[Glenny] is prepared to be shocked by the brutalities of organised crime, although it takes a lot to shock an experienced, war-scorched reporter like him. But, more important, he is prepared to admit uncomfortable truths. He makes clear that mobs, mafias and global rackets are often performing useful and occasionally vital social functions that no other institution – governments, legal systems, the police, the economy itself – is capable of providing.

Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem.
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation,
Get on with the fascination,
The real relation,
The underlying theme

Then in November 2002 it was gone. The ‘goneness’ was palpable. The storm propelled the boulder 5 kilometres, stopping on a sandbank in the Dwryd estuary. Now tidal, it became very mobile. The high tides around full moon and the new moon moved it every 12 hours to a new place, each placement unique to the consequence of the tide, wind, rain and depth of water.

In January 2003 it disappeared from the estuary but was found again in a marsh. An incoming tide had taken it up a creek, where it stayed for five weeks. The equinox tide of March 19 2003 was high enough to float it back to the estuary where it continued its movement back and forth 3 or 4 kilometres each move.

The wooden boulder was last seen in June 2003 on a sandbank near Ynys Giftan. All creeks and marshes have been searched so it can only be assumed it has made its way to the sea. It is not lost. It is wherever it is. [source]

That evening, though, I remembered something else that had always puzzled me. Whenever I lingered in the booking hall to watch her carefree morning sashay away from the ticket barriers ... there was always a point at which she slipped from direct sight and I had to turn my eyes to the nearby CCTV, eagerly anticipating her arrival inside its fuzzy grey image of lift doors. And here’s the thing: although those doors would have been at most a dozen feet away from the point at which she disappeared, the screen always remained empty for six whole seconds.

It had, as I say, always baffled me. But now, suddenly, in my emotionally-heightened state, the explanation seemed obvious: at some point between the ticket barriers and the lifts at Lambeth North station, SPACE AND TIME HAD BECOME DISLOCATED. To any - for sake of argument - five-foot-three Scottish brunette making that walk, nothing would seem awry; but to anyone watching, for six whole seconds, she would be… elsewhere. Where? Well, I couldn’t say for sure. But, as I sat there listening to the singing of the tracks and the distant rush of air somewhere down the tunnel to my right, I became convinced that, were I to yank open that small yellow door at the very moment she disappeared, then I would see her, trotting brightly across the eternal black void, mind on other things, still failing to look back.

Once I’d got home, I left a message on her answerphone, asking her what she thought.

It’s been nearly ten years now.

In the mornings, there is a clinging, overripe smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market gardens. Animal droppings in hot mounds. The distant rumble of construction convoys. The heron dance of elegant cloud-scraping cranes. Flocks of cyclists clustering together for safety, dipping and swerving like swallows. Hard hats and yellow tabards monkeying over the scaffolding of shrouded towers, the steel ribs of emerging stadia. Early risers, in the privilege of first-use recreation, a smudge of sun burning off the fug of pollution that hangs over a pre-Olympic city, fall into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets.

Another film, The Long Good Friday, arrived in 1979, so pertinent in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery handshake of mutually beneficial relationships between local government corruption (‘The new casino’s gone through’), kickbacks to rogue Irish Republicans in the burgeoning construction industry, bent coppers and old-style Kray hoodlums making overtures to the New York Mafia with their lawyers specialising in property and gambling tax. Much of this was documentary refraction: it had happened, it was happening, and it described the future we are now experiencing. According to a persistent urban myth, the gang that robbed the Brinks Mat warehouse at Heathrow on 26 November 1983 quadrupled the estimated £26 million value of the gold bars by investing in riverside regeneration. Swashbuckling capitalism led the way for timid hedge-fund managers and City sharecroppers. The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth creation. A DIY anticipation of computer-generated presentations for the Olympic wonderlands. ‘Water City’, a new Venice (without the memory-mud of centuries), will rise from the stinking filth of back rivers and green-scum canals.

.... What should a priest be?

Accessible and incorruptible
abstemious, yet full of celebration
informed but not threateningly so
and far above the passing soufflé of fashion

What should a priest be?

An authority on singleness
Solomon-like on the labyrinth of human sexuality
excellent with young marrieds, old marrieds,
were marrieds, never marrieds, shouldn’t have marrieds,
those who live together, those who live apart,
and those who don’t live anywhere

respectfully mindful of senior citizens and war veterans
familiar with the ravages of arthritis,
osteoporrosis, postnatal depression, anorexia,
whooping cough and nits ....

.... What does a priest do?

Mostly stays awake at Deanery synods
tries not to annoy the Bishop too much
visits hospices, administers comfort
conducts weddings, christenings -
not necessarily in that order -
takes funerals
consecrates the elderly to the grave
buries children and babies
feels completely helpless beside
the swaying family of a suicide ....

Invocation

Ohhh ... friends we call across the seas to you from echo chamber of the soul
we call now stirred by rhythm that you drum
We call upon the triple billion year old songlines of world’s oldest rock
“I lift a stone; it is the meaning of life I clasp” - says the bard MacDiarmid
So let us honour stone. Let us call afresh the foundational litany:
The Lewisian Gneiss ...
The Cairngorm pegmatites and sparkling Aberdeenshire granite
The Old Red Sandstone
The Durness limestone sequences and Bathgate’s forest Carboniferous
The Tertiary radiating basalt dykes from great volcanoes Mull and Raasay
The Sgurr of Eigg and Ailsa Craig
The idle pebbles...
tossed to and fro, round and round, inwards outwards
dark moon full moon vortexing on today’s high tide at noon
Ohhh ... the rocks the rocks the rocks
we call on you ...
Rise up from sleep sunk strata beds!
Giant women, wizened men, totemic creatures once laid down to be our hills
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up and waulk this Earth in us!
... bring back the land within the people’s care
... bring back the care to touch from hand to land