A Somerset Lad

Sitting, waiting, there was a hint of warmth in the February sun and birdsong was audible.

The view did not match the vernal cheer: a high wooden planked fence, greyed with age and holed in places; a scrubby hedgerow unrecovered from autumn slashing; a verge of weeds and briars; a solitary metal lamp post bearing faded yellow stickers. Not the stuff to inspire.

Games always help to pass the time. A car passed, braking as it approached a junction.

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with R. L.”

(Local rules for I-Spy allow the use of two words when there is a lack of variety in the scenery).

A pause.

“Red light.”

“Correct. My turn.”

“I spy with my little eye something beginning with L. P.”

A shorter pause.

“Lamp post.”

“You’re right.”

One person games of I-Spy can become boring, I always guess what I have chosen. Sometimes, for dramatic effect, I’ll give the wrong answer, or explore other options I might have chosen for the letter I have given myself.

There are other games I could have played.  I could have flipped a coin to count sequences of heads and tails. I could have watched to see what cars pass and to see how many words I could make from the make of car that had passed. (Volkswagen is good for such a game, Saab is not good, and BMW is rubbish).

Such games recall times sitting in my father’s car while he had called in to see someone “just for a minute,” or when my parents had gone into a warehouse for the weekly shopping (for years, they shopped at a warehouse called Norman’s, which seemed to be a cash and carry open to the public).

Oddly, in this third decade of the Twenty-First Century, what did not occur to me was to use my iPhone to browse the web, or message friends, or to play games. Instead there was a reversion to being the child who devised strategies for passing times of waiting.

Perhaps the attitude derived from spending many hours on my own in the pre-electronic age. Sometimes I would play chess against myself. A couple of times, I even played Monopoly, being the car and the top hat and the boot, but didn’t manage to win as any of them.

The constant dependence on the smartphone is reducing the capacity for imagination among most younger people. Left alone without a phone, they have no idea as to how they might cope with boredom. They shall never know how bizarre it is to play games against themselves.

“I’m surprised he enjoys RE, ” the parent commented, “most people find it boring.”

The comment made me smile. He did enjoy RE, he loved imagination and speculation.

The opinion of the child has become more important to me than the opinion of a parent.

The passing years have taught the wisdom of taking children seriously. Not only have they a habit of speaking the untarnished truth about things they find boring or dislike, their capacity for untramelled imagination is far greater than that of adults, the most mundane moments can be imbued with excitement and possibility.

American writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor understands that the capacity for imagination we have in childhood days is unlikely to find expression in our adult years, and it is certainly unlikely if we are not to be objects of ridicule. Keillor reassures us that we aren’t the only ones to have had such ideas.

Clarence Bunsen, one of the most loveable of Keillor’s Lake Wobegon characters captures a moment that has about it a familiar feel:

“Anything that ever happened to me is happening to other people,” says Clarence. “Somewhere in the world right now, a kid is looking at something and thinking, ‘I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.’ And it’s the same thing that I looked at forty years ago, whatever it was.”

If that is true and our lives are being lived over and over by others, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

If that is true, somewhere a boy rides next to his father in a car, his eyes level with the top of the dashboard, and pulls back slightly on the window crank which lowers the wing flaps and makes the Ford rise toward the clouds. He tests this principle with his right hand out the window, feeling the lift. He sees that the clouds are following this car; so is the sun. The car is under his power and is the center of the world”.

Are there not countless kids who had such thoughts, or similar ones?

The world is a magical place where reality has not yet crushed the power of imagination, where a big old Ford car can become an aircraft soaring through the sky. Anything is possible in the realms of the imagination; the unexpected, the unlikely, the absurd, they are all acceptable. All around the world there are kids whose imaginations can take them on the same flights. Keillor captures those possibilities, those speculations, in a unique way.

And there is reassurance as well in Clarence Bunsen’s reflections. “It’s the same thing I looked at forty years ago”, he says. There is a continuity in childhood experience. The stories of Keillor are a reminder that being old is not the only way of living.

The child still inhabits the realm of imagination long forgotten by the parent.

In this afternoon’s sub-zero wind chill, staff from our school gathered on the front field. We danced a collective version of the Jerusalema dance that has spread around the world through social media.

Standing in the back row, getting every step wrong, I laughed aloud at the comments of a rugby player PE teacher beside me who was as light-footed as someone half of his size, and even louder at the head of PE who injected Pythonesque elements into his dance (Monty Python that is, not python of the reptilian variety).

At Strode College in Street in the 1970s, Paul Selby strove to teach us Shakespeare. He 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 time. He would prompt us to look for deeper meanings, to search for the things which were timeless.

During one English class he pondered dancing. He felt 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. It is hard to imagine what Paul Selby would have made of the popularity of the television series Strictly Come Dancing.

Dance is about something deeper than the superficial and trivial silliness of Strictly Come Dancing. Considering dance on the basis of whether steps were together and whether moves were co-ordinated is to consider it on the basis of its mechanics. Strictly Come Dancing 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?

The Jerusalema dance this afternoon prompted thoughts about the meaning of dance and the recollection of the questions of Paul Selby.

Our efforts seemed the ultimate move away from the forms of traditional dance, yet laughing and watching those who threw themselves into the dance there was a sense of both a connection with the music and transcendence of themselves, but there was also a sense of the solidarity of the individual with all those around. The Jerusalema dance is dancing for its own sake, without demand for formal precision, but like the dancing Paul Selby valued, it created a strong bond of community.