Club Days

Posted on 27th May 2023 by Ian

Only today did I discover what it was all about:

The objects of the Society shall be:
The encouragement of Thrift, Self-help and Sobriety of Conduct in each individual member, and the promotion of a Spirit of True Comradeship, Friendliness and Brotherly Love towards all.
The Society shall provide charitable donations from its funds to local organisations which provide useful services to the community

Today was the day when the Langport Friendly Society held their annual walk, next Saturday, it will be Long Sutton. Long Sutton Parish Council describes the annual walk by their Friendly Society.

It used to hold its traditional Club walk on each Trinity Monday but changed from 1972 and is now held on the first Saturday in June and is one of a few of its kind still in existence.

The day starts with the church bells being rung at 6.00am and is followed by the annual roll call of Members at the Village Hall. The procession is headed by the Banner Bearer, Secretary, Chairman and President of the society followed by the band and then the members. Over the years the society has been supported by Kingsbury, Yeovil and in recent years Sherborne Town bands, one year though, in the 1990s, there was no band available and a Jazz band was asked to lead the members round.

​The members’ parade from the hall to the church for their annual service, stopping outside the West Door for the National Anthem and then parading into Holy Trinity Church for the annual service, where music again is provided by the band. The banner with its motto ‘United we stand, divided we fall’ is draped across the altar during the service. The hymns selected are well known and, to hear a church full of men singing with a brass band, is quite an experience.

After the service the parade then reforms and the members set off on their walk calling at various houses and farms for refreshments of all kinds

I remember the excitement of club day arriving. The sun shone and there was a mood of happiness in the heart of a small boy. The club members, my uncle among them, wore dark suits and rosettes and were led by a silver band. The members of the club called for refreshments at various farms in the neighbourhood before gathering for lunch at the manor farm in the village.

Five years ago, a man in his nineties told me about  the bits that I had forgotten.

“Townsends would bring their fair up from Weymouth. They were not allowed to set up on the village green until after the evening service at the church on the Sunday evening. On Monday morning, the club members would all meet at the church for a service and would then be led by the Kingsbury Episcopi Silver Band. It was Whitmonday, but must of the men were farm workers, so didn’t get bank holidays off work, club day was accepted as a day they did get off. The walk would visit the farms where one or other of them worked and the farmer would provide them all with a glass of beer or cider. There would be a good lunch at the end – and then a whip round to pay for it. Then there would be the fair in the evening.”

Our friendly society in Long Sutton, a small Somerset village, was aptly named, it was the embodiment of friendliness. The paucity of financial rewards from farm work was counterbalanced by a rich sense of community; club day cemented the day in the thoughts of members throughout the year.

 

 

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Four and a half miles of separation

Posted on 18th May 2023 by Ian

There is a fingerpost in the village of Shapwick that announces that High Ham is four and a half miles. The first time I noticed the sign, it seemed such an unlikely claim that I measured the distance from Shapwick to the village green in High Ham on the car odometer – it was correct.

Perhaps the doubt was unwarranted, the wrought iron fingerposts were erected in times when local councils were particular about things being correct; in some places distances are shown to the nearest quarter of a mile.

The thought arose because there seemed no connection between the villages, no reason for the distance to High Ham to be shown; lines of communication between the one place and another consisted of a narrow road down a hill and an undulating road across a peat moor. There might be reason for people to travel through High Ham on their way from Shapwick to somewhere else; there seemed little reason for anyone to travel to High Ham.

When the sign was erected, the two villages would have lain in the jurisdiction of different district councils. They remain within different parliamentary constituencies; their children attend different secondary schools; the two parishes are not even contiguous, the parish of Ashcott lying as a buffer between them.

One could set out across the moor toward High Ham and not be certain of ever arriving anywhere. If one were to ask the inhabitants of the respective villages whether they belonged to the same community, the answer would probably be a firm negative. There might only be four and a half miles distance, but there is little sense of connection.

Lines of communication and bonds of community seem inextricably bound together, the more communication exists, the greater the shared sense of community. Four and a half miles may be a close geographical proximity, but in the case of the two villages geography is not a factor that has the capacity to create a community.

It is communication that creates community. The various government initiatives to promote community life will not be successful unless the connections the government seeks to create are consonant with people’s own perceptions of which communities it is with which they identify, with which communities they feel they can communicate. Programmes not rooted in people’s own feelings of where they belong will no more bind them into communities than road signs saying the distance is only four and a half miles will bind together two disparate villages.

 

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It’s iris time

Posted on 15th May 2023 by Ian

The iris in my mother’s garden is white. If it looks mauve, that’s because the picture was taken in the evening light. It is now forty-five years old and looks as it does at the moment for only a brief time each May.

It is white, but it and its companions might have been any colour. They were gathered from the rubbish heap, rhizomes discarded because they had been muddled with others, either after they had been cut, or in the dispatch shed where the irises were packed before being sent off to addresses around the country.

We were free to take rhizomes from the rubbish heap, they had no value and a handful of them might turn out to be a range of entirely different colours.

Two summers were spent at the nursery. Two months in 1978, and four months between completing A-Levels and starting university in 1979. A total of six months of work, and hardly any awareness of what an iris looked like.

By the time the summer came and the season for cutting and dispatching rhizomes arrived, all traces of the flowers had long since disappeared. That they were May-flowering was an easily learned fact, but there was no memory of how the fields of the nursery had looked during May.

Irises seemed half-dead, unattractive plants, it was a mystery why people went to occasions like the Chelsea Flower Show and placed orders for dozens to be sent to them by post.

The nursery’s specialisms were irises and peonies. The peonies were even less attractive than the irises. Peony roots were sent to the customers. Presumably these roots had once been the source of beautiful flowers, but the brown clumps that were dug and posted gave little clue of the potential they held.

On one occasion, being allowed an afternoon in the packing shed instead of out in the fields, it was odd to look at the peony roots and consider how much people would pay for them. The top price was £6.50 or so for the more expensive ones, that’s around £40 each in 2019 values. Who would spend £40 on a single peony that might not grow at all? (Some of them didn’t grow: irate customers would arrive at the nursery seeking out the foreman who would tell them calmly that he was afraid that the foreman was not around the yard that day).

Peonies never found their way onto the rubbish heap, presumably they were too valuable to muddle. Forty-five years on, the irises are staging their brief annual show.

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Artificial intelligence cannot cope with teenage boys

Posted on 10th May 2023 by Ian

The Financial Times carries an article stating that ‘AI will create a serious number of losers.’  The article states that AI tools ‘will shake up everything from medical diagnostics to teaching and copywriting, a range of jobs will be eradicated.’

One can only assume that the DeepMind founder who is making such claims has not met the boys of the Second Year class on Wednesday afternoons. The poor electronic device intended to replace the teacher would find itself unplugged so they can charge their phones, its pleas for order would be met with paper balls and darts, and everything it said would be ignored.  Anyone who tried teaching electronically during lockdown will know how it failed completely with unwilling students.

However successful computer programmes may be, the possibility of them demonstrating intelligence comparable with that of humans is still remote.  The intelligence demanded for daily human life demands countless skills and choices, it demands the answering of unanticipated questions, something beyond the capacity of a computer programme, which can only base its response on the information it has been given.

As a Religious Education teacher, it seems that the greatest difficulty for artificial intelligence will be in responding to moral questions. One of the issues raised in objections to driverless cars is how they make moral choices. An adult pushing a child in a buggy steps off of the pavement without looking: should the car hit the adult and child or should it swerve to the right for a head-on collision with a car coming in the other direction? Someone writing the programme to allow a vehicle to travel autonomously would have to decide what the programme should instruct the car to do, someone has to take the moral decision because the programme is incapable of doing so by itself.

Real artificial intelligence will have emerged when a programme can argue with itself, and with other programmes, about what is right and what is wrong. Perhaps, given the speed of technological progress, that possibility will arrive sooner than expected, but for that point to be reached, programmers will have to teach value systems to their machines, they will have to install a code of ethics as part of the computer’s thought processes.

Who is going to decide on the moral values of artificially intelligent computer programme? Whether it is taking the decision to run over the child in the buggy, or the decision about which lives to save in an accident and emergency ward, someone is going to have to write the moral software. The point when a computer can take decisions for itself seems still distant..

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Happy to talk

Posted on 8th May 2023 by Ian

The four boys sat around the table talking, there was not a phone in sight. I went over to them and said how encouraging it was that they were content to just happy to talk.

Talking was a serious business when I was a child. Harold and Glady called at the farm at Pibsbury each Sunday evening. Friends of my grandparents they would sit in the farmhouse sitting room and talk about the events and news of the week. It was an evening just to talk.

Glady’s name was presumably ‘Gladys,’ but, if it was, it was never used. Names were not necessarily what you might have assumed. My grandmother was known by everyone as ‘Cis,’ a name that apparently arose from her little brother’s inability to pronounce her name ‘Geraldine’ (why ‘Cis’ and not ‘Sis,’ I never discovered). My Auntie Gus’s full name was ‘Augusta,; something I only discovered years after she had died. Glady’s full name might have been anything.

In memory, Glady wore a hairnet during her Sunday evening calls, but that might be a conflation of memories of Glady, Gus and Ena Sharples from Coronation Street. In memory, Glady was not very agile, but that cannot have been due to her age.

While Harold and Glady seemed very old to a small boy, they were of my grandparents’ generation, which means the Sunday evening visitors were not yet sixty, for I was twelve before my grandmother was sixty and thirteen before my grandfather reached his sixtieth birthday. It is odd to think that the couple that I now remember as elderly were younger than I am now.

Glady always liked a very firm chair upon which to sit. Perhaps she had orthopaedic problems, perhaps the desire for a hard chair was just a matter of personal preference.

Sitting upright on a firm seat could sometimes give the sitter an almost regal air.

Auntie Gus would sit bolt upright in her sitting room, in the chair where she passed the days sat beside Uncle Jack. Jack had suffered severe hardship as a prisoner of war and as forced labour, in a coal mine during the First World War, and it would have been easy to have imagined reasons why he would have found a straight-backed chair to be more comfortable. It would not have been so easy to have explained why Gus chose such seating.

Perhaps straight-backs were cultural. Born before the Great War, Harold and Glady and Gus and Jack would have been shaped by the culture of their times. The body language of an upright stance suggests confidence and transparency and a willingness to conform with the rules. Perhaps sitting straight-backed was a mark of respect to one’s host. Perhaps it was an indicator of the seriousness with which talking was taken.

 

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