…took place last Thursday in the Cathedral. After a swift registration in school, the bells summoned the great phalanx of blue-blazered bodies onto the North Walk and Bishop’s Walk, and the diagonal path across the Green filled rapidly. It is only really on such mornings that I suddenly realise just how many boys there are at our school as they stream towards the North Porch. Once inside Bishop’s Boys decant into the nave and transepts, settling in a chattering mass and changing the dynamics of the medieval building dramatically. That must be how it has happened for over a century and, as I said when I introduced the service, the hand of history on the shoulder is inescapable. We benefited from some rather rare sunshine on Thursday morning which transforms the nave into a work of Art, diagonal shafts of light falling across the space and catching the dust spiraling upwards. Golding wrote of this in ‘The Spire’, and it easy to see why it caught his imagination. We are so privileged to be able to come into such a space so often, and I urged everyone in the service to not take it for granted, to soak up the atmosphere for themselves. It is of such things as these that memories are made.
The theme of the service was ornithology, a passion of mine since a very young age, and the service sheet and my script should be available on the BWS website at http://www.bws-school.org.uk/main/The_Chapel/. The particular focus was on the relationship between mankind in the UK and the Red Kite, employing the species as a proxy measure for the health of the environment. It is not a story without hope; in Tudor times kites were common scavengers in cities and countryside throughout England, Scotland and Wales, but a combination of hunting, trapping, poisoning and habitat encroachment caused their decline to near extinction by the late twentieth century. Since the late nineties however their prospects have dramatically changed, so much so that I now regularly see kites flying over my garden to the North East of Salisbury, and they can even occasionally be seen soaring at height over the city centre. Research, reintroduction, protection and monitoring have reversed the population decline, so that kites now rival buzzards on the summer thermals across Southern England – a wonderful sight for everyone, whether you are a bird enthusiast or not.
The story of the Red Kite gives hope for environmental change and the power of mankind to effect change for the better. My hope is that governments also understand that positive action can achieve similar change on a bigger scale in the future, and that they can be persuaded to take appropriate and proportional action now.
SDS
