Storyteller’s World

I’m delighted to report the huge success of yesterday: Alison found a hat to go with the outfit she has also bought for Tom’s wedding!! Shrewsbury boasts, among its many wonders and glories, at least two Proper Hat Shops.

The hat she chose was the second one she tried on. And here I learned an important lesson I should have learned years ago, which I gladly share with all the husbands among you. For years I have made the foolish mistake of encouraging her to buy the first thing she tries on. This does not work. It doesn’t work, because it looks too much as if you are simply trying to get out of the shop as soon as possible and back to Waterstones (or the pub, or wherever). But go for the second thing, and your efforts may well be rewarded with success, because it looks as if you are really considering, and weighing your opinion.

It doesn’t save you having to try on everything else in the shop as well, to be sure … But at least you can go back to the Second Thing You Tried On, with a good chance of getting a result and not having to repeat the whole ordeal next time you’re anywhere near a shop.

(The other lesson to pass on, is that whenever special items need to be bought, it’s no use looking in your own town. This is not special or exotic enough. You have to go Somewhere Else. In this case, while it was Shrewsbury for the hat, the outfit itself came from Henley. You never know, there may be some people living in those Other Places who come to Oxford for their special outfits.)

A lightning visit to Shropshire and the flat reveals this headline on the billboard of one of the local papers in the area:

DRUNKEN DUCK KILLER

It’s clearly one of those headlines where the story attached to it is probably a huge anti-climax compared with the story you want to invent to go with it. So let me just leave it with you as a seed-thought, or even a meme-starter. What’s your best story to fit the headline?

I never would have imagined how intriguing I would find last night’s documentary, Spellbound, about the phenomenon of the American spelling bee. It followed a number of children through interviews with them and their parents, and glimpses of their home lives, to the finals of the National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C.

So many different thoughts and emotions ranged through the viewing experience. There was: At last! A competitive sporting event that I might have stood some chance at, when young. Something that shows that geekery and a love of words and learning can be every bit as nail-bitingly exciting, and crowd-pulling, as football or athletics.
There was: Not another activity where parents can live vicariously through their champion children, by coaching them and pushing them to become high-achievers.
There was horror and yet fascination for the snapshots of American life, so familiar and yet so alien.
There was the sense that the Spelling Bee was a true equaliser in some of the original senses of the American Dream: the slum child who worked at it stood as much chance as the wealthy suburbanite. (Well, maybe this is a slight exaggeration …)
There was the sitting through it with the Chambers Dictionary on my lap, checking on the meaning of words we’d never heard of before.
And there was, of course, the getting involved by trying to spell along with the spellers. I would have got the winning word, logorrhoea, right - but only because I had got so much into the spirit of the thing that I spelled it the American way, logorrhea. But then, I got several earlier words wrong. It’s not just about memory and understanding and loving words. There is luck involved too.

Must read that dictionary more often. In fact, we probably need to buy a few more: there are some rooms in the house without a dictionary in them.

New Life Experiences #49036

Cycling through an April shower with hailstones pinging on my cycle helmet. Sadly, it’s one of those helmets with holes in, so every so often they pinged instead on my (unthatched) scalp. Not funny.

Neal Stephenson (TSOTW, p.772):

There was an old joke that Newgate must be like Heaven, for the way to it was straight and narrow.

He then goes on to describe a narrow and shortest-distance-between-two-points alleyway running from the Old Bailey to Newgate Prison, that condemned prisoners have to walk down.

Now, I always thought the origin of the phrase ’straight and narrow’ was the Authorised Version of Matthew 7.13-14:

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Yet COED defines the straight and narrow as: the honest and morally acceptable way of living. Is this simply an example of homophones with almost opposite sense getting confused? Or is it essentially a theological confusion, arising from a misunderstanding of the way of salvation? (viz. We can earn salvation by works, by good living.)

Maybe I just shouldn’t think so much about words, when I’m reading.

Hi, my name’s Tony, and I’m … I’m a techno junkie. Most days I can keep my craving under control, as long as the computer’s on all the time except when I’m watching TV. Or asleep. Sometimes it helps to be with people, or doing strenuous exercise, especially if it’s on a treadmill with digital output of all my stats. But I’ve been under a lot of stress recently, and earlier this week I cracked and bought a Fisher Space Pen on the Internet. I didn’t even know there was a Fisher Space Pen, or at least, not that you could get one if you were a non-astronaut earthling, until I read about them on someone’s blog. Now I carry mine everywhere with me, and keep wanting to take it out of my pocket and look at it, caress it, write with it. It’s just so beautiful: tiny, yet perfectly formed and satisfying to hold. I’m seriously considering how to convert one of the rooms in the vicarage to a zero gravity chamber, to test its writing in those conditions. Yes, that’s probably easier than getting inside the oven at Gas Mark 6 to see if it really does write at 200 degrees Celsius. But that’s not all. The same day my dental hygienist asked me if I used an electric toothbrush. I’ve never even wanted one before, but I suddenly knew she was not only giving me permission, but that I had to have one. I went right out and bought one.

Two new gadgets in one day. That’s when I knew I needed help, so I came and joined this group.

ER is one of the jewels in TV’s crown at present, and God bless Channel 4 for it. Contemporary, subtle, passionate, gripping, humane, witty, thought-provoking, challenging, it shows up British hospital dramas like Casualty and Holby City for the soapy trash that they are: mere piffle before the wind.

I haven’t always been as committed as I am now. My loyalty has been tested and has waxed and waned, over the years. Yet I have hung on through every trial: through Nurse Hathaway’s leaving; through every new unsuitable man Abby takes up with - none of them good enough for her; through John Carter walking out on her (b*st*rd!) and going off to the truly terrible horrors of the Congo; through Dr Corday returning to England (where I haven’t seen her yet, dammit).

Last night’s episode was a gem. In it, Kerry Weaver at last found her birth mother and was dealing with all the issues of acceptance, self-acceptance, abandonment, betrayal, self-image that you might expect. Her mother, a widow, was a born-again Christian who had been “saved by the Church”, and was visiting Chicago with the church choir.

When Kerry told her mother she was gay, it was too much for her. “Let me pray for you.” “I love you, but I can never accept this!” etc. And at last they parted, unreconciled, with the background strains of the introduction to the church choir’s rendering of “Just as I am, without one plea”.

This episode should be required viewing for all Christians involved in the sexuality debate.

Anyone who lives in Oxford can tell you horror stories about the problems we’ve had with our postal deliveries over the last few years. But imagine my horror and dismay, when my invitation for that other wedding only arrived this morning!

I mean, I thought it was a bit odd when I wasn’t invited. To say nothing of how it must have looked to all the rest of the guests, not to see me there. I thought for a moment I’d said or done something to upset Stephen Fry - who seems to be the Establishment, these days.

But my problem now is, what ever am I going to tell the happy couple? If the truth gets out, there’ll be hell to pay at the Royal Mail. Someone will likely lose his head, or at the very least end up doing ten years in the Tower of London.

Looks like I’ll just have to think up some story or other …

Just been to Moss Bros in Oxford to order my outfit for the Wedding of the Century. Said, the assistant, looks me up and down and accurately estimates all my dimensions, including the ones I’m trying to conceal or fib about. While the rational part of me knows that this must be some sort of trade skill, acquired by experience (rather like being able to pray extempore, or knowing which eucharistic prayer to use on any given occasion) there’s also a primitive part of me, some survival of the medieval peasant, that thinks this must be a kind of uncanny, spooky magical art. I can’t estimate anything spacial - still haven’t worked out how to tell with any confidence whether a glass is half full or half empty. And here’s this guy divining my waist and inside leg measurements. Whoa!

Caleb passed me this. It’s definitely something I’ve needed a few days to think about, though this week’s answers won’t be the same as next week’s.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
John Crowley’s Little, Big, because it’s the most magical book I’ve ever read. Because when I was a serious, sober, dogmatic young curate, it first opened my heart, my imagination and my senses to Other Worlds. Because Ursula Le Guin, no less, has called it, “A book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Not since I was 11, when I fell heavily for Dejah Thoris, in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Warlord of Mars. But I did, to my great surprise, fall in love with an author just a couple of years ago. This was Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris). She is some kind of woman: beautiful (her mind, I mean), intelligent, witty, literate, and writes like a goddess.

The last book you bought is?
Alan Bartlett, Humane Christianity. Don’t know how I missed it when it first came out. It doesn’t say anything I don’t agree with, but it’s disturbing because it brings into sharp focus things I haven’t fully seen before.

What are you currently reading?
Apart from Bartlett, Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World (Part 3 of The Baroque Cycle). Do you really want a list of the hundreds (thousands?) of other books I’ve started but never finished, most of which I have not actually decided I won’t ever finish? So technically I’m still reading them?

Five books you would take to a deserted island?
It would have to include the Bible and Shakespeare, which you’re allowed even on the proverbial desert island. What else? Proust, for if I got really desperate and wanted to make a quick end of myself by rage or boredom. Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, because some people call it the greatest book ever written, but I would need a desert island experience to get around to reading it. Baden Powell’s Scouting for Boys, to tell me how to light a fire by rubbing two sticks together - which I never mastered even with safety matches, when I actually was a boy scout.

Ask me next week and the list will probably be different …

Who are you going to pass this to (three persons) and why?
Ali, because she doesn’t get many visitors and wants something literary to blog about; Feroce, because she’s in Oxford with 2000+ books (that she has read? still needs to read?); Sharon, because she reads an incredible amount just in a weekend. If any of you don’t want it, pass it back and I’ll try and give it to someone else!

Reaching Book 8 of The Baroque Cycle - only about 260 pages to go of the third hefty 900 page volume - has the effect of making this reader demob happy. To such an extent that when Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) gets a mention, variants of the old joke spring, unbidden, instantaneous, ghastly, to mind.

Q. Do you like Grinling Gibbons?
A. I don’t know, I’ve never grinled a gibbon.

The COED defines (or ought to define):

grinle. v. to attempt to elevate the mood of someone by tweaking up the drooping corners of their mouth with the thumbs, and saying, “Go on - SMILE!”

This definition is palpably spurious, not to say surreal. I mean, when did you ever see a melancholy gibbon?

Election fever comes to our patch, with the first visit by any of the parties. And not just any old visit: this is Steve Goddard, the Lib Dem candidate himself, showing up on our doorstep. This has to count in his favour, even if it was only about 2 minutes before we were going to sit down to eat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a candidate before, in any of the constituencies I’ve ever lived in - though it’s true that so many of them were safe seats one way or the other, that no one ever really bothered.

Can it be that red republican Marston is considered such a hotbed of disaffected Labour supporters, that it could fall into other hands, given a small tweak by the candidate himself?

Stealing from the poor to give to the rich takes on a new complexion in the Observer’s report of the demise of Rover:

Rover may have run out of money last week, but the four directors of its parent company certainly did not. John Towers, Nick Stephenson, Peter Beale and John Edwards - the so called ‘Phoenix Four’ - plus a fifth man, Kevin Howe, who was appointed chief executive in 2000, can plan a comfortable retirement. Meanwhile, the pension fund for Longbridge’s 6,100 workers has a current net liability of £67 million.

It is thought that the directors have paid themselves about £40m since they took over the business from BMW in 2000 for £10 and a £60,000 contribution from each of them. The £40m is extrapolated from salaries, pension contributions - £16.5m in the past two years - and proceeds from a £10m ‘IOU’ they issued to the company shortly after taking it over in return for ceding some control of the business.

Isn’t free enterprise a good thing?

St Augustine may have a lot to answer for in other ways, but he may well be a candidate for the patron saint of the free software movement. Thanks to Gill for this!

A passage from Augustine’s de Doctrina Christiana has been seen [1] (http://gnuhh.org/work/fsf-europe/augustinus.html) as a fore-runner of the free software movement, as it expressed the philosophy that knowledge, unlike physical possessions, must be freely shared: “For if a thing is not diminished by being shared with others, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned and not shared.”

John Naughton in the Observer mentions so now who do we vote for?: a resource for dismayed Labour voters.

I’m not sure how helpful this site will be. In this constituency it suggests (tentatively) voting Green, “to give the sitting Labour MP a fright”. But I don’t think the Greens have a hope of getting elected, which could mean the Lib Dem or - even worse - the Tory getting in. I think, after all, I may have to vote with my tribe. Though I’m still furious about Iraq, university tuition fees, and the failure to redistribute wealth by taxing the rich.

The daily Lectionary is up to its tricks again; and as so often when it goes walkabout like this, it seems to be sex that makes it go doolally. Yesterday evening we read the first part of 1 Corinthians 6, about Christians going to law (don’t do it, it’s better to be wronged - is this the earliest anti-lawyer Scripture?), and about the kind of wrongdoers who won’t inherit the kingdom of God. But we stopped at verse 11; and when we resume reading at Evensong today, lo and behold we’re taken to the beginning of chapter 8, which is about what Christians may or may not eat.

Omissions from the lectionary always make me want to read what we’re not being allowed to read; and when I found that the whole of chapter 5 was omitted also, I became more suspicious.

God forbid that any outside observer should interpret the Church of England’s daily lectionary as a guide to the Church’s current teaching on sexual morality. If that were the case, you could sum it up like this:
Adulterers, sodomites and male prostitutes still get it in the neck. (1 Cor.6.9)
But cohabiting with your stepmother is OK. (5.1 - omitted)
So is using prostitutes (6.15 - omitted)
And getting engaged but never marrying (ch 7) - which looks like an ancient form of gender exploitation.

Or is there some other mysterious hidden reason for leaving out these passages?

I always go on retreat hoping for great revelations: that God will speak, like he did from the burning bush, or on the mountain top. I have this secret, pagan wish that he will grab my collar and utter in block capitals or red letters - as everyone knows God is supposed to do: DO THIS. GO THERE. THIS IS WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. THIS IS THE ANSWER.

And, (is it any surprise to anybody but me?) God does no such thing. Even in my little talk to the splendid abbot - well, surely God was going to speak to me through him, wasn’t he? Isn’t that what the Rule of St Benedict is all about, through and through? - it felt like I was talking to some inscrutable kind of guru, giving out gnomic utterances that I needed to remember in great detail so that I could puzzle over them and try to understand them for the next 30 years, like Julian of Norwich thinking about her visions, or a zen novice wrestling with his koans.

Well, there was something of the sort. It was as if all the things I was talking about - the family, my parents, the church, my own inner life - were about being responsible for different things, feeling there was something I could and should do about them, and finding, painfully, that I can’t do anything. I’m actually powerless, they are out of my control. And that this experience is like dying. Everything around me is in process of dying. Which is to say, it is changing. And all I can do is let go, let be, let it die. And somehow trust that there is a resurrection. Without death, there can be no resurrection.

Being brought face to face with mortality: my own, and that of everyone and everything I love, is not actually what I signed up on this retreat for. I don’t really want to hear this. Isn’t there anyone else up there? Someone who will say: DO THIS. THIS IS THE ANSWER?

Silence.

Four days’ retreat at Burford Priory: what a luxury and privilege! I haven’t been there since 1993; it’s so difficult to book there, but worth waiting for.

Feeling holy - no need to kick the cat - but much in need of that half bottle of wine this evening.

I’m going to be away on retreat for a couple of days. I think the scenario runs like this: Priestly spouse, father and vicar goes to spend a few days with a religious community, joining in their daily round of worship, spending time in silence, prayer, spiritual reading. And at the end of it returns home thoroughly rested, refreshed, exuding a faint glow of holiness, and eager to immerse himself again in parish life.

Or more likely, on the basis of previous experience, comes back irritable, stroppy, wanting to get drunk and kick the cat, and feeling he’s overdue for a holiday.

Which’ll it be? Watch this space …

I read in the local paper that the local fire service are desperate to recruit retained firefighters between the ages of 18 and 55.

I never, ever wanted to be a retained firefighter. So why is my first reaction that twinge of bitter disappointment: that I’m now too old to be one?

Much of Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World is set in early 18th century London. This is probably the reason why he has suddenly started using the word bloke a lot, thinking that it is the kind of thing Londoners say (think of Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins): so much so that it’s become the chief one of his English usages to make me stumble in my reading of this volume.

e.g. Page 117, para.2:

A bloke wanting to leave the urban confines of Clerkenwell Green and venture out across the fields towards Black Mary’s Hole would have to contend with a few obstacles … And the sort of bloke who passed the time of day going up to Black Mary’s Hole would instinctively avoid such establishments.

I’ve got a hunch that bloke is a word that Americans find tricky.

According to the original (1933) Oxford English Dictionary:

bloke. sb. slang. Also bloak. [Orig. unknown: Ogilvie compares ‘Gypsy and Hind. loke a man’] Man, fellow.

1851 MAYHEW. Lond.Labour III,397 (Hoppe) If we met an old bloke we propped him. 1862. KINGSLEY in Macm.Mag. Dec.96. Little better than blokes and boodles after all. 1865. MISS BRADDON in Temple Bar XIII. 483. The society of the aged bloke is apt to pall upon the youthful intellect.

Now, do these citations indicate that the word wasn’t in common use before the mid-19th century? (In which case its use in 1714 London would just be anachronistic.) Or, that it hadn’t appeared in print because it was entirely colloquial? (In which case its use in narrative, rather than reported speech, would explain why it ‘feels’ odd.)

The recent Concise Oxford English Dictionary suggests the word is of 19th century origin, from Shelta. I didn’t know about Shelta. According to COED, again, it is an ancient secret language used by Irish and Welsh tinkers and gypsies, based on altered Irish or Gaelic words. A Shelta web-site gives the Cant word for man as glokh, which could have been modified into bloke, perhaps.

Another interesting thing about the word bloke is that you can’t use it in the vocative. Li tells the story of an American summer school visitor who was trying to understand from her and her colleagues the meaning of bloke, and thinking he understood it, went into a pub and addressed the barman thus: “Excuse me, bloke - can I have a beer, please?” It doesn’t work, somehow, do you see?

I was gobsmacked to see one of the Tories’ latest election offerings last week: an enormous hoarding-sized poster at the motorway service station saying:

I mean, how hard can it be to keep a hospital clean?

Well, I don’t know. Let’s see. Given the numbers of people who work in hospitals, the numbers of people who are in and out all the time, the numbers of sick people with every imaginable sickness, infection, or wound; all the bodily fluids around the place: blood, vomit, urine, faeces, etc.; to say nothing of the staff shortages and minimal wages paid to cleaning staff, so that in many parts of the country it’s impossible to employ anyone other than overseas workers to do these jobs … yes, all in all I’d say it was pretty difficult. Have you ever tried it, Mr Howard? Have you ever even been in an NHS hospital?

I’ve got to say, if all their campaigning is as perspicacious as this, it doesn’t bode well for the intellectual capacity of the Tories to govern.

I caught BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s April Fool hoax yesterday morning (reported in today’s Independent). It was not only all too plausible, not even only extremely tasteless - it was offensive, to boot. Why give any of these people the oxygen of publicity anyway? They claim they don’t like it - presumably that’s what the BBC were getting back at them about. Let’s just ignore them; stop taking the least bit of notice of their lives and opinions; stop paying them. And in a few years’ time we may be able to dispense with them altogether and grow up into a grown-up country.