Weight not volume

“Sold by weight not by volume,” the words on the Corn Flakes box always spoke with an air of authority, as though a legal declaration was being made at the kitchen table each morning, as though the red Formica-topped table was the site of daily participation in British jurisprudence.

Initially, the words seemed baffling, “volume” in our house referred to how loud the television or radio were played. When the meaning of volume in the context of a cardboard box was explained, it seemed not so much baffling as odd. If it said sixteen ounces on the front of the carton, then it would be only proper to expect that there would be sixteen ounces inside the packet, no matter how much or how little space the pound of Corn Flakes filled.

The explanation offered was that Kellogg’s needed to put the words on the front in case someone opened the box and, finding that the sixteen ounces had settled and did not fill the space, complained that the box was not full. In the perception of a schoolboy, this seemed like going to the village shop for a quarter pound of sherbet bonbons and complaining that the sweets purchased did not fill the white paper bag in which they had been placed by the kindly shopkeeper.

It seemed an early lesson in being wary of people who might try to turn situations to their own advantage: a pound of Corn Flakes might mean a pound of Corn Flakes to almost everyone, but if someone could somehow claim they expected more, they could claim to have been short sold.

Much of the claims industry seems to rest on the notion that things are not as they are assumed to be unless one makes repeated statements that this is how it is, and that everyone should take note that this is how it is, and that those who do not take note that this is how it is do so at their own risk. Warning signs sometimes seem as simplistic as saying, “sixteen ounces equal sixteen ounces.” One will see notices warning that there is a danger of death by electrocution at the foot of pylons or a danger of drowning beside fast-flowing rivers.

A child would know such things, but it seems necessary to advise adults of such realities, or risk a claim for damages if something calamitous should happen. Worst of all, there is an entire industry surrounding the seeking of compensation, firms advertising on radio stations asking people who have had accidents to contact them as there may be financial damages due to them.

Did the rot begin in the days when Kellogg’s had to advise their breakfast cereal was sold by weight and not by volume? Isn’t it time that the government enacted an “Act of Responsibility” making stupid choices the responsibility of those who make them?

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Glad to be rid of him

All Souls’ Day: in parish days it was a season for the remembrance of the faithful departed by those whose cosmology allowed for a temporal space between death and the final culmination of time; it was a time to tread warily when speaking of those who had gone before us. It has become a time to reflect upon mistakes made in those parish days.

There was a widow who did not seem overwhelmed by grief, in fact, she seemed quite light-hearted about the matter.  Shock often acts as an anaesthetic to the pain of grief and it seemed likely that the moment would come when the pain of loss hit her.  The lightness continued. The matter became clearer sometime later when a neighbour commented that the woman was enjoying herself for the first time in years now she was rid of her horrible husband.

No-one in theological college days had ever suggested that loss was something that might be welcomed and that the prospect of seeing the person again would definitely take the sheen off an eternity in heaven.

William Trevor’s Love and Summer suggests pastoral care at times of bereavement should be based not on repeating platitudes, but a careful sensitivity regarding the relationships between the deceased and the survivors.

The anticipation of personal contentment, which had long ago influenced Mrs Connulty’s acceptance of the married state and the bearing of two children, had since failed her: she had been disappointed in her husband and in her daughter. As death approached, she had feared she would now be obliged to join her husband and prayed she would not have to. Her daughter she was glad to part from; her son – now in his fiftieth year, her pet since first he lay in her arms as an infant – Mrs Connulty had wept to leave behind.

Perhaps Mrs Connulty’s daughter would be as relieved to see her mother depart as Mrs Connulty was relieved to be rid of her husband, yet in both cases, in a real situation, the same words would have been said expressing great sorrow for the person’s loss.

What message is given to people when the church blandly asserts that people shall spend forever with those who have gone before them?  What does it say when priests use prayers couched in terms such as:

Strengthen them to meet the days to come
with steadfastness and patience,
not sorrowing as those without hope,
but in thankful remembrance of your mercy in the past,
and waiting for a joyful reunion in heaven.

What if the person felt like Mrs Connulty and had no desire whatsoever for a reunion in heaven?  Are the terms used in the funeral liturgies of the church articles of faith?  Does faith in the resurrection mean being stuck with someone forever?

If a woman has had to endure years of being kept short of money to feed her family, of being verbally abused, of being knocked about when her husband came home drunk, of being belittled in front of others, what good news does the church offer when it tells people that they they will be reunited in heaven?

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A mangold wurzel and half a crown

It is fifty-five years since I won the prize.

31st October 1966 was Punkie Night at Long Sutton Primary School, not that many of us would have had pumpkins with which to make Hallowe’en lanterns.  For most of us, it would have been more appropriate to have called it mangold wurzel night.

Mangold wurzels were grown on the local farms as winter fodder for cattle and were usually pink or purple or orange on the outside.  In the absence of the exotic pumpkin, they did the job perfectly.

There was a competition for the best punkie, but when you are six years old competitions don’t mean very much.  It was the occasion that mattered.  We all walked around the village green with our punkies lit before going into the village school for our Hallowe’en party.

My Dad had made my punkie. It was a longish mangold that had been hollowed out and had narrow, evil looking eyes.  The mouth was wide with matchsticks at odd angles for jagged teeth.  The hair was the best bit.  He had combed out lengths of coarse twine to give the punkie a full head of hair, but had plaited this on either side to give it pig tails.

After the party in the main room of the school we were all made to sit on chairs set out in rows.  I was in the second row, watching the proceedings over someone’s shoulder.  Various announcements were made and then the prize for the best punkie was announced.

I was so surprised that when I went forward for the prize I felt more bemused than excited.  I was even more bemused when I got the prize.  I walked back to my seat and was asked what it was by the children around – I didn’t know.

I looked at it.  It was a booklet with pale blue pages, pages that were wider than they were long.  Each page had lines of darker blue squares, two rows of four squares across each page.  The only time I had seen squares of colour on a page was on a card my Nan had got from the paint shop, but those squares were different colours, these squares were all blue.  My moment of glory had ended in confusion.

My Dad explained afterwards to me that it was a National Savings book.  You bought savings stamps and stuck them onto the pages, over the darker blue squares.  The stamps were half a crown and the first stamp had been stuck into the book for me.

Half a crown?  Couldn’t they have just given me the money? The sense of losing out remains!

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Wailing winds

My sister’s Chihuahua and Maltese were ready for their evening walk. They barked impatiently waiting for their leads.

Only as we stepped out of the door did I remember how dark nights in rural Somerset could be. No light from the sky broke through the thick cloud cover. Once we would have stepped back inside the door to find a flashlight. Instead, smartphone torches provided the illumination that would once have depended on Ever Ready.

The dog end of October always seemed a time when the year was dying. days and months were in double figures and the disappearance of the daylight was always accentuated by the turning back of the clocks. The deep gloom of the road toward the windmill captured the mood of the season.

“Less than eight weeks to the solstice,” I said to the night air.

The mild breeze grew into a blustery wind of a force that would make sea travel unpleasant, its presence audible in a deep moan from the overhead electricity power lines.

The sound brought a momentary recall of a day in childhood.

The road is a place where the wind blows steadily and consistently, as one might expect of a place where a windmill was built two hundred years ago, but there would be moments each winter when the steady wind would grow to gale force and there would be a threat of damage.

The day was one when my father was away, probably working at Lossiemouth or at Kinloss, air stations in Scotland where the air came down from the Arctic, places that made Somerset seem a year round summer land.

Perhaps the weather forecast had been severe for it was with a sense of urgency that my mother gave instructions to “batten down the hatches.” Anything that could be stored away was moved, covers were weighted down, doors and windows were secured. It seemed activity more appropriate to the high seas than to a council house garden distant from the coast.

The storm arrived with a wail of the wind through the wires, the sound a lament, a Banshee cry, a mourning for the loss of the summer and the daylight.

Since then it has been a mournful sound, a sound of the restriction, the isolation brought by the dark months of the year.  The wind blows in mocking tones, aware of its power to bring confinement, to intimidate, to spoil. On a late October evening, it was an anticipation of winter.

 

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Wishing for a rail journey

We went to see the Mappa Mundi, that artefact of a pre-modern world in which the mythological combined with the geographical and historical, that theological statement about the nature of Christendom.

Afterwards, I dropped them off at Hereford station, they to travel northward to Llandudno, I to drive southward and homeward. I should have loved to have made the journey back to Somerset by train.

Of course, railway travel has not the elegance that was once possible. The 1715 service from Newport to Taunton might once have had a locomotive and carriages, but, five years ago, when I last travelled on it the train was a four car diesel multiple unit. The seating was utilitarian, not built for long journeys.

Travelling eastward, lines joined from the right and the left, the reason for the convergence became apparent. Now gone without trace, the Severn Crossing toll booths on the M4 motorway were then still visible from the window, the lines joined to run through a tunnel beneath the Severn.

If any station has been omitted from the list of stops, it is hard now to recall what it might be. Once Bristol is reached there seem few possibilities that could have been overlooked. There is always a poetry in the way in which the stations are announced, a rhythm that lulls one into a sense of ease where the name of a stop might be missed: Severn Tunnel Junction, Patchway, Filton Abbey Wood, Bristol Temple Meads, Bedminster, Parson Street, Nailsea & Backwell, Yatton, Worle, Weston Milton, Weston-super-Mare, Highbridge & Burnham, Bridgwater, Taunton.

On approaching the great cathedral of railway architecture that is Bristol Temple Meads, the train slowed to walking pace. An announcer told us that the slow progress was because we were following a late-running service to Weymouth and that our routes would diverge at Bristol.

To have been travelling to Weymouth on that fine June evening would have been an enviable prospect, to have walked the promenade and to have sat on a bench and eaten fish and chips. The train passed so slowly through Stapleton Road station that, in days when carriage doors could be opened by the handle on the outside, someone might have run along the platform and leapt aboard.

Temple Meads is a wonderful declaration of Victorian confidence, a statement that engineering and science would shape the religion of the new age. The railways effected a revolution as profound in the Nineteenth Century as “smart” technology is in the Twenty-First.  Journeys that once took days now took hours.

Commuters filled the carriage at Bristol and the luxury of spreading a jacket, case, laptop and book across four seats ended. It was hard to imagine that they ever felt the need to give much  thought to Brunel and the ways in which his genius helped to change the landscape of the country and the fabric of ordinary lives.

It’s hard to imagine Brunel would have been overly impressed by the journey time of four and a half hours from Chester to Bridgwater, and would have been baffled that anyone might travel through the Welsh Marches to Newport before catching a train to Somerset when the obvious route would have been through Birmingham, but he didn’t have to cope with a fare structure that meant that it cost three times more to travel on the obvious route.

What was reassuring was that the trains were busy, that opportunities for spreading out, even in the rearmost part of the train, were limited, and that the poetry of railway station names will continue to be recited for at least a few years to come.

 

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