Storyteller’s World

What’s the oldest book on your shelves? I mean, the book you have owned longest? 40 Years Ago Today reminds me of the title that may qualify for that distinction in my library.

On Saturday, 9 July 1966 I had a busy day of shopping, mostly kitting myself out for the coming month in Germany. First to Tottenham (a pair of casual trousers and a waterproof jacket); then to Foyles in Charing Cross Road, then to Palmers Green (underwear and 2 shirts). (I’m not even sure you could cover that much ground in one day, nowadays.) At Foyles, my friend John bought a Bible (”he seems to have been thoroughly converted by Billy Graham”), while I bought the Penguin edition of the poems of Baudelaire, which lies open in front of me as I write this. It includes the French text, and a prose translation; the pages are brown with age. I don’t think I ever read very many of them, but I was captivated by the idea of the decadent poet, and for years Baudelaire replaced Goethe as my poetic hero.

Then I went to work at Weir Hall Library from 4 to 7 p.m., (imagine public libraries staying open till 7 on a Saturday evening!) where I graduated from shelving returned books, to tearing up the index cards of withdrawn books, and sticking in new labels where they were full. At the end of the day I was paid £1 for 5 hours’ work that week. (4 shillings - 20p - an hour.) These were riches indeed, in the days when the Baudelaire volume cost 6 shillings (30 pence).

Here’s a rather personal topic out of Sun’s Journalling Jar:

Well now, what can I say? It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t keeping a diary that year, or at least, that end of that year. As I’d only recently become a Christian, keeping a diary was one of the things I thought I should give up. (C. S. Lewis thought the same)

So, it was autumn 1971 when we met, after graduating from different universities and starting work in North London, and beginning to attend the same church where there was a lively fellowship group for 18-25 year olds. I first noticed Alison when she was acting as stage director, prompter and props person for a piece of drama that her friend Dave had masterminded, about Job. I don’t think I could say it was love at first sight - we were much too serious for that kind of thing, in Sunday Fellowship. But friendship blossomed into something more. It had to, because you couldn’t ask a girl out unless you were fairly convinced that marriage was a real possibility. So when I had decided that was how things were, I walked round to the house where Alison was lodging in the upstairs flat, with the intention of Asking Her Out. (It was the sort of big deal that asking a man for his daughter’s hand in marriage used to be - and seems to be becoming again?)

She was on her way out to do her laundry at the local launderette; so I went with her and we sat and talked while her washing went round and round in the machines. After sharing that kind of experience, what more is there than to get married?

That was October 1972, after we’d been friends in the same social group for a year. We decided the following May that we’d get married, announced it in September, and were married in March 1974. A lightning courtship, by some people’s standards? But in those days and circles you couldn’t live together, etcetera until you were married.

From 40 Years Ago Today:

On July 6, 1966, I began my first job in a library: 5 hours a week as a teenage skivvy at Weir Hall Library, Edmonton (now bulldozed to build a flyover). After a brief training session by the deputy librarian (”This is a book; these are the shelves”) I was let loose to spend my first two hours placing the former on the latter.

I write, of course, of the olden days when shelving returned library books was quaintly considered correct practice. Nowadays, at Oxford Central Library, returned books are left on the trolleys, or on temporary shelves, until someone else borrows them. This kind of undermines what I was taught was a first desideratum of librarianship: to be able to retrieve stuff. Call me a dinosaur, if you will.

Working at Weir Hall must have infected me with something. But it was not my first paid employment. Those who know me well will be surprised, not to say incredulous, to learn that the first paid work I did was

(more…)

For those of us who have the fortune (good, or otherwise) to share a forename with the Glorious Leader:

Hat-tip: Jo

What is it about computer and internet helpline types, that makes them assume everyone who calls in is a complete idiot?

(OK, possible answers: 1, Most of them are; or 2, The helpline types don’t know their stuff either, and are slavishly following the diagnostic flow-chart they have in front of them, rather than really listening to what the caller is saying.)

Our broadband was down this morning. Every so often, after kicking (AKA rebooting) the router, you could get it connected for half a minute - long enough to download e-mails, but not long enough to reply to any of them. So I phoned “technical help”. A pleasant enough young man - not from around here - went through the usual patter about unplugging everything else from the phone sockets except the router (not possible, in our case, though he clearly didn’t believe me); turning off the router and turning it on again (also restarting the computer, for some reason - which probably makes sense if you’re running Windows but not so much with a Mac, and I guess is only suggested to make the poor schmuck at home think s/he’s achieving something).

In vain did I insist, and repeat, that it was a line problem. It was only after half an hour of being put on hold, walking round the house jumping through the hoops the young man suggested, and coming back while he interrogated his terminal for the next useless step, that he said, “I’ll just run a line test.” Not even this was easy, since it took a couple of tries to get a result. Result? A fault on the line, which he referred to the engineers, with a promise to me that they would cure it within 3-5 working days.

“I told you so” was exactly true, but entirely useless and gave no satisfaction whatsoever. To Internet Costs now has to be added another wasted half-hour of my time.

Has anyone found a way of shortcutting this, and getting them to listen to you at the beginning of the half-hour, rather than the end?

I wonder if anyone has done any research into whether people who blog are more likely than average to be, or once have been, diary or journal scribblers?

In the spirit of full and frank confession, I report that I have been that sort of guilty scribbler, on and off through much of my life, but seldom more so than between the ages of 13 and 18. It’s a salutary and unnerving experience when, from time to time, the volumes that survive from those years resurface from the bookshelves where they have rightly slumbered.

Thus I am able, at present, to remind myself of what I was doing 40 years ago today. It was the closing days and weeks of my Lower Sixth form life, and the prevailing themes and emotions in the diary are boredom, frustration, lust, shortage of money, an inflated opinion of myself, and anxiety about what other people thought about me. This is not comfortable stuff to be reminded of, but I do it in the purgatorial spirit of one who is re-reading Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Thus, on July 4, 1966:

I describe reading the lesson in school Assembly (the vision of the new Jerusalem from Revelation 21); nerves about standing up in front of the whole school, and fumbling with the bookmark as I turned the page. Getting results of end-of-year exams, and devoutly exulting in the comparison of my grades with others’. Auditioning for the school play (Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle - I only got a disappointing four-line part.) Going to the library and borrowing two books on Germany, where I was about to go for a four week summer language school (which cost my parents £50).

I’m so glad that I’m not young any more. It really is too extreme a punishment to inflict on anyone, especially the supposedly innocent.

Out of Sun’s Journalling Jar comes:

Most Memorable Teacher at School.

Well, weren’t they all memorable? When you’re a child, your teachers bestride your little universe like giants or demigods (and -goddesses). Perhaps Sun, teaching RE at her comprehensive, is thinking how she can become someone’s most memorable teacher in years to come. You may do, Sun, but here’s the thing: they just don’t make them like they used to. The glorious eccentrics, the crazy pedagogues of yore, have all been laid to rest. The golden mould is broken.

How could today’s teachers rival those of my childhood?

Mr Masters, who always wore a black leather glove on his right hand: it was rumoured (though never proved) that he had an artificial hand, having lost his own in the War.

Mr Bull, whom I asked to recommend what secondary school I should go to, and answered, “Borstal” - an academy I had never heard of, and longed devoutly, for several months, to get into.

Mr Melville, who drove into the rear of Dad’s brand new Austin A40 at the junction of Chequers Way and the North Circular Road, and seemed unaccountably keen that I, his star pupil, shouldn’t learn who was responsible. (I didn’t, till several years later.)

All these were at primary school, in a bygone age when you still had male primary school teachers.

Then, at secondary school, an even more diverse range of strange characters, and/or objects of pre-adolescent passion, stalked the corridors and classrooms.

Miss Loewenthal, who first really encouraged my creative writing, but failed to inspire in me the love of Chaucer that I would have now.

Mr Sprosen, the terrifying Games master who could lift you from the floor by your sideburns and dangle you there. One of the great mysteries of my school days was his change in character about the time we started the sixth form, when some of my classmates (not I) were as tall and as strong as he was. Suddenly he became friendly and polite…

“Chicker” Knight, the deputy head with eyebrows that made Dennis Healey’s look tame, and a voice that was so imitable, that I can hear it still in my mind’s ear: “Silly boy! Running in the corridors! See me after assembly!” (It doesn’t quite work on the screen, does it?)

“Cracker” Cox, the middle block head (middle blockhead, we usually wrote it) who taught Latin with a fearsome rod of iron.

“Sid” Knight, the English master who tried so hard to discourage my adolescent interest in Oscar Wilde, and make me love D. H. Lawrence instead. The only result of that is that nowadays I don’t think much of either Wilde or Lawrence.

Then there were “Fred” McNeill, “Soapy” Luxom (the senior blockhead) Miss Satterley (Biology and Library, “etcetera and so forth”), Messrs Ager, Skeels, Tilley, language assistants Herr Gaberthuel and M. Della-Rocca.

Most of all, perhaps, Miss Joan Edwards, who started me on Latin, but principally saw me through German, right up to Oxford Entrance and University. She was a prime mover in organising theatre trips and other cultural events which I thought little of at the time, and only now am so impressed that any teacher should bother with. One of the most stunning episodes in my school life was the lesson where we reduced her to tears, and she snatched up her handbag and stormed out of the room. Yet, unstable or highly-strung as she may have been, she worked at that school until she retired, and still appears, much loved and probably the oldest former member of staff, at school reunions.

They helped make me what I am. Sometimes I wish I had helped them a bit more than I did.

From 40 years ago today.

Don’t say we never done nothing cultural when I was at school. On July 1, 1966, we went on a school trip to the Odeon, Haymarket, to see Laurence Olivier’s Othello. (”As with so many of Shakespeare’s plays, I felt it dragged at times.”)

Then to Earls Court to meet up with a different party from school going to hear Billy Graham in his 1966 Greater London Crusade.

I was really disgusted by it. After we had managed to get into the arena itself instead of having to be in the closed circuit TV room, the elders plus Billy came in. Then one of them began to pray to God to bless all present, especially “our beloved Billy”. Ugh! But the worst was yet to come, for when Graham called all the people forward as converts, he said (and these are very nearly the exact words): “Come forward now, because it may be a long time before you are so close to the Kingdom of God again.” The conceit of it! I was far from converted, although a couple of hundred people must have gone up. But it was a sight worth seeing. I suppose.

So, that was a resistance to mass evangelism, then. I never did like to pray or believe just because someone else told me so, and that has pretty much shaped my life.

Here’s a really useful resource for parish clergy - and not just for them, but for anyone who’s wanting to arrange a church wedding.

In most cases, the legal preliminaries for a church wedding involve “publishing the banns” of those to be married, in their parish churches. But how do you know which is your parish church? Especially if you live in a city where parishes are cheek by jowl and it’s hard ringing round all the nearby vicars to ask “Am I in your parish?” - because clergy never answer their phones or return answerphone messages.

Enter the Parish Finder, to the rescue. You type in your postcode, and click on the resulting map, and up comes a detailed map with the parish boundaries, and details of the nearest Anglican churches (including distances.) With a link to their web pages if applicable.

This is something new. If only we’d had it as recently as a few weeks ago when we were trying to identify which parish Sun lives in: it turns out she is literally in the bottom corner of Trumpeting Loudly.