A Somerset Lad

No, it’s not a spelling mistake. It is a ‘g’ and not a ‘c.’ It is a Brazilian football club, not a form of Spanish dancing.

Had you ever heard of Flamengo? Perhaps there are footballing cognoscenti who would be familiar with the name, most people whom I know would not have heard of the club. I had not heard of Flamengo until this morning.

Most of the Third Year students have gone on a school trip to Belgium.  Just four students were left in the class, and one of the boys and I stood watching a soccer match from the classroom window. The under-18s were playing a team from another school in the county in a fiercely contested match.

‘Who do you support?’ I asked him.

‘In the Premier League – Liverpool, but at home in Brazil, Flamengo.’

Knowing nothing about South American football, I could not comment on the merits or otherwise of his preferred team.

At the end of the lesson, it was lunchtime and I took out my phone. Opening Facebook to check on family news, the first thing to appear was a suggested item. It was a picture of the Flamengo football team who had won the Brazilian cup last week, a team of which I had not heard until twenty minutes previously.

In the past, when I have suggested to people that mobile phones eavesdrop on conversations, I have drawn looks of incredulity, but this morning’s evidence seemed conclusive.

My suspicions had become very strong when the prominent Dublin surgeon John Crown came up in conversation some weeks ago. He had provided excellent care to my friend who wondered what age he might be.

Taking out my phone, I had typed ‘John’ into Google, when ‘Crown’ immediately came up on the screen as one of three suggestions from which I might choose. How many hundred or even thousand surnames might have been prompted by the forename ‘John’? Had there been even a dozen possibilities suggested, I might have thought it was a piece of random chance, but it seemed very unlikely that random chance could have provided the name as one of just three?

It is not just that the phone is eavesdropping, it is obviously also passing information on to third parties who are monetising the information they have gathered through being able to offer advertisers very targeted advertisments.

I think the time has come to start including random words in conversations to see which are noted and what responses they elicit.

The drivetime news was so annoying that I put a CD on to play. The Killers – I saw them in concert in June and the music conjured memories of summer days.

The Killers have become bracketed in my memory with Paul Selby, an English lecturer at Strode College who faced the task of teaching English Literature to boorsih rustics like myself.

Paul Selby strove to teach us to see the world in a way other than in the way of the trivial and the material culture of the late 1970s, to look for deeper meanings, to search for the things which were timeless.

During one class he pondered dancing, feeling that dancing of the ballroom variety was a complete negation of the meaning with which dancing was imbued in traditional societies. Dance to mark the passing of the seasons, the fading and the return of the light, the fertility of the earth and human beings, had a significance far deeper than tangos and foxtrots.

I sang along with the refrain of Human, a 2008 song by The Killers, which asks,

Are we human?
Or are we dancer?
My sign is vital
My hands are cold
And I’m on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human?
Or are we dancer?

Brandon Flowers and his fellow song writers recognised the capacity of dance to lift people out of their ordinary reality, to create a state of mind that is other than the everyday and the commonplace.

Dance is about something deeper than the superficial and trivial silliness of programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing. Considering dance on the basis of whether steps were together and whether moves are co-ordinated is to consider it on the basis of its mechanics.  It is like considering a painting on the basis of how paints were applied and what canvas was used. Ballroom dancing is like the work of a local art club where there is so much emphasis on method that no-one stops to ask about meaning. How often do the television judges ponder whether the steps they think are so important actually express any existential thought?

Oddly, while line dancing might seem the ultimate move away from the forms of traditional dance,when one watches it there is a sense of both the person’s connection with the music and transcendence of themselves, and there is also a sense of the solidarity of the individual with all those around.  It is dancing for its own sake, without demand for formal precision, but with a strong bond of community.

Are we human or are we dancer? To be dancer means to be human in a different way.

What age would he have been forty years ago?

There is a photograph of Dr Michael Richards in Wetlands, Patrick Sutherland and Adam Nicolson’s 1986 book on life in the Somerset levels. Already his tight curls seemed more grey than dark. Tweed jacket, flannels, collar and tie, he was the embodiment of reassurance, the epitome of what a country doctor should be.

In the photograph, he is holding his surgery in the front parlour of our village pub, The King’s Head.

There was no bus service from our village and if you had no car, there was no way of getting to the surgery in Langport, our local small town, so once a week the doctor would come to the village to hold a surgery.

For someone who grew up in the village, a doctor who came and conducted a medical surgery in the pub was worthy of remembrance.

It is hard to imagine in the days of practice managers, and ‘on call’ services, that any doctor would consider a  pub a proper place for medical practice.  I have no doubt that medical care is best provided in appropriate facilities, but the Wednesday afternoon surgeries in the village did say something about regard for individuals.

Moving to Ireland in 1983, I missed the sort of care provided by Dr Richards and his colleagues in Langport Surgery. There were no longer the familiar faces in the waiting room, no longer doctors who might care for three generations.

It was a day in late October 1998 that I had cause to return to Langport Surgery. A night ferry crossing from Belfast to Liverpool had contended with 65 knot winds and I had been violently seasick, so sick that acid from my stomach had burned my throat.

The ever genial Dr Richards had smiled sympathetically and prescribed a large bottle of Gaviscon. ‘Don’t I know you?’ he had asked.

‘Perhaps,’ I replied, ‘I was a patient here when I was young. I was very asthmatic.’

Memories of him are of a man who was always calm, patient, solicitous, a manwho represented the National Health Service at its best.

Talking to my mother this evening, she described going to get her Covid booster vaccination yesterday.

‘I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to stand very long. Sarah had taken the wheelchair out of the car for me to sit in when a volunteer appeared to push it. The volunteers were retired staff. Do you know who pushed my chair? Dr Richards!’

Dr Richards must be well into his seventies, if not more. There was a moment of delight in hearing the best of doctors was still active.