A few brief notes about tea, conversations, books and sometimes cats
My Grandmother had a print of this on her wall and it has always mean a lot to me. Everything has a beginning and it is often a bit scary. I must admit blogging is a bit scary and starting today daunting.
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Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.
As the classical author said ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’. I expect the world of 2078 to be the same but different. In your hundred years of life the world will have changed tremendously and in many respects 1978 is a world away.
I remember in 1988 the first BBC computers in schools. These were less powerful than the phones twenty years later but radically more powerful than the computers on the space rocket that went to the moon. I remember in 1996 hand writing essays for my university course and typing everything by 1999, in 2024 I started using the dictate function on my iPhone. What wonders did you see between 2026 and 2078?
My son was born in 2014 a hundred years after his grandmothers birth and a hundred years after his great great grandfathers death. When I am a hundred he will be sixty four, more than a decade older than I am now. Dear God I hope he has a great life not marred by war or disaster.
I expect my sisters and my wife will still be alive and kicking, although many people that I know will be dead. My parents will I expect have gone by the 2050s and 60s along with the entire fifties and sixties generation. How strange to think of entire generations just passing away like corn before the scythe.
I hope our life improves, that our fears do not come to pass and that in the far future I can hear birds, smell flowers and stroke the distant relative of our current cat.
Where would you go on a shopping spree?
We live in an age of consumption and I wonder just how good that is for us. I am not sure it’s healthy for me or my wallet to have 24 hour access to Amazon the largest retainer in the world. I wonder repeatedly about the story I once heard of a man who loved gooseberries and loved it when gooseberry season came when he could indulge. Now he eats gooseberries all year round and something has been lost. I feel the same when I see hot cross buns for sale. Once these were a Good Friday treat, now they are ubiquitous.
So with this in mind I have cut down on my consumption and now reserve shopping sprees for Christmas. I am trying to eat seasonally and shop according to seasonal needs.
But if I were to splurge it would be Warhammer and books.
What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
Oh mum and dad what did you do to me giving me a name meaning ‘great’ or ‘magnificent’. I, of course, am neither just a mild mannered normal person who now knows his middle name is an English corruption of the Latin name Augustus! Augustus in the Middle Ages was corrupted to Augustine which was then further corrupted to Austin and mine is Austen.
If course we always want the best for our children and I wanted to name my son Beowulf. My friends gently told me that this might be a bit much to live upto…
What is the last thing you learned?
In my life I have studied a lot and learnt lots of interesting things but I have neglected myself and now find that there is ‘maintenance’ to do on the old machine.
As I approach fifty the body will no longer just look after itself and I have to watch what I eat and how I choose to exercise. I would like to be active in later life so now is the time to put a bit of work in.
I need to focus on my mental well being as well and have started doing a bit of self help. I have read a few useful books and talk to a councillor every so often just to clean house.
I think the most useful thing is thinking about how and what I think about. Yesterday I posted that the most important question you can ask is Why? And as Christ said “physician heal thyself!” Why do I think the way I do? What are the premises for my thinking and are they healthy?
I am for myself, a fascinating study, but the last thing I learned was that I should look after myself for the future.
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
The question I hate to be asked is the question that more people should ask, especially of people like me.
It is “Why?” Because it forces you to confront the reasons for something you think, something you just say or something you mindlessly believe. I hate to be asked it but am relieved when people do. It shows me that I am not alone in believing that authority figures should explain their thinking, should be accountable for that thinking and reassures me that people are thinking.
The last thing that we need is to be listening to people who are unwilling or unable to account for the reasons that they say things. Anyone can say thing, we need to be listening to reasoned thinking.
Share one of the best gifts you’ve ever received.
The greatest gift is the gift of life. Of the huge number of possible numbers of sperm and eggs and the titanic millions of combinations of genes it is incredible that the combination that has emerged is us.
We live on a planet in the Goldilocks zone, we live in an ecosystem that is perfect for us and at climatic latitudes where we can thrive. Furthermore we can read and write, how many millions are denied this simple pleasure because of lack of educational opportunities or simply being born at a different time, and if you are reading this now on a screen, how wonderful is it to be living in the time of the internet!
Humans as we know them have been around for a couple of hundred thousand years, we have opportunities to read and write from our liberal educational system and books are common and cheap. For me the greatest gift is being born in an age when we can read the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Narnia and other great works. We live in a blessed age and that is a great gift.
What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?
I do not write for a living, yet, but I hope to do so in my dotage, if we last that long.
The way the world is going at the moment makes me feel very sad. I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s and saw the optimistic 90s and 00. I am sad that my little boy is growing up in the uncertainty and fear of the 20s.
I am sure it will all be alright in the end, nobody is seriously so unserious about using nukes, right?
What advice would you give to your teenage self?
Let’s be frank, the world of 1999 is very different to the modern age. I got my first mobile phone in 1999, there was no Facebook etc and I think prepackaged sandwiches were a strange novelty.
So telling myself to get to grips with the internet would be a mistake that I did in fact make. My second postgrad was e-commerce which was new and odd at the time. People would ask what it meant and even the experts were not particularly sure. I know that sounds odd in this Amazon age but there we are.
I wonder if I would actually listen to myself in 1999. I would certainly tell myself to get a serious qualification and not look at airy things. Definitely I would tell myself to stop drinking, spending money on nonsense and in general straighten up and fly right.
But I don’t think I would have listened.
What bores you?
I am increasingly thinking that the post enlightenment world is needlessly cut off from myth and majesty. It is a funny feeling but I do wonder if the world is running on empty. It is a feeling that I have had for a long time.
When I worked in an open air museum I had a feeling that the trees were working overtime, that they sensed that the end was nigh and that we only had a limited time, a last hurrah!
I have had this sensation and think it is a sense of collective boredom with the world. What bores me is the same stories on television and in books, what bores me like recycled air on a plane is this pulp that we are expected to be excited by but turns out to be more of the same.
What I feel is that we need to connect with the source of the stories, the original myths and mythos of our collective civilisations. We need to reenchant the forests so that we don’t see them as an investment but something else, something far richer than money.
There have been a number of Lord of the Rings adaptations over the years, some better than others, and nothing starts a row amongst Tolkien fans faster than saying which adaptation is the best. But here I go with my half-penth, the best adaptation of Lord of the Rings is the 1981 BBC version by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell.
Why choose a radio drama from forty years ago as the best adaptation? Well the first advantage of the BBC version is that it is radio meaning that you have to use your imagination for the setting and the characters. Film and television dominate the mind tyrannising us with how things look as opposed to how things might look. My friend Jim also loves this version but I bet a pound to a penny that if you could see what he was imagining when the Nasgul hunts Frodo or the Eagle sings of the victory over Sauron to the city he will be seeing something quite different to me. Radio is the ultimate medium because it engages the imagination.
The BBC version boasts an all star cast of its day some of whom are no longer with us. This gives us a distinct advantage in that we do not see the actor and the character shines through better. John Le Mesurier is better known as Sgt. Wilson from Dads Army but his Bilbo is fantastic. Ian Holm, who played Bilbo in the recent film, plays Frodo and again gives an amazing performance running through a series of emotional highs and lows that brings the trial of the ring into sharp relief.
The musical score is sometimes criticised for being intrusive but I disagree. It is dramatic and powerful music, with a strong nod to Wagner, fitted for an apocalyptic narrative. Different songs are appropriate to different races for example the charge of Rohan at the Field of Pelennor is accompanied by a heroic song that inspires you to just want to jack in your day job, buy a horse and kill orcs for the rest of your life. Absolutely sublime.
One of the great points is that this adaptation is very true to Tolkiens epic but appears to miss out Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wights. This is a tricky point because to some Tom is a blemish and to others like myself he is a vital part of the story. Whilst it is true that he is excluded from the adaptation it is also true that they did record Old Man Willow, Tom and the Barrow Wights and this can be heard in Brian Sibleys ‘Tales from a Perilous Realm’. The question is does it work? And it absolutely does. My only criticism of the BBC adaptation is that the Tom recording was excluded.
So to conclude it is my assertion that the BBC adaptation is the best and is a version I go back to again and again and again world without end. It is well written fully sensitive to the source material with a strong sense of epic, catastrophe and drama fitting the Downfall of the Lord of the Rings.