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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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.
CS Lewis had a prime facie complicated approach to Christmas but on analysis it is clear that there are underlying reasons for his complicated response to this jolly season.
In the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Narnia is in a miserable situation. It is a land which echos the lyrics ‘Who have winter, but no Christmas‘ from the hymn ‘Cradled in a Manger meanly’ by George S. Rowe (1830-1913). It is part of the breaking down of the Witches power that Father Christmas can break into Narnia for the first time in a hundred years and start to distribute gifts and jollification. It is a horrific moment in the book when the Witch discovers a small group of Narnians who are celebrating Christmas. She calls the feasting a wicked waste then turns them to stone. A small evil but one that cements Jadis as one of the villains of children’s literature. Aslan and Father Christmas as on the side of jollification and fun whilst evil is frigid and cruel to baby squirrels. All joking aside this is a theme that is important in Lewis who says that heaven delights in looking down on a family enjoying a meal together and generally argues that fun is a virtue in and of itself. In stark contrast the demon Screwtape asks Wormwood the pointed question of his patient “Why should the creature be happy?”
Christmas in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is an essential breaking down of the Witches power but in the real world Lewis was strongly critical of the commercialisation and the onerous duties associated with modern Christmas in England. In ‘Xmas and Christmas A Lost Chapter from Herodotus’ Lewis describes the horror of secular Xmas from buying unnecessary tat as presents to spending too much on food and drink. The horror of thinking that you have bought all the gifts you need and then get a surprise gift that you need to go back out into the over crowded shops so you can reciprocate. His imaginary correspondent observes the ritual of Xmas and asks a priest why Xmas and Christmas have to be at the same time and the priest replies that it is a racket. The theme that xmas is a racket is repeated in ‘What Christmas Means to Me’ with Lewis pointing out that the ritual of gift giving had grown and grown out of recognisable proportions. The Victorians had given modest gifts between lovers, parents to children and cards between acquaintances. Lewis condemns this on a number of grounds with the strongest being that it gives little pleasure. He is told that it is good for the economy, for trade, but bites back that rather than be saddled with junk it might be better to just give money to the shops as a charity. Finally in ‘Delinquents in the Snow’ Lewis is confronted by the delinquents who have been tormenting his household and stealing from his garden murdering carols at his front door for tips. This is a dense essay that is well worth a read where Lewis ranges far and wide over criminal policies and the moral duties of the Christian.
So I wish you all a very jolly Christmas with your families and friends. Please don’t spend too much or struggle with the shops. Happy Christmas one and all.
The success of An Inspector Calls lies with JB Priestley’s talent with exploiting the underlying tensions within the Birling family. It is from these tensions that the drama – a thing done – flows. The characters act logically within their own moral frameworks and limited perceptions which are exposed by the Inspector who sees not the limited but the expanded impact of the families choices.
Arthur Birling is an up and coming industrialist whose progress has been smooth so far but he fears a scandal. He is not of the same class as Gerald, who treats him as an equal despite being younger, but seems to aspire to this status and have it within his grasp. Seeking to reassure Geralds mother he boast of potentially being honoured which would go somewhere to achieving this.
Clearly the class issue is a source of tension between Geralds parents and the Birlings. They are of old money whilst the Birlings are new money, men whose status relies on their wealth as opposed to some hereditary title. Arthur is well aware of this status imbalance and confides to Gerald that he is aware that Geralds mother thinks he could have done better and even stayed to his own class. The anxiety of not belonging to the hereditary nobility tells in Birlings treatment of his workers. In order to distance himself from his origins, potentially within this class or at least close to it, he treats them with suspicion, harshness and a dismissiveness verging on the contemptible. Certainly to a contemporary audience who had seen the rise of organised Labour and the creation of the Labour Party this aspiration to join the aristocracy would have looked out of step with reality. By the 1940s and 50s these were yesterdays men.
Shiela shows the greatest development throughout the play not least in her change from a self absorbed engagee. In the beginning of the play she could not take her eyes off her engagement ring when her father wanted to address her and her involvement with Eva Smith is associated with her self perception. Shiela has Eva fired from the last steady job that she has because she looks prettier than her and because she thought that Eva was laughing at her. Shielas identity is wrapped up in her feminine identity and her status as an attractive woman. A status that is always under attack by her mother who insists on treating her like a child and maybe even a doll. Her relationship with Gerald is equally complex as she suspects him of having other love interests since he did not come near her one summer. The fault lines around Sheila are significant which may go a long way to explain why she develops the most of all the characters.
The title is a butchered CS Lewis quote but I think you get the message. One of the things adolescents fear is looking childish, I think children themselves feel shame if someone accuses them of being acting like a child, despite being a child a quality of being young and something to be enjoyed. Not enjoying childhood is a complete waste and taking childhood from someone early is demonic.
What does it mean to be an adult? There are somethings that an adult can do, they can buy adult things like alcohol or monster drinks at a certain age but it is not the age that is important. Its the quality of their relationship with society. An adult is a person (literally a legal person) who can be trusted with potentially harmful materials, substances, actions and relationships to enjoy them responsibly and in a socially responsible way. The way we judge this is by age. I often wonder if people should take a personality test to be allowed to date, a genetic test to assert if they can handle beer etc etc but then my dystopia alarm goes off. We have to trust people.
I thought I would feel like an adult when I could do adult things without being supervised. I imagined that beer, a girlfriend and a job would make me an adult. I was wrong and these things were shallow opportunities to be an adult though rich and rewarding in themselves. Something was missing. These experiences were symbols or signals of my adult hood and I was wearing them like scout badged sewn onto my jumper. I thought about it long and hard one night in the university bar where I suddenly realised that I did not want another beer. What I actually wanted was a lemonade, a crisp, cold and refreshing glass of lemonade. Part of me recoiled and I imagined people looking escance at the adult man drinking a lemonade but then I thought that it was only pride talking and if I wanted something from my childhood why not get something from my childhood. In that moment a whole new world opened up for me. Now that I was an adult I could enjoy childish things.
Most of my work is tongue in cheek and flippant. I try to make useful points but I am far too English to be serious. This prompt calls for me to use my imagination and I have done so thinking in terms of my real interests in the world. I have a heart for the vulnerable and the marginalised even if I don’t have the means or the temperament to help them directly. So I have selected three charities that I think are important and would love it if you clicked on the links.
Embrace is a charity that works with prostitutes in Coventry. I first came across the charity at Hope Church in Hillfields. What struck me was that the charity was not a ‘finger wagging’ exercise but a loving outreach to women and girls who were being exploited in the most horrendous way. One of the things run was a weekly tea party for the ladies which restored to them a sense of dignity and respect. A deeply loving venture that I can not praise enough.
To think that there are more slaves in the world than have ever been is a horrible thought. I feel it very deeply because one of my relations was Thomas Clarkson a man who drove himself to a nervous breakdown in his efforts alongside Wilberforce and others to abolish the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. To think that in this day the world is more dependant on forced labour, slavery, child labour and low wages is deplorable and this charity works hard to raise awareness of and take action against slavery in the modern world.
I care deeply about life and that people should live good lives and have good deaths. Death is the ultimate statistic one in one die. Despite this commonality people find death to be a terrifying experience either for themselves or their loved ones. Myton provides expert care based on years of experience to make this terrible time easier and better.
To conclude if I had a million dollars to give away I would choose these three charities who work so hard at the coal face of human experience.
The title to this blog is absolutely true, if you want to do sky diving twice you need a parachute. You can go once and will have the ride of what is left of your life but I could never do that. I would be terrified. In fact I would also be terrified of jumping with a parachute. It is not for me.
It is not the kit that would be the problem I would have complete confidence in the people organising the jump it is my imagination that would bring up horrible images. And that is the cusp of this writing prompt. I think that you can have a ‘belt and braces’ approach to life absolutely safe and secure but your imagination will always produce a fantasy of horror.
Roald Dahl points out in one of his books that the nightmare of rich people is that they wake up in the morning with nothing in the bank. Being rich insulates you from the troubles and tribulations of real life and to go from pampered luxury to real life must be a terrible thing. A horrific example is when the top fell off Charles II cane at his trial and nobody reached down to pick it up. To go from King to normal person must be a test of character.
The danger of this question, this geni bargain, is to remove reality from our lives. In real life success is never assured. We have proverbs about ‘best laid plans’ and ‘slips between cup and lip’ and life is always a gamble however well you stack the cards in your favour. Chance and chaos find a way.
The cool sport of this month is the World Conker Championships held in Peterbough, Cambridgeshire. I hope you’ve got your nuts good and hard!
