The wind beneath my wings

Funny old blog this one. I had the urge to write and started several anecdotes to see which one appealed enough for me to elaborate further. I couldn’t choose between them so you’ve got the lot. Sorry.

The Living Years
I’m still sorting through Mum and Dad’s belongings, trying to decide what to keep, what to chuck and what to give to the hospice charity shop. Today I was tackling the last of their scrapbooks and photo albums. Most stuff I’m happy not to keep; a few items I’ve placed on the to-be-decided pile. I know I won’t look at most of it again, but I can’t yet bring myself to part with everything. One such item is a letter I wrote to Dad when I was five and he was away from home. Where he was isn’t important, neither was what I wrote (although the spelling, grammar and punctuation are impressive for such a wee bairn). It was the fact that he’d kept it, in his ‘special’ scrapbook. I never knew that. He died 14th March 2015, as undemonstrative as ever, apart from when he squeezed my arm on the 13th.

The sermon Welby should have given

Like many, I was incensed by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter sermon, widely reported with glee in the likes of the Guardian, and with umbrage in the Daily Mail et al.

Welby is an intelligent man, an experienced man of the cloth, a man with a real-world (i.e. non-ecclesiastical) past, so you’d think he’d know how to write a sermon, especially at Easter, the most joyous event in the Christian calendar. Such a sermon should have been accessible and inspiring, uplifting yet deep, authoritative but humbling, didactive while forgiving.

‘Twas nothing like that. The kindest thing I can say is that it was unhelpful. Welby basically said, Priti’s plan to send immigrants to Rwanda is bad and God will be cross, because I say so.

Einstein, Jesus, Irving and Beethoven

While writing my previous blog (“Inspired choices of music”), I had a feeling that I’d written something very similar before. I checked previous blogs – no nothing there. I searched all my documents saved on my laptop – including archives – and found an essay I had drafted in 1998 while living in the US. It was almost published in a prestigious magazine, nay TWO prestigious magazines, but the first rejected it after a monumental tussle between two editors, and I rejected the second when the editor said he liked the essay’s first half but not the second so could I re-write it. No one tells me what or how to write, so it remained unpublished and I forgot about it …

 … until I wrote ‘Inspired Choices’, the following bit in particular:

“You can analyse the pants off it in the most scholarly, imaginative way, but at the end of the day it boils down to your instinct. Your soul. A religious experience. A certain piece of music just does ‘it’. What’s ‘it’? Ask your soul,”…

Israel and Palestine – the skinny

I went to the Cambridge Footlights Review, in 1981 I think, which starred students who went by the names of Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. Slattery performed the most wonderful sketch – all Star Wars episodes in 90 seconds. I laughed so much I felt nauseous! On a similar level of ridiculousness, I now try to summarise my take on the Israel-Palestine conflict in about 1300 words. 

Two funerals and a wedding

When Princess Beatrice married her dashing Edoardo last summer, the contrast with the previous showy, lavish, crowd-filled, OTT affairs of sister Eugenie and, before that, cousin Harry was marked but necessary.

The country was in Covid-crisis. Minimal social gatherings were the law. The Royal Family were (are) not above the law. Bea and Ed accepted their selfless roles in wider society and didn’t pull rank. They did their duty by respecting the law and showing solidarity with those who have no rank to pull. To drive the message home, Bea symbolically wore a second-hand frock. (Yeah I know it was still one helluva frock.)  In other words, the British Royal Family showed leadership and grace.

So much for being principled

I was chuffed to bits last week when my best friend’s teenage daughter signed up to LinkedIn and invited me to connect, her first invitee outside her immediate family.

She’s a grand lass, as we say up north. I’ve known her all her life and she’s kind of a Godchild. Only kind of, not a proper one, because of me and my stupid principles.

Forgiveness? Not gonna happen

Went to church with Mum today. Pity. Lovely Indian summer day. Could have spent it in the garden or walking across the fields. But I had promised her on Thursday that I’d take her and, like a good Christian, except I’m an atheist, I keep my promises. Unless it’s a really huge inconvenience, then tough.

The theme of today’s service was ‘forgiveness’, and how even if the perpetrator doesn’t apologise / repent / make amends or wotnot, a Christian should still forgive them unconditionally, or God won’t forgive the Christian their own transgressions when the time comes. 

Oh! The Ruin of Mandalay

It’s not often I’m relieved that my Dad is no longer around. This morning, however, is different. Yer see, Rudyard Kipling was his favourite poet, and my Dad knew poetry, having published his first when he was just 14 years old. It was a poem from the pen of an average-ish student who, if he was lucky, would one day take over his father’s music shop. But as a result of the poem being read by his teacher and his father, his true talents were realised and nurtured.

Several years later, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he read English Literature under the tutelage of C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. It doesn’t get much better than that. Except in Dad’s eyes it did, in the form of Kipling.

Kneel to God only

I took my 90-year-old Mum to church today, first time she’s been since before lockdown and she was so happy to be there. Unlike Mum, I’m not a regular Sunday church-goer. More like weddings, funerals, the odd Midnight Mass, and tourist jollies such as Eucharist at one of the Four-Weddings-And-A-Funeral venues, or at Wells Cathedral, where my great-grandfather learned to play the organ back in the 1880s.

However, I used to go to church every week when I was younger, so some prayers, psalms and hymns I know by heart, even now. But today, while reciting one of those familiar litanies, I had an epiphany. I was reciting the Penitential Rite that includes the following:

Five Loaves, Two Fishes, and an Unintended Consequence

Growing-your-own is a good thing. Everyone knows that. But it’s more than about tastier food at (once you get going) a fraction of the over-priced, under-flavoured, not-the-freshest supermarket stuff.

The first tentative harvesting of the beetroot from our new-this-year vegetable beds proved the flavour thing. And as well as steaming the beets for dinner, I used the leaves in a salad for lunch – so fresh, so tasty, so nutritious, so waste-not-want-not. Grow more veg, eat more veg. Can only be a good thing, right? (Keep reading!)

Cummings' Reasonable Motives

Just got round to reading the local paper (Bucks Herald) to see the publication of my latest letter-to-the-editor. Also this week, the other local (Leighton Buzzard Observer) published my photo of a great tit leaving its nest in a ceramic deer head on our back wall, but that’s another story.

Back to the letter. I wouldn’t say I was unquestionably in agreement with Dominic Cummings’ dash to County Durham to secure necessary childcare for his son, rather I was pointing out the hypocrisy and nastiness of some of those railing against him.

My letter in full reads: