The early episodes of the television series Heartbeat seemed to treat of more serious themes than those more recent. There was a comic element in Bill Maynard’s character Claude Greengrass but the situations faced by PC Rowan seemed more rooted in the realities of rural life.

Religion was still a part of the weekly life of ordinary people. In Heartbeat country, religion meant ‘chapel’. In our village in the 1960s, there were three chapels and two churches. Two of the chapels still function at a reduced level, the church just about lingers. It’s hard to imagine that so much has changed in a single lifetime

The Heartbeat episode depicted a chapel congregation. There was hearty singing of What a friend we have in Jesus and the preacher talked about the healing power of prayer.

A television soap it may have been, but there was an odd sense of reassurance in listening to it. Words and music that seemed to have a timeless quality to someone who valued the gentle evangelical faith expressed in such sentiments.

Going to church yesterday morning, there was a sense of the sort of faith expressed in that that television dramatisation of chapel.

The church is a small Church of Ireland congregation in an area where the memorials to those who fought in the Great War testify to the large number of Protestant families who once lived in the area.

Standing looking up at one of the memorial plaques, the vast majority of whom were ordinary private soldiers, I wondered where so many working men had been found in a community that would have been right at the edge of the capital. ‘The railway works,’ said a church warden standing beside me.

The numbers now are much reduced. On a typical Sunday morning, there are about twenty or so people in the pews. Yesterday, being the first Sunday of January, the weather being bitterly cold, the forecast being for ice and snow, most of those who might have been found at worship were missing. There were nine of us in the congregation, but the number was of no matter.

The reassurance was in the words of Scripture, the singing of the hymns, and the firm faith of the rector for whom sermons are an important part of her ministry. The Bible readings were the rousing lines of Isaiah Chapter 60 and the account in Saint Matthew Chapter 2 of the arrival of the magi. The hymns were those for the Epiphany, As with gladness, Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, and that evocation of childhood mischief, We three kings.

Leaving church there was a mood of something deep within the past being alive.