Storyteller’s World

I can’t believe this.

I finally summoned up the courage to have another try at buying a wireless modem and router, and networking the computers in the house. (Two previous attempts failed, when both pieces of hardware fell at the first fence, by not even detecting a broadband signal.)

The kit arrived today from Amazon, and with some trepidation I plugged it in to Alison’s PC - overcoming all the nausea and disgust that working with Windows induces. It wasn’t as straightforward as the instructions claim (needless to say). It needed a phone call to BT Broadband: “We don’t support Netgear, as it’s a third-party product.” “I don’t want support, I just want some information about your DNS servers.”

It still didn’t work at first; but in the end I tried the sometimes-worth-trying ploy of switching everything off and then on again. And suddenly, there was a live connection. First thing I did was download Firefox so we won’t have to use IE on Alison’s machine - don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade her, perhaps I’ll tinker with the preferences and make it the default browser…

And now (bliss!) I’m sitting in the living room with my iBook on my lap, actually surfing and using the Internet. Think of it: I’ll be able to stay in bed all day and work - or even not, as the case may be.

Will this be a way of using consumer muscle to get fairer, lower prices from the greedy petrol companies?

The only way to find out will be if they get the numbers they want to sign up for it.

I think it must be true: reading Proust really does change your life. Not only that, it can actually heal you.

I used to be neurotic, paranoid and hypochondriac. But after a mere 350 pages of volume 2, especially Marcel’s account of his journey to Balbec and first night at the Grand Hotel, I realise I am completely cured. In fact, was never ill.

Today is the feast of lovely George Herbert; and with Lent beginning two days from now, it seems good to read his poem about it.

Lent

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
                       But is composed of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
                       To every Corporation.

The humble soul composed of love and fear
Begins at home, and lays the burden there,
                       When doctrines disagree.
He says, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandal to the Church, and not
                       The Church is so to me.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
                       When good is seasonable;
Unless Authority, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it less,
                       And Power it self disable.

Besides the cleanness of sweet abstinence,
Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
                       A face not fearing light:
Whereas in fullness there are sluttish fumes,
Sour exhalations, and dishonest rheums,
                       Revenging the delight.

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
                       And goodness of the deed.
Neither ought other men’s abuse of Lent
Spoil the good use; lest by that argument
                       We forfeit all our Creed.

It’s true, we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
                       Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Saviour’s purity;
Yet are we bid, Be holy ev’n as he.
                       In both let’s do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
                       That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
                       May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
                       As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlour; banqueting the poor,
                       And among those his soul.

Calamity in the campanile.

Last night our ringers were going at their craft with a merry will, when one of the bells (the no. 2, I think they told me) fell unnervingly silent. Closer investigation showed that the clapper had broken: not where it joins the bell, but the shaft of the clapper itself. And we’ve only been using it for a couple of hundred years, too. Sounds like an expensive item; but at any rate, cheaper than casting a whole new bell.

In the mean time, since this is the tolling bell, I’m unable to fulfil the obligation of Canon B11, to give notice, “by tolling the bell or other appropriate means, of the time and place where the [morning and evening] prayers are to be said or sung.” Sorry, folks.

There’s an amusing report in today’s Observer: Da Vinci trial pits history against art.

Apparently “historians” Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, co-authors of a bestseller of some years ago entitled The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, are suing Dan Brown for plundering their ideas for the entire plot of his runaway publishing phenomenon. He has simply stolen the fruits of their years of research (sic) and is freeloading on the back of their labours. (And where did they get their ideas from, we might ask?)

Well, I never thought I’d feel sympathy for Dan Brown or agree with him about anything, but it just goes to show that life is full of surprises. Apparently he and his lawyers intend to argue that great art (hmm…) always borrows from other sources: without this there would be no Chaucer, Shakespeare, and so on. “Good writers borrow; great writers steal.”

Not that agreeing with him is going to persuade me to read his book. He’s not getting one brass farthing from me, to augment his multi-millions.

After Paris, I’m full of good intentions to have another try at Proust, which the Rough Guide to Paris describes as “Written in and of Paris: absurdly long but bizarrely addictive.” Proust and I have not always agreed in the past: I’ve felt the same distaste for his characters and situations, all their social attitudes and pretensions, as I once felt for Jane Austen. Who cares about these upper class prats and their angsts about who is going to invite them to their “dos” or cut them dead on the Champs Elysées? But the comparison with Austen at any rate holds out the possibility of learning to love him.

So here we go. Not back to page 1 of volume 1, which I read 3 or 4 years ago; I’m starting instead with volume 2, Within a Budding Grove.

As you might expect, there’s a lot about Proust on the Web.

A. N. Wilson, in his Beginner’s Guide to Reading Proust, recommends that Proust newbies start with the scene in The Guermantes Way about the Duchess’s red shoes:

The pace and the hurry of the scene are masterly, and the sense - as in Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts - of everything turning away quite leisurely from the disaster, Death itself. I am sure that by reading these 20 pages some of you will have discovered the extraordinary paradox that in this most snobbish and superficial of writers there is contained almost more solemn spiritual profundity than in Dante himself.

Henry James characterised reading Proust as “inconceivable boredom associated with the most extreme ecstasy which it is possible to imagine” (from the Guardian review)

Some Proust sites:

Temps Perdu.com

Marcel Proust in Wikipedia

A blog about reading Proust

Alain de Botton on How Proust can change your life

Marcel Proust resource materials

Microsoft Office 2007 Upgrading Could Be an Expensive, Time-Consuming, Unnecessary Process With a Big Learning Curve. Now’s the Time to Consider OpenOffice.org Instead.

For those of us who can remember ‘68, this morning dawned with the promise of some of that old exhilaration of taking to the streets to fight for what we believe in. It was dry and bright, with the prospect of two rival demonstrations, for and against the Oxford Animal Lab. I was hunting in the back of the clothes cupboard for my steel-lined balaclava and body armour (somewhere near where I last saw my Tom Baker-style Doctor Who scarf) when Alison said, “I really don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go: they’re talking about violent clashes, real street-fighting, man. Who’s going to take the service tomorrow morning, if you’ve had your head broken?” So, like it or not, I agreed to sit it out in my bath chair, with my rug tucked around my knees, and a shawl where the Doctor Who scarf should have been.

As it happened, we were in Broad Street - trying to get across the road to Blackwells by dodging in front of the hooves of the police horses - just as the procession was moving off towards the Lab. A megaphone man was leading the chant: “Stand up for science! Stand up for reason!” “What do we want? (Animal testing!) When do we want it? (NOW!)”

All at once my heart was filled with the despondency of the old protester. For all their appeal to what a University stands for, science and the advancement of knowledge, over against the ignorance of superstitious sentimentalism, their chanting sounded no more rational (no less irrational) than that of the anti-Lab protesters.

Must it be ever thus? Will it always be that those who demonstrate and protest in the streets, sound indistinguishable from each other?

But then, it’s one thing to sit in front of your computer monitor blogging about your opinions concerning this or that. It’s a completely different order of commitment to be out there in the cold, having your picture taken by policemen with digital cameras, and risking having your head broken by members of a rival faction.

‘Ping’ from the microwave - that’ll be my cocoa ready.

Addendum: Chris was there too, and muses in his report on the colour co-ordination of police horses’ accoutrements.

Long-term readers (very long-term, actually) will remember the Great Aubergine Famine of July and August 2004.

It’s with a heavy heart that I have to report that Sainsbury’s are again unable, for reasons which naturally pass understanding, to stock this delectable vegetable (or fruit? Perhaps someone can enlighten?) For two successive weeks, when I got there, the aubergine shelf was bare, and I must go away empty-handed.

Now, I know this isn’t in the same order of hardship as not being able to buy bread or potatoes. But in a supermarket ethos that spends so much effort on persuading us to buy pre-prepared mashed potato, stuffed larks’ tongue tortilla kits, and other suchlike decadencies, a natural unprocessed aubergine doesn’t seem so much to ask for.

If anyone can report a sighting of an aubergine anywhere, I’d be glad to hear of it. Otherwise, it’s back to the Co-Op, who did have some this week.

This is definitely one of those posts I’m nervous about writing, in case I come to seriously regret it.

For the last several years, when there has been any talk of giving up alcohol for Lent, my reaction has been No Way! Absolutely not! And I’ve gone on to talk piously about how it’s not what you give up for Lent that matters, but what you take up. (More hours of prayer, extra acts of service or charity, being nice to the mother-in-law, etc.)

But I don’t know. Suddenly it feels much more as if that couple of glasses of wine in the evening, or a beer at lunchtime, or a whisky before bed, has become not so much a pleasant treat, but a necessity of life, something I really can’t do without. And where do the invisible lines come, between not wanting to give up alcohol for Lent, and not choosing to, and not being able to, and “Hello, my name’s Tony, and I’m an alcoholic”?

So this year, we are both talking more seriously than ever before about giving up alcohol for Lent. It’s not going to be quite 100%: we have a wedding anniversary on March 23, and we’re jolly well going to celebrate that with a bottle of wine. But for the rest of it, I think we’re really going to go for it.

In any case, this may be an Idea Whose Time Has Come. My grandparents in their staunchly nonconformist youth all signed the Pledge of the Band of Hope, now re-branded as Hope UK, a Christian charity which provides education and advice on drugs and addiction. Hope UK are inviting or challenging people to go for 40 days without alcohol, as a kind of protest against our binge-drinking culture. So, for whatever reasons, we may not be alone.

But I’m going to need all you people to be very gentle, right? After next Wednesday, please don’t offer me a drink, or flaunt your supermarket wine boxes at me. And if you find I’ve fallen off the wagon, don’t gloat, or boast how well you’re doing, or leave Twelve Step leaflets lying around the place.

Wish us luck!

John has an excellent post on Intelligent Design: The Theology of Intelligent Design, which is thoughtful and scientifically informed, and altogether says it much better than I ever could.

Thanks, John!

Another estate agent sends me a letter asking if I’m thinking of moving in the near future, because they have had a number of enquiries (authentic ones, forsooth!) for properties in this road or area.

It always intrigues me when I get this kind of thing. Do estate agents simply not know that vicars don’t own the houses they live in? (Which would make them incredibly ignorant.) Or do they just not think? (Which would make them incredibly, er, unthinking.)

As usual I am momentarily tempted by the idea of trying to sell the house very quickly for the half a million or more it might command in this Monopoly money age, and run off with the cash. To somewhere warmer. Much warmer.

Then I remember that, with solicitors having to be involved, there’s no such thing as selling a house very quickly. Darn it. Looks like I’ve got to sit out the cold and the grey, after all.

I made some comment about the French being our nearest neighbours, yet somehow so very very alien. It’s true, there are things about France that drove me crazy. Like having members of the party shouted at for walking on the grass (which, like an out-of-work actor, was “en repos”), or taking pictures inside a church. Hand in hand with this tight officialdom goes the inefficiency of the cash machine in the Pompidou Centre, which was ostensibly to sell tickets, but actually would not accept cash and yet refused every kind of plastic known to (English)man.

Yet, I’ll say this for them: They’ve always had a respect for intellectuals and for learning. Not like our own idiot society and idiot Labour ministers.

See Christina Odone’s comment in the Observer.

Nick Cohen talks sense in today’s Observer: It’s so cowardly to attack the church when we won’t offend Islam.

He points to the willingness of the so-called avant-garde to attack Christian beliefs (though he thinks, wrongly, that it is chiefly Catholicism which is being mocked) when they don’t attack Islam for fear of the ensuing anger and death threats they might call upon themselves.

Nothing new here: it’s been going on for years. Even within the last few months, the BBC (God bless ‘em) ignored the protests of thousands of Christians and screened Jerry Springer - The Opera, yet didn’t show all those offending Danish cartoons, in order not to stir up more Muslim anger.

I’m not saying they should have shown them; but if it comes to being careful not to offend people’s beliefs, a level playing field would be good. Christians can be gravely offended by treatment of Jesus that they consider blasphemous. Does anyone care?

It’s often said that our blasphemy laws “only protect” Christians, and should be extended to others. But the evidence suggests that Christians are the ones who need it, and who are generally not protected because the law is ignored. Other faiths - well, let’s face it, we mean Islam - aren’t subjected to this offensive treatment by and large, because the bold bad secular critics of religion are too scared to treat Muslim beliefs in the same way.

Perhaps I should have looked at some of these before I went. But then, would it really have made any difference?

The Paris Pages

The Musée d’Orsay

The Musée Rodin

Time Out Paris Guide

Eiffel Tower webcam

The Wikipedia article on Paris is disputed!

The Rough Guide to Paris was helpful; only get the current edition, not the one we were using, which was a 7-year old edition that still talks about francs instead of euros.

Yes, it was Paris, as Milan recognised.

For several years, Alison’s colleague Bill has organised a trip to Paris for student teachers at Oxford Brookes, in mid-February. This year he persuaded Alison to join them, and to take me too. It’s supposed to be an Art and Creativity experience, giving students the opportunity to think about organised visits to places of culture, museums, galleries etc., with school parties, and how to facilitate their learning.

It’s only my third visit to Paris, and out of these the first one didn’t count. I was 19 and went to France with my friend Tom (not his real name - in 1968 we didn’t use our real names .) We camped for two nights in the Bois de Boulogne, it rained solidly, we made one metro ride into the centre and saw hardly anything, and the next day we went off to the Loire Valley where the weather was better.

Then seven years ago I went with Alison to spend our Silver Wedding Anniversary in Paris and it was great. So this was visit #3 (or #2).

So many things astonish me about Paris: even though you’ve never been there, it’s so familiar from films etc. that you know what to expect round the next corner. It is a city that is the common property of the whole human race. Although they’re our nearest neighbours, in some ways the French are more foreign than you can possibly imagine.

When you’ve only got two full days and an evening to spend there, you are hungry to absorb everything, as much of the experience as you possibly can. People have been saying to me, “Have you had a good rest?” The answer is, No, I’m exhausted, we’ve been trying to devour so much during these 60 hours, enough to last us for the next however many years, until we can get back there again. Each time we go to Paris we deliberately don’t visit some major sight, so that we have a reason to return. For example, this time we (again) didn’t go up the Eiffel Tower or visit the Louvre. Next time …

I didn’t have anything to read of the You Are There variety, but now I want to read some of those Paris novels: Hugo, Dumas, Zola. Hell, I may even give Proust another try.

It’s an enormous experience. I don’t want to visit Paris. I want to live there, for six months or a year.

I’ve been a committed Firefox user for a couple of years. But today I heard that the Camino browser for MacOS is available in a stable 1.0 version, so I’m giving it a try.

On first impressions, it looks very good indeed. It’s also based on Mozilla (like Firefox) but with the Mac Aqua interface. Very elegant indeed.

I guess it was a mistake to read his memoirs, before I’ve read any of his novels. But I’ve just never really fancied the novels - I tried A Hundred Years of Solitude once, but couldn’t get into it. And then again, when the man (or rather, his translator) pinches the name I’d given my website, for his memoirs, I knew I’d have to read them sooner or later.

According to the blurb, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is “the twentieth century’s greatest and most-beloved writer,” a writer of “unique charm”. Yet, readable though the memoirs were, and interesting in describing a country and period of history I knew nothing about, their “charm” as such somehow passed me by.

Here’s a man who tells how he spent most of his adolescence and early adulthood in debt, borrowing money from family and friends so he could write instead of getting a paying job. Not that he wrote all the time: by the age of 22, he’d suffered two bouts of gonorrhoea from spending most of his nights with whores. And this in a culture where the women were expected to be virgins when they married, and there was hell to pay if they strayed from chastity either before or after marriage, while the men were free to play the field: in fact, it was considered a sign of great charm and being an all-round good fellow if they’d had those requisite doses of clap.

In fact, Gabito is chronicling (or is it revelling in? or glorifying?) a life and a society which I find distressing and appalling, rather than charming.

Perhaps someone can tell me whether it’s just me being a hidebound prude, or whether there’s something emperor’s-new-clothes-like about Gabito’s charm?

In case you haven’t recognised the particular style of street furniture.

Where else to be on St Valentine’s Day, but “the most romantic city in the world”?

Been away from the keyboard for a couple of days.

Guess where?

Oh yes, I’m signing. This is about the only area of life in which I stand up to be counted as a Real Man.

Christians rise up against quiche, from Church of England Newspaper Online

From the Journalling Jar, the latest topic is: Favourite story to tell.

The most successful story in my repertoire is “The Unluckiest Man in the World”, which I first heard from Angela Knowles at that memorable workshop where I learned that I was a storyteller. So if “favourite” includes, the stories that give me the greatest buzz, this would have to be near the top of the list.

But I’m also very fond of “The Lord’s Blessing”, “Kate’s Story”, “Mrs Field’s Chocolate Chip Cookies”, “The Man Who Looked On His Face In The Glass”. In fact, any story I really get involved in and that goes down well, so you could say: Whatever story I am currently telling.

The thing that interests me just as much, is the question not about my favourite story to tell, but What story am I telling myself, internally?

I think we all have an internal story (or stories) we are constantly telling and retelling ourselves, which shape our attitudes and indeed our whole life. At one time I realised that my inner story was “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; and it meant I was living in constant expectation and dread that at any moment someone would see through me and realise I was in fact naked, a sham.

What I then discovered is that you can change your life by changing your inner story to something else, anything else that you want it to be. (Well, OK, I suppose it’s got to be something tolerably credible.) The one I hit upon was “The Brave Little Tailor”, in which the hero’s self-confidence, nay chutzpah, lift him out of his impoverished lifestyle and put him in a position where he marries the princess and inherits the kingdom.

So the little tailor was and remained a king to the end of his life.