As a teenager in the 1970s, I ranged on Saturday afternoons across the ravaged industrial-revolution landscapes of the West Midlands, arguing politics, progressive rock and religion with a gang of similarly precocious, shandy-fuelled ranters, on a succession of free public transport options. We deserved to be beaten soundly by strangers. And often were. But we saw ourselves in the grand tradition of Birmingham’s intellectual sects – the Lunar Society of Handsworth, the Birmingham Surrealists of the Kardomah Café and, from Shard End, both the Electric Light Orchestra and the radical splinter group ELO Part II (featuring Bev Bevan and Kelly Groucutt), formed as as result of philosophical differences.
One Saturday afternoon, when we were 16 or so, we descended drunkenly from the lush green archipelago of the Lickey Hills to the grounds of Oratory House, to smoke upon the shared grave of the 19th-century theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman and his friend Ambrose St John. Newman had asked to be buried with Ambrose, presumably in light of the scarcity of serviceable holes in overcrowded Victorian Birmingham. Our A-streamer friend Plimpton, a tortured, repressed homosexual Christian with a Cambridge classics scholarship looming, said the Latin headstone read: “Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth.” We made it our motto and gave our adolescent philosophy group a name, in honour of Newman’s friend. We were the New Ambrosians, and the world was ours for the taking.
On the way home, some Zulu Warriors, local football hooligans, clubbed me to the concrete with a rolled newspaper near Paradise Circus for “looking gay” and spat on me. They knew not what they did. Such were the sufferings and degradations of a New Ambrosian, but they would not break me. Sadly, the New Ambrosians were soon to divide into the Original New Ambrosians and radical splinter group the New New Ambrosians (featuring Plimpton and Speccy Hawkins), as a result of philosophical differences.
I lost touch with Plimpton, who struggled to reconcile his faith with his sexuality throughout his life. He was last seen, some time at the turn of the century, by none other than Speccy Hawkins. Hawkins’s contact lenses had clocked his fellow New New Ambrosian, sat alone in soiled trousers at Newman’s headstone, as he cruised past the graveyard on Leach Green Lane in his grey Ford Focus.
On Tuesday night, along with many other self-congratulatory Observer readers, I saw the young rap singer Kate Tempest looking and sounding like the prophet this absurd age deserves, an Abiezer Coppe for the Deliveroo generation. If we were young today my fellow Original New Ambrosians would have loved her as I did. I went home, anxieties amplified, values confirmed, an evening well spent.
Meanwhile, beyond the Hammersmith Apollo, police job definitions deformed to encompass arresting environmentalists who will, within years, be hailed unequivocally as heroes by a drowning, burning, starving humanity. Struggling with implications beyond his paygrade, a police spokesman on LBC on Tuesday complained that driving vans of officers from Scotland to capture protesters was actually increasing emissions. It was clear that the environmental impact caused by crushing the demonstrations was weighing heavily upon his conscience, a sure sign that Extinction Rebellion’s message was getting through.
But in the midst of all this misery, some good news. One of the Catholic church’s marketing strengths is that it has a patron saint for everything. St Adrian of Nicomedia is the patron saint of arms dealers and butchers; St Jesús-Malverde is the patron saint of drug-traffickers and bandits; St Maturinus is the patron saint of comic actors and plumbers generally, and of sailors, but only if they hail from Brittany. (I can’t help thinking the Panini company are missing a major collectible sticker-set market here.)
So weep no more, disappointed liberals in the Age of Hate. Last Sunday the pope himself, who often seems to be operating to an agenda designed to amuse him personally in private at a later date, made a saint of a man who was probably gay, and hailed from Birmingham, where homophobic hate crime is up 333% in the wake of School Gate-gate’s religious aggravations; a man who, says Father Ignatius Harrison, the provost of Birmingham Oratory, “would have been a Remainer”. In the shape of Cardinal John Henry Newman, we now have a patron saint for Remainers, homosexuals and people from Birmingham. All three of these are traduced and demonised groups whom Christ would obviously have held close to his heart, as he did prostitutes, lepers and people who worked for the Inland Revenue.
There were some teething troubles in Newman’s canonisation. The church had tried to separate Newman’s remains from his friend Ambrose’s in 2008 but found none left. The Oratory website explains: “There are no First Class relics of Saint John Henry Newman available for distribution.” Presumably that’s what happens if you bury a saint in a damp city, and it explains the Brummie saying, “It’s so black over Bill’s mother’s we’ll have no First Class relics available for distribution.”
Late on Wednesday night I found myself wondering what my old friends the Original New Ambrosians would think of Newman’s sainthood. I even found myself remembering fondly the traitorous New New Ambrosians (featuring Plimpton and Speccy Hawkins), whose dissenting views on the relative merits of the second Hatfield and the North album no longer seemed important. Then the phone rang. “Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth,” said a shaking voice, and the line went dead. It was Plimpton, 40 years since I last heard him. I tried unsuccessfully to call the number back. On Thursday morning, an anonymous package arrived, a lone femur swaddled in bubble wrap. Plimpton, it appeared, had made his peace with his god in his own particular way. I expected no less from a New Ambrosian.
Stewart Lee’s new book, March of the Lemmings, is available now, as is a download of his last standup show, Content Provider. National dates for his new show, Snowflake/Tornado, are on sale now
