A Somerset Lad

Audio books have become a therapy whilst sitting in the constant traffic jams that are part of everyday life.  The congestion causes a nine mile journey to take 45 minutes.  (Yes, public transport is available, if the connections were right, the nine mile journey could be completed in two hours).

The problem is selecting material to which to listen.

Detective stories have been the first choice since childhood days.  The tales of Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Sherlock Holmes, Paolo Baldi, and miscellaneous other sleuths have helped to overcome the impatience caused by erratic traffic lights, drivers in the wrong lane, bin collections in the middle of rush hour, cyclists who prefer not to use the cycle lanes provided by the city council at great expense, and all the other annoyances encountered by a bad and grumpy driver.

Choosing a new selection for listening this week, the name of Anthony Horowitz caught the eye.  The Foyle’s War television series had been excellent, so the audiobook Magpie Murders seemed likely to offer engagement of a similar quality. The story, set in 1955, centres upon a German private detective living in post-war London, Atticus Pünd.

It seems strange not to have encountered Herr Pünd before.  His character is full of surprises.

Magpie Murders brings the detective from London into a gossip-filled village in an English shire.  It took only a few minutes to realize that the story was set in the north-eastern corner of Somerset and that the police force involved was the Bath and Somerset Constabulary.

Pünd encounters Detective Inspector Chubb, a police officer with whom he has co-operated and Chubb (a good Somerset name) is a man who understood what Somerset meant to its natives.  Investigating a murder that involved extreme violence, he considered Somerset to have been violated.

Raymond Chubb did not like murder. He had become a policeman because he believed in order and he considered the county of Somerset, with its neat villages, hedgerows and ancient fields to be one of the most ordered and civilised parts of the country – if not the world. Murder changed everything. It broke the gentle rhythm of life. It turned neighbour against neighbour. Suddenly nobody was to be trusted and doors, which were usually left open at night, were locked. Murder was an act of vandalism, a brick thrown at a picture window and somehow it was his job to put together the pieces.

Horowitz captures a feeling of how secure life felt in our village and the sense many older people now have in being in a place that is not what it was.

‘Ian, are you alright?’

‘Yes. The older I get the more I think and the less I say.’

Sitting in silence with my hands folded in front of me seems to discomfit some people.

It is not intended to do so.  It is not some psychological power play. It is not an attempt to intimidate or to make a statement.  It is simply sitting quietly and listening and watching and thinking.

Once, there was a delusion that thinking could lead to the uncovering of something significant.  Of course, decades of thinking have never brought any breakthrough in knowledge. More often, there has been the replaying and replaying of the same sequences.

Once, there was a need to say something in every discussion, to contribute some insight imagined to be new, to attempt some pithy summary of the exchanges. now, silence seems a preferable option.

First order questions have never been welcomed. Matters of principle are not the stuff of routine meetings, not considered relevant to day to day management.

Too many years of engagement in theology have prompted a desire to dissect arguments, to ask why conclusions have been drawn.

After saying ‘yes’ there was a desire to say something else.  It had seemed abrupt, perfunctory and had offered no explanation for the noticeable diffidence.

Eventually, words from my grandmother came to mind.  They seemed to offer a rationale for having sat disengaged while the group around the table took part in a discussion, the thread of which I had long lost.

Turning to my questioner, I said, ‘my grandmother taught me a rhyme when I was a child.  It was primary school stuff, but it has stuck with me.

A wise old owl sat on an oak
The more he heard the less he spoke.
The less he spoke the more he heard,
why don’t you be like  that wise old bird?

Perhaps it didn’t really explain anything.  Perhaps it was appropriate to someone sat in a classroom in High Ham Primary School but not for a sixty-four year old who had left that school more than fifty years previously. Perhaps it was a disingenuous response, a deliberate avoidance of the reason for my silence.

Had there been an honest answer, it might have been an admission that I could just not be bothered, that I had attended meetings for more than forty years and could not remember one that had made a difference.

Perhaps at next week’s meeting I shall sit with a notepad and assume a greater air of interest.

‘It’s cold’, said my mother, during one of our thrice weekly telephone calls.

‘It is’, I said. ‘I can’t wait for the spring.’

When I was young, in our house being cold was normal.

There was a fire lit in the living room on a daily basis. My father would light it before heading out to work at 7.00 each morning.  During particularly cold spells, the fire might have been kept in overnight.  There was always a sense of security in seeing the glow of the coke with which it had been banked up.  Sometimes, not often, the kitchen fire might also have been lit.

In the bathroom, which was downstairs, there was a paraffin heater that was lit while we washed; but on cold nights, it had to go outside to ensure the pipes in the toilet did not freeze. Warmth in the bathroom generally depended upon filling the washbasin with hot water and plunging one’s arms into it. The other rooms were unheated.

The purchase of a big grey convector heater was a great boon, although it could not be used on a casual basis. In 1972, four electric storage heaters were fitted in our three bedroomed council house, and the toilet was moved inside. It seemed the most cosy house in England, we still had to go downstairs to the toilet, but it no longer had a seat that chilled the flesh.

In the years of ministry in parishes, the cold moments returned. Half of the thirty years were spent in buildings from former times, big rambling glebe houses, dating from times when servants were a customary part of life, it was impossible to keep more than a handful of rooms at a tolerable temperature. People in the parishes regarded the oversized buildings as part of the heritage of the community and many thought clergy should regard themselves as privileged to be living in such houses, had they experienced the places on winter mornings, they might have revised their opinion.

Perhaps the advancing years have caused the blood to thin, or the metabolism to slow down, but there has developed an aversion to the cold. It is not hard to understand why so many people moved to Spain upon retirement, it wasn’t about flamenco or sangria, it wasn’t about beaches or bars, it was just about being warm.

There is cold in the air tonight. It is the sort of chill that penetrates to the bones, and that leaves the whole body shivering.