St Neots Parish Church

On an ancient manuscript it apparently says ‘ All the world’s mad: children won’t obey their parents and everyone wants to write a book.’ Children have certainly been a problem for ever. The current form that the problem takes is apparently teenagers with nothing to do getting up to mischief. (I seem to remember doing this fifty years ago.)

As always the proposed solutions are institutional: a youth club for every town. I don’t want to knock youth clubs, but I wonder whether the entire population of our two secondary schools would be able to use such a club.

There are times for peer groups to get together, but the daily gathering of a family around a meal table is, in some places in the world, an opportunity for talking and listening, for socialising and dealing with issues. In Italy, it still flourishes in spite of television. Interaction across the generations is uniquely valuable; but even apart from television it is hard to maintain: shift work, peer pressure, fast food (and everything else) militate against it.

But it is of the essence, not only of family life, but of being human. Religion, which expresses itself in essential human activities, focuses its worship on a collective meal. Leisurely gatherings around a meal are sacred events. There is something even blasphemous about their interruption by those, such as television companies, who take no responsibility for our family life, but who suggest to us that what is not real is more important than what is, fiction more valuable than real fact.