Storyteller’s World

It was 40 years ago today … that I got my GCE O-level results. Back then, teenage exam results were not the traumatic event that they have since become. Nobody ever seemed to worry much about them, and parents used to greet the news of success or failure with “Oh really, dear. That’s nice.”

That’s how I remember it, anyway. And if Mum and Dad were anxious or worried in any way, they had an admirable English sang-froid that kept it well out of sight.

According to my Diary, the results didn’t come until the afternoon. (Can you imagine: afternoon postal deliveries? Well, we’re getting back to that, except now it will be the first of the day rather than the second or third.) I got 6 passes: A in French, Latin, German and Maths; B in Biology and History. In the top stream we took English a year early; the theory behind this curious arrangement was that if you were bright your head might explode if you took as many exams all in one go as everyone else had to. A year earlier I had got a B for Lang and an E for Lit. This didn’t stop them letting me go on to do French, German and English Literature for A-level, on the grounds that they thought, possibly mistakenly, that an E didn’t truly reflect my ability. I now think Latin would have been a better bet. (Long-term readers will remember that If I could have my life again, one of the things I’d be, is a classicist.)

And 35 years ago (yesterday):

(This is a true story, in spite of the surreal details.)

My friend Alan from Oldham was staying, wanting to see some of the excitements of London, though neither of us had as much money as we would have liked. So we sat in the local park most of the morning making ourselves more and more depressed, then went into London on the Tube, where we met Astrid and her friend. Astrid was half an hour late as she had been the time before. We wanted to go to Dirty Dick’s for a drink but found it wasn’t open on a Sunday evening.

So we went in search of somewhere to eat instead and ended up at the New Shanghai Restaurant in Wardour Street, where I had been with a party from school 3 years before. The food wasn’t bad, but there was hardly anyone else in the place. Then walked around Soho for a bit before going home. I wrote in my Diary:

Very nice to see Astrid again, but expensive: I spent £2 today, and I’d had to borrow it from Sally. Better not go to London too often.

My heart goes out to the victims of another terrible Muslim religious disaster: to the dead, the injured, the bereaved, the traumatised:

It used to be said, with heavy irony, of divided and warring Christians: “See how these Christians love one another!” Now it is Sunni and Shi’a who are divided, and it was fear and tension between the two groups, on one of the holiest festivals for Shi’a Muslims, that led to the fatal panic in Baghdad.

I could wish for a lot more realism among Muslims. That they actually own, and face, and try to resolve, their own divisions, instead of projecting onto the hated West all the ills of a “war against Islam”. Perhaps these are some of the pains of Islam in flux, maybe working through some kind of Reformation. But it’s one thing to have your internal religious wars in an age of pikes and muskets. Another, in an age of high explosive, cruise missiles and nuclear warheads.

Psalm 133.1? “How very good and pleasant it is, when brothers live together in unity!”

My day off began with an unplanned and unexpected 160-mile round trip to Gatwick. Alison was off to a conference in Dublin, and we got up early to drive her to the bus stop to catch the coach to the airport. At the bus stop we checked which terminal she needed to board for, only to find we were waiting for the coach to the wrong airport: flights to Dublin leave from Gatwick, not Heathrow. This would have meant waiting nearly another hour for the right coach, and a journey time of up to two hours: all cutting it too fine. No alternative but to drive all the way.

So, it was a good thing it was my day off.

Silver linings: a) I got a full English breakfast at the airport.
b) I got home before the lorry explosion on the M25 blocked both carriageways. That would have been the last straw.

I’m left reflecting on our quite different travel foibles. I stress about it so much I need to be at the airport two hours before I have to be. Alison stresses so much she doesn’t check her itinerary. Perhaps between the two of us you might have one competent traveller.

Is there any other industry where, no matter what’s going on - war, wind, weather, or peace, prosperity and playtime - you just can’t lose? Prices and profits and share prices go up and up and up? Even arms manufacturers have a (slightly) lean time of it in peacetime. Whereas the big casino owners, who can’t lose when people are gambling, maybe don’t do so well in time of war.

But the oil companies really can’t lose, can they?
BBC NEWS | Business | Oil close to highs as storm rages

I should have been listening more carefully when my old grampy was telling me what shares to buy. Not BT, dammit: BP!

It’s not that Microsoft isn’t trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can’t pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.

This is from a good article about open source, blogging, work, business, being an amateur, writing: all sorts. What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Thanks to John Naughton.

What’s in your computer? is a political issue.

This article describes how the South Indian state of Kerala is actively encouraging the use of Linux and open source software. It’s some of the comments on the article that are alarming. Apparently what is an issue of freedom and independence, when it’s chosen by individuals, becomes a version of commie oppression when it’s promoted by authorities. The fact that most governments and institutions all over the world promote Microsoft et al, at enormous cost to education and health services, isn’t considered political. It’s just the freedom of the market that you get in free, liberal, democracies.

From today’s Oxford Mail:

50 FIREFIGHTERS TACKLE VILLAGE BLAZE

Shocked resident Lucy Hughes told how she spotted a raging fire in her thatched outbuilding as she made her way upstairs to bed at home in Oxford.

Mrs Hughes, 65, of Oxford Road, Old Marston, alerted the fire brigade shortly after 1am yesterday and 50 firefighters were called in to fight the blaze.

The fire is the second involving thatch in the county in a week. The cause is being investigated, and arson has not been ruled out.

Early last Sunday,fire destroyed five thatched cottages in Stanford in the Vale, leaving 15 people homeless. The cause is still being investigated.

Mrs Hughes, who lives at her 16th century former farmhouse with her husband Anthony, also in his sixties, and daughter Tamsin, 35, said: “My husband had already gone to bed and so had Tamsin, and I had stayed downstairs to read the paper.

“As I went up, I looked out through the window which looks on to the outhouse which we use as a garage and saw that the thatched roof was well alight.

“I called the fire brigade and they were here within minutes. They immediately moved our car, a Vauxhall Corsa, to a safe place, and put the fire out.

“I’m really glad I went to bed after everyone else because it was quite by chance that I saw the fire.

“If I had spotted it later, it could have been more serious.”

Mrs Hughes added: “It’s lucky the outhouse is a short distance away from the main house, but it is a 17th century former stable and, like the house, it is listed so I think we will have to try to rebuild it.

“It’s a real shame, but we are just glad no-one was hurt. Now it’s a question of clearing up the mess in the garden.”

Assistant divisional fire officer Richard Bowley, based at Abingdon, who was the incident commander, said it was unusual for firefighters to tackle two blazes involving thatch in one week.

He added: “We were able to get to the fire quickly and ensure that it did not spread to any neighbouring buildings.

“There were fire crews from The Slade, Rewley Road and Wheatley stations and we used the hydraulic platform to get above the flames. We are still investigating the cause of the blaze and so far nothing has been ruled out.”

Mr Bowley said people living in thatched cottages could call Oxfordshire Fire Service’s fire safety hotline on 0800 325999 and get an information pack about protecting thatched roofs.

My neighbour tells me this afternoon that the police have identified a possible perpetrator (who was, needless to say, among the bystanders and spectators last night) and are going to prosecute. I’m hoping this will prove to be the same man responsible for the other fires, so as to put local residents’ minds to rest. Though it would have been better if he’d been spotted and identified last time around…

Last night there was another garage fire in the village. At around 1 o’clock on a Sunday morning, exactly ten weeks after our own garage was burned down, the thatched garage of some of our neighbours was set on fire.

Ten weeks ago we were told by the fire department that they did not think our fire was started deliberately. I didn’t believe this at the time, and didn’t know how they could be so sure, since the destruction was so complete that any evidence must have been destroyed along with everything else. Today I believe it even less. No one ever came to explain why they thought this, or to ask us any questions or listen to our suspicions or concerns. Even after I had phoned them twice to ask about their investigations (there were none.)

In July another elderly neighbour, a frail widow living alone, phoned and told me someone had set fire to some of her garden furniture in the night. Again, a Saturday night. Fortunately that fire did not spread to her house either. I phoned the police station asking to meet a local officer to talk to them about some of these unexplained fires in the village, not all of which get reported because they seem too trivial, and to make sure they understood there was mounting local concern. No one returned my call or came to see me.

What is it going to take to get the police or the fire department to investigate these fires properly? Or to provide a police patrol in the village on a Saturday night? Someone’s house to be burned down, perhaps? Maybe even (God forbid) people’s lives to be put at risk?

Sun blogs about getting back in touch with an old friend, who writes her own version of it here.

Meanwhile, and a bit belatedly, my post about a visit to the Wrekin got picked up by All Friends Round the Wrekin, a website dedicated to the eponymous (tara!) hill.

You’ll not get much sense out of me today. I thought I’d try and get the old Linux box working again, that I was using before I got the iBook. So far I’ve managed to wreck the whole thing, had to reformat the HDD and wipe out everything, failed to install Debian 3.1; managed to get Fedora 3 in there, but it doesn’t want to connect to the Internet. Etcetera.

One of the problems is having got used to things working for me without the hassle. Maybe I just like this and will let it stay that way.

When I was at school, one of the best places to meet girls was the School Play. Away from the sexual war zone of the classroom, the School play was a place you could socialise without fear. Or maybe, with less fear than most other places about the school.

For some reason, I never got a part involving more than one line. Friends and contemporaries who I thought had no more talent than me regularly got the leading roles: I got the single line again. Perhaps the director had some dim inkling of the fact that I wasn’t there for the sake of my art, but to meet the girls. One of those one-line parts was the part of Rastakovsky in Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector. Rastakovsky appears in one scene, in the midst of some party or social gathering, at which he utters the words, “With man this is impossible; but with God, everything is possible!”

For some reason which I never remotely understood (perhaps it had something to do with not being on stage for most of the rest of the play) this always got a huge laugh. The laughter annoyed me. Because I didn’t get the joke, even as a non-believer.

Later we all went to see a professional staging of the play. Blow me if Rastakovsky didn’t steal the scene. At the point of uttering his line, this crazy old man emerged from the background where he had been chatting up some honey, delivered the words with much wheezing and gasping, collapsed in an apoplectic fit, and was carried offstage.

I wished I’d done it like that. Perhaps I might have gone on to have a lucrative stage career. Might even have made it to Hollywood.

Good grief! An early version of my website has a place in history, at the Internet Archive.

You can see this “snapshot” from July, 2002 of Tony Price’s Web Page. The frightening thing is to see the pages that have hardly been updated since then.

I visited a parishioner who has been in hospital for several weeks. He’s lying in bed, looking much better than the last time I saw him. But as far as you can see they’re not treating him for anything, or doing any further tests, and he’s basically lying in bed, not getting any better. He looks to me like someone who is in the long slow decline of old age, who is basically dying.

But this is not something we talk about. The sum total of my pastoral help, apart from praying for him and with him, amounts to trying to boost his morale with news of the parish, and encouragement about looking forward to being able to get back to his own home.

I hate myself for this. I’m sure there is pastoral and healing value in the ministry of cheering up, but I long too for the realism and honesty of our forebears who knew how to confront people with their mortality and help them prepare for death. I long for someone to say to me, “Don’t give me any of that bullshit, padre [it’d have to be someone who called me that, I suppose]: I know my number’s up. Help me learn how to die, for God’s sake.” But instead I feel like I’m colluding with the whole inertia of a medical profession for whom dying is the last defeat. Is it collusion? or denial? or, let’s be honest: betrayal?

Then I leave by the main entrance, walking out behind a patient in his dressing gown who’s pushing the saline drip stand he’s attached to. He stops just outside - several yards short of the designated blue area - and avidly lights a cigarette. Round the corner, under the covered entrance, a small group of theatre staff in their caps and white gowns are also puffing away during their break. I don’t know who’s more in denial here. But all they, who presumably think it won’t happen to them, and I, who am failing to tell them it jolly well will, are not helping each other.

At the Wallingford Bunkfest storytelling fringe, with Barbara Neville, Tina Bilbé, and Fionnaghal. In the Corn Exchange Curtis Room, from 15.30 to 18.30, on Saturday September 3. All welcome!

Wallingford BunkFest 2005 - Timetable at a glance

There are, after all, some sensible and interesting Oxford blogs out there. Most of the ones I’ve found so far are political; obviously the political class of Oxford includes some keen and accomplished bloggers.

Thus you can read
Antonia’s blog
or Jo Salmon.

These two are both Labour Party activists, partners, Microsoft refuseniks, and power their blogs with WordPress. What more could you ask for?

Then there’s
Chris Brooke at the virtual portico or roofed colonnade.
What is it about cats and bloggers?

It’s not only Labour who produce bloggers.
Councillor Matt Sellwood is a local Green Party councillor.

Not quite sure what to make of Katy Ross?
Still more cats?!

Nick responded to my post about Badger’s God with a link to a nice picture of the hyrax or rock badger that appears in the Bible. (Err, would that be Psalm 104.18 and Proverbs 30.26?)

Fortunately he didn’t send me the link to the appalling BadgerBadgerBadger, which I had to find for myself. Warning: Don’t click on this unless you have Broadband and strong nerves. Oh, and aren’t afraid of the animal rights people. This is definitely cruel and unusual treatment of animals.

It’s a sad day for science. A sad day for civilisation, for medicine, for society, for liberty. A sad day for - what was it the Government were so keen on? - never giving in to terrorists.

The lunatic terrorists of the animal rights movement have forced a family business to close down, after an increasingly sickening 6-year campaign of intimidation, culminating in grave robbery, and the theft of the remains of an old woman related to the family:

BBC NEWS | England | Staffordshire | Targeted guinea pig farm closes

It’s a law of nature, probably. If you make animals more important than human beings, your own attitudes and actions will end up lower than the level of the beasts’.

See also: the Research Defence Society.

From time to time I pick up Prospect magazine, which Andrew Marr describes as “Political writing for grown-ups… Europe’s outstanding political and cultural monthly.” Even subscribed to it one year, but didn’t renew because I just wasn’t getting around to reading it each month, there’s so much between those covers. But it always entices, calls to me from the newsstand: “Call yourself intelligent? informed? Buy me, and you will be.” (Sure, but only if I read it, no?)

Anyway, I did buy the August issue because it’s got several articles about British Muslims, Iraq, etc. in the wake of the July 7 bombings.

Among them is a piece by Kamran Nazeer which talks about the process of self-examination among Muslims in Britain, following the discovery that the bombers were British. It includes this interesting comparison of faith groups studying their scriptures:

One of the obstacles here is the lack of true dialogue in Muslim communities. I sometimes used to go to a local Koranic study circle. More recently, I sat in on a Bible study group that a friend of mine attends. Both meetings were similar in many ways - they were both held around kitchen tables, many cups of tea were drunk, and they were led by men with beards. But when I think back on them, there was one striking contrast. Whereas everyone got a chance to speak during the Bible group, the Koranic circle was dominated by the leader, the imam of the local mosque. He was a knowledgeable man and spoke well, but I remember noticing that he didn’t ask the other members of the group any questions. The purpose of the meeting was not to figure out the meaning and significance of the text that we were reading together, but to learn it from the imam.

She concludes that there needs to be more open debate and conversation with and within Muslim communities to tackle Muslim grievances, including educational underachievement. And some of that means addressing their own culture. Alison used to teach in a multi-cultural primary school, and one of the reasons that some Muslim boys didn’t do as well, was that they were learning from, if not being taught by, their home and community background, not to respect women as much as men. Most English primary school teachers are, guess what? women. Ergo, a massive disincentive to getting the best out of the primary school experience.

Just wandered into the lounge where Tui is watching daytime TV, and caught the AA commercial out of the corner of my eye. Does anyone else find this the most terrifying thing on TV at the moment? I mean, as bad as some of the Doctor Who episodes, like the animated shop window dummy brides, or the Empty (”Are you my mummy?”) Child?

I mean, here’s this poor woman motorist, broken down by the roadside and alone in the middle of nowhere - which is bad enough in all conscience. She calls the AA, and just as the man arrives, suddenly there are 20 of them, all dressed in yellow jackets, walking towards her like a phalanx of slow-motion zombies. “LET US FIX YOUR CAR …”

It’s enough to make you join the RAC.

You’d think there would be lots of Oxford bloggers, wouldn’t you?

Well, there may or may not be, but the ones I’ve managed to find out there, (cf. yesterday’s post) don’t seem particularly sensible or interesting. One of the exceptions is Kate at Pandora’s Blog, who visited Elsfield this weekend.

If you’ve never been there, don’t forget to have a look at the church, and John Buchan’s grave.

The truly amazing thing about the world of blogs is that anyone ever finds anything out there. There are the Big Fish that everyone reads, that I won’t even bother to name as I try not to read them. Mostly because they are often not that special, I reckon. And then there are the millions of others, some of which must be real gems. And all of them a piece of someone’s actual life.

I started at random clicking on the NEXT BLOG >> button at the top of some Blogger blogs. You get taken to some strange places. One or two of them - but really, surprisingly few, are not even in English.

This too is a message in a bottle. Perhaps, some day many years from now, someone out there may find it.

You’re Siddhartha!
by Hermann Hesse
You simply don’t know what to believe, but you’re willing to try anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you’ve spent some time in every camp. But you still don’t have any idea what camp you belong in.
This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It’s time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in ferries.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I don’t know what all this “camp” stuff is about, unless it’s an allusion to being a man in a profession that involves wearing long dresses to work?

John Naughton, in Memex 1.1 > Blog Archive > Computers and masochism, asks the question: Why do (Microsoft) computer users put up with it? “It” being the endless assault of viruses, trojans, malware, and the accompanying cost of updating and patching security. You’ve got to wonder with him, haven’t you?

I think he’s a bit hard on vicars and their soothing bromides. I like to think it’s his Catholic upbringing speaking, which seems to have been grim by all accounts.

Is this the ultimate in geekdom? Or a deep-seated longing for a Cistercian kind of plain simplicity? I’ve been enjoying the discussion over at 43 Folders about the possibility of “Life inside one big text file”. Keeping all the “stuff” inside your computer, in one single plain text file.

It was a discussion started by Giles Turnbull, and apart from the discussion at 43 Folders there have been separate articles or contributions by Robert Daeley, Giles Turnbull on his own website, and Danny O’Brien.

So I’ve been sitting here today, preparing tomorrow evening’s sermon, wondering how long I can get signed off for the HRI (holiday related injury) which I sustained on returning home yesterday afternoon. After carrying an over-loaded suitcase up the stairs, with great care not to damage my back, I let go of it a moment too soon and dropped it on my little toe. This clearly makes it impossible for me to wear black clergy shoes, and I’m therefore unable to work. Worth a try?

On an unrelated note, I heard just before going away of a friend who, after being ill for some years, discovered he had an intolerance to yeast and all dairy products. Having given these up, he has been miraculously better. This doesn’t bear thinking about. Milk, cheese and butter I could live without. But bread? Beer? Marmite!?

No way!

Rachel tips me off to the existence of BlogPulse, which tells you interesting statistics about your blog (or other people’s): blogs that link to yours, keywords that you use, other blogs “in the neighbourhood” i.e. with similar concerns. Some of these are weird. But I was taken with the images in Project for the Old American Century. We don’t seem to have the same kind of political dialogue in the UK. Is it that we don’t need it? Or that we’ve been taken over by the Right and there is no liberal agenda?

OK, now I’m back from summer holiday, so postings from now on will (probably? possibly? perhaps?) once again carry the date when they are actually posted, rather than when they were written.

The advantage of first-floor town-centre living: you can sit in your own home, watching the world go by outside your window. The world, in this part of it, means people coming to shop at the supermarket opposite and going to extraordinary lengths to find a parking space in the road so as to avoid paying 30p for the car park. There are holidaying families loading and unloading more or less disgruntled children from people carriers. “What do you mean, we’re there now? This isn’t anywhere!” There are the walkers setting off with their walking boots, backpacks and sticks for a day in the hills. A passing acquaintance informed me recently that this is how you get people to think you are athletic, locally: put on your walking boots and promenade around the streets a bit.

People out there come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Close observation of men and women in holiday attire doesn’t yet provide proof of yesterday’s tabloid assertion that British boobs are getting bigger. So far the evidence suggests only that British beer bellies are. (More observations called for.)

When evening comes, the shoppers, walkers and families depart and give place to the town’s night life. At this point the car park and the road outside become the local version of Silverstone. It’s a question of honour to start your car with the maximum of noise: squealing of rubber on tarmac, roaring of engines, obviously the intention is to accelerate to 60 mph between the car park entrance and the T-junction 30 metres up the road. There are 4×4s reversing into spaces they were never intended for, like the one last week that smashed its tow-bar into the crash barrier that fortunately protects our neighbour’s brick wall. The tow-bar came off worse, to general relief of residents (but not driver). Last night a driver who had come out of the pub reversed into the entrance, knocking over the salt-grit bunker on the corner before roaring off. With that degree of control at 5 mph and in reverse, he left me feeling glad I was safe at home instead of out on the roads myself.

And then there’s the shrieking and screaming of teenagers outside the chippy. The mobile phone conversations where you can construct whole life stories from the one side of the conversation that you hear. Probably not even as bizarre or exciting as the truth. All the fun of town centre living.