*** While staying at the home of the late Jim Cotter, I wrote this at FIRTH PARK in Sheffield to offer as a processional hymn for the church of St Michael the Archangel in Southampton City Centre.

Here we stand, we Christian people.midi

With a touch of vanity I treasure a comment after the first singing of this hymn, that it was “like an Anglo-Saxon war-chant”;     the reference being, I presume, to the image in The Dream of the Rood (an Anglo-Saxon poem) of “mankind’s Lord … The young hero stripped himself – he, God Almighty – strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows, bold before many …”