzying heights of their collective efforts. 

But a biopic for each bandmember is a terribly 2020s take. We want to feel that main character energy pulsing through our veins. While we want to feel part of something bigger, we want to feel that our lives are unique and distinct, not derivative (the latter not being a problem for The Beatles). 

But a quartet of films, "challenging the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies", harmonising in new ways (remind you of anything as subversive and groundbreaking?) provides an utterly lovely step-change in cinema. There's been no shortage of Beatles biographies and films, but this new concept comes closer to art imitating life. Our lives have to be lived independently, but are somehow made more meaningful and rich in connection and collaboration with others.  

The philosopher Tom Morris wrote: "There are two striking human passions, the passion for uniqueness and the passion for union. Each of us wants to be recognised as a unique member of the human race. We want to stand apart from the crowd in some way. We want our own dignity and value. But at the same time, we have a passion for union, for belonging, even for merging our identities into a greater unity in which we can have a place, a role, a value.” 

Can those passions be held in tension? The Christian faith, while commending us to be outward-focused, does more than polyphonic films. It says that each of us are worthy of our own 'cinematic events'. Yes, we mightn't have started living until we have broken free from our own confines to the concerns of broader humanity, as Martin Luther King said, but an omnipresent director still has infinite attention for each one us within a grander narrative arc. 

All you need is love, they sang. But that love needs the perfect perspective of someone else. 

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