In a recent Guardian quick crossword, one of the clues used the phrase “diacritical marks”, so I looked it up. These are the accents put above or below letters to modify their sound that are relatively rare in English; only appearing in loan words, usually from French, like cafe. So rare that they don’t make an appearance on keyboards, which is why the accent on the final “e” in cafe isn’t there in the sentence above (implying that you’d have to pronounce it cayff, if you didn’t know better).

Looking through the list of marks revealed that a “Macron” is a straight line above a letter elongating its sound. So a macron over the “r” in Macron would be read Macrrron, or over the “o” would read Macrooon. Such a pity that there isn’t a Chancellor Umlaut. Though, I suppose, he, or she, would be a bit dotty.

One of the many repurposings of Congress House, that used to be the Coop Department Store in Grays – which was named after the TUC HQ and seemed to be the future in 1961- is “The light Christian school”, which seems to have opened recently to cater for the growing number of evangelicals in the town.

The Warehouse area at the back of the old store is now a big charismatic church, with a poster proclaiming that God can do anything: which begs the question of what He, or She, is doing about Gaza. Not a lot, by the looks of it. Reminiscent of the only joke that David Baddiel has ever told that has made me laugh, in a bitter sort of way. “God realises that he hasn’t heard any jokes about the holocaust, so he asks a survivor to tell him one. So he does. God says, “that’s not very funny” The survivor says, “well, I suppose you had to have been there to get it”.

The old Ritz cinema, with seating for 1500, has also been a mega church since 2016, having survived a post film half life as a Bingo Hall, a sort of purgatory before rapture, as is the old snooker hall above Burtons the tailors in the High Street – which now lives down its sinful past with small but very visible congregation that dresses in long white dresses and what look like chefs hats.

The same is true of the local Conservative Party; one of the factors driving its former white racist base towards Reform.

The title of the school is a bit ambiguous. “Christian light” might be thought of as linked to enlightenment, in a rapture oriented sort of way: “I see the light!” But “light Christian” implies either that is for Christians who don’t take theology all that seriously – “too heavy, man” – but find that a light smattering of Faith is helpful to get by day to day, with scripture as a series of Hallmark posters papering over existential cracks with uplifting moral thoughts, or it could, literally, be for light Christians, those with a Body Mass Index acceptable to the Kingdom of Heaven.

There is a high density of preachers in the High Street. If there isn’t a busker, who are usually uplifting, playing songs that strike chords and you can sing along to as you walk past, there’s someone with a microphone and a Bible. A bit like Northern Ireland in the seventies, except that instead of a red faced middle aged man in a dusty black suit, the preachers are whip smart young black guys, or aunties.

Sometimes this has an air of desperation about it, with the preacher shouting verses from an open Bible in a slightly wild eyed way. People drift by. No one gathers to listen, or even dispute. As in the parable of the sower. “And some fell upon stony ground”. Perhaps this gives the preacher a sense of elect distinction, that she/he is offering a way out to the heedless masses, who wander by getting on with everyday life oblivious of the heavenly apocalypse to come – as they ignored Noah before The Flood. You can lead a horse to salvation, but you can’t make it get on the Ark.

Sometimes its more discursive, as though the preacher is trying to convince themselves. Recently, as I walked past, one was arguing that the “apple” in the Garden of Eden was actually sex. I’m not sure how he got to that, as a believer in the literal truth of The Book. Take it literally, the apple is an apple. I suppose the tree of knowledge can be seen as the tree of KNOWLEDGE, as in carnal. Which begs the question of why an omnisceint and omnipresent deity would set Adam and Eve up with the temptation. Just to see if they could resist it? But, if God is omniscient, He/She would have known what was going to happen before He/She set it up. Which seems a bit sadistic. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” For “gods” read “God”.

Musing on this evident theological imperative towards sexual repression as I walked home with the shopping, I was reminded of Wilhelm Reich’s observations about debates between the German Communist and Catholic Youth Movements in the late 1920s. He said that most of these consisted of the speakers talking past each other. The Communist would talk about the Party’s economic programme. The Catholic, would talk about personal morality. Reich himself would short curcuit this by asking the Catholic speaker if they believe that God designed the human body. When they said “yes”, he would ask, “so, why did he design the clitoris?” Which opened a whole different way of looking at life. You could take this further. If you believe that “man” was “created in the image of God”, what is the divine dick for? Does God pee and poo?