...no busy priest can afford to be without his diary - or should the stipend stretch that far his diary secretary. H would of course, if asked, perform that latter function without demur or complaint, but the fear of creating another angle for rank wifely nagging has always deterred me from hinting let alone asking.
"You know you should be setting off for N now. You can't keep +Tom waiting and you never have change for the car park. So drop the homily notes. That can wait for this evening. Honestly!"
You can imagine the scenes as they unfold, neither to my delight nor to my peace of soul.
Mind you being at the right place at the right time for the right hatch, match or dispatch is no light matter. Well being there is, it is the not that isn't.
Just the once, relying on but memory unaided, have I pitched up at an assembly of godly folk expecting to promote to glory one gone shortly before, only to find I was actually being expected to bind a Betty to her Dave.
Entirely the wrong vestments on board of course - not that they would have noticed, possibly even remarking how 'cool' I looked and that black was quite the colour perfectly to offset the bride's somewhat disingenuous virginal white.
Mercifully, all necessary textual matter was to hand in the vestry and if the intended homily on the beauty of aged wisdom - interspersed with fond remembrances of dear Gladys in India before the War - had to be dropped in favour of an extempore rant on the wonder of fecund creation in a sometimes spiritually sterile world, then it did them no harm to hear it.
Too close a call for comfort mind you that. From that time to this there has been a self-imposed strict inscribing of each minute detail of who goes where, when and why.
That said, that has tended to be the limit of my diary keeping and with the diary itself kept firmly on the desk where it belongs. Can't be doing with these clerics who carry round their leather-bound Filofax numbers under their arms as if it were - though most certainly it were not - Holy Scripture.
This 'blog' - still dread word - then must serve as necessary and sufficient recall of events through the ages. Not by any means a full record but, shall we say, serving as handy marker buoys on the sea of personal amnesia.
And thus one does occasionally turn back the pages for recall and review. The time of year being now to be doing that for the year gone by. And thus, as I read past posts, I come across my first thoughts of 2008 on the whole utter ghastliness of New Year's Eve and the sheer sinking dread it brings.
By golly though, if I thought that then shan't we all be thinking it next week? Can we stand the expectation and anticipation of just how wretched 2009 is likely to be?
I doubt we can any of us. You should see my wine cellar overflowing with intemperate volumes of fine wines and spirits to deaden the impending pain. I won't be alone in this, of that I am certain.
"Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow........."? Will I be here to write it as well as survive it? Watch this space if you care or dare.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Saint Thomas Lord...
...if you think you missed the announcement of the canonisation of this new Saint of ours - patron of cricket and clean whites naturally - fear not for the Vatican has yet actually formally to pronounce Ex Cathedra as it were.
I am, I own, thus being somewhat premature - not to mention singular - in bringing this wondrous news to the attention of the Faithful.
But bring it I must, for it must be true. No sooner have I averred that prayers to the - as yet unsainted - Thomas are to be invoked against the wretched ECB and all their demonic works, than word comes from HQ that finally - a mere fifteen years having slowly passed - MCC are offering the ultimate glittering prize of Full Membership.
Well huzzah and hurrah, as Sir Percy would say. Not perhaps the cure for all the world's economic, social or spiritual ills - though close enough to trouble the scorer - but to me the veritable glimpse of heaven on earth; a Wordsworthian moment when - if one were - being young would be truly spiffing and uplifting and all. (Lapsing into a benign Blackadderish / Woosterian combo mode seems irresistibly apposite in the circs.)
Funnily enough - and this a part of the English joy of the thing - accession from Associate to Full MCC membership is barely, if at all, visible to the naked eye. True one may now harrumph at meetings or seek to vote down contrarian motions, and one may doze after luncheon at each and every match not just most of them. But one wouldn't harrumph or vote in any case, and there are only so many afternoons in any one year one can dedicate to doing nothing but napping
The great unwashed might reasonably assume that The Tie ['Rhubarb and Custard' or 'Bacon and Eggs' according to taste] and other trappings of office are but newly granted. But not so. All comes with Associate. There is no new mark one can adopt outwardly to show the distinction.
Now that is special. I challenge you to name any slightly nuanced gradation in ecclesial status that does not have its concomitant and showy sign. That which delineates a second sub-deacon from a first may not be much in the hierarchy of heaven, but in stripes on a surplice believe you me it matters. (Try calling a consultant surgeon 'Doctor' and you'll get my drift.)
So tonight then I salute our new Saint and offer him as patron not only of all things cricket - including clean whites - but also of subtle, gentle good English manners.
And by Glory don't we need a stout measure of that in these somewhat desperate times?
I am, I own, thus being somewhat premature - not to mention singular - in bringing this wondrous news to the attention of the Faithful.
But bring it I must, for it must be true. No sooner have I averred that prayers to the - as yet unsainted - Thomas are to be invoked against the wretched ECB and all their demonic works, than word comes from HQ that finally - a mere fifteen years having slowly passed - MCC are offering the ultimate glittering prize of Full Membership.
Well huzzah and hurrah, as Sir Percy would say. Not perhaps the cure for all the world's economic, social or spiritual ills - though close enough to trouble the scorer - but to me the veritable glimpse of heaven on earth; a Wordsworthian moment when - if one were - being young would be truly spiffing and uplifting and all. (Lapsing into a benign Blackadderish / Woosterian combo mode seems irresistibly apposite in the circs.)
Funnily enough - and this a part of the English joy of the thing - accession from Associate to Full MCC membership is barely, if at all, visible to the naked eye. True one may now harrumph at meetings or seek to vote down contrarian motions, and one may doze after luncheon at each and every match not just most of them. But one wouldn't harrumph or vote in any case, and there are only so many afternoons in any one year one can dedicate to doing nothing but napping
The great unwashed might reasonably assume that The Tie ['Rhubarb and Custard' or 'Bacon and Eggs' according to taste] and other trappings of office are but newly granted. But not so. All comes with Associate. There is no new mark one can adopt outwardly to show the distinction.
Now that is special. I challenge you to name any slightly nuanced gradation in ecclesial status that does not have its concomitant and showy sign. That which delineates a second sub-deacon from a first may not be much in the hierarchy of heaven, but in stripes on a surplice believe you me it matters. (Try calling a consultant surgeon 'Doctor' and you'll get my drift.)
So tonight then I salute our new Saint and offer him as patron not only of all things cricket - including clean whites - but also of subtle, gentle good English manners.
And by Glory don't we need a stout measure of that in these somewhat desperate times?
Saturday, December 13, 2008
ECB - Lord Save Us!
Intercessory prayer to the Saints is my common practice. There may be some low churchers who care not for it, but I care not for them uncharitable though that thought may be. (Many a lost car key or somesuch precious domestic item has been restored courtesy of dear Saint Anthony. Try it. Works every time.)
The accredited Saint does of course have the ear of the Almighty. That goes with the badge as it were. But what of the regular soul? Can one be so assured? Possibly not, though there is little lost in trying.
Hence tonight my prayer is for the intercession of Thomas Lord in the case of Regina vs. ECB and all its dark ways. Good egg certainly. Saint not noted in the calendar as such, but the man who gifted the land that now is the HQ of cricket must deserve some small place in Paradise surely?
And on that premise I invoke his heaven sent assistance to thwart the fell desire of the ECB (and all its very dark works) to rob Lord's of its two Tests a year, guaranteeing only - can one imagine the very idea - no more than two Tests every five years!
This - for those who know not these things - is a bit like saying that Wimbledon can host the All England Championship every once in a while, or Twickenham the odd game of international rugby!
Dear Thomas Lord I beseech thee thus....
The accredited Saint does of course have the ear of the Almighty. That goes with the badge as it were. But what of the regular soul? Can one be so assured? Possibly not, though there is little lost in trying.
Hence tonight my prayer is for the intercession of Thomas Lord in the case of Regina vs. ECB and all its dark ways. Good egg certainly. Saint not noted in the calendar as such, but the man who gifted the land that now is the HQ of cricket must deserve some small place in Paradise surely?
And on that premise I invoke his heaven sent assistance to thwart the fell desire of the ECB (and all its very dark works) to rob Lord's of its two Tests a year, guaranteeing only - can one imagine the very idea - no more than two Tests every five years!
This - for those who know not these things - is a bit like saying that Wimbledon can host the All England Championship every once in a while, or Twickenham the odd game of international rugby!
Dear Thomas Lord I beseech thee thus....
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Bricking It....
...One must and one does have a certain deal of sympathy with the neighbours of Mr Martin Solomon in the West Country town of Stroud, who have long tired of his late night drunken tirades.
For it would seem that Mr Solomon is often much taken with drink and, as oft, much ill taken with the rubbish to be found on his television. Neither in and of themselves of course offensive, but it seems Mr Solomon's loud swearing rants at what he sees and hears have caused distress and disturbance, not least to the young children in the adjoining households.
There can be no excusing the last, and one is glad that the Courts have taken a firm line in this matter. Nonetheless who can not have but some empathetic understanding of Mr Solomon's plight? Who indeed has not - drunk or sober - yelled the foulest and most impotent of abuse when creatures such as Lord Slime of Slime opines on probity in public life, or cast swearing slander at the total drivel that constitutes much of the televisual offerings on any channel?
There is though a cure should it be wanted. Not watching is not the option. An Englishman pays his licence fee and is, thereby, perfectly entitled to watch and scorn.
The trick is this, a device long in circulation. An auto-changer disguised as a soft furry brick. When endurance is beyond bearing and Lord Slime must be assailed and assaulted mid-waffle, the to-hand 'brick' is wellied at the screen with full force of personal venom. The channel changes and the rage subsides leaving the Mr Solomon's of this world equally content that they have made their point. And, what's more, made it silently.
Bro. Charles would call this a 'win-win scenario' bless him.
For it would seem that Mr Solomon is often much taken with drink and, as oft, much ill taken with the rubbish to be found on his television. Neither in and of themselves of course offensive, but it seems Mr Solomon's loud swearing rants at what he sees and hears have caused distress and disturbance, not least to the young children in the adjoining households.
There can be no excusing the last, and one is glad that the Courts have taken a firm line in this matter. Nonetheless who can not have but some empathetic understanding of Mr Solomon's plight? Who indeed has not - drunk or sober - yelled the foulest and most impotent of abuse when creatures such as Lord Slime of Slime opines on probity in public life, or cast swearing slander at the total drivel that constitutes much of the televisual offerings on any channel?
There is though a cure should it be wanted. Not watching is not the option. An Englishman pays his licence fee and is, thereby, perfectly entitled to watch and scorn.
The trick is this, a device long in circulation. An auto-changer disguised as a soft furry brick. When endurance is beyond bearing and Lord Slime must be assailed and assaulted mid-waffle, the to-hand 'brick' is wellied at the screen with full force of personal venom. The channel changes and the rage subsides leaving the Mr Solomon's of this world equally content that they have made their point. And, what's more, made it silently.
Bro. Charles would call this a 'win-win scenario' bless him.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Redressing The Balance Of Army Compensation - A Modest Proposal
...there will be not a few who are aghast that Bombardier Kerry Fletcher has won a one hundred and eighty six thousand pounds payout from an Employment Tribunal because she suffered harassment - largely by text message it would seem - on account of her sexuality.
There will, doubtless, be more people aghast that this award is greater than that available to other serving soldiers whose bodies and lives have been ripped apart by injuries sustained in the battlefield.
Examples as:
I have a modest proposal.
Bombardier Fletcher should naturally donate her entire payout to a charity or other body that cares for disabled ex-servicemen. That goes without saying.
Beyond that personal gesture though the Army itself must not shy away from a more systemic fix to the whole difficulty.
It runs thus.
Whenever a gravely wounded soldier is being evacuated to a military hospital the attending paramedics should read this pre-scripted message to him or her:
"Dear soldier X. We are here to save you and to care for you. We hate that you have been so grievously hurt and we know how much you must be suffering at this moment. Be assured that you have all our dedicated professional skills at your disposal. Be confident that you will receive the finest medical treatment we can give. If it is within our powers you will live.
But please also note - for reasons of compensation only - that we regard you as 1) a degenerate homosexual, or 2) a person of an ethnic minority we despise, or 3) someone we would like to shag given half or no chance. [Delete as necessary for the purpose].
Please understand that we do not do this from any motive of any personal malice, or that we actually mean what we say. This is purely an artificial device to enable you to sue the Army for harassment and to ensure that your eventual compensation package is adequate to your needs and commensurate with your real injuries."
What you reckon?
There will, doubtless, be more people aghast that this award is greater than that available to other serving soldiers whose bodies and lives have been ripped apart by injuries sustained in the battlefield.
Examples as:
- Marine Ben McBean, who lost an arm and a leg in a blast in Afghanistan, has been offered £160,000.
- Lance-Bombardier Ben Parkinson received £150,000 after losing his legs also in Afghanistan.
- Private Jamie Cooper benefits from just £57,000 for terrible injuries to his arm and stomach sustained whilst fighting in Iraq.
I have a modest proposal.
Bombardier Fletcher should naturally donate her entire payout to a charity or other body that cares for disabled ex-servicemen. That goes without saying.
Beyond that personal gesture though the Army itself must not shy away from a more systemic fix to the whole difficulty.
It runs thus.
Whenever a gravely wounded soldier is being evacuated to a military hospital the attending paramedics should read this pre-scripted message to him or her:
"Dear soldier X. We are here to save you and to care for you. We hate that you have been so grievously hurt and we know how much you must be suffering at this moment. Be assured that you have all our dedicated professional skills at your disposal. Be confident that you will receive the finest medical treatment we can give. If it is within our powers you will live.
But please also note - for reasons of compensation only - that we regard you as 1) a degenerate homosexual, or 2) a person of an ethnic minority we despise, or 3) someone we would like to shag given half or no chance. [Delete as necessary for the purpose].
Please understand that we do not do this from any motive of any personal malice, or that we actually mean what we say. This is purely an artificial device to enable you to sue the Army for harassment and to ensure that your eventual compensation package is adequate to your needs and commensurate with your real injuries."
What you reckon?
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Deeply Shocked...part the second
Serendipity, unlike good cheer (see previous), is not dependent on the stability or otherwise of the global financial markets. Indeed, it is in the very nature of the thing to pop up where and when least expected.
H and I were on a rare day out, taking in a neighbouring town and its delights. Though as befits a man and a wife our lives are joined at more than the odd hip, what we respectively look for in such a place must differ.
For she it will be a more than decent little Italian restaurant in which to take a fine luncheon, or a shop piled high in pastel household goods of great appeal and little practical purpose. Self will, naturally, nose out the local Church or Chapel for a particular memorial or architectural quirk, but other than that I am not much moved unless I spot an inn with a fair sized pool table and a gang of players who appear to know their game. (Few if any indeed spot the hustler behind the dog-collar as I seemingly fluke the black off three cushions and clean up the cash. No word to H or the Bish I beg!)
But as we strolled down the High Street a marvel came upon us both. For there, in a dusky courtyard corner, was one of those fine old music shops bursting with CDs of the music of our youth. Hard ever to know whether these fellows are in it for the trade as such. Mostly seems more a case of shifting a private collection into a public place for admiration and delight rather than for monetary gain.
Rarely, if ever, do I enter such a shop - we will call it that - in search of a particular song. It is much more a matter of relishing the prospect of being confronted with an album one had long forgotten existed. They really are the best of memories - those that are absent until of a sudden reappearing. Totally Proust really.
So we wandered and gazed therein, meandering through the racks of disks and the years gone by. Look, 'The Housemartins' before they became urban legends. Ah here, Jerry Garcia's first solo album! See, 'Bird On A Wire' never bettered. And so forth.
Then a little humming tune began to come before me. Simple strumming guitar and soft melody, sweet female voice and a half-recalled lyric. "Anchored down in Anchorage Alaska" it alliteratively went. Dum dum dee dum, dum dum dee dum (but with more gentle bounce than the words can convey of course).
The joy of such a place is that one can take such a fragmented tale to the counter and, with but a very brief sucking on teeth, the hairy being who holds sways gets it first time. "Michelle Shocked, that's who you mean. Album 'Short, Sharp, Shocked'. Haven't got it in at present. Shall I order it?"
Well, yes of course he shall. The song and the singer were precious enough to want to repossess, but it was more than that. For some many summers past, when H and I were first as one, we had been venturing for a day's pleasure into N and happened to spot, as we strolled, that Miss Shocked - whose music appealed to us both - was appearing that one and only night at the local theatre. But oh grief following sudden joy, all tickets were gone! We locked out, as the jargon of the day went.
Was it that that had triggered the nascent memory? All very possible. Sufficient possibility for me later that evening to take a Google check on the fate, fortune and forthcoming tour dates of Miss Shocked since that long ago time.
Deeply shocked to report - no avoiding the pun, in fact relishing it - the dear woman is to be performing once more in N but a few weeks hence! This time there will be no missing her. Two tickets are duly purchased courtesy of the modern miracle of online booking and we are set fair to attend.
I am already humming quite my favourite of all - 'Memories of East Texas'. The tune is in my head and most of the lyrics are re-emerging. "piney green rolling hills", "...and I mean to tell you my friends they weren't no easy roads", "...down by Kelsey Creek and detour through something something something". It's coming. I'm getting there.
Could look it up I guess, but I prefer to let the memory surface as it will. That's the beauty of serendipity.
H and I were on a rare day out, taking in a neighbouring town and its delights. Though as befits a man and a wife our lives are joined at more than the odd hip, what we respectively look for in such a place must differ.
For she it will be a more than decent little Italian restaurant in which to take a fine luncheon, or a shop piled high in pastel household goods of great appeal and little practical purpose. Self will, naturally, nose out the local Church or Chapel for a particular memorial or architectural quirk, but other than that I am not much moved unless I spot an inn with a fair sized pool table and a gang of players who appear to know their game. (Few if any indeed spot the hustler behind the dog-collar as I seemingly fluke the black off three cushions and clean up the cash. No word to H or the Bish I beg!)
But as we strolled down the High Street a marvel came upon us both. For there, in a dusky courtyard corner, was one of those fine old music shops bursting with CDs of the music of our youth. Hard ever to know whether these fellows are in it for the trade as such. Mostly seems more a case of shifting a private collection into a public place for admiration and delight rather than for monetary gain.
Rarely, if ever, do I enter such a shop - we will call it that - in search of a particular song. It is much more a matter of relishing the prospect of being confronted with an album one had long forgotten existed. They really are the best of memories - those that are absent until of a sudden reappearing. Totally Proust really.
So we wandered and gazed therein, meandering through the racks of disks and the years gone by. Look, 'The Housemartins' before they became urban legends. Ah here, Jerry Garcia's first solo album! See, 'Bird On A Wire' never bettered. And so forth.
Then a little humming tune began to come before me. Simple strumming guitar and soft melody, sweet female voice and a half-recalled lyric. "Anchored down in Anchorage Alaska" it alliteratively went. Dum dum dee dum, dum dum dee dum (but with more gentle bounce than the words can convey of course).
The joy of such a place is that one can take such a fragmented tale to the counter and, with but a very brief sucking on teeth, the hairy being who holds sways gets it first time. "Michelle Shocked, that's who you mean. Album 'Short, Sharp, Shocked'. Haven't got it in at present. Shall I order it?"
Well, yes of course he shall. The song and the singer were precious enough to want to repossess, but it was more than that. For some many summers past, when H and I were first as one, we had been venturing for a day's pleasure into N and happened to spot, as we strolled, that Miss Shocked - whose music appealed to us both - was appearing that one and only night at the local theatre. But oh grief following sudden joy, all tickets were gone! We locked out, as the jargon of the day went.
Was it that that had triggered the nascent memory? All very possible. Sufficient possibility for me later that evening to take a Google check on the fate, fortune and forthcoming tour dates of Miss Shocked since that long ago time.
Deeply shocked to report - no avoiding the pun, in fact relishing it - the dear woman is to be performing once more in N but a few weeks hence! This time there will be no missing her. Two tickets are duly purchased courtesy of the modern miracle of online booking and we are set fair to attend.
I am already humming quite my favourite of all - 'Memories of East Texas'. The tune is in my head and most of the lyrics are re-emerging. "piney green rolling hills", "...and I mean to tell you my friends they weren't no easy roads", "...down by Kelsey Creek and detour through something something something". It's coming. I'm getting there.
Could look it up I guess, but I prefer to let the memory surface as it will. That's the beauty of serendipity.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Deeply Shocked...part the first
Good cheer is, it must be acknowledged, somewhat lacking for most if not all in these troubled times. Although we in The Wolds are hardly banking folk by and large, with City positions to take and maintain, we do still fear for our rural livelihoods, our homes and our pensions as we helplessly watch the meltdown of financial institutions the world over.
Indeed, the only broad grin to be seen in the streets abroad these days has rested on the otherwise unappealing face of Farmer Burdock. Not one of nature's charmers, Farmer B makes it clear from one year end to the other that he cares as little for the company of others as he does about their respective fates and fortunes. (There was, long ago, a Mrs Farmer Burdock about the place, but she scarpered with an itinerant harvester - man not machine - preferring, it seems, the uncertainty of a traveller's life to the dread certainty of living with her grim husband. I judge not. Our Lord did not and nor shall I.)
Anyways, not ever disposed to group-hugs, spontaneous love-fests or other charismatic signs of bonding with his fellow creatures, it can be reasonably assumed that the desertion of his wife merely served to confirm Farmer Burdock in his distrust of humans and all their dark ways.
Among such dark ways he would pour particular and regular scorn on banks qua banks and on bankers qua bankers. "Rogues and thieves the lot of 'em," he did aver if - or indeed if not - asked, and though at the time his admonitions might be thought a bit strong it might be allowed that his is perhaps currently the majority view.
I do indeed feel quite sorry for poor Mr Potter, who holds sway at our one and only local banking emporium. A figure more particular in his probity one could not imagine. Imagine a Captain Mainwairing preserved in aspic and you have some idea of the man. No 'Master of the Universe' he, just a decent cove doing a difficult job in hard times. To see now, almost, skirts being drawn in and eyes of babes sheltered as he passes - mournfully - down High Street of a morning is as great a sorrow to witness as it must be to bear.
Needless to say perhaps that Burdock and Potter would never have batted for the same team. Farmer B has indeed long boasted that his cash - rumoured by many to be not an insubstantial pile - would as soon be cremated on an open fire as buried in the vaults of Potter's bank. Potter for his part has kept his counsel: the bank door stands open ready to receive Burdock's doubloons, but he - Potter - will not demean himself by touting for their trade.
Long years this stand-off has maintained, and of little note or consequence to any has it been. The Wolds moves on - albeit slowly - and if Farmer B's millions (the rumour would but grow of course over time) did not move with them then that was not our business or concern.
Hence of course the recent, rather unlovely, grin adhering to the Burdock countenance. Not one he to suffer with his fellow men; whilst we fret and stew that our pounds in Potter's place might just vanish overnight, Farmer B has been smirking - no other less hostile word will suffice - at our dismay. "Mine be safe if'en yourn be not" he positively crows.
Safe quite where we cannot but begin to wonder? Under the proverbial mattress seems hardly sufficient for such a mountain of moolah. Buried ten paces from the equally proverbial old oak tree is a goer. One has, it must be 'fessed, occasionally idly speculated.
Deeply shocking though now to reveal, some villains about the place have passed from probing thought to plundering act. For message comes today that Farmer Burdock's remote gaff has been burgled in the night, and he bound and bundled into his cellar as the thieves rampaged through the farmhouse in search of illicit booty.
Constable Tim, who brought this dreadful news to the Rectory, was quite unable - or perhaps professional lips were sealed - to say what precisely has been looted or who were the prime suspects in the case. He did though - the reason for his call - say that the 'old goat' (his phrase not mine naturally!) had been quite shaken up by his ordeal and that perhaps a soothing parsonic visit might be just pick-him-up required.
Hmm I briefly pondered. That duty called was not in doubt, though the efficacy of the purpose most certainly was. Not once in my twenty year tenure has Farmer B illumined Saint Dominic's with his presence, and although no firm word had ever been uttered by him on the subject it has been my reasonable opinion throughout that he holds clerics as a life-form no worthier or loftier than oft-abused bank managers.
But loins girded off I naturally set to administer such succour as I might to a fellow creature, expecting largely to be greeted with both a low and a dismissive countenance by my beloved parishioner. Wonder then my surprise when Farmer Burdock greeted my arrival with the broadest of broad grins and a fine indeed welcome to his humble home.
Odd or what? Yes, he said, he had howled at the moon for the very temerity of the rogues who had disturbed his night, his home and his person. But the humour of the man, not merely robust enough to survive such a multiple trespass was positively chuckling.
"Be like this Vicar. Mayhap I don't care for Potters and their Banks. Why should they make money from my money after all? 'Tis me that earned it and if there is gain to be had from the having of it, I'll make that my gain not their. But I ain't silly in the head. There is growth to be had and I have ensured it be the very first growth indeed. Come see."
So the old man - for such he is - led me down to his captive cellar and by torchlight showed me his vast and unraided treasure house. Rack upon rack of the finest vintage wines from around the world lay before me. Dusty dozens of bottles of golden and of crimson liqueur within startled my very being. Line upon line of the heavenliest harvests entranced my soul.
"No malts I fear Vicar, though I know that be thy tipple." (Canny goat then as well as an ancient!) "They do nicely from time to time, but the real return on investment has always been from wines. Was my father returning from the War who brought some Chateaux Petrus with him that started this business. He didn't know what he had, but I looked it up and bided my time. Thirty years gone and the wine not drunk, the selling of it paid for that lower meadow I bought from Widow Milner after her husband fell into the timber shredder never to be seen again."
The remembrance of Farmer Milner's awkward funeral filled my mind for a moment. There really hadn't been anything discernibly human left to bury. Such corpse as there was to be found had been spewed onto and into the woodchip pile. More pagan souls than mine had suggested to Widow Milner that she burn the lot as a magnificent sky cremation. Indeed, had not Tom the Bish interposed with a strict 'Non est', I might have been moved to agree to the solemn beauty of the thing. Unorthodox maybe, but a neat solution to a tricky matter. But no, we had to shovel - no other word - a representative sample of chip and bone and blood into a coffin for a proper church affair. The rest of the pile was indeed burnt - no other course considered - so Farmer Milner had a double send off really.
Burdock's voice cut through the remembrance. "So when them buggers came pounding through my door and threw me down into my cellar I nearly rocked with laughter. Let them rampage through my pots and pans I thought. If they want my old spoons and that dreadful painting by Great Aunt Maude that has haunted my parlour these decades, let 'em have 'em. I was safe guarding my real treasures!"
We emerged back into the kitchen. Farmer Burdock set me down for one last discourse. "Don't 'ee Vicar be telling folk of my tale. This is a matter of importance and due secrecy between a man and a man of God."
Assuring him of total and proper discretion I made to leave. Thrusting one dark bottle which he had carried up from the cellar into my hand - Tokay Essencia no less, a dessert wine as rare as wondrous and true Godly nectar - old man Burdock bade me farewell.
A bribe for my silence? A gift for my troubles? Uncharitable to say I couldn't tell which it might be. But as I sip a little of this perfect wine tonight I thank him for the deed, whatsoever the motive.
I have also checked the price of the thing and I tell you straight I am shocked, deeply shocked. Have you seen what a small bottle of Essencia will fetch on the open market? Well if you haven't I have and I am stunned. That last sip alone accounted for a parson's monthly stipend I reckon.
Will talk to Potter tomorrow about moving the Palladas Pension Pot, such as it is, out of bonds and into wines. He, solid fellow he is, will doubtless advise against anything so reckless. But I shall insist I believe. I shall say to Potter that I am seeking 'future liquidity'. I expect him to be impressed with my newly found financial nous, if never learning from whence it has come.
Indeed, the only broad grin to be seen in the streets abroad these days has rested on the otherwise unappealing face of Farmer Burdock. Not one of nature's charmers, Farmer B makes it clear from one year end to the other that he cares as little for the company of others as he does about their respective fates and fortunes. (There was, long ago, a Mrs Farmer Burdock about the place, but she scarpered with an itinerant harvester - man not machine - preferring, it seems, the uncertainty of a traveller's life to the dread certainty of living with her grim husband. I judge not. Our Lord did not and nor shall I.)
Anyways, not ever disposed to group-hugs, spontaneous love-fests or other charismatic signs of bonding with his fellow creatures, it can be reasonably assumed that the desertion of his wife merely served to confirm Farmer Burdock in his distrust of humans and all their dark ways.
Among such dark ways he would pour particular and regular scorn on banks qua banks and on bankers qua bankers. "Rogues and thieves the lot of 'em," he did aver if - or indeed if not - asked, and though at the time his admonitions might be thought a bit strong it might be allowed that his is perhaps currently the majority view.
I do indeed feel quite sorry for poor Mr Potter, who holds sway at our one and only local banking emporium. A figure more particular in his probity one could not imagine. Imagine a Captain Mainwairing preserved in aspic and you have some idea of the man. No 'Master of the Universe' he, just a decent cove doing a difficult job in hard times. To see now, almost, skirts being drawn in and eyes of babes sheltered as he passes - mournfully - down High Street of a morning is as great a sorrow to witness as it must be to bear.
Needless to say perhaps that Burdock and Potter would never have batted for the same team. Farmer B has indeed long boasted that his cash - rumoured by many to be not an insubstantial pile - would as soon be cremated on an open fire as buried in the vaults of Potter's bank. Potter for his part has kept his counsel: the bank door stands open ready to receive Burdock's doubloons, but he - Potter - will not demean himself by touting for their trade.
Long years this stand-off has maintained, and of little note or consequence to any has it been. The Wolds moves on - albeit slowly - and if Farmer B's millions (the rumour would but grow of course over time) did not move with them then that was not our business or concern.
Hence of course the recent, rather unlovely, grin adhering to the Burdock countenance. Not one he to suffer with his fellow men; whilst we fret and stew that our pounds in Potter's place might just vanish overnight, Farmer B has been smirking - no other less hostile word will suffice - at our dismay. "Mine be safe if'en yourn be not" he positively crows.
Safe quite where we cannot but begin to wonder? Under the proverbial mattress seems hardly sufficient for such a mountain of moolah. Buried ten paces from the equally proverbial old oak tree is a goer. One has, it must be 'fessed, occasionally idly speculated.
Deeply shocking though now to reveal, some villains about the place have passed from probing thought to plundering act. For message comes today that Farmer Burdock's remote gaff has been burgled in the night, and he bound and bundled into his cellar as the thieves rampaged through the farmhouse in search of illicit booty.
Constable Tim, who brought this dreadful news to the Rectory, was quite unable - or perhaps professional lips were sealed - to say what precisely has been looted or who were the prime suspects in the case. He did though - the reason for his call - say that the 'old goat' (his phrase not mine naturally!) had been quite shaken up by his ordeal and that perhaps a soothing parsonic visit might be just pick-him-up required.
Hmm I briefly pondered. That duty called was not in doubt, though the efficacy of the purpose most certainly was. Not once in my twenty year tenure has Farmer B illumined Saint Dominic's with his presence, and although no firm word had ever been uttered by him on the subject it has been my reasonable opinion throughout that he holds clerics as a life-form no worthier or loftier than oft-abused bank managers.
But loins girded off I naturally set to administer such succour as I might to a fellow creature, expecting largely to be greeted with both a low and a dismissive countenance by my beloved parishioner. Wonder then my surprise when Farmer Burdock greeted my arrival with the broadest of broad grins and a fine indeed welcome to his humble home.
Odd or what? Yes, he said, he had howled at the moon for the very temerity of the rogues who had disturbed his night, his home and his person. But the humour of the man, not merely robust enough to survive such a multiple trespass was positively chuckling.
"Be like this Vicar. Mayhap I don't care for Potters and their Banks. Why should they make money from my money after all? 'Tis me that earned it and if there is gain to be had from the having of it, I'll make that my gain not their. But I ain't silly in the head. There is growth to be had and I have ensured it be the very first growth indeed. Come see."
So the old man - for such he is - led me down to his captive cellar and by torchlight showed me his vast and unraided treasure house. Rack upon rack of the finest vintage wines from around the world lay before me. Dusty dozens of bottles of golden and of crimson liqueur within startled my very being. Line upon line of the heavenliest harvests entranced my soul.
"No malts I fear Vicar, though I know that be thy tipple." (Canny goat then as well as an ancient!) "They do nicely from time to time, but the real return on investment has always been from wines. Was my father returning from the War who brought some Chateaux Petrus with him that started this business. He didn't know what he had, but I looked it up and bided my time. Thirty years gone and the wine not drunk, the selling of it paid for that lower meadow I bought from Widow Milner after her husband fell into the timber shredder never to be seen again."
The remembrance of Farmer Milner's awkward funeral filled my mind for a moment. There really hadn't been anything discernibly human left to bury. Such corpse as there was to be found had been spewed onto and into the woodchip pile. More pagan souls than mine had suggested to Widow Milner that she burn the lot as a magnificent sky cremation. Indeed, had not Tom the Bish interposed with a strict 'Non est', I might have been moved to agree to the solemn beauty of the thing. Unorthodox maybe, but a neat solution to a tricky matter. But no, we had to shovel - no other word - a representative sample of chip and bone and blood into a coffin for a proper church affair. The rest of the pile was indeed burnt - no other course considered - so Farmer Milner had a double send off really.
Burdock's voice cut through the remembrance. "So when them buggers came pounding through my door and threw me down into my cellar I nearly rocked with laughter. Let them rampage through my pots and pans I thought. If they want my old spoons and that dreadful painting by Great Aunt Maude that has haunted my parlour these decades, let 'em have 'em. I was safe guarding my real treasures!"
We emerged back into the kitchen. Farmer Burdock set me down for one last discourse. "Don't 'ee Vicar be telling folk of my tale. This is a matter of importance and due secrecy between a man and a man of God."
Assuring him of total and proper discretion I made to leave. Thrusting one dark bottle which he had carried up from the cellar into my hand - Tokay Essencia no less, a dessert wine as rare as wondrous and true Godly nectar - old man Burdock bade me farewell.
A bribe for my silence? A gift for my troubles? Uncharitable to say I couldn't tell which it might be. But as I sip a little of this perfect wine tonight I thank him for the deed, whatsoever the motive.
I have also checked the price of the thing and I tell you straight I am shocked, deeply shocked. Have you seen what a small bottle of Essencia will fetch on the open market? Well if you haven't I have and I am stunned. That last sip alone accounted for a parson's monthly stipend I reckon.
Will talk to Potter tomorrow about moving the Palladas Pension Pot, such as it is, out of bonds and into wines. He, solid fellow he is, will doubtless advise against anything so reckless. But I shall insist I believe. I shall say to Potter that I am seeking 'future liquidity'. I expect him to be impressed with my newly found financial nous, if never learning from whence it has come.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Tattoo You Sir...
One's generally esteemed colleague, the Rev. Mullen, has gotten himself deep into some pretty hot water for 'injudicious' (if you accept the "only joking" excuse offered) or downright awful (if you take him straight - as it were!) remarks about the efficacy of tattooing male homosexualists' bottoms with dire warnings concerning the health risks pertaining to the act of sodomy.
We have been, of course, historically a society that has not shunned from branding certain classes of criminals with a palpable and everlasting mark of their offence. ("Oh you mean Jones the Burglar? Fat bloke, hangs round the village pump most days. Got a dirty big 'B' branded on his forehead. You'll not miss him.)
Not, overall, conducive to rehabilitation that one I would have thought, but no matter now. We are done with it and for better no doubt. But are we in danger of missing an important trick here? Seems we might. For story just in of perhaps the most hapless criminal loon of the year, who was caught nicking cars by a CCTV camera that had little difficulty in homing in on his neck on which the man's name and date of birth had been largely and visibly tattooed!
An elective act presumably, handy perhaps even for assuring oneself of one's identity at an amnesiac drugged or drunken moment. Useful at parties too, for avoiding those awkward moments of trying to pretend you can recall the name of the newly arrived, dimly but very distantly remembered, guest who hails you as the best of friends.
Think of the possibilities. Would save a fortune on ID cards or DNA databases. Being 'collared' - that once popular name for being arrested by a member of Her Majesty's finest constabulary - would take on fresh meaning and legs. ('Scuse me Sir. May I just turn down your shirt collar for a moment to confirm whom I am arresting for littering the Queen's highway?)
H, mind you, has always banged on about how I should have my name and number embellished on the old dog-collar lest I get lost far from home. Have assumed 'til now she to have been jesting. Must re-visit that premise!
We have been, of course, historically a society that has not shunned from branding certain classes of criminals with a palpable and everlasting mark of their offence. ("Oh you mean Jones the Burglar? Fat bloke, hangs round the village pump most days. Got a dirty big 'B' branded on his forehead. You'll not miss him.)
Not, overall, conducive to rehabilitation that one I would have thought, but no matter now. We are done with it and for better no doubt. But are we in danger of missing an important trick here? Seems we might. For story just in of perhaps the most hapless criminal loon of the year, who was caught nicking cars by a CCTV camera that had little difficulty in homing in on his neck on which the man's name and date of birth had been largely and visibly tattooed!
An elective act presumably, handy perhaps even for assuring oneself of one's identity at an amnesiac drugged or drunken moment. Useful at parties too, for avoiding those awkward moments of trying to pretend you can recall the name of the newly arrived, dimly but very distantly remembered, guest who hails you as the best of friends.
Think of the possibilities. Would save a fortune on ID cards or DNA databases. Being 'collared' - that once popular name for being arrested by a member of Her Majesty's finest constabulary - would take on fresh meaning and legs. ('Scuse me Sir. May I just turn down your shirt collar for a moment to confirm whom I am arresting for littering the Queen's highway?)
H, mind you, has always banged on about how I should have my name and number embellished on the old dog-collar lest I get lost far from home. Have assumed 'til now she to have been jesting. Must re-visit that premise!
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Don't Panic!
...That great rallying cry to alarm of our very own and much cherished Corporal Jones [see 'Dads Army' passim] only passed his lips, of course, when he was in a very deep blue funk; not of fear as such - for he would yet have charged a Nazi tank with a British broom handle if necessary - but as an air-raid siren to warn all and sundry that something very nasty was imminently afoot.
So did I panic today when dear E cried out in tears and agony to her doting Papa that she was showing all and every sign of a heart attack as we pulled into some horse show? Actually it was not she who signed the thing specific. She merely described the symptoms - acute chest pains, inability to breathe properly and tingling all down her arm. Plus body rent by spasms that no parent ever wants to observe in a beloved child.
Oh and clammy too to the feel. That last at the insistence of the terribly calm lady at Ambulance Central - or howsoever titled - who smartly asked to be so advised. Serious from the start of the call, I could tell from the urgent tone of her voice that as soon as the "Yes very clammy" phrase was half out of my lips she'd hit the red button.
"We have a First Responder who will be with you in minutes. An ambulance will follow shortly thereafter and may even arrive before the air ambulance lands." In the end it was a tie. The paramedic vehicle pulled in just as the helicopter was circling for its rapid descent.
That I am sitting here tonight so very calmly posting this note is perhaps clue enough that all is well that has ended well. The diagnosis given on the spot was a panic not a heart attack. A much welcomed, of course, and half-assumed at the time alternative explanation of what was unfolding.
E, as all riders about to compete, does get nervous and roused. General and clear signals of such pressures and stresses are loud swearing and cursing. At the horse often, at her dear Mama and Papa always. We the parents - and perhaps too the horse - don't much care to be so roundly abused, but we take it - as indeed does the horse - in good if battered spirits. (A sort of equestrian equivalent of "You cannot be serious!" as performed by dear young Mr McEnroe those many years ago.)
Oddly enough, as she later described the events, E had not been feeling consciously anxious about the impending show though indeed it was to have been one pretty significant qualifier for a regional, possibly national event. "I was just reading NME [ah how the years slip away!] when it started out of the blue."
She didn't panic as such it seems but she was very scared. That I can well imagine. When the body starts so misbehaving that way for no discernible reason it can only be terribly frightening.
Everybody was wonderfully supportive and helpful it has to be said. "Not a well puppy" were the kindly words of the on-site First Aider - whose show it was and whose show indeed had to be suspended whilst the helicopter came and went. (Can't really be having a dressage test running "B to M working trot. At X rider bucks off as horse bolts to sound of descending aircraft!")
Reassurance too from the paramedics in whimsical fashion: "My middle name's Jesus. I've cured you without any medication." Not the first mention of Our Lord's precious name that afternoon I can tell you!
You stand there as parent not panicking but dreading. It cannot happen you pray. You believe. You insist!
It could be happening you do though know. It did happen to a friend of mine some years ago. Her young daughter - a mere mid-twenties - collapsed one day for no clear reason. It was, it terribly transpired, her heart. She had been born with - unknown until that day - a defect called 'Long QT syndrome.'
A genetic - I believe - abnormality of the heart rhythm for which there was only medication once revealed but no cure. The consultant told the mother that her daughter might live a long and normal life. Or not. Emma - for that was her name - woefully got the not. She died within the year.
It has been long since I last pondered this terrible sadness of some twenty years ago. It will be yet a while before I stop remembering.
Did one then in the end panic? Yes and no. It was not panic that decided me to call for an ambulance in the face of uncertainty. No father of any wit or sense can contently rest on the arrogant presumption that fell illness cannot strike his beloved simply because that is what they are - his beloved. There was a binary choice to be made - call or not call. A call was the only call to make then in all the circs. as given.
But did I panic as I waited those long anxious minutes to be told there was no need to be afraid for the very life one holds so completely and utterly dear and precious?
Need you ask or I reply?
So did I panic today when dear E cried out in tears and agony to her doting Papa that she was showing all and every sign of a heart attack as we pulled into some horse show? Actually it was not she who signed the thing specific. She merely described the symptoms - acute chest pains, inability to breathe properly and tingling all down her arm. Plus body rent by spasms that no parent ever wants to observe in a beloved child.
Oh and clammy too to the feel. That last at the insistence of the terribly calm lady at Ambulance Central - or howsoever titled - who smartly asked to be so advised. Serious from the start of the call, I could tell from the urgent tone of her voice that as soon as the "Yes very clammy" phrase was half out of my lips she'd hit the red button.
"We have a First Responder who will be with you in minutes. An ambulance will follow shortly thereafter and may even arrive before the air ambulance lands." In the end it was a tie. The paramedic vehicle pulled in just as the helicopter was circling for its rapid descent.
That I am sitting here tonight so very calmly posting this note is perhaps clue enough that all is well that has ended well. The diagnosis given on the spot was a panic not a heart attack. A much welcomed, of course, and half-assumed at the time alternative explanation of what was unfolding.
E, as all riders about to compete, does get nervous and roused. General and clear signals of such pressures and stresses are loud swearing and cursing. At the horse often, at her dear Mama and Papa always. We the parents - and perhaps too the horse - don't much care to be so roundly abused, but we take it - as indeed does the horse - in good if battered spirits. (A sort of equestrian equivalent of "You cannot be serious!" as performed by dear young Mr McEnroe those many years ago.)
Oddly enough, as she later described the events, E had not been feeling consciously anxious about the impending show though indeed it was to have been one pretty significant qualifier for a regional, possibly national event. "I was just reading NME [ah how the years slip away!] when it started out of the blue."
She didn't panic as such it seems but she was very scared. That I can well imagine. When the body starts so misbehaving that way for no discernible reason it can only be terribly frightening.
Everybody was wonderfully supportive and helpful it has to be said. "Not a well puppy" were the kindly words of the on-site First Aider - whose show it was and whose show indeed had to be suspended whilst the helicopter came and went. (Can't really be having a dressage test running "B to M working trot. At X rider bucks off as horse bolts to sound of descending aircraft!")
Reassurance too from the paramedics in whimsical fashion: "My middle name's Jesus. I've cured you without any medication." Not the first mention of Our Lord's precious name that afternoon I can tell you!
You stand there as parent not panicking but dreading. It cannot happen you pray. You believe. You insist!
It could be happening you do though know. It did happen to a friend of mine some years ago. Her young daughter - a mere mid-twenties - collapsed one day for no clear reason. It was, it terribly transpired, her heart. She had been born with - unknown until that day - a defect called 'Long QT syndrome.'
A genetic - I believe - abnormality of the heart rhythm for which there was only medication once revealed but no cure. The consultant told the mother that her daughter might live a long and normal life. Or not. Emma - for that was her name - woefully got the not. She died within the year.
It has been long since I last pondered this terrible sadness of some twenty years ago. It will be yet a while before I stop remembering.
Did one then in the end panic? Yes and no. It was not panic that decided me to call for an ambulance in the face of uncertainty. No father of any wit or sense can contently rest on the arrogant presumption that fell illness cannot strike his beloved simply because that is what they are - his beloved. There was a binary choice to be made - call or not call. A call was the only call to make then in all the circs. as given.
But did I panic as I waited those long anxious minutes to be told there was no need to be afraid for the very life one holds so completely and utterly dear and precious?
Need you ask or I reply?
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Bandit Country...
Ever pictured yourself as a Balkan bandit?
By and large I suspect not. Nor indeed, mild parson that I am, have I much dreamt of a life of brigandry. Fearless - near desperate sometimes - descent from mountain fortress intent on fell havoc on peaceful valley folk below. That sort of thing.
This though is the glory of the pipe, as filled from Eastern European tobacco and purveyed by harmless, eirenic no doubt, London retailers.
Tonight, through them, I can be the fiercest bandit alive, should ever I wish to be such.
Latakia based baccy in a Churchwarden pipe?
'À rebours' as dear Joris-Karl Huysmans would say.
By and large I suspect not. Nor indeed, mild parson that I am, have I much dreamt of a life of brigandry. Fearless - near desperate sometimes - descent from mountain fortress intent on fell havoc on peaceful valley folk below. That sort of thing.
This though is the glory of the pipe, as filled from Eastern European tobacco and purveyed by harmless, eirenic no doubt, London retailers.
Tonight, through them, I can be the fiercest bandit alive, should ever I wish to be such.
Latakia based baccy in a Churchwarden pipe?
'À rebours' as dear Joris-Karl Huysmans would say.
"De Mortuis...
...nil nisi bonum." That, we were told, was the golden rule when speaking of the newly dead. They weren't exactly in any decent position to rebut or refute any ill or unkind words, so it was deemed only fair not to say what may well have been on anyone's mind about the fellow.
May well have been a complete basket-case, but best not to harp too much on that tune; refer rather to the deceased as 'mildly eccentric not perhaps completely at ease in the society of others.' Not an untruth, but neither the full picture. A satisfactory code among friends.
It was though dear Harold Laski who so cleverly picked up on where that might lead: 'De mortuis nil nisi bunkum' indeed. Paeans of praise for a right shafter, or charged glasses raised in tribute to an utter stinker.
Better though perhaps that rank hypocrisy than the all too modern habit of the relentless scribing of positive pen-portraits for all deceased and sundry, but most especially for the all too many young people who die so needlessly and early.
I do not want to read that Charlie was well-liked by all in school, eternally cheerful and diligent in work and play. I do not want to be told that Angie was an angel who touched the lives of all she met.
They may well have been just so. But equally they might have been appalling little monsters who terrified their families and terrorised their neighbourhoods.
The only desperate thing that matters now is that they have died, and that death is a horror to those who love them - God too - saints in the making or budding little devils alike.
May well have been a complete basket-case, but best not to harp too much on that tune; refer rather to the deceased as 'mildly eccentric not perhaps completely at ease in the society of others.' Not an untruth, but neither the full picture. A satisfactory code among friends.
It was though dear Harold Laski who so cleverly picked up on where that might lead: 'De mortuis nil nisi bunkum' indeed. Paeans of praise for a right shafter, or charged glasses raised in tribute to an utter stinker.
Better though perhaps that rank hypocrisy than the all too modern habit of the relentless scribing of positive pen-portraits for all deceased and sundry, but most especially for the all too many young people who die so needlessly and early.
I do not want to read that Charlie was well-liked by all in school, eternally cheerful and diligent in work and play. I do not want to be told that Angie was an angel who touched the lives of all she met.
They may well have been just so. But equally they might have been appalling little monsters who terrified their families and terrorised their neighbourhoods.
The only desperate thing that matters now is that they have died, and that death is a horror to those who love them - God too - saints in the making or budding little devils alike.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
A Fête Worse Than...
...is there indeed anything more to be dreaded than the impending annual fête de village, that terrifying mix of warring egos all gathered together for the alleged greater glory of the parish coffers though in reality assembling but for an occasion of ferocious factional fighting?
You'll not have failed to spot that there has been a lacuna not far short the span of the Missouri River at its very widest (round about where it whacks into the Mississippi if you must know one gathers) of tales of local derring-do and other country matters in these writings of late.
In truth, one has been walkabout much this past year - both interiorly and externally - and thus heart and mind as well as travelling body has been largely absent from Woldean parts.
H has been a brick throughout it must be said at once. If one were to describe this whole thing as a reverse 'Brief Encounter' climax - you know the lines "You've been a long way away." "Yes." "Thank you for coming back to me." - that would be wrongly to impute that romance of an adulterous kind, howsoever unconsummated, had been the fell matter in hand.
Au contraire - as the visiting Victorian Frenchman replied to his English hosts when asked after a particularly rough Channel crossing if he had partaken of luncheon - there have been fewer than two persons involved in this tricksy little shindig of mine. Moi seul indeed has been somewhat lost in transit not found in any wrongful place or arms.
One has though in some ways been off-piste as well as off-colour. 'Male menopause' might be the glib - if singularly organically inapposite metaphor - to have thrust at one by way of explanation. Yes, there has been some nostalgic sense of 'a great future behind him', but then one has always been somewhat of a gloomy cove for whom the obvious impermanence of the fragile glass was always more to the fore than whether its contents should be considered half way up or half way down.
Nor indeed has the time of life quite yet been reached when one by instinct turns first to the Telegraph obits. for the latest news on one's cronies. ("Ah dear Parson 'Mildew' Millhouse. Never knew he toyed with Roman ways in his youth. Quite the proto-Oratorian it seems he was. Too much dry sherry at an impressionable age I'd call it." That sort of thing.)
Though by happenstance, it must be said, it was only the other evening when old Canon 'Hanging' Jeffries - a pal since seminary days - phoned for a chat and enquired, inter alia, how our mutual friend Prior Margaret of the Sisters of the Lost Souls did, to which one could but only reply "Still dead I fear" she having passed on to glory a decade or more since. Bit of a teeth and malt sucking moment for all that one.
No, not death but life has me in a jangle, and jangling one doesn't know for the life of one what quite the matter is. A troubled faith perhaps, though what faith deserves the name if it is not so assailed by frets from time to time? Certainly some ill-bodings on perhaps the irredeemable nature of our land and its people - that rank heresy of course but not an unarguable position.
Bit foxed without a clear route to a bolthole it must be said. Maybe there are no boltholes anymore, the ones one thought were there merely illusory even.
Dear Dom. Robin would never have stooped to the "Get a grip boy" confessorial line, but if he had he might be so tempted now.
Cannot in any way dispute that a firm grip on this wretched - no stripe that, wondrous - village fete heading my way is needed. Squadrons of helpers of all sorts from showers-in to shovers-out to be recruited. Legions of impeccably fair judges to be lined up for all the varied and desperately important competitions from pony dressage to melting-moment cakes. One or two families even to be sharply warned that the archery display is quite not the time to settle ancient festering feuds!
The mettle of a warrior priest must be summonsed from far distant dusty attic rooms. The mantle of battle shaken out of its moth-strewn cupboard. The motto of Hannibal - 'Aut viam inveniam aut viam faciam' - once more to adorn the Palladas crest.
That's the way to do it. I trust!
You'll not have failed to spot that there has been a lacuna not far short the span of the Missouri River at its very widest (round about where it whacks into the Mississippi if you must know one gathers) of tales of local derring-do and other country matters in these writings of late.
In truth, one has been walkabout much this past year - both interiorly and externally - and thus heart and mind as well as travelling body has been largely absent from Woldean parts.
H has been a brick throughout it must be said at once. If one were to describe this whole thing as a reverse 'Brief Encounter' climax - you know the lines "You've been a long way away." "Yes." "Thank you for coming back to me." - that would be wrongly to impute that romance of an adulterous kind, howsoever unconsummated, had been the fell matter in hand.
Au contraire - as the visiting Victorian Frenchman replied to his English hosts when asked after a particularly rough Channel crossing if he had partaken of luncheon - there have been fewer than two persons involved in this tricksy little shindig of mine. Moi seul indeed has been somewhat lost in transit not found in any wrongful place or arms.
One has though in some ways been off-piste as well as off-colour. 'Male menopause' might be the glib - if singularly organically inapposite metaphor - to have thrust at one by way of explanation. Yes, there has been some nostalgic sense of 'a great future behind him', but then one has always been somewhat of a gloomy cove for whom the obvious impermanence of the fragile glass was always more to the fore than whether its contents should be considered half way up or half way down.
Nor indeed has the time of life quite yet been reached when one by instinct turns first to the Telegraph obits. for the latest news on one's cronies. ("Ah dear Parson 'Mildew' Millhouse. Never knew he toyed with Roman ways in his youth. Quite the proto-Oratorian it seems he was. Too much dry sherry at an impressionable age I'd call it." That sort of thing.)
Though by happenstance, it must be said, it was only the other evening when old Canon 'Hanging' Jeffries - a pal since seminary days - phoned for a chat and enquired, inter alia, how our mutual friend Prior Margaret of the Sisters of the Lost Souls did, to which one could but only reply "Still dead I fear" she having passed on to glory a decade or more since. Bit of a teeth and malt sucking moment for all that one.
No, not death but life has me in a jangle, and jangling one doesn't know for the life of one what quite the matter is. A troubled faith perhaps, though what faith deserves the name if it is not so assailed by frets from time to time? Certainly some ill-bodings on perhaps the irredeemable nature of our land and its people - that rank heresy of course but not an unarguable position.
Bit foxed without a clear route to a bolthole it must be said. Maybe there are no boltholes anymore, the ones one thought were there merely illusory even.
Dear Dom. Robin would never have stooped to the "Get a grip boy" confessorial line, but if he had he might be so tempted now.
Cannot in any way dispute that a firm grip on this wretched - no stripe that, wondrous - village fete heading my way is needed. Squadrons of helpers of all sorts from showers-in to shovers-out to be recruited. Legions of impeccably fair judges to be lined up for all the varied and desperately important competitions from pony dressage to melting-moment cakes. One or two families even to be sharply warned that the archery display is quite not the time to settle ancient festering feuds!
The mettle of a warrior priest must be summonsed from far distant dusty attic rooms. The mantle of battle shaken out of its moth-strewn cupboard. The motto of Hannibal - 'Aut viam inveniam aut viam faciam' - once more to adorn the Palladas crest.
That's the way to do it. I trust!
Monday, August 18, 2008
A Timely Gift...
...You will recall (or see archives if not) a fondness of mine for the travel writings of dear Patrick ('Paddy') Leigh Fermor. So morbid have been recent thoughts I hardly dare write his name lest it prompt refulgent and deserved obits. to appear. Ninety-something he must be by now, possibly though dessicated to immortal mummification by the fierce Mani sun.
They do say that his sole novel, 'The Violins of Saint-Jacques', only among his works failed to trouble the scorer as it were. Breathe it not in Babylon, but I've not much quite cared either for his monastic book 'A Time To Keep Silence.' Not that it's a hash by any stretch, making rather a decent smite - as an outsider - at the life to be lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict.
That though is the keen point. The view of the outsider cannot in any place or at any pace comprehend or communicate the utterly alien other world of the insider. An anthropologist's doom that one. Even I, as one once in now out again, cannot say or recall to the new self what once the old self knew and lived.
He could have done worse of course. Graham Greene did for one. Rattled on about "the vow of silence" in 'Monsignor Quixote' I believe it was. Tried warning him that there was no such thing, but the pompous prig avowed he knew better because he was "...a frequent guest of the Abbot."
Guest my arse, is my riposte. That is precisely it. Guests are not there to know anything whatsoever and if they did it would probably shrivel their tender, slightly idolatrous, souls.
But put him in his métier vraiment - the young itinerant with a passion for secular, pre-War European cultures de haut en bas - and there is none to match Paddy for sharpness of observation and richness of insight. From the hideous bursting Burghers of Munich - and their wives - gorging themselves obese in monstrous tribute to their nation, to pale, delicate White Russian exiles all shadow and cobweb yet joyous musical talents; from welcoming farmers and artisans for whom a guest was indeed a holy thing, to lustful young peasant women happy to fetch some colour to a pale Englishman's cheek - all shall be found, and so much more, in but the first two books of his travels on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s.
Not though merely - as if that were little which it were not - depicting or describing the present, the crisp glory of a near silent European winter forest or the bustle of hard-working, hard-drinking farmers, Paddy takes you through the voluminous historical pasts that swarm through every town and over every field. A battle fought across these river banks in the time of the Caesars, meddling if righteous medieval saints uprooting sacred pagan oaks, Renaissance dynasties or Carolingian factions disputing every mountain and valley - all this is woven into the landscape of rock or river, and thus no single blade of grass even seems less than a thousand years old.
Architecture, art, music, literature all sprung from its place in European time, that too is there. The gross martyring artisans, belching as they slew the troublesome saint, the be-ribboned Landsknecht - in whose elaborate costume the modern quite bursts through the medieval - or the blond warrior giants of The Thirty Years War all pose for their respective portraits or else emerge from pages of wonderful poetic text. Towns, towers, walls of castles and houses - generations of history in stone and wood. The summation of Gothic art and mind in a single decorative carving on a cathedral choir stall.
The slow, occasionally turbulent often brutal, wending of ancient tribes and races across the continent. The rapidly rising modern tide of darkly approaching Nazism. Or lighter than that, the castle prison of Richard the Lionheart or that precise spot on the Danube where Schubert - he too on a walking trip - composed the 'Trout Quintet'. All - as Melville's warp and woof of life - is freely given as a gift to the reader.
Was all this blown away in the flattening horror of the war just to come, or did we simply forget how to see the past in and through a post-war facade of cement, steel and ideology? Would it be possible - permitted even - to take that same journey now, and meet by chance in crowded, smoke-filled (not that alas for certain) inns people who would greet a stranger with kindliness and fill him with food, beer and knowledge of lore, custom, nature and life stretching back over centuries? Somehow I fear I doubt it would.
If you know the story then you do. Some forty years past the first volume - 'A Time of Gifts' - was published; nearly another decade before the second - 'Between the Woods and the Water' - appeared. And now some twenty years later we still wait for the third and final instalment to show.
Time for another gift if you would be so kind Paddy. But if not to be then one's thanks for favours already gratefully received.
They do say that his sole novel, 'The Violins of Saint-Jacques', only among his works failed to trouble the scorer as it were. Breathe it not in Babylon, but I've not much quite cared either for his monastic book 'A Time To Keep Silence.' Not that it's a hash by any stretch, making rather a decent smite - as an outsider - at the life to be lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict.
That though is the keen point. The view of the outsider cannot in any place or at any pace comprehend or communicate the utterly alien other world of the insider. An anthropologist's doom that one. Even I, as one once in now out again, cannot say or recall to the new self what once the old self knew and lived.
He could have done worse of course. Graham Greene did for one. Rattled on about "the vow of silence" in 'Monsignor Quixote' I believe it was. Tried warning him that there was no such thing, but the pompous prig avowed he knew better because he was "...a frequent guest of the Abbot."
Guest my arse, is my riposte. That is precisely it. Guests are not there to know anything whatsoever and if they did it would probably shrivel their tender, slightly idolatrous, souls.
But put him in his métier vraiment - the young itinerant with a passion for secular, pre-War European cultures de haut en bas - and there is none to match Paddy for sharpness of observation and richness of insight. From the hideous bursting Burghers of Munich - and their wives - gorging themselves obese in monstrous tribute to their nation, to pale, delicate White Russian exiles all shadow and cobweb yet joyous musical talents; from welcoming farmers and artisans for whom a guest was indeed a holy thing, to lustful young peasant women happy to fetch some colour to a pale Englishman's cheek - all shall be found, and so much more, in but the first two books of his travels on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s.
Not though merely - as if that were little which it were not - depicting or describing the present, the crisp glory of a near silent European winter forest or the bustle of hard-working, hard-drinking farmers, Paddy takes you through the voluminous historical pasts that swarm through every town and over every field. A battle fought across these river banks in the time of the Caesars, meddling if righteous medieval saints uprooting sacred pagan oaks, Renaissance dynasties or Carolingian factions disputing every mountain and valley - all this is woven into the landscape of rock or river, and thus no single blade of grass even seems less than a thousand years old.
Architecture, art, music, literature all sprung from its place in European time, that too is there. The gross martyring artisans, belching as they slew the troublesome saint, the be-ribboned Landsknecht - in whose elaborate costume the modern quite bursts through the medieval - or the blond warrior giants of The Thirty Years War all pose for their respective portraits or else emerge from pages of wonderful poetic text. Towns, towers, walls of castles and houses - generations of history in stone and wood. The summation of Gothic art and mind in a single decorative carving on a cathedral choir stall.
The slow, occasionally turbulent often brutal, wending of ancient tribes and races across the continent. The rapidly rising modern tide of darkly approaching Nazism. Or lighter than that, the castle prison of Richard the Lionheart or that precise spot on the Danube where Schubert - he too on a walking trip - composed the 'Trout Quintet'. All - as Melville's warp and woof of life - is freely given as a gift to the reader.
Was all this blown away in the flattening horror of the war just to come, or did we simply forget how to see the past in and through a post-war facade of cement, steel and ideology? Would it be possible - permitted even - to take that same journey now, and meet by chance in crowded, smoke-filled (not that alas for certain) inns people who would greet a stranger with kindliness and fill him with food, beer and knowledge of lore, custom, nature and life stretching back over centuries? Somehow I fear I doubt it would.
If you know the story then you do. Some forty years past the first volume - 'A Time of Gifts' - was published; nearly another decade before the second - 'Between the Woods and the Water' - appeared. And now some twenty years later we still wait for the third and final instalment to show.
Time for another gift if you would be so kind Paddy. But if not to be then one's thanks for favours already gratefully received.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Is There A Doctor Faustus In The House...?
Doctor Faustus made a pact with the devil, one he came unsurprisingly deeply to regret though remorse was no escape. I made no such pact, would not even if I could. But I did, when this wretched sarcoma came, avow that as best I could I would live long enough to see E grow up.
Being somewhat the pedant I would have seen her turning eighteen as that moment of formal adulthood. But I think she has beaten me to it at a mere seventeen. Left school, with a more or less live-in boyfriend [see earlier] the dear infant - ah but no longer that - even started her first job on Tuesday this.
A veterinary practice in the village has taken her on as a trainee, but the first of many steps to qualifying in some profession to care for animals. A man - a father more - could not be more proud. At lunchtime on her first day, I texted her to enquire how she was doing. 'So far so good' came the reply. Dear child - that too no longer - I could not bring myself to add 'Just another forty years to go then!'
And so she has grown up and my avowal is fulfilled, thank the Lord. I do not believe Lucifer has come to claim his reward, for it was not with him I made my concordat. But maybe, just perhaps, higher claims are being put upon me. We shall see. It may not be, but if so then I shall rest in peace.
Not until the very late autumn is my next scan - the proverbial now annual date with destiny - and I do trust I shall manage some undisturbed nights while I wait. I get the message, believe me, if message there is to be one.
Being somewhat the pedant I would have seen her turning eighteen as that moment of formal adulthood. But I think she has beaten me to it at a mere seventeen. Left school, with a more or less live-in boyfriend [see earlier] the dear infant - ah but no longer that - even started her first job on Tuesday this.
A veterinary practice in the village has taken her on as a trainee, but the first of many steps to qualifying in some profession to care for animals. A man - a father more - could not be more proud. At lunchtime on her first day, I texted her to enquire how she was doing. 'So far so good' came the reply. Dear child - that too no longer - I could not bring myself to add 'Just another forty years to go then!'
And so she has grown up and my avowal is fulfilled, thank the Lord. I do not believe Lucifer has come to claim his reward, for it was not with him I made my concordat. But maybe, just perhaps, higher claims are being put upon me. We shall see. It may not be, but if so then I shall rest in peace.
Not until the very late autumn is my next scan - the proverbial now annual date with destiny - and I do trust I shall manage some undisturbed nights while I wait. I get the message, believe me, if message there is to be one.
La Mort Encore....
What is it with me and death at present I ask? Last night, once more, death came by in a singularly aggressive and unmannerly manner. A dream again, yet perchance a portent? (Might even be minded to check my life insurance policy, but then that wouldn't take long as I have none.)
The circs. were slightly different, though the grabbing, thrusting act was the same. A totally invisible force this time; no hand or arm just a sharp presence.
Forewarned being forearmed, when death struck last night I struck back. It grabbed me, so I grabbed it with equal, opposing force. That though not to its liking one bit - nor actually to any useful avail - for it merely hurled me the length of the dream room leaving me startled, winded and more or less running up the white flag of surrender.
That the moment to wake up of course, in something of a muck sweat and wonderfully rationally aware that the fell fiend was there before me still, an inch from my face daring me to open my eyes to confront its invisible self.
So I did. Eyes ablaze, but it was not there. It had fled my conscious counterblast. For this time at least death has not undone me. I do believe though it is getting bolder by the hour.
The circs. were slightly different, though the grabbing, thrusting act was the same. A totally invisible force this time; no hand or arm just a sharp presence.
Forewarned being forearmed, when death struck last night I struck back. It grabbed me, so I grabbed it with equal, opposing force. That though not to its liking one bit - nor actually to any useful avail - for it merely hurled me the length of the dream room leaving me startled, winded and more or less running up the white flag of surrender.
That the moment to wake up of course, in something of a muck sweat and wonderfully rationally aware that the fell fiend was there before me still, an inch from my face daring me to open my eyes to confront its invisible self.
So I did. Eyes ablaze, but it was not there. It had fled my conscious counterblast. For this time at least death has not undone me. I do believe though it is getting bolder by the hour.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Death's Dream...
...every once in a while I dream of my death. Don't we all? Can't spend all our sleeping time in complete oblivion, or else in some incestual turmoil despite Herr Freud's prognostications.
This then my latest death's dream:
I am in our house of life. It is a long, low bungalow. One storey - but many stories, each for one of who we are. My room off a corridor that opens out to H's room and to E's.
Both are absent this day, not something that troubles me. We are on a high plain, the land is glossy and bright. Old, magical clowns play on the sand. They could be irksome, with wild clothing and hats, but I am not anything more than intrigued that they are there.
The wind picks up and I lie down to show that this defensive posture is best for protecting against a coming storm. Only mild swirls of perhaps danger approaching, so I am not sure why I am so determined to be down on the ground.
But then someone says "Look, see the tornado, we are in its path." And we are. A force five massive funnel comes over the hill straight towards the house of my life.
Can I run away, avoid its path? Why should one man not avoid nature, a natural thing I allow, but looking so much a cartoon merely a moving sketch? But strangely I cannot. My humanity is not able, I am cross to discover, to nip to one side and avoid this terrible thing. The tornado, no longer just a drawing in charcoal, must hit right across me and the house of my life.
So again I duck down into the ground. I fear above all that I will be sucked up by the force of the thing, flung high into the air to my doom.
At a mercy, however, as the full force of the tornado passes over me, it does not lift me up but pushes me down into the friable earth. The wind is a terrible weight. I am driven deeper and deeper underground. I am almost buried in the earth and I clutch a small root hoping neither to be plucked up into the sky nor to be suffocated into the ground.
There must come a climax, the epicentre of the tornado and then the passing. And so it happens. The crushing, downward force lifts from me and I must scrabble towards the light to be free from the earth that threatens to drown me. There is the light from a window above me and I push upwards towards that light. The root to which I have clung breaks, but I had expected no more and no less of it. Not quite a symbol, nor yet a strong refuge, it had been what it could be.
I am alive and I am safe. Alone, but not yet entirely sure that E or H have been hurt or unharmed. I must check the other rooms in the house of my life to be sure they have escaped. In the first room there are mementos of how we were when E was little. Small cameos, inscribed on plaster, show our lives as they were. I cannot be certain that each episode is our actual past, but if not then close enough to something we once were.
But I must at least call out to make sure that they are not here, that E and H have been somewhere entirely away from the tornado.
No response from either and though the silence is somehow sad, it still remains that better that I here alone without them than that they too should have been scared by the wind.
So I must check their rooms to see if they are all right. I know where to look for them, but by accident I open the door to a room that is not one of ours. There is a thickish grey curtain blocking the view and behind it lies someone or thing that must not be disturbed. I retreat to the corridor off which lie all our rooms and I find one room that is ours, though it is empty.
Emptiness is not a problem: E and H were not here when the storm came, but I have to be sure.
One more room to check for their presence. It is a simple matter of setting aside the room not to enter. But I cannot count out this other room and once again I open the door to the not-our room with the curtain behind which lies my doom.
To have done this the once was forgivable, but not a second time. The doom is unleashed. A hand - an arm but no body - whips out like a snake's tongue. The hand grips me by that part of my side where the surgeon cut out the sarcoma.
The hand clasps that place. It knows what it seeks. The pain is horrid and unendurable. I know that the hand grips me for a purpose. It compels my death. It knows that this grip is all that it does and that in doing it I am slain.
As that moment comes I awake with a terrible gripping pain in my side, in that very place where death-to-be once lived.
Did I but sleep badly for lying on that one sore spot, or has death come to tell me it will not wait for me forever?
I am inclined to believe the latter.
This then my latest death's dream:
I am in our house of life. It is a long, low bungalow. One storey - but many stories, each for one of who we are. My room off a corridor that opens out to H's room and to E's.
Both are absent this day, not something that troubles me. We are on a high plain, the land is glossy and bright. Old, magical clowns play on the sand. They could be irksome, with wild clothing and hats, but I am not anything more than intrigued that they are there.
The wind picks up and I lie down to show that this defensive posture is best for protecting against a coming storm. Only mild swirls of perhaps danger approaching, so I am not sure why I am so determined to be down on the ground.
But then someone says "Look, see the tornado, we are in its path." And we are. A force five massive funnel comes over the hill straight towards the house of my life.
Can I run away, avoid its path? Why should one man not avoid nature, a natural thing I allow, but looking so much a cartoon merely a moving sketch? But strangely I cannot. My humanity is not able, I am cross to discover, to nip to one side and avoid this terrible thing. The tornado, no longer just a drawing in charcoal, must hit right across me and the house of my life.
So again I duck down into the ground. I fear above all that I will be sucked up by the force of the thing, flung high into the air to my doom.
At a mercy, however, as the full force of the tornado passes over me, it does not lift me up but pushes me down into the friable earth. The wind is a terrible weight. I am driven deeper and deeper underground. I am almost buried in the earth and I clutch a small root hoping neither to be plucked up into the sky nor to be suffocated into the ground.
There must come a climax, the epicentre of the tornado and then the passing. And so it happens. The crushing, downward force lifts from me and I must scrabble towards the light to be free from the earth that threatens to drown me. There is the light from a window above me and I push upwards towards that light. The root to which I have clung breaks, but I had expected no more and no less of it. Not quite a symbol, nor yet a strong refuge, it had been what it could be.
I am alive and I am safe. Alone, but not yet entirely sure that E or H have been hurt or unharmed. I must check the other rooms in the house of my life to be sure they have escaped. In the first room there are mementos of how we were when E was little. Small cameos, inscribed on plaster, show our lives as they were. I cannot be certain that each episode is our actual past, but if not then close enough to something we once were.
But I must at least call out to make sure that they are not here, that E and H have been somewhere entirely away from the tornado.
No response from either and though the silence is somehow sad, it still remains that better that I here alone without them than that they too should have been scared by the wind.
So I must check their rooms to see if they are all right. I know where to look for them, but by accident I open the door to a room that is not one of ours. There is a thickish grey curtain blocking the view and behind it lies someone or thing that must not be disturbed. I retreat to the corridor off which lie all our rooms and I find one room that is ours, though it is empty.
Emptiness is not a problem: E and H were not here when the storm came, but I have to be sure.
One more room to check for their presence. It is a simple matter of setting aside the room not to enter. But I cannot count out this other room and once again I open the door to the not-our room with the curtain behind which lies my doom.
To have done this the once was forgivable, but not a second time. The doom is unleashed. A hand - an arm but no body - whips out like a snake's tongue. The hand grips me by that part of my side where the surgeon cut out the sarcoma.
The hand clasps that place. It knows what it seeks. The pain is horrid and unendurable. I know that the hand grips me for a purpose. It compels my death. It knows that this grip is all that it does and that in doing it I am slain.
As that moment comes I awake with a terrible gripping pain in my side, in that very place where death-to-be once lived.
Did I but sleep badly for lying on that one sore spot, or has death come to tell me it will not wait for me forever?
I am inclined to believe the latter.
Friday, July 11, 2008
The Character of Brown...
...So our Gordo compares himself to Emily Bronte's Heathcliff does he, much to the amusement of all?
Wrong character, wrong novel.
Gordon Brown is the spitting image of Widmerpool.
See Anthony Powell's duodenary masterpiece 'Dance' passim.
Wrong character, wrong novel.
Gordon Brown is the spitting image of Widmerpool.
See Anthony Powell's duodenary masterpiece 'Dance' passim.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
One Hundred Things To Do When You're Dead Drunk...
...you can sense already where this is heading, and you'd not be wrong. Those lost moments when alcohol commands the stage; brain, conscience, fiscal probity, etc., all banished mute to the wings.
The act itself - written, directed and performed a bottle soliloquy - need not be awful, merely unhinged, unexpected and utterly untoward. Very personal too. One is not talking of some ghastly public display of moral turpitude, tale of which is round the village 'ere one is half-way to perdition; but rather some matter or moment of inner silliness distressing none and hurting none more.
So behold 'One Hundred Things To Do When You Are Dead Drunk" #1:
Traffic, now there's a band. Couldn't abide them first time around between you and me. A veritable mish-mash of styles, all with layers of embarrassing English whimsy. One minute quite groovy rockers-lite, next some half-decent, mystical coves in fey Albion mode (a little of that going quite a long way thank you), but then falling over themselves dissolving into fits of schoolboy giggles at some silly impish nonsense.
The occasional gem of course - 'No Face...etc.', 'Low Spark...et al.' and, above all dear 'Dear Mr. Fantasy', anthemic in quite the right manner for the time. A band for the pick 'n' mix Ipod generation if ever there were one. Pick the few treasures and deep six the rest! ('Hole in My Foot' eh? My arse rather!)
That last though presumes one is, and one absolutely isn't - Ipod-man I mean. 'Twas hard enough letting go of vinyl for CDs, but that was it as far as this dude was and is concerned. At least there was some residual tangible thing qua thing with a CD - an object to have and to hold - even if no one ever rolled a decent joint on their tiny, plastic covers.
Did I ever give the typology of the very different highs to be had from a joint rolled on a mid-period Grateful Dead album sleeve as opposed to, say, an early Bob Dylan? No? Probably best just left to the quietude of history, lest Tom the Bish should ever glance at these idle pages! (But do try - if you are that way minded, and not if not - doing a five-skin spliff on the inner cover of the Allman Brothers Band double-album 'Each A Peach'. That extended hippy-happy world graphic will give you something to fall into until the morn' I can tell 'ee.)
But here we were, late one night, not stoned of course but seriously tipsy. And what should happen? A sudden, inexplicable, irresistible urge to hear Traffic once more. Do not ask from whence it came this compulsion, for I knew it not then and could not tell it now.
But came and rested it did. Traffic must be summonsed from the grave of youth to haunt the hearth of the ancient. Now had one been an ancient versed in this music 'downloading' malarkey no doubt the appetite would have been satisfied - satiated rather - in but a few twirls of apposite computer knobs and dials. Google this, click that and hey presto out she comes.
And if one had, would one have even recalled the doing of it the next day, let alone remembered either the pleasure or the pain? (We are talking some serious level of inebriation after all.) Well no, one wouldn't have. Possibly a faint returning wisp of memory a few days later: "Did one? One did! Lord above, fancy that!" etc.
Not me though. Luddite to the core, mastery of the fell desire was the ordering of the requisite CDs that have duly arrived today a week or so after the squiffy night in question. All right, that did involve a certain online activity complete with site search (Germany seemed to have it all for some reason), placing of orders and confirmations of dispatch, etc. The upshot though is that - now, later, and largely sober - I have three fine Traffic CDs to be consumed at my leisure.
The moot point remains: does one dare listen stone cold sober to music of one's long abandoned youth, risk rending the veil of forgetting unaided, unjuiced?
Things To Do When Dead Drunk #2 - listen to early Traffic?
Time shall shortly tell.
The act itself - written, directed and performed a bottle soliloquy - need not be awful, merely unhinged, unexpected and utterly untoward. Very personal too. One is not talking of some ghastly public display of moral turpitude, tale of which is round the village 'ere one is half-way to perdition; but rather some matter or moment of inner silliness distressing none and hurting none more.
So behold 'One Hundred Things To Do When You Are Dead Drunk" #1:
Traffic, now there's a band. Couldn't abide them first time around between you and me. A veritable mish-mash of styles, all with layers of embarrassing English whimsy. One minute quite groovy rockers-lite, next some half-decent, mystical coves in fey Albion mode (a little of that going quite a long way thank you), but then falling over themselves dissolving into fits of schoolboy giggles at some silly impish nonsense.
The occasional gem of course - 'No Face...etc.', 'Low Spark...et al.' and, above all dear 'Dear Mr. Fantasy', anthemic in quite the right manner for the time. A band for the pick 'n' mix Ipod generation if ever there were one. Pick the few treasures and deep six the rest! ('Hole in My Foot' eh? My arse rather!)
That last though presumes one is, and one absolutely isn't - Ipod-man I mean. 'Twas hard enough letting go of vinyl for CDs, but that was it as far as this dude was and is concerned. At least there was some residual tangible thing qua thing with a CD - an object to have and to hold - even if no one ever rolled a decent joint on their tiny, plastic covers.
Did I ever give the typology of the very different highs to be had from a joint rolled on a mid-period Grateful Dead album sleeve as opposed to, say, an early Bob Dylan? No? Probably best just left to the quietude of history, lest Tom the Bish should ever glance at these idle pages! (But do try - if you are that way minded, and not if not - doing a five-skin spliff on the inner cover of the Allman Brothers Band double-album 'Each A Peach'. That extended hippy-happy world graphic will give you something to fall into until the morn' I can tell 'ee.)
But here we were, late one night, not stoned of course but seriously tipsy. And what should happen? A sudden, inexplicable, irresistible urge to hear Traffic once more. Do not ask from whence it came this compulsion, for I knew it not then and could not tell it now.
But came and rested it did. Traffic must be summonsed from the grave of youth to haunt the hearth of the ancient. Now had one been an ancient versed in this music 'downloading' malarkey no doubt the appetite would have been satisfied - satiated rather - in but a few twirls of apposite computer knobs and dials. Google this, click that and hey presto out she comes.
And if one had, would one have even recalled the doing of it the next day, let alone remembered either the pleasure or the pain? (We are talking some serious level of inebriation after all.) Well no, one wouldn't have. Possibly a faint returning wisp of memory a few days later: "Did one? One did! Lord above, fancy that!" etc.
Not me though. Luddite to the core, mastery of the fell desire was the ordering of the requisite CDs that have duly arrived today a week or so after the squiffy night in question. All right, that did involve a certain online activity complete with site search (Germany seemed to have it all for some reason), placing of orders and confirmations of dispatch, etc. The upshot though is that - now, later, and largely sober - I have three fine Traffic CDs to be consumed at my leisure.
The moot point remains: does one dare listen stone cold sober to music of one's long abandoned youth, risk rending the veil of forgetting unaided, unjuiced?
Things To Do When Dead Drunk #2 - listen to early Traffic?
Time shall shortly tell.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Remembering The Day....
"Do you remember that time you came round to my flat. I cooked coq-au-vin and you...?"
The rest of the sentence was lost amid the general noise of the crowded conference-on-a-break room. 'Man - Something To Be Overcome?' the title of the day. Not, mercifully, an outright charge by the feminist brigade to oust all remaining male vicars but rather - perhaps worse - a theological gonk having overdosed somewhat on dear Nietzsche - "More meddled against than meddling" was Dom. Robin's fine take on the man - and deciding we clergy needed exposure to a spot of 'radical transvaluation in faith'. (I have to say when it comes to impenetrable jargon we church coves can knock the spots off any Town Hall apparatchik or business middle-manager.)
But back to my interlocutress. There she stood, diminutive as ever, still perky, bright and - one cannot deny - as alluring as ever she was those fifteen or so years ago we last met. The surprise in now finding ourselves thrown once more into the same company was mostly mine not hers. A vicar even then, it made sense to both that I should be now attending some ecclesial bash. But that she had not veered off into a career path of, say, high fashion retail, preferring rather to stick to her guns as shepherdess of souls - albeit in a lay capacity - was not by me expected I owned.
It was perhaps recollection of our very first encounter that had sealed my mistaken conviction she would not last. Dashing breathless and late into some dull 'inter-agency' committee meeting, it was less the frazzled hair or the waft of heady scent just applied, but more the little black frock number that caught the eye, ear, nose and attention of all.
"So sorry, Madam Chair, got held up in traffic" she gushed as she took her place, before whispering to her startled neighbour: "Actually, don't say anything to Daphne [said Madam Chair] but I never quite managed to get home last night. Clean forgot about this bloody meeting in all the fun. No time to change. Do I look frightful? Name's Sarah by the way. New head girl of MetSoc. How do you do?"
The aforementioned startled neighbour happening to be myself I boldly, if utterly untruthfully, murmured her appearance was perfectly fitting for the occasion and also - more in truth this time - that I did rather well. MetSoc it took little working out was her abbreviation for the 'Metropolitan Society for the Preservation of Souls' - a Victorian charitable institute that had somehow survived the century to become a pretty fine and effective toiler in the troubled vineyard of young women gone rather off-piste through drugs and alcohol. ('Head girl' turned out to be Chief Executive, a joke I never quite took to though never dared rebuff.)
I being re-parished not long after - perhaps some six months - my time in professional company with Sarah was brief as well as occasional. Enough to become convinced she had the heart and guts for the difficult work of her trade, but possibly also not to assume it would last. Time then to confess I was wrong in that latter, for here she was still at it after all the years. No longer leader of MetSoc, but even more exalted as procuress-in-chief for one of the largest of independent health providers in our Woldean vicinity.
She was, it seemed, on the look-out for a new Chaplain for a recently opened hospital they ran and hence her attendance on the day. We agreed that the Bish would not necessarily appreciate her being seen to 'head hunt' in such a manner or gathering, but I promised not to tell so long as she dared not tip her hunting hat in my direction.
That hat-tipping thing of hers was a matter of some local legend it has to be said, way back where and when. 'Man eater' is not a happy phrase and so I shall not use it, but if one were to cast the matter into the gourmet mold it would have to be said that Sarah had then a more than fair-to-middling appetite for the delights of the table.
This is not to cast a stone, nor even to pick up a pebble. Wedded as I was to both trade and H, it was perhaps more a matter of relief at not having had to resist any temptation that might have befallen. For some the dog-collar is a great aphrodisiac - the allure of the forbidden of course - but for Sarah, she had freely owned at the time, it was anything but.
"No offence P, but I'm not into clergy," she had told me once in passing. "Can't be doing with all the pre-coital guilt - that unmannerly 'forgive me Father for I am about to sin' thing." I could and did see her point.
Which all the more made her remark this latter day so alarming. Remember going round to her flat? Not, I fear, in the slightest did I! Could I really have been there, done that and then not even had the decency to recall the - presumably - ecstatic moment? ("Hello H. How's your day been? Guess what I've discovered. Apparently I was unfaithful to you some fifteen years ago and had completely forgotten about it until today! What a hoot eh?" No, that would not do at all.)
Was it she in fact mistaken? Could I have been muddled with another assignation, one other who having dined on doubtless delicious chicken in the French style had...? Not merely an unkind thought but highly improbable a truth, Sarah having already in the conversation shown sharp recall of so much of my life as she had known it then. How was E? How was H? Did we still live in X? What about that cat with the dodgy temperament...etc? Accurate personal info tripping off her tongue as if last spoken of yesterday not a decade and half before; was such acuity of recall compatible with a misremembered tryst? Not as best I could judge.
"Lord! I didn't did I?" was not on the whole the finest of remarks to have blurted out in reply, implying as it did not only that I had no recollection of the deed - hardly the act of a gentleman - but also that the doing of it would not have been to my particular taste - the act really of nothing less than a cad.
Amusement, mercifully, not astonishment nor approbation even was the note of the dear lady's kind response. As gentle a letdown as was not my deserved lot in the circs. "No, silly man. We never had sex. I gave a dinner party for the regional forum and you came along with Daphne and all that dread committee of hers. You made some pompous remark about the best wine for a coq au vin."
'A wine snob? Moi?' as they say. Sadly all too possible, though marginally preferable to the amnesiac adulterer.
The rest of the sentence was lost amid the general noise of the crowded conference-on-a-break room. 'Man - Something To Be Overcome?' the title of the day. Not, mercifully, an outright charge by the feminist brigade to oust all remaining male vicars but rather - perhaps worse - a theological gonk having overdosed somewhat on dear Nietzsche - "More meddled against than meddling" was Dom. Robin's fine take on the man - and deciding we clergy needed exposure to a spot of 'radical transvaluation in faith'. (I have to say when it comes to impenetrable jargon we church coves can knock the spots off any Town Hall apparatchik or business middle-manager.)
But back to my interlocutress. There she stood, diminutive as ever, still perky, bright and - one cannot deny - as alluring as ever she was those fifteen or so years ago we last met. The surprise in now finding ourselves thrown once more into the same company was mostly mine not hers. A vicar even then, it made sense to both that I should be now attending some ecclesial bash. But that she had not veered off into a career path of, say, high fashion retail, preferring rather to stick to her guns as shepherdess of souls - albeit in a lay capacity - was not by me expected I owned.
It was perhaps recollection of our very first encounter that had sealed my mistaken conviction she would not last. Dashing breathless and late into some dull 'inter-agency' committee meeting, it was less the frazzled hair or the waft of heady scent just applied, but more the little black frock number that caught the eye, ear, nose and attention of all.
"So sorry, Madam Chair, got held up in traffic" she gushed as she took her place, before whispering to her startled neighbour: "Actually, don't say anything to Daphne [said Madam Chair] but I never quite managed to get home last night. Clean forgot about this bloody meeting in all the fun. No time to change. Do I look frightful? Name's Sarah by the way. New head girl of MetSoc. How do you do?"
The aforementioned startled neighbour happening to be myself I boldly, if utterly untruthfully, murmured her appearance was perfectly fitting for the occasion and also - more in truth this time - that I did rather well. MetSoc it took little working out was her abbreviation for the 'Metropolitan Society for the Preservation of Souls' - a Victorian charitable institute that had somehow survived the century to become a pretty fine and effective toiler in the troubled vineyard of young women gone rather off-piste through drugs and alcohol. ('Head girl' turned out to be Chief Executive, a joke I never quite took to though never dared rebuff.)
I being re-parished not long after - perhaps some six months - my time in professional company with Sarah was brief as well as occasional. Enough to become convinced she had the heart and guts for the difficult work of her trade, but possibly also not to assume it would last. Time then to confess I was wrong in that latter, for here she was still at it after all the years. No longer leader of MetSoc, but even more exalted as procuress-in-chief for one of the largest of independent health providers in our Woldean vicinity.
She was, it seemed, on the look-out for a new Chaplain for a recently opened hospital they ran and hence her attendance on the day. We agreed that the Bish would not necessarily appreciate her being seen to 'head hunt' in such a manner or gathering, but I promised not to tell so long as she dared not tip her hunting hat in my direction.
That hat-tipping thing of hers was a matter of some local legend it has to be said, way back where and when. 'Man eater' is not a happy phrase and so I shall not use it, but if one were to cast the matter into the gourmet mold it would have to be said that Sarah had then a more than fair-to-middling appetite for the delights of the table.
This is not to cast a stone, nor even to pick up a pebble. Wedded as I was to both trade and H, it was perhaps more a matter of relief at not having had to resist any temptation that might have befallen. For some the dog-collar is a great aphrodisiac - the allure of the forbidden of course - but for Sarah, she had freely owned at the time, it was anything but.
"No offence P, but I'm not into clergy," she had told me once in passing. "Can't be doing with all the pre-coital guilt - that unmannerly 'forgive me Father for I am about to sin' thing." I could and did see her point.
Which all the more made her remark this latter day so alarming. Remember going round to her flat? Not, I fear, in the slightest did I! Could I really have been there, done that and then not even had the decency to recall the - presumably - ecstatic moment? ("Hello H. How's your day been? Guess what I've discovered. Apparently I was unfaithful to you some fifteen years ago and had completely forgotten about it until today! What a hoot eh?" No, that would not do at all.)
Was it she in fact mistaken? Could I have been muddled with another assignation, one other who having dined on doubtless delicious chicken in the French style had...? Not merely an unkind thought but highly improbable a truth, Sarah having already in the conversation shown sharp recall of so much of my life as she had known it then. How was E? How was H? Did we still live in X? What about that cat with the dodgy temperament...etc? Accurate personal info tripping off her tongue as if last spoken of yesterday not a decade and half before; was such acuity of recall compatible with a misremembered tryst? Not as best I could judge.
"Lord! I didn't did I?" was not on the whole the finest of remarks to have blurted out in reply, implying as it did not only that I had no recollection of the deed - hardly the act of a gentleman - but also that the doing of it would not have been to my particular taste - the act really of nothing less than a cad.
Amusement, mercifully, not astonishment nor approbation even was the note of the dear lady's kind response. As gentle a letdown as was not my deserved lot in the circs. "No, silly man. We never had sex. I gave a dinner party for the regional forum and you came along with Daphne and all that dread committee of hers. You made some pompous remark about the best wine for a coq au vin."
'A wine snob? Moi?' as they say. Sadly all too possible, though marginally preferable to the amnesiac adulterer.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
OK Commuter....
...Never have I quite gotten my head round precisely what it is Bro. Charles does for his living. He can - and indeed does - talk at great length about the desperate iniquities of the entire health and social care systems, which - so he would aver - only he is best placed to fix root and branch.
That much is more or less clear. We all know it doesn't work as it should. But it is rather a large leap for any sibling to believe in the soi disant heroics of a Bro. (howsoever cherished of course) as the White Knight come to rescue us all. (More of a Don Quixote if you ask me, but breathe it not abroad!)
And as for the technicalities of it all - processes and systems, strategies and policies, dynamics and behaviours - well veritably I glaze over as he rants, much as one did back at seminary when Dean 'Fruitbat' Wilfred would go so on and on about the theological intricacies of the latter part of the Albigensian heresy. (All very well if you're up with the lingo of course, but pretty deathly if not I find.)
Yet with that caveat it is good to hear from the urban-doomed Bro. from time to time, and on that note this just in from him:
"The last time I commuted for a living was last century, that distant time when Blair was largely blameless we thought and Radiohead seemed so, so cool. I hated it then and I abhor it now. Blasted new contract, however, requires a daily slog through the so many undone dead of whom Eliot wrote so chillingly.
But you know what Bro? I could almost weep sweet tears of nostalgia. Not of course for the beastliness of it all - the shove and the push, the suppressed anger or the flat despair, the train with no seat at the end of a long, baking, aching day - but for the wondrous, vivid recall that there was actually a time before.
A time before one lived daily with the bugbear of the beast and its pain, a time when life-limiting illness was something out there not in here. (You know what I mean and have no need of repeated detail.)
In its significant if illusory way I have been returned to that past that cannot be, it feels as if the Garden has been re-opened and one has been asked back inside - just a day tripper, a visitor, tourist perhaps but I have been there, where it never seemed I could go again.
OK Commuter?"
Needs a good holiday one suspects does the Bro. Not sure a week in the The Wolds is quite the thing, but I shall offer.
That much is more or less clear. We all know it doesn't work as it should. But it is rather a large leap for any sibling to believe in the soi disant heroics of a Bro. (howsoever cherished of course) as the White Knight come to rescue us all. (More of a Don Quixote if you ask me, but breathe it not abroad!)
And as for the technicalities of it all - processes and systems, strategies and policies, dynamics and behaviours - well veritably I glaze over as he rants, much as one did back at seminary when Dean 'Fruitbat' Wilfred would go so on and on about the theological intricacies of the latter part of the Albigensian heresy. (All very well if you're up with the lingo of course, but pretty deathly if not I find.)
Yet with that caveat it is good to hear from the urban-doomed Bro. from time to time, and on that note this just in from him:
"The last time I commuted for a living was last century, that distant time when Blair was largely blameless we thought and Radiohead seemed so, so cool. I hated it then and I abhor it now. Blasted new contract, however, requires a daily slog through the so many undone dead of whom Eliot wrote so chillingly.
But you know what Bro? I could almost weep sweet tears of nostalgia. Not of course for the beastliness of it all - the shove and the push, the suppressed anger or the flat despair, the train with no seat at the end of a long, baking, aching day - but for the wondrous, vivid recall that there was actually a time before.
A time before one lived daily with the bugbear of the beast and its pain, a time when life-limiting illness was something out there not in here. (You know what I mean and have no need of repeated detail.)
In its significant if illusory way I have been returned to that past that cannot be, it feels as if the Garden has been re-opened and one has been asked back inside - just a day tripper, a visitor, tourist perhaps but I have been there, where it never seemed I could go again.
OK Commuter?"
Needs a good holiday one suspects does the Bro. Not sure a week in the The Wolds is quite the thing, but I shall offer.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Crazy Days...
...the least - let alone the more - of you will have spotted how few posts there have been here these last months.
Many the reasons for this. Work, life...blah, blah. So many other distractions, too many to mention.
But key has been how to comment in any rational or valid way on a world gone utterly, utterly crazy? Nothing one can say seems to have relevance or purpose when so much is totally insane. "The horror, the horror"...once one accepts Colonel Kurtz's view, is there really anything else to say?
But, one will try. Two moments just cannot be ignored.
First. Two Christian preachers - the evangelical types one would ordinarily cross the road to avoid - are close to being arrested for daring to distribute religious leaflets in a predominately Muslim part of an English city. They are told they are committing a 'hate crime' and if there were to be beaten up - as they assuredly would be - it would be nothing but their own fault.
Well damn their eyes I say! Not the eyes of the preacher men, but the police auxiliary goons who dare spout such offensive rubbish. John Stuart Mill you should be living now!
Second. An man is refused access to an aircraft because his tee-shirt carries an image of a gun!!! It is a cartoon. It is some ink on cotton. Yet he cannot board the aircraft until he changes into some other, less offensive, garb.
Bloody, bloody nonsense both. The one not unconnected to the other.
This is my tee-shirt I wear everywhere - and I swear - everyday now: "If You're Not Appalled You've Not Being Paying Attention."
Need one say more?
Many the reasons for this. Work, life...blah, blah. So many other distractions, too many to mention.
But key has been how to comment in any rational or valid way on a world gone utterly, utterly crazy? Nothing one can say seems to have relevance or purpose when so much is totally insane. "The horror, the horror"...once one accepts Colonel Kurtz's view, is there really anything else to say?
But, one will try. Two moments just cannot be ignored.
First. Two Christian preachers - the evangelical types one would ordinarily cross the road to avoid - are close to being arrested for daring to distribute religious leaflets in a predominately Muslim part of an English city. They are told they are committing a 'hate crime' and if there were to be beaten up - as they assuredly would be - it would be nothing but their own fault.
Well damn their eyes I say! Not the eyes of the preacher men, but the police auxiliary goons who dare spout such offensive rubbish. John Stuart Mill you should be living now!
Second. An man is refused access to an aircraft because his tee-shirt carries an image of a gun!!! It is a cartoon. It is some ink on cotton. Yet he cannot board the aircraft until he changes into some other, less offensive, garb.
Bloody, bloody nonsense both. The one not unconnected to the other.
This is my tee-shirt I wear everywhere - and I swear - everyday now: "If You're Not Appalled You've Not Being Paying Attention."
Need one say more?
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Sentamu Nails It
This prolonged Yorkist sojourn has few perks. Still slaving away in penitential mode on this 'training the clergy' malarkey. Nearly done - and nearly in truth done in too.
There is though one perfect blessing, which is proximity to the mighty spirit and voice of the local Arch.
He one John Sentamu, famously bereft of dog-collar pending the binning of that great monster Mugabe.
A prayer he has written for Madeleine. No better words than these could there be:
"Keep her safe and take away her fear and anxiety. May your holy angels guard and protect her. We pray that she may be reunited with those who love her. Give hope to all her loved ones and hear our cry for her safe return."
Hear our cry indeed, for her and for all children who suffer today.
There is though one perfect blessing, which is proximity to the mighty spirit and voice of the local Arch.
He one John Sentamu, famously bereft of dog-collar pending the binning of that great monster Mugabe.
A prayer he has written for Madeleine. No better words than these could there be:
"Keep her safe and take away her fear and anxiety. May your holy angels guard and protect her. We pray that she may be reunited with those who love her. Give hope to all her loved ones and hear our cry for her safe return."
Hear our cry indeed, for her and for all children who suffer today.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
One Year, Another Day...
...Some months back I watched a documentary on the mass trade in Chinese children - boys kidnapped to be the one male heir, and now girls to mate in time with the boys.
A mother sat weeping, crying out in her pain: "Each day I wonder where he is, what he is doing, if he well. When it rains is there someone to keep him dry? If he weeps does someone wipe his tears? I should be doing this, but if I cannot I can only pray that someone is."
A year's anniversary of the abduction of Madeleine McCann and we too pray that her life is nourished and nurtured, not cruel and scared. The imaginings of that life must always be with Kate and Gerry.
One year of loss, another day of wondering and hoping and praying.
Wherever she is, may - as He most assuredly does - the Lord hold her in the palm of his hand, keep her safe from harm. One day to return her.
A mother sat weeping, crying out in her pain: "Each day I wonder where he is, what he is doing, if he well. When it rains is there someone to keep him dry? If he weeps does someone wipe his tears? I should be doing this, but if I cannot I can only pray that someone is."
A year's anniversary of the abduction of Madeleine McCann and we too pray that her life is nourished and nurtured, not cruel and scared. The imaginings of that life must always be with Kate and Gerry.
One year of loss, another day of wondering and hoping and praying.
Wherever she is, may - as He most assuredly does - the Lord hold her in the palm of his hand, keep her safe from harm. One day to return her.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Learning Lessons...
Wales, it seems, is to "learn lessons" from the conviction of these two modern day witches - see below - for manslaughter.
Pray tell what would these be? That our society is doomed and we all with it?
That - rather I am sure - a restructuring of the procedures for child protection will be whipped up as a substitute for any real action?
That the Inquisition was not so very far off in prescribing burning at the stake for witchcraft?
Do I sense despair and doom-mongering here in the fragrant Wolds? God, you betcha I do and the sooner we stop being so immune to such horrors the better.
Pray tell what would these be? That our society is doomed and we all with it?
That - rather I am sure - a restructuring of the procedures for child protection will be whipped up as a substitute for any real action?
That the Inquisition was not so very far off in prescribing burning at the stake for witchcraft?
Do I sense despair and doom-mongering here in the fragrant Wolds? God, you betcha I do and the sooner we stop being so immune to such horrors the better.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Meltdown...
A judge today has spoken of his deep concerns that British families are in meltdown, a threat he sees as far more serious than global warming. (The Government, naturally, has responded with a flurry of specious statistics that claim to prove, as ever, the MacMillan Myth 'We've Never Had It So Good'.)
Meanwhile, another judge - this time sitting in a Court rather than giving a public speech - is presiding over a case in which a mother and a half-sister are accused of leaving the sixteen year old daughter of the former to die of an overdose of heroin, preferring rather to watch something called 'Emmerdale' on the television than to call for an ambulance.
The girl - born to an addictive 'family' - herself hooked on heroin at fourteen - had - the prosecution alleges - been assisted by the two women to 'score' drugs during that fatal day and who were, therefore, reluctant to call for help lest their their complicit crime be revealed.
So noticing the child was showing signs of an overdose - 'blue lips' a bit of a giveaway - they put her to bed 'in the recovery position' before popping downstairs to watch their soaps. (I imagine they learned that procedure on some 'Hug A Druggie' training course funded by the NHS - i.e. you and me.)
This is what we hear. We also hear of the mother who giggles during police interviews when her son is accused - then later convicted - of kicking a young woman to death simply because she was a Goth in her dress and demeanour.
Meltdown? Total obliteration of the entire human race cannot come too soon. I speak as a loving Christian.
"Save the planet. Put an end to humanity."
There is a logic. A fearful logic.
Meanwhile, another judge - this time sitting in a Court rather than giving a public speech - is presiding over a case in which a mother and a half-sister are accused of leaving the sixteen year old daughter of the former to die of an overdose of heroin, preferring rather to watch something called 'Emmerdale' on the television than to call for an ambulance.
The girl - born to an addictive 'family' - herself hooked on heroin at fourteen - had - the prosecution alleges - been assisted by the two women to 'score' drugs during that fatal day and who were, therefore, reluctant to call for help lest their their complicit crime be revealed.
So noticing the child was showing signs of an overdose - 'blue lips' a bit of a giveaway - they put her to bed 'in the recovery position' before popping downstairs to watch their soaps. (I imagine they learned that procedure on some 'Hug A Druggie' training course funded by the NHS - i.e. you and me.)
This is what we hear. We also hear of the mother who giggles during police interviews when her son is accused - then later convicted - of kicking a young woman to death simply because she was a Goth in her dress and demeanour.
Meltdown? Total obliteration of the entire human race cannot come too soon. I speak as a loving Christian.
"Save the planet. Put an end to humanity."
There is a logic. A fearful logic.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Life, The Universe And Everything...
....not a Holy Week homily - that yet to be carefully scripted for delivery at the Vigil of course - but a reflection on a dear friend now so early dead. (In Heaven too I am sure, though he would have scorned the very existence of the place whilst on Earth.)
DNA - no not that either as life's meaning, but the man's name.
Douglas Noel Adams. You'll know him, though not perhaps the Noel bit. He of 'THHGTTG' - and if I have to spell that one out you'll not be knowing of him and the point of the tale would be lost, so I shan't.
Anyway, cutting to the chase as ever one does, there was - now some thirty years ago God spare us from remembering how long ago - the matter of the meaning of 'LTU&E', that being the Ultimate Question put to Deep Thought, a computer of gargantuan scope that took some several millions of years to come up with the question's answer: '42'
Good answer, if a bit tricky to fathom - as many of the best answers are. So still comes the secondary question - what on Earth was DNA up to? Forty-frigging-two! Some crazed, teasing, madcap genius playing with our sensitivities these thirty years? In many ways yes.
The source of many a learned paper on the matter, with explanations quite as weird and wonderful as the answer itself. Many based on warped misuse of the near-science of numerology: codes within codes revealing a certain truth all dependent on symbolism and affinity. (Quite fun in its way - dear Saint Augustine loved it - but generally that way obsessive compulsive madness lies.)
All wrong in any case of course. Lend or bend - according to taste - an ear, I shall expound all.
DNA and I roomed together at School. When I say 'roomed' I mean rather that we were but two among four hundred or more boyish souls condemned by cruel fate - and harsher parenting - to dwell in the deep discomfort of a boarding school.
Among the many aches and pains of such a life was the very industrial scale of the thing. Nothing was ever really personal, all was en masse from bathing facilities to dormitories to dining halls.
Eating would indeed be at a long double-sided table seating twenty or so pupils, each grabbing what they could from the vast troughs of food 'ere a greedy neighbour had scoffed the last remaining pie.
In such circs. a boy's fantasy would be dining on a totally more domestic scale. As indeed boy turned to youth, hormone infested and deeply charged with - largely - unrequited sexual longings, the perfect ideal would be the a dinner date with a lascivious female as prelude to whatever the virginal youth - as such he was - could most fervently imagine.
From thus came forth the great - and greatly misunderstood - answer to life the universe and everything. Deep Thought - taking on the mantle of its author - did not give a numerical answer, as generally taken, but a verbal. Being, however, a computer not entirely versed in the full idiom of English the words were not uttered entirely as they ought.
Deep Thought thus, in answer to the great mystery of life, spoke of "For tea two" - that wonderful intimate moment of a pair of persons alone with their scones and their Darjeeling - instead of the intended or more correct "Tea for two".
That was the earthly paradise the boarding school boy had yearned for, and the one he wished pronounced. An intimate meal - nothing more, but most certain nothing less.
There is in fact, within the text, a 'second phase' (as these rugger types would say) meaning not to be overlooked.
For the people who heard Deep Thought utter the Great Answer assumed that a computer must give a numerical answer, because computers were but vast 'number crunchers' after all. '42' might be odd and a bit off, but at least it was a logical starting point, they reckoned (applying further the numerical idiom).
And thus from this dual misunderstanding, based on mutual attempt to see the world from the point of view of the other, came complete confusion.
Or chaos.
Which is where DNA really did intend to leave his Universe.
But I do hope - indeed I know - that the man has finally found his proper ordering of the finite world within his now infinite sphere.
Might not be the making of an Easter homily. But then again it might.
DNA - no not that either as life's meaning, but the man's name.
Douglas Noel Adams. You'll know him, though not perhaps the Noel bit. He of 'THHGTTG' - and if I have to spell that one out you'll not be knowing of him and the point of the tale would be lost, so I shan't.
Anyway, cutting to the chase as ever one does, there was - now some thirty years ago God spare us from remembering how long ago - the matter of the meaning of 'LTU&E', that being the Ultimate Question put to Deep Thought, a computer of gargantuan scope that took some several millions of years to come up with the question's answer: '42'
Good answer, if a bit tricky to fathom - as many of the best answers are. So still comes the secondary question - what on Earth was DNA up to? Forty-frigging-two! Some crazed, teasing, madcap genius playing with our sensitivities these thirty years? In many ways yes.
The source of many a learned paper on the matter, with explanations quite as weird and wonderful as the answer itself. Many based on warped misuse of the near-science of numerology: codes within codes revealing a certain truth all dependent on symbolism and affinity. (Quite fun in its way - dear Saint Augustine loved it - but generally that way obsessive compulsive madness lies.)
All wrong in any case of course. Lend or bend - according to taste - an ear, I shall expound all.
DNA and I roomed together at School. When I say 'roomed' I mean rather that we were but two among four hundred or more boyish souls condemned by cruel fate - and harsher parenting - to dwell in the deep discomfort of a boarding school.
Among the many aches and pains of such a life was the very industrial scale of the thing. Nothing was ever really personal, all was en masse from bathing facilities to dormitories to dining halls.
Eating would indeed be at a long double-sided table seating twenty or so pupils, each grabbing what they could from the vast troughs of food 'ere a greedy neighbour had scoffed the last remaining pie.
In such circs. a boy's fantasy would be dining on a totally more domestic scale. As indeed boy turned to youth, hormone infested and deeply charged with - largely - unrequited sexual longings, the perfect ideal would be the a dinner date with a lascivious female as prelude to whatever the virginal youth - as such he was - could most fervently imagine.
From thus came forth the great - and greatly misunderstood - answer to life the universe and everything. Deep Thought - taking on the mantle of its author - did not give a numerical answer, as generally taken, but a verbal. Being, however, a computer not entirely versed in the full idiom of English the words were not uttered entirely as they ought.
Deep Thought thus, in answer to the great mystery of life, spoke of "For tea two" - that wonderful intimate moment of a pair of persons alone with their scones and their Darjeeling - instead of the intended or more correct "Tea for two".
That was the earthly paradise the boarding school boy had yearned for, and the one he wished pronounced. An intimate meal - nothing more, but most certain nothing less.
There is in fact, within the text, a 'second phase' (as these rugger types would say) meaning not to be overlooked.
For the people who heard Deep Thought utter the Great Answer assumed that a computer must give a numerical answer, because computers were but vast 'number crunchers' after all. '42' might be odd and a bit off, but at least it was a logical starting point, they reckoned (applying further the numerical idiom).
And thus from this dual misunderstanding, based on mutual attempt to see the world from the point of view of the other, came complete confusion.
Or chaos.
Which is where DNA really did intend to leave his Universe.
But I do hope - indeed I know - that the man has finally found his proper ordering of the finite world within his now infinite sphere.
Might not be the making of an Easter homily. But then again it might.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Capering Curates....
Charlie the Curate is a fine fellow, much welcomed around these parts. The parishioners adore him, as well they might being all chubby-cheeked and cheerful and earnest and all. (They like their curates fresh. Somewhat in the manner of Count Dracula sometimes I fear - young blood on which to feast and be forever young.)
I too rather approve of the cove. Keeps me on my toes with a veritable - if occasionally mildly irritating - encyclopaedic knowledge of all things scriptural and eccesial. He never means it of course, but oft-times it's a bit like one of those entertaining yet irksome chappies in public houses who can perform the most astonishing of card tricks, also never failing to chip in with the right answer when there's a pub quiz question the team simply cannot fathom. Smart or what, in a kind of too-good-to-be-true sort of way.
Quote him any line - half-line, word even it sometimes seems - from the Good Book and he'll be back at you with the next Chapter and a Half before you can say "Fine Charlie. Take your point. Now where's that bottle of malt gone?"
Not that there is anything of the showman about the fellow, nor even - far worse - the dour text-book puritan ever on the lookout - and all too swift to shout it out loud - for a soul in peril of perdition for not having the right party line about a particular Biblical matter of God and salvation.
For all that though Charlie can have - as these young chappies must in truth - an eagerness for truth that can set the teeth a-grinding. He's done it before - no doubt will do it again - and has once more done it today.
Comes a story - perhaps no more than that - from you-know-where of a Bishop (male) and a close junior cleric (female) who may - or who may not, though don't put your mortgage on it - have been indulging in "Ugandan discussions" to the detriment of their respective marriages and the shame of the diocese.
Now Charlie may well have a point that no Bishop worth his reputation for sanctity or his stipend should be allowing any such person to be his 'PA', let alone one who is female, young and tolerably sprightly by view of all the many photographs of the woman now filling the Internet. (The one of her gazing with seemingly infinite adoration up at the man from her desk was not a wise move.)
Be all of that as it may, and howsoever it all pans out, I am not best pleased to have had to received six of the hottest telephone calls this late morning from church folk voicing the strongest objections to my Curate's harsh words on the subject, uttered - in a moment of madness it must be - at Mattins of the day.
Had he merely rushed to judgement, as these young sorts will do, I could have let that pass. Not entirely in the loving spirit of the Lord I would have advised him, yet not condemned the man the more for having fallen short in the mercy of God department.
But does he do that alone? No, sadly not. He cannot merely content himself with some pertinent if prejudicial ranting. He has to take the angle that a man in a position of power should not be dabbling in any improper exercise of that power over a subordinate.
Don't get me wrong. Although such a notion is, for me, too far into the deathly realm of sexual politics from which fell domain no person may return unscathed, I would not refute Charlie's central notion that men in power should learn to keep their hands to themselves. No Sir - or Madam - me.
Charlie's fault lies not in the subject itself - howsoever tangential to the main matter of Peace on Earth and all that - as in the chosen expression of his thinking. For Charlie, you must understand, came forth from the mournful land of 'meejah' to become the burgeoning cleric he is. And it is from that place his metaphor arose to the consternation of the Mattins masses.
It goes thus I am told: "Are we not minded when we hear of this possible great scandal of that sad motto from the world of television - the PA made the tea and the Producer made the PA?"
Well, no they were not so minded of course! Not one of them knows a jot or a tittle about the dark world of television and who does what to whom for what indulgent, sensual purpose. This is The Wolds and not the White City, or wheresoever television is made these days.
Charlie's perky remark might have played well among people for whom such matters are daily food and drink. Out here though they have caused a right stink, as well they might.
Silly boy - as Captain Mainwairing would have said!
I too rather approve of the cove. Keeps me on my toes with a veritable - if occasionally mildly irritating - encyclopaedic knowledge of all things scriptural and eccesial. He never means it of course, but oft-times it's a bit like one of those entertaining yet irksome chappies in public houses who can perform the most astonishing of card tricks, also never failing to chip in with the right answer when there's a pub quiz question the team simply cannot fathom. Smart or what, in a kind of too-good-to-be-true sort of way.
Quote him any line - half-line, word even it sometimes seems - from the Good Book and he'll be back at you with the next Chapter and a Half before you can say "Fine Charlie. Take your point. Now where's that bottle of malt gone?"
Not that there is anything of the showman about the fellow, nor even - far worse - the dour text-book puritan ever on the lookout - and all too swift to shout it out loud - for a soul in peril of perdition for not having the right party line about a particular Biblical matter of God and salvation.
For all that though Charlie can have - as these young chappies must in truth - an eagerness for truth that can set the teeth a-grinding. He's done it before - no doubt will do it again - and has once more done it today.
Comes a story - perhaps no more than that - from you-know-where of a Bishop (male) and a close junior cleric (female) who may - or who may not, though don't put your mortgage on it - have been indulging in "Ugandan discussions" to the detriment of their respective marriages and the shame of the diocese.
Now Charlie may well have a point that no Bishop worth his reputation for sanctity or his stipend should be allowing any such person to be his 'PA', let alone one who is female, young and tolerably sprightly by view of all the many photographs of the woman now filling the Internet. (The one of her gazing with seemingly infinite adoration up at the man from her desk was not a wise move.)
Be all of that as it may, and howsoever it all pans out, I am not best pleased to have had to received six of the hottest telephone calls this late morning from church folk voicing the strongest objections to my Curate's harsh words on the subject, uttered - in a moment of madness it must be - at Mattins of the day.
Had he merely rushed to judgement, as these young sorts will do, I could have let that pass. Not entirely in the loving spirit of the Lord I would have advised him, yet not condemned the man the more for having fallen short in the mercy of God department.
But does he do that alone? No, sadly not. He cannot merely content himself with some pertinent if prejudicial ranting. He has to take the angle that a man in a position of power should not be dabbling in any improper exercise of that power over a subordinate.
Don't get me wrong. Although such a notion is, for me, too far into the deathly realm of sexual politics from which fell domain no person may return unscathed, I would not refute Charlie's central notion that men in power should learn to keep their hands to themselves. No Sir - or Madam - me.
Charlie's fault lies not in the subject itself - howsoever tangential to the main matter of Peace on Earth and all that - as in the chosen expression of his thinking. For Charlie, you must understand, came forth from the mournful land of 'meejah' to become the burgeoning cleric he is. And it is from that place his metaphor arose to the consternation of the Mattins masses.
It goes thus I am told: "Are we not minded when we hear of this possible great scandal of that sad motto from the world of television - the PA made the tea and the Producer made the PA?"
Well, no they were not so minded of course! Not one of them knows a jot or a tittle about the dark world of television and who does what to whom for what indulgent, sensual purpose. This is The Wolds and not the White City, or wheresoever television is made these days.
Charlie's perky remark might have played well among people for whom such matters are daily food and drink. Out here though they have caused a right stink, as well they might.
Silly boy - as Captain Mainwairing would have said!
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