Storyteller’s World

Employment minister Margaret Hodge has warned that as many as eight out of 10 voters in her Barking constituency were considering voting BNP.

Seen in BBC NEWS | UK | Archbishop urges ‘anti-fear vote’

Is it just me that’s confused about the news coverage of the possibility that the Vatican ‘may relax condom rules’ to combat HIV/AIDS?

Somehow I can’t manage to make sense of the idea that the reason all the men (usually men) who are spreading the virus through unprotected promiscuous sex don’t use condoms, is that they are such devout Catholics? What? So if the Pope says they can use condoms as the “lesser of two evils” to prevent the spread of AIDS, they’ll all start doing what he says then, when so far they’ve ignored the Church’s teaching on sexual morality?

Pardon me if I don’t rush out to buy shares in Durex.

Not that it wouldn’t be great if their wives were given a chance of avoiding infection. But if they’ve cared little enough about their wives to sleep around and contract the virus in the first place, they’re not likely to cover up to save those wives’ lives in the second.

Wow! After the disappointment of episode 1, and even a bit of uncertainty with last week’s werewolf, School Reunion this evening finally struck gold for the new series. Anthony Head was a wonderfully creepy and Hannibal Lecter-ish baddie. There were some genuine scares with bat-like aliens in the staff room - just as we always suspected, and Buffy proved to us, the school really has been taken over by the enemy. There was the theological moment, in which the Adversary tempted the Doctor to become like God and put everything in the universe right. And you thought for a moment - this is the dangerousness of David Tennant’s Doctor - that he might give in. And Sarah Jane was gorgeous - I take it all back. There were some really touching moments as the two Doctor Who girls, from the 1970s and the 2000s, transcended their rivalry to compare notes about the Doctor. (”Does he still do that - stroke parts of the Tardis, etc?” “Yes!” Shrieks of collusive female laughter.)

And next week, the promise of an 18th century version of the murderous shop-window dummies. Can’t wait!

Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure…

And that’s what I need to do tonight after all that. For even plus longtemps, it feels as if I’ve read nothing but Proust (though it’s only 10 weeks or so); as if I’ve been sharing my life with him all this time like M. and Albertine locked in together in their destructive and doomed relationship.

But now it’s finished. Time has been regained, whatever that means. I don’t think it’ll be spoiling it for anyone if I tell you that it was standing on an uneven flagstone in the Guermantes courtyard that made it begin to come out all right in the end. It turns out we are all huge, and growing larger the longer we live, because of the space we occupy not in a physical sense, but in time. I hope you’ve got that.

I kind of feel there ought to be one of those boasting badges you can put on your web page:

Marcel Proust
Je l’ai lu!

The reverse of all Proust’s talk about Memory is, of course, Forgetting.

And this dream-like existence became as torpid as death in certain old men on the days that followed any day on which they chanced to make love. During those days it was useless to make any demands on the President of the Republic, he had forgotten everything. Then, if he was left in peace for a day or two, the memory of public affairs slowly returned to him, as haphazard as the memory of a dream.

If this is true, it sheds a whole new light on political events. Perhaps Clinton wasn’t ever lying: he really couldn’t remember whether or not he had ever had sex with that woman…

But what about more recent events? In this country? What’s been happening at the Home Office? The whole sorry Blunkett afffairs? What has Charles Clarke been up to?

The Cloud Appreciation Society

With not much more than 100 pages to go, the end is in sight…

There were passages in the course of The Captive and The Fugitive when it really felt as if I’d “hit the wall” like you do when running the marathon (not that I would know anything about that.) If it wasn’t for the thought of the “medal” waiting at the end of it, I might have given up. Well, maybe that’s not quite true: even in the midst of all that tedious stuff about love and not-love, and jealousy, there are gems to be relished.

But now, in the final volume, Time Regained, I’m enjoying quiet ecstasies as Proust’s narrator describes how he returns to Paris “after many years” and meets people he hasn’t seen during his whole absence in the sanatorium. It’s the only book I can remember that has so well captured and described the reality of the passing of time, and the amazing experience of growing older. The whole project of exploring time and memory suddenly seems like the book of my life - as indeed Proust says:

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.

This is close kin to the novel I never wrote about Time, when I was 21: the novel that led indirectly to me being a Christian. I don’t think I’d heard of Proust then; certainly didn’t know anything about him. Time is like a labyrinth or vortex that you can enter anywhere, and which will swallow you up or toss you out somewhere, as if randomly - but who can tell if the apparent chaos really is random, or something else? Yet you can also get back to the same place, by entering from a myriad different points.

Then I understood that … he was in fact old and that adolescents who survive for a sufficient number of years are the material out of which life makes old men.

If some of the women in the room had acknowledged the arrival of old age by starting to paint their faces …

(So that’s what make-up’s for!)

But then it turns out that old age makes some of the men stop painting their faces.

Is it the past that is a foreign country where they do things differently - or just France?

Annual Church Meeting this evening.

Note to self: If giving up booze for Lent, always have the Annual Church Meeting after Easter.

‘Nuff said.

Rather late I have downloaded Google Earth and discovered like everyone else that it’s amazing and magical. It’s also decidedly quirky as to which places appear in high resolution already, and which don’t. Thus, my “bigger” parish is all fuzzy, while my “other”, “tiny” parish is all shown in lovely clear detail, so you almost feel you can make out John Buchan’s grave in the churchyard.

It feels so weird to be able to “spy” on the house where I lived for the first 21 years of my life, and to which I’ve never returned. But I can see what colour (though not what make) the present occupants have parked outside their door. (It’s blue.)

And in that cheap Aberystwyth eating place, the Gents / Dynion toilets include one with this notice on the door:

Toilet out of order. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Well, I guess you have to have just visited a very sick relative in hospital to smile at that.

I’ve heard it said that Aberystwyth exists in a kind of bubble in time, 20 years behind the rest of us. And now we know it’s true.

This is a place where you can buy a pint of beer for £1.50. Where you can get a burger and chips and a glass of merlot for £3.99. (Not done well, but you are surprised that it’s done at all.) Surely these are prices that haven’t been experienced in Oxford since 1986? Though it would have been good to pay a bit extra and get some real food …

I’m back in front of the computer screen after the traditional post-Easter vicar’s break.

We went to The Flat hoping for some decent walking, but in fact the weather wasn’t brilliant and in between the mists, fogs and pouring rain we also made two forays into Wales to visit Mum in hospital in Aberystwyth.

The good news is she’s much better, though still very weak and, like any 85-year old, still at risk of the whole system just failing under the strain put on it by the various infections she’s had to deal with. Thank you, all of you who have been praying for her. Yesterday she was definitely getting stroppy with the nurses, which I suppose we have to take as a sign that she’s much improved.

The next few weeks will still be fairly complicated as we try and sort out where she goes from here, and find out whether she will even be able to return to independent living. Like most people who have never known anything else, she isn’t going to like accepting any of the possible necessary alternatives.

Alison has been writing an assignment on contemporary culture, and I finally moved on from the stage of saying, “Oh, you won’t need to bother about X or Y; I’ve never needed to know anything about that…” to “That sounds really interesting; can I read that after you?” I know, it’s about time.

The one afternoon I thought I’d sneak a quick walk up onto (into?) the Long Mynd, the skies opened and the rain fell in stair rods. Walk cut short, as the water was running into my boots inside my trousers.

I think this was a punishment for feeling really angry with a dog owner whose monster leaped up at me as I was setting off up the hill. I really think animal lovers don’t grasp how much this feels like a physical assault, to those who don’t share their besottedness. But that was no excuse for me to feel so hatefully unforgiving. I deserved to get a soaking.

Resurrection, by Piero della Francesca

I had a mini-break between volumes of Temps Perdu, reading Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Didn’t like it very much. It seemed strangely thin on incident (strange criticism, after a 4 volume diet of Proust!), way too unbelievable (even for early science fiction), and, considering what a chthonophobe I am, nothing like scary enough. (I had nightmares reading Tom Sawyer.) No love interest (it stayed home in Hamburg) and not enough dinosaurs.

Yet I wanted to like Jules Verne. Any suggestions of one I might like better?

Lent ends in 5 hours 15 minutes.

Here’s part of the lineup of hopeful thirst-breakers.

Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat

And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by a fit man into the wilderness; and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.

Leviticus 16.21-22

She’s 85. Although she has been managing quite well, and living independently since Dad died last october, she has been feeling increasingly frail and weak. Her diuretic tablets have led to low levels of potassium and sodium, which is fairly common; sodium deficiency in particular can make you more susceptible to infections. After a dose of flu, she was admitted to hospital with a chest infection, and treated with antibiotics while also having her fluid intake restricted to deal with the low sodium level. Lack of fluids led to a urinary tract infection, together with severe dehydration which has affected her mental state, producing derangement, hallucinations, etc. In addition she has picked up one of those hospital superbugs, clostridium difficile.

The good news is, they now seem to have identified all these conditions and are planning to use specific antibiotics and rehydrate her.

The question is, why has it taken them ten days to begin to do joined-up thinking about this sick old lady? The doctor we saw yesterday was impressive, but it was his first day on the case. What was going on before?

It almost feels like you have to wheel out the whole family arsenal, so that instead of just facing them with my sister (plain Mrs Price) you also produce the Reverend Price, and Dr Price, and the other Dr Price, to persuade them they are dealing with serious people. Health care shouldn’t be a lottery about which families can produce people with impressive (and entirely non-medical) titles.

Now Bromyard, on the other hand, have some very clean and pleasant public toilets in their nice new Library and Information Centre.

They will also provide you with a good laugh, if you collect unusual instructions in public places. On the hot air hand dryer is the notice:

Shake well before each use.

I’ve visited Leominster a couple of times before, but it was some years ago. Since we’ve had The Flat, we haven’t been there. And now I have a clearer idea of why: it may just be that Leominster is The Most Inhospitable Town in Britain.

We’ve just returned home from two days on the road - not the best week of the year for it! - to visit Mum who is seriously ill in hospital in Aberystwyth. The A44 runs all the way from Oxford to Aberystwyth, and Leominster is about halfway. So yesterday, when we got there just after 4 in the afternoon, we thought we’d stop for a cup of tea. Only to discover that the teashops in Leominster all close at 4 o’clock. Now, in my part of the world, teatime (the time you might want to drink tea) certainly doesn’t end at 4 - in fact, that’s when it’s just beginning. But Leominster teashops are interested only in morning and lunchtime trade - no such antisocial stuff as teatime business (when else are the staff to drink their own tea?) Still, we thought we’d see if there were any public toilets, and we found some at the short stay car park. They were pretty foul-smelling and unwelcoming - only one roll of loo paper in the ladies’, and that was hung on a hook outside the cubicles - but usable.

OK, so on the way home today we thought we’d stop to use the toilets again. But after the first sign to the short stay car park on the way into town, as soon as you get near anything that looks like shops or a town centre, the signs disappear completely, and the only thing signposted is “Other Routes”, which chucks you out onto the ring road again by the shortest route. So, no car park, no tea, no toilet break.

If anyone from Leominster Town Council is reading this, you can take it as a review from one unsatisfied visitor who most likely won’t be coming back.

The new Radio Times is full of features about the new series of Doctor Who beginning next Saturday. It promises to be another treat with genuine scares to rival the “mad woman in the attic” moments of my childhood. I tremble in anticipation of whether it’s more terrifying to think of the Sisters of Plenitude as nuns dressed as cats, or cats dressed as nuns. Either way, it may be years before I summon up the courage to go on retreat (to Wantage) again.

Equally scary may be the reappearance of Sarah Jane Smith. I was watching Doctor Who as a teenager and sweaty adolescent, and the thought of this woman still looking as good as this seems to threaten the stability of the space-time continuum. I guess Tardis-travel will do that for you. Not that she was ever my greatest heart-throb: those would have been Leela, Peri and Tegan Jovanka.

Russell Davies waxes amazed about the possibility of creating “event television” for Saturday evenings: he too has been taken in by the general media orthodoxy that anyone worth considering isn’t at home watching TV on a Saturday evening. This is barmy: there’s a huge prospective audience that would watch something decent, in preference to the televisual rancid dishwater that is all they usually offer. Casualty. The National Lottery. Who wants to be a millionaire. Need I say more?