Hello,
A couple of years ago we attended the funeral of one of our guys. He was 29.
The crematorium was rammed. The music that led us in was Louis Dunford’s When We Were Hooligans. I didn’t know the song then. I do now.
I was amazed at how well the humanist celebrant kept the proceedings on track, weaving in reflections on this young man’s life and just enough reference to faith and religious values.
As you know, we are in regular contact with many of our graduates, and references to faith can be part of the mix. Some are quite obscure, but some are full-on. One came through just this week:
“5 and a half year clean now… Praise the Lord JESUS.”
There is a lot I recognise in other Louis Dunford’s songs too.
London’s Requiem talks about sex, drugs and romance, victims of bad chance, children living and dying by the knife, and the many lives that are lost, but whose stories are rarely told.
It moves from people sleeping rough on the pavements to addiction, loneliness and people dying alone and broken. It also captures something about drugs being seen as a kind of medicine… something that offers relief, even though ultimately, it can cause such terrible harm.
On Sunday, Julie and I were asked to attend and speak at a local Harvest Festival. Held in a beautiful church, full and a lovely service.
The connection was essentially about eating together. We do a lot of that at LandWorks (more than 3,000 communal lunches over the years) and it is very much at the heart of what we do.
Everyone is welcome to sit at the LandWorks table and eat.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I had never really understood the significance of eating together in Christian values. I do now.
Slightly unhelpfully, during the service I kept thinking about a line from Louis Dunford’s When We Were Hooligans:
“I’d call us kids just having fun.”
It is a simple line, but there is something quite profound in it. Others might have called them hood rats, scum or delinquents. He remembers them as kids.
Perhaps that is one of the places where faith and humanity meet, in the refusal to reduce a person to the worst thing they have done, or to the label that has been placed upon them.
And we can all sit down together, to share food.
Chris
15th October 2026