Vox Meditantis

Friday, 24th November 1978

Funny thing, sitting here in the half-light with the organ gone quiet and just the echo of the last hymn still hanging about the rafters. There’s a question that keeps turning itself over in my mind, one of those daft things you hear on the wireless or read in the colour supplements: “Who are your current most favourite people?” Current. Favourite. As if affection were something you could tune in like a frequency, adjust the aerial and pick up clearer reception.

The shadows are long across the pews this afternoon, November shadows, the sort that seem to carry more weight than summer ones. I’ve been thinking about machines, about progress – the calculators the lads use at the grammar school now, little things that fit in your pocket and do sums faster than any of us ever could with our slide rules. There’s talk at the works of computerised inventory systems, great humming cabinets that’ll replace the ledgers we’ve kept for fifty years. My eldest asks whether we’ll have a video recorder by Christmas, wants to tape programmes off the telly whilst we’re out at church or visiting his grandmother. It’s all moving so fast, isn’t it? The Moon landings not ten years gone, and already they seem like ancient history to the children.

Who are my favourite people, then? Well, there’s the wife, naturally – thirty years married this past September, and I still catch myself watching her fold the washing or stand at the kitchen window with that particular way she has of holding her shoulders when she’s thinking something through. There’s a kind of engine in her, quiet and relentless as one of those Japanese transistor radios that never needs new batteries. She keeps us all running, doesn’t she? Then the boys – both of them grown now, or near enough – one training to be a draughtsman, learning to render the future in precise lines on vellum, and the younger one, well, he’s got his head full of music and electronics, wants to build synthesisers in the garage. I don’t always understand what they’re after, but I can see the light in them when they talk about it, the same light I suppose my own father saw when I told him I wanted to work with engines instead of going into the shop.

But favourite feels like the wrong word, doesn’t it? Too slight, too much like choosing between flavours of ice cream. What I feel for them is something older and heavier, something that doesn’t switch on and off. The evening’s lesson spoke of love, the kind that endures, that bears all things – I’ve heard those words from Corinthians a hundred times, but tonight they seemed to echo differently, seemed to mean something about how we’re all connected by these invisible threads, like the wires inside the telephone exchange, carrying voices and messages we don’t always understand.

There’s a shadow of my father in me still, I think, though he’s been gone these fifteen years. An echo of his hands showing me how to true a wheel, how to listen to an engine and know what it needs. And I wonder if my own boys will carry an echo of me, some shadow-habit or turn of phrase, long after I’m gone. Perhaps that’s what these machines we’re building are really about – leaving echoes of ourselves, extending our reach beyond the span of our own two hands and the hours we’re given.

The light through the stained glass is making patterns on the stone floor, blue and gold and crimson, shifting as the clouds move outside. It’s beautiful, in its way, though I’d never say so aloud. Men of my generation don’t, do we? We talk about efficiency and progress, about getting the job done, about providing for our families. But sitting here in the silence, with the smell of old hymn books and furniture polish and that particular mustiness that belongs to churches, I can admit – just to myself, just for a moment – that what I’m really trying to do with all this talk of technology and tools is make sense of time, of how quickly it passes, of how to hold onto the people I love even as they change and grow and move away from me.

Current most favourite people. I still can’t make the words sit right. But if someone pressed me, if they really wanted an answer, I’d say: the ones whose voices I’d recognise in the dark, whose footsteps I’d know on the stairs, whose absence would leave a silence louder than any echo. That’s who. That’s all of them, really – the whole blessed lot.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.