Thirty-five years ago

Posted on 26th June 2021 by Ian

The fourth Sunday in June in 1986 dawned clear and bright at Murlough, Co Down.  The natural beauty of the place with the Mourne mountains across the bay would have made it not such a bad place to have stayed were it not for the fact that accommodation was in dormitories, which might be fine for people in their younger teens, but by the time you reach the age of 25, a bit of comfort is welcome.  Little memory remains of the time spent there; a man had said something about Saint Augustine and the food must have been reasonable, for there is no recall whatsoever of eating there.  The experience came with Monty Python moments; the bishop insisting those present wear cassocks, a sight that struck fear into anyone else who might have been walking on the beach during the time spent in residence.

There were a dozen or so present and disaffection amongst those of the other group who were not to be allowed to return home prior to proceeding to their evening event.  Driving a red Austin Metro northwards, there was a sense of excitement combined with annoyance at the pettiness surrounding some of the details of the afternoon arrangements.

Family members had arrived from England and we drove to the small town of Dromore. The sun shone and the crowd gathered and the service proceeded. The sermon was unintelligible and the ceremony quickly completed.  An arbitrary ruling had been made that only candidates and their family members might receive Holy Communion, which prompted a clergyman who went on to be Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin to stride from the back in defiance of the instructions.  The 80s were a time of petty sectarianism and bigotry, and the wearing of red stoles by some of those present brought out the worst in  some of the country Protestants.

The tea afterwards was the real source of grievance. This was rural Ireland and an occasion for which hundreds had assembled, but it had been decreed that there would be a meal where those present were to be seated and that each of the seven candidates could only have have ten guests. We were able to fill our quota only by including people from my new parish, but another person had to tell those who had travelled the length of the country to support him that they would have to go elsewhere.

To be honest, the day was not exciting or life changing.  It seemed a necessary procedure before getting on with the real business of parish life and would probably have faded altogether were it not for one picture

Photographs of our family at the table were taken by Michael McCaughan, the churchwarden in Newtownards where I would serve as curate.  A copy of one of those photographs was given to my paternal grandmother who had not been present and who lived in Yeovil in England.  The photograph seemed a source of pride to her; for she placed it on top of the television, where I saw it when visiting after Christmas 1986 – a month before she died.

Thirty-five years on from being ordained on that June Sunday afternoon, that moment seeing the picture in her house had made the day worthwhile.

 

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Green utopia

Posted on 25th June 2021 by Ian

BBC Radio 4’s Last Word programme included an obituary for Mary Kemp, a leading figure in the rise of the Green Party.

Thirty years ago, with Derek Wall, Mary Kemp was co-author of A Green Manifesto for the 1990s. Kemp and Wall’s asserted that the idea that global capitalism will cure the planet’s ills is a delusion. They defined themselves as “anti-growth, capitalist hostile Greens.” The definition of “capitalism” they adopted seemed to embrace the entire working of the free market.

Yet how would they have inhibited the working of the capitalist system they opposed? Would they have created a siege economy? Banned travel outside the country? In the absence of a price mechanism, how would decisions on production and distribution have been taken? Presumably there would have been high fences and disciplined border guards who would have kept us all inside the country?

What would the end of capitalism in one country have achieved?  There would have been an exodus of all of those who had the means to leave. There would have been a collapse of trade. There would have been severe restrictions on civil liberties.

Is this the sort of society the Greens would envisage? And how would its adoption by one country address global issues? Perhaps the aspiration is not limited to one country, but there is a hope for a return to a worldwide pre-industrial society. How likely is such a vision? How likely is it that the international community would turn its back on Twenty-First Century life and embrace a life free of capitalism?

There seems a good deal of millenarianism within the environmental movement, people who are like Christian fundamentalists in their belief that their vision of the future is the only one possible and that to accept their ideas will usher in some Golden Age. Realistically, to assert that capitalism in the world must come to an end is as wild an idea as the notion that everyone should convert to some narrow sectarian religious belief.

And who would be most hurt by a project to eliminate the working of the free market in a country? Who always gets most hurt by bans, prohibitions and levies?

An end of capitalism in one country would mean the wealthy would depart, taking their money with them. Shortages of consumer goods would lead to a mushrooming of the black market comparable with that in the old Soviet Union. Rationing would place a premium upon particular items and allow for profiteering. It would take a voice out of the international community: create a pariah state.

A Green manifesto seems not to have much to commend it.

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Happiness is a pair of sandals

Posted on 24th June 2021 by Ian

“Share if you remember” said one of those memes that circulate the web. The picture to be shared was a pair of Clark’s sandals. I did remember them, I would have worn such shoes in childhood years, but they were a symbol far more potent than that of any passing social media meme.

Clark’s was the major employer in my community. Their headquarters in the Somerset town of Street were eight miles away. Our next door neighbours worked there, as did the neighbours next door but two.

Clark’s was a formative influence in the life of our local community, a presence for the good. The founding principles of Quaker family that started the company had brought great benefits to countless people.

Clark’s meant more than a pair of sandals, it meant the bright and prosperous town where I went to the grammar school when I was eleven, it meant the town where I went to sixth form college when I was sixteen. Clark’s sandals were a symbol of childhood and youth, of a secure and optimistic world.

Such a world seemed far away on a Sunday morning in December 2012. Sitting under a tree to escape the heat of the Burundian sun, I noticed something strange. On the ground in front of my chair, imprinted in the dust, there was the image of a church tower standing on a hilltop. It was an image with which I had grown up, it was Glastonbury Tor.

Rubbing my eyes to ensure that the image was not an hallucination. I lifted my left foot, crossing my leg over my right knee in order to be able to see more clearly. It was taking my foot in my right hand that caused me to realize that the sole of the shoe was not smooth – an image was set into it, the Tor, the familiar trademark of Clark’s Shoes.

There was a sense of disappointment – Glastonbury Tor had not appeared in the soil of mid-Africa, the sense of reassurance that had come with the childhood image was dispelled.

What if the people of that place had experienced not the rapacious attentions of a colonial power followed by a succession of presidents, each more corrupt than his predecessor, but the old fashioned paternalism of people like the Clark family? What if the place had been administered not by those who took all they could, but those who had a genuine concern for the whole community?

Nineteenth Century British capitalism may have had many faults, but it left an enduring legacy. Few companies like Clark’s were now exist, future generations will not be able to appreciate the significance of those sandals. For the people of Burundi, such times never existed, and are never likely to do so.

Clarks Sandals

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Midsummer’s Night income generation

Posted on 23rd June 2021 by Ian

Midsummer’s Night: the last time I encountered the play inspired by the occasion was not at the theatre, but in a classroom. Called to cover a Year 7 class for an English teacher, I was delighted to find that they were doing something that was fun. Or it should have been fun, if the students had not assumed that Shakespeare could only be read in a serious way.

In groups of six, they were reading the passage from Act 1 Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the Mechanicals are going to rehearse for a play. As Peter Quince tries to allocate the parts, Bottom offers to play most. It is a very humorous piece, but the students could not be dissuaded from the view that Shakespeare was not about smiles and laughter.

Shakespeare knew well enough the audiences of his time, that those who stood and watched could be fickle, rowdy, hostile, that those who came to the theatre expected to be entertained.

The Mechanicals are engaging in a play within a play, the theme of a play within a play is also to be found in Hamlet, where players arrive at the court of Elsinore.

The Players from Hamlet appear in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are Dead. The Player’s words are a reflection on both the times of Shakespeare and on modern times, probably, in fact, on any time in the history of theatre. Acting is a precarious living and people’s tastes tend not to be very discerning:

GUIL: Do you know any good plays?
PLAYER: Plays?
ROS (coming forward, flattering shyly): Exhibitions…
GUIL: I thought you were actors.
PLAYER (dawning): Oh. Oh, well, we are. We are. But there’s not been much call.
GUIL: You lost. Well, then – one of the Greeks, perhaps? You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are
you? The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri, fratri, sorrori, uxori and it goes without saying –
ROS: Saucy –
GUIL: – Suicidal – hm? Maidens aspiring to godheads –
ROS: And vice versa –
GUIL: Your kind of thing, is it?
PLAYER: Well, no, I can’t say it is, really. We’re more of the blood, love and rhetoric school.
GUIL: Well, I’ll leave the choice to you, if there is anything to choose between them.
PLAYER: They’re hardly divisible, sir – well, I can do you blood and love without rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric
without blood. Blood is compulsory – they’re all blood, you see.
GUIL: Is this what people want?

Four hundred years after Shakespeare, the protracted lockdown has meant the future of theatre is very uncertain. Guildenstern asks what it is that people want and survival will mean giving people what they want. The capacity of theatre to generate income will probably demand more characters in the tradition of Peter Quince and Nick Bottom and fewer in the tradition of Hamlet, prince of Denmark.

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Someone else should pay for me

Posted on 22nd June 2021 by Ian

On BBC Radio 6, the presenter Steve Lamacq invited listeners to send in their memories of the Glasyonbury Festival, to suggest what music from the BBC archives of the festival should be played on the programme.

The BBC weren’t at the Glastonbury Festival I attended, in fact not many people were. The attendance was 12,000, a small fraction of the number of those who have attended in recent years.

It was a big event for us. It was the first festival since 1971 and, being locals, we were able to buy our tickets at Crispin Hall in Street for a discounted price of £3 each instead of at the full face value of £5.

Taking a day off from our summer jobs, a friend and I hitched our way to Worthy Farm outside the village of Pilton, including riding in an empty silage trailer for part of the journey.

We had taken with us a two man tent and sleeping bags, a camping stove and saucepan, some tins of baked beans, and a pack of twenty-four cans of Skol lager. We reckoned we could buy whatever else we needed for the three days at the festival site.

Frequenting pubs in the town of Glastonbury, we were familiar with the eccentricities of some in the community, but those whom we had seen before seemed conventional and mainstream when compared with some we encountered at the festival.

Among the crowd were members of various radical political groups. Perhaps “radical” is the wrong word, among the crowds were members of various weird political groups.

One man handed out copies of the International Times. We had heard of the underground newspaper, its name had a certain mystery about it. The suggestion that there were stories about which we had not been told prompted us to read the paper. It was disappointingly dull, the editorial was vitriolic comment and outpourings of resentment; there was not a single shocking revolution.

The oddest publication of all was one that criticised the festival organisers for charging for tickets. The 1971 festival had been free because rich sponsors had paid for it.  The critics suggested the 1979 festival should also have been free and that tickets were commercial exploitation of the festival goers. To someone brought up to pay his way, it seemed odd, why should it be free? Who was going to pay the bills?

It was a first encounter with an attitude found among members of the middle class hippy movement that suggested someone else should pay for them to live as they wanted. In the intervening years, the question “why?” never seems to have been answered.

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