Signs and Portents...

...Religious enthusiasm is another difficulty [see previous] little known in The Wolds.

True enough that local history does relate the occasional outburst of massed outdoor prayer gatherings, led in the main by hairy and itinerant preachers of - it would ultimately transpire - dubious personal morals as well as hygiene; hundreds or more erstwhile sensible farming folk who, losing all control in the whipped-up artificial fervour of the thing, would crowd around a tree to bark at it - quite literally - their unquenchable love of the Lord.

Difficult one assumes for the incumbent of the times to maintain due order at Evensong with so much hysteria in the air, but a rapidly passing fever these matters mainly, some mid-summer madness soon recovered.

There is too the odd - one uses the word advisedly - young curate heaven-bent on inflaming local passion for all good things. One has little trouble here either, indeed it can be quite restorative to be dosed in the same juvenile desire for salvation and its ways one once felt beat so fiercely within.

A bit of a pep all round that can be, though tearful ends there often are for these fellows tend to rouse quite other passions in impressionable young maids, more desirous of the messenger than the message. A folk-Mass guitar in the wrong hands can be indeed much more the aphrodisiac than the strummer thereof either knows or intends.

Or, as one occasionally darkly muses, precisely what is knowingly intended. Curate R, for example, one recalls with a certain lack of charitableness. Perfectly aware that one the impact of a pale face, dark soulful eyes and some plangent chords! All too relieved to learn he soon dropped all pretence of probity and went off to lead some nu-church commune with overtly impure aims and objectives.

It is not though this up-tempo sort of enthusiasm that one now fears, but rather the far more gloomy and deep set mood that can and does give rise to outbursts of apocalyptic, end-is-at-hand rants. Slow burners these in the main.

General and perfectly rational expressions of concern about the hardness of times can sit heavy in a sensitive heart. That sensitive heart then begins to muse on 'whither the world' in quite a mournful manner. Nothing so much of harm necessarily in that, no more perhaps than a handy re-calibration of the individual moral compass away from the material towards the spiritual.

Worse news though then piles in on bad. World economic meltdown is a bit of a teeth-sucker by itself, but when laid on top of growing terrorism of many kinds - the Taliban we hear perfectly poised to take Pakistan - and now, of a sudden, the potent threat of a global pandemic promising death to many in all lands in a trice; all that and who can escape feeling queasy about it all?

One does indeed find oneself wondering whether St. John the Divine might not really have had a point after all about his Four Horsemen a-riding to herald universal chaos and destruction.

I'll not yet be chalking-up 'The End Is Nigh' or the 'Repent For Thy Doom Cometh' sandwich-boards to be wearing about the place. But I might yet. One more sign or portent and you could find me reaching for the paint pot.