All lit up.

Like the fleet in Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Woodrooffe’s well-lubricated commentary for the BBC in 1937, I’m all lit up today. Yesterday I wasn’t. To elucidate: on Tuesday it snowed steadily from dawn to dusk. The evening was punctuated by a succession of power cuts which caused the alarm to go off on the central heating boiler. I had to switch off the pump to prevent the boiler exploding. On Wednesday the sun shone down on a winter wonderland for those of us who didn’t have to drive anywhere. I imagine those who did felt about as cheerful as the Grande Armée on its retreat from Moscow. The children were happy, though, as the schools were closed and they could spend the day snowballing.

  I was feeling a bit like Troilus when Criseyde’s gone over to the Greek camp. It’s all very well for Pandarus to tell him:

Ye, god wot, and fro many a worthy knight

Hath his lady goon a fourtenight,

And he not yet made halvendel the fare.

What nede is thee to maken al this care?

The difference is that Troilus, as Criseyde’s pervy uncle is well aware, doesn’t know when, or even if, she will return. And then things got worse: I couldn’t get the wood-burning stove in the kitchen to light. I tried six times, using up precious firelighters and kindling. Eventually I gave up and shivered all day until I lit the fire in the sitting room in the evening. 

 Today, at the second attempt, it lit and as Wordsworth said in a completely unrelated context: ‘And oh the difference to me.’ Being all lit up hasn’t reconciled me to my situation but it’s made it slightly less miserable. 

Solo, perduto, abbandonato!

As a sequel to Jimbledon Fortnight, for the last ten days we’ve had something approaching a normal social life. The Thursday before last, Jane came to stay at her house in the Faveto. We saw quite a lot of her, including going for a ramble in the foothills near Amandola. And the Sunday before last Warren came to stay with us for a week while he did some work on his house in the Cese. We suggested to him that he get his partner, Rachel, to subscribe to Skype so that he could talk to her and their son, Archie. Above all they could see each other. She did and it worked like a dream.

  But what a change a week can make. On Saturday Jane went back to England as did Warren the following day. And today, in response to a sudden - though not unexpected - family crisis Pat has flown off to Stansted from Ancona. We don’t know when she’ll be back. So apart from Eva and Meg, I’m on my tod for the foreseeable future!

Quinn’s fourth birthday.

Got back yesterday from five days freezing in England.  Arrived at Candy’s last Sunday evening. RyanAir did their usual nonsense of playing a fanfare when we arrived at Stansted proudly proclaiming that yet another flight had arrived on time. We then spent fifteen minutes waiting for the steps to arrive so that we could actually disembark. Just imagine if your train arrived at Paddington and you then had to wait for a quarter of an hour before you could actually get off! On our journey back I was told at the gate to put my carry-on case in the container which checks that your luggage isn’t too large. It wasn’t, but pulling it out of the container ripped the stitching on the front pocket. God, I hate RyanAir.

   On Monday we went to Wisbech looking for a mother-of-the-bride outfit for Pat. Quinn and I went to the Bygones Café where I had an all-day breakfast and Quinn had a sausage sandwich. Pat began painting the wainscoting in Candy’s bathroom.

   On Tuesday - Quinn’s birthday - Candy, Pat, Quinn and I went to the SeaLife Centre in Hunstanton in the afternoon, and had a birthday tea at Candy’s in the evening. Shen and Linda, Milshen, Kelly, Jessica and Amber came. Phil brought Quinn a rather super cap-gun.

  On Wednesday, Pat and I went to Colchester to look at more mother-of-the-bride outfits and met Deborah there. Had lunch at the Lemon Tree. Starter and pudding was nice, but the main course was rather a disappointment.

   On Thursday Pat finished painting the wainscoting and I assembled the computer desk which Linda, Shen, Naz and Milshen had bought Quinn for his birthday. It was one of the most straightforward flat-pack kits I’ve ever assembled, having clear and comprehensive instructions. I played doctors with Quinn - he was the patient who died and resurrected everal times. In the evening I went to the Lamb and Flag with Richard and Jane.

 It was 16 degrees in Ancona when we got back yesterday, a pleasant change from the two degrees in England.

  Click here to see a video of Quinn’s birthday.

A good death?

Ever since Norman Painter died on October 29th, I’ve been waiting for Phil Archer to snuff it. And yesterday he did. Jill came home from an outing with Peggy and Christine to find Phil sitting by a recently  emptied teacup with The Dream of Gerontius playing on the gramophone. 

  It was a moving moment, particularly for those of us who’ve dipped in and out of the Archers since its inception in the 1950s. ‘I’m glad they gave him a good death,’ said Pat. And by today’s standards it was.

  Our mediæval ancestors would have thought it the worst of all possible deaths:

     ‘A subita et æterna morte, Libera nos Domine,‘                    they prayed. 

And King Hamlet would have concurred:

    ‘Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
    Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,
    No reckoning made, but sent to my account
    With all my imperfections on my head’

If this is the only life we have, the scriptwriters gave Phil a good death; if it’s not, I’m not so sure. 

Fighting corruption.

Synchronicity strikes again: I have spent the last ten days battling corruption in both my virtual and actual lives.

On the 25th of January I composed an item for my blog. When I came to post it I got the message that there was an unknown error preventing its being published. I was not unduly concerned as I’d received the same message once before some months ago and had solved the problem by repairing my permissions file. This time, however, that strategy didn’t work and after scouring the forums and ‘chatting’ to an Apple employee I found that my domain file had become corrupted. I could read the file but couldn’t publish it. And I hadn’t backed it up! Consequently, I’ve spent the last ten days copying the material from the corrupt file into a new domain file via Pages. A bitter lesson learnt: always back-up your files.

   Meanwhile back in the real world my Mighty Mouse had given up the ghost and I’d ordered a Magic Mouse to replace it. On the 27th I tracked the order, only to discover that according to the couriers it had been delivered on the 25th and signed for by someone called Mancini. I assumed this was a made-up name, but when I looked in the ‘phone book I discovered that it was my neighbour Mimi’s, surname. However, when I called round, Mimi knew nothing about the package. I therefore contacted the couriers, explaining that the package hadn’t arrived and Mimi hadn’t signed for it. They promised to investigate. That afternoon the package arrived, brought not by an employee of the couriers but by a chap in a van belonging to a computer company. He ‘explained’ that the courier had asked him to bring it as it was snowing in Montefalcone. True it was snowing; but it hadn’t been on the 25th! When the couriers rang me later that afternoon I told them all about the dodgy circumstances attached to the package’s eventual arrival. I guess someone will be getting fired.

The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 2).

In yesterday’s post I suggested that our mediæval ancestors’ reaction to a natural disaster would be different from ours. Yes, they would be horrified and grief-stricken but they wouldn’t have seen it as calling into question the benevolence of God. Amongst the dead the baptised infant below the age of reason would, ipso facto, be in Paradise; the decent adult in Purgatory; and the evil-doer in Hell, so saving potential  victims from his attentions.   

   But this does not mean the more thoughtful would not have wondered why such events occurred. There were two answers -  one of which, though it has its attractions, no longer holds water; the other might. The first stems from the concept of the Great Chain of Being made familiar by Tillyard to English undergrads in the sixties. Rattle any bit of the chain which links the angels and saints, humankind arranged hierarchically, animals, plants and inanimate objects, and the consequences are felt along its length. We are all too aware today how human greed and stupidity impinge on the animal kingdom and the material make-up of the planet. Unfortunately we are also aware of Darwin, so can’t really buy in to the idea that imperfections in the natural order - earthquakes and volcanoes - are a consequence of the Fall. We know that the tectonic plates began moving millions of years before the human race came into existence.

   The second concept is memorably expressed by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde:

           … O, Fortune, executrice of wierdes,

          O influences of thise hevenes hye!

        Soth is, that, under god, ye ben our hierdes,

         Though to us bestes been the causes wrye.

In other words, things only seem to happen arbitrarily because we don’t have the whole picture. In reality every event is a jigsaw piece and God’s got the box with the illustration. The idea is given flesh in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, and most poignantly of all in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

  In Chaucer’s story, Dorigen, awaiting her husband’s return to Brittany from England, upbraids God for having created the dangerous rocks which could sink her husband’s ship. 

    'Eterne god, that thurgh thy purveyaunce

     Ledest the world by certein governaunce,

    In ydel, as men seyn, ye no-​thing make;

     But, lord, thise grisly feendly rokkes blake,

    That semen rather a foul confusioun

    Of werk than any fair creacioun

    Of swich a parfit wys god and a stable,

     Why han ye wroght this werk unresonable?

     For by this werk, south, north, ne west, ne eest,

      Ther nis y-​fostred man, ne brid, ne beest;

Pestered by an amorous squire, Aurelius, Dorigen jokingly promises to  sleep with him if he can get rid of the rocks. At vast expense, he hires a magician to create the optical illusion that the rocks have gone. Her husband, Arveragus, having returned, Dorigen reveals her rash promise. He tells her she must keep her word, otherwise she loses all integrity. When she arrives in tears to keep her promise Aurelius is moved by her distress to release her from her vow. He, in turn, begs the magician to let him pay him in instalments, or he will face financial ruin. Hearing what’s transpired, the magician waives his fee. God has answered Dorigen’s question: the rocks are the necessary cause of a chain of noble deeds.

   Unlike Shakespeare’s other tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is not an aristotelean work: events are not the consequence of a tragic flaw. On the contrary, the protagonists’ innocence is stressed. Instead it embodies the mediæval concept of tragedy as an integral part of the human condition: once we step on the wheel of fortune it will for a time carry us aloft until inevitably its revolution plunges us into the depths. But although the lovers’ deaths are tragic they are necessary to bring redemption. Their:

     … misadventur’d piteous overthrows

    Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife

    … And the continuance of their parents’ rage, 

    Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove.

Today, only the lunatic fringe of the American evangelical right sees natural disasters forming part of any over-arching divine plan. According to Pat Robertson the Haitian earthquake was a punishment for a pact with the devil. One would have thought France, which until 1947 extorted ‘reparations’ from its former colony for the losses incurred by the expelled slave owners, might have been a more suitable target. 

   So, whatever he said, John Sentamu was stuffed. If he’d replied, ‘Stuff happens. But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery, And their going from us to be utter destruction : but they are in peace,’ he’d be accused of insensitive escapism. If he dodged the issue, as he did, he’d be equally unconvincing. In an age of disbelief perhaps the only effective answer is to address the issue we can all agree on: the yahoo lurking beneath the surface in all human beings, though pretty close to it in the likes of Pat Robertson. To ask why the disaster in Port-au-Prince was so much worse than the one in L’Acquila nine months earlier. Perhaps the French being allowed to bleed dry a desperately impoverished country might supply part of the answer.

The Lisbon Earthquake (Part 1).

Exactly two weeks ago, whilst sitting enthroned in my bathroom I heard and felt, what I thought was a bang on the door. It wasn’t: it was an earthquake centred on Loro Piceno around 20 kilometres away. Fortunately it only measured 4.5 on the Richter scale and was about 20 km deep. There was no damage.

  Today, our parish priest announced that the collection would be sent to aid the victims of the earthquake in Haiti - they hadn’t been so lucky: 7 points and near the surface.

  In the interval between these two events I heard the Anglican Archbishop of York being grilled on the Today programme. The poor man was having to attempt to reconcile the Christian belief in an omnipotent and all-loving God with the devastation wreaked by his creation on the unlucky sods living in Port-au-Prince. Ever since Voltaire’s demolition of Leibniz after the Lisbon earthquake, that’s been a tough call. Inevitably John Sentamu made an embarrassingly poor fist of it, muttering platitudes about God being there suffering alongside the victims. Try telling that to mother’s whose baby’s just been crushed to death.

  However, I suspect his pre-reformation Catholic predecessors would have had an easier job. These days we wander down a pick-and-mix counter of beliefs either selecting astrology, Buddhism, Islam or Christianity in any of its multifarious guises or, alternatively, deciding not to buy at all but to go down the road to Dawkins & Co who have a much more up-to-date selection. In the middle ages you had Catholicism and that was it. Everybody you’d ever met or even heard of was a Catholic, belief wasn’t an option, it was as much part of life as the sun coming up in the morning or going down at night. And the Church taught that this life was just a small and finite part of an eternal existence, solely important as a determinant of where you spent that eternity. The Archbishop of York may well believe this today, though, his being an Anglican, it’s difficult to be sure. Even some of the Today programme’s audience may share the belief. But what none of them will share is our mediæval ancestors’ experience of it not as a belief but an undisputed fact, a given. To have that you need the intellectual hegemony which the Church exercised 500 years ago.                  

  The nearest modern equivalent is the West’s belief in democracy. Apart from the odd BNP nutter, we instinctively share Churchill’s belief that despite its weaknesses parliamentary democracy is the best political system on offer. A mother whose son gave his life defending Britain against Nazi Germany would have felt the same anguish felt by the Haitian survivors today. But behind the pain would be the knowledge that his death was part of a larger pattern which gave it a positive meaning. And maybe that gave some comfort. Similarly, whilst the pain of bereavement was no less acute in the Middle Ages, behind the grief was the knowledge that the loss was not final. Luther, Calvin and Zwingli destroyed that world for ever. We may well feel the change was for the good. But in losing that world we’ve lost the only thing which could comfort us in the face of a natural disaster.