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Stuart Reid
Charterhouse
Entries
January 2009
Resolutions I won't keep
December 2008
Boris's tidings of joy
How to create a monster
Dying for a bargain
November 2008
God bless you, Auntie
Why we still remember
Farewell to the Poles
Catholic hospital misled regulator, says report
Bishop Roche issues forceful call to resist push for assisted suicide
Pope gives top Curia officials cake, sparkling wine and end of year review
Government offers £1.5m to preserve historic churches
Features
Hermit, vagabond... saint?
Celia Brigstocke recalls John Bradburne, who laid down his life for lepers in war-torn Rhodesia
'I love ritual, incense and Latin'
Peter Stanford meets the poet Angela Kirby
Live Simply is a call to alms
By Bishop John Rawsthorne
Reviews
A classy pic with tricky morals
Freddie Sayers
The concert that made my Christmas
Michael White
Low-key humiliation
Robert Tanitch
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Resolutions I won't keep |
Friday 2 January 2009
New Year's resolution: To attend the extraordinary form of the Mass more regularly
Do Catholics make New Year's resolutions? I suppose so, but it seems rather pagan. A Catholic does not wait for the New Year; a Catholic makes resolutions every day: that at any rate is what contrition implies. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner" (to borrow from the Orthodox).
All the same, it does one no harm to have a game plan for the coming year. Mine - and I'll no doubt regret writing this, since it will be a source of Guilt and Remorse - is to attend the old rite of Mass with greater regularity. For reasons of harmony and prudence (and convenience) I now go to the New Rite more often than the old.
But to relax now that the struggle seems to have been won risks reversals. One has to watch and keep guard.
As it happens, I do not think there's a danger of our ever returning to those really embarrassing (not to say offensive) People's Masses of the Seventies, but we - at any rate I - surely ought to do more to support the dignity and decency, the truth and beauty, of the Mass that inspired Beethoven, Bach and Palestrina. (Fastidious moderns like to make the point, at this juncture, that Bach was a Lutheran, but that makes absolutely no difference to the argument.)
I am sure I will disappoint myself. I lack discipline. I am not even sure that I can stick to my resolution never again to watch or listen to old hit songs on YouTube while writing this column, and especially not when I am in the middle of an angry denunciation of Decadence.
But try to understand: when you no longer drink or smoke, and when you have qualified for your travel pass (complete with an "expiry date"), when humiliation and disappointment face you at every turn, "Boney Maronie" by Ritchie Valens (who with Buddy Holly and the Big Boppa died in a plane crash 50 years ago next month, RIP) can be a great comfort.
"I got a gal named Bony Moronie. / She's as skinny as a stick of macaroni."
The Sanctus from the Grande Messe des Morts by Berlioz is pretty comforting too, but sometimes you just want to weep over your lost and misspent youth. I have quoted Theodore Dalrymple on this vice before, but he deserves another outing: "Is there a man so lacking in pity that he cannot feel sorry for himself?"
***
Since the economy is still in the news - or was when this issue went to press just before Christmas (it may since have been replaced by bubonic plague or nuclear war in the Middle East) - I hope I will be forgiven if I write about money, again.
When our builder took up the floor in the kitchen not long ago he found two coins: a 1948 George VI half-crown and a George III ha'penny. Both are objects of joy, but especially the ha'penny, which was legal tender during the Napoleonic Wars and when the future Curé d'Ars was in hiding from the military police.
The stash set me thinking. Not all Eurosceptics are stupid, or even Protestant - on the contrary - but in their talk of "saving the pound" all show themselves to be sentimental and superstitious. The pound was lost when Britain went decimal. Before that we had real money. Since then we have had playdough.
The old currency was not only beautiful in its own right but, with its farthings and florins and guineas, was also good for the brain and therefore for the soul. Fifty years ago people were rather more nimble than they are today; certainly I was.
In 1953 any reasonably well-fed 10-year-old knew how to subtract a penny three-farthings from two shillings and sixpence, and still have change for a packet of cigarettes, a fish dinner, a trip to the cinema, three pints of Mackeson's Stout and a tram ride home - oh, and a ha'penny for the collection at the seven o'clock Mass next morning (for which, such was the medieval cruelty of the times, he would have had to fast from midnight if he wanted to receive Communion).
And now? Absolutely nobody can do the math, and we watch helplessly as our currency is debased and debauched. Bring on the euro - but it is probably too late for that. Tony the Evangelist put America ahead of Europe and we have been paying the price ever since.
***
If you try hard enough, you can turn any problem into a moral problem. When is it sinful not to stand up for a woman on the Tube? Probably never when you are as old as I am; and probably never whatever age you are.
Even so, I am assailed by both guilt and righteous fury on the way to work these days, since for the first time in years I have to travel before 10 am, and often find myself sitting when women are standing.
If they are young (up to 40, say) I do not scruple too much. If they are over that age, I get agitated and sometimes (not often enough) stand.
And yet I am perhaps less concerned about the poor women who are standing than by the young men who sit with their iPods and their lewd newspapers, legs aggressively apart, and do not stir themselves until they have reached their stops.
One morning recently, perhaps partly to shame men young enough to be my grandchildren, I made to stand for a woman of perhaps 45. As I tried to get up, however, the pocket of my sleeve got stuck in the arm rest of my seat and I had to bend over to loosen it.
That was more difficult than I had expected, and as I struggled my glasses dropped from the bridge of my nose to the carriage floor. After I had retrieved them, I rose sweating and flustered and offered the woman my seat.
"No, thank you," she said, looking embarrassed.
"Oh please do take it," said I.
"No, really. Thank you."
"Oh, but I insist."
"No, really. I am getting out at the next stop."
Serves me right for being so pompous and ingratiating and - in targeting the young men - passive aggressive.
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Boris's tidings of joy |
Friday 19 December 2008
Boris Johnson has delivered a sterling Christmas message to readers of The Catholic Herald
Southwark Cathedral was in festive and caring mood for the Mayor of London's Christmas carol service last week. There was a large but tastefully decorated Christmas tree in the sanctuary and signers were on hand to accompany the carols and readings.
Those in the congregation who were deaf, and were unable to follow the order of service because they had left their reading glasses at home, at least had the consolation of knowing that they were not excluded. The rest of us, meanwhile, enjoyed a most extraordinary show, as the signers made baby-rocking gestures, or suggested flights of angels by waving their hands like Hawaiian dancers.
We sat with an English Hindu couple from Kent. The man had Krishna markings on the bridge of his nose, and engaged my wife in small talk about "paradigms" ("whatever they are," as my wife said later).
But do not run away with the idea that this was just another gig for London's vibrant, multifaith (and hearing-impaired) community. It was nothing of the sort. This was a traditional Christmas.
The Greater London Authority apparatchiks had wanted there to be absolutely no mention of Christmas, but the Mayor put his foot down. It was to be a Christmas carol service.
And so a carol service it was, and with a bonus: Boris broke ranks with the cathedral authorities by reading the opening of St John's Gospel from the King James Bible rather than from the New Revised Standard Version Bible as printed.
That's not to say that the New Revised etc is all bad, but the King James is better, not least for being close to the Douay (which predates the King James by three years - 1609 vs 1611).
I much prefer the cadences of the older versions, and the blue-blazered Daily Mail reader in me noted with satisfaction that the King James version (like the Douay) gives us "the life was the light of men" rather than the Revised Standard's "the life was the light of all people". Come on, people: women are men too.
After the service we struggled through the photographers and fans to congratulate Boris on his brave defence of tradition. "If a Conservative Mayor of London can't pull that sort of thing," he said, "what's the point of being Mayor?"
Quite so. But did the Mayor of London perhaps have a message for the readers of The Catholic Herald? He had, as it turned out, and it was a message of comfort and joy.
"I cannot remember a Christmas when there has been such foreboding about the state of the economy," he said in a message delivered later by a faithful retainer, "and so I want to remind any anxious readers of the words of Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: 'Some day this war's gonna end.' Some day this recession is going to end, and in the meantime we need to help the poorest and neediest of London to get through it."
Then Good King Wenceslas yielded to City Hall:
"That's why we are freezing our share of the council tax, giving older people the right to travel free for 24 hours a day, and maintaining cut-price travel for those on income support."
Then the Good King returned:
"But I hope it is not naïve to imagine that the downturn will also promote a sense of duty to our neighbours. And so I want to conclude by reminding all Catholic Herald readers who happen to feel guilty about their huge bonuses that they can readily palliate their guilt by donating them to the Mayor's Fund for London, a new charity dedicated to disadvantaged young people in the capital city.
"Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."
***
At the party that followed the service, as the congregation scoffed mince pies and glugged mulled wine, Stanley Johnson, Boris's father, asked me if I had ever found out whether Boris was baptised a Catholic.
It was what my youngest son would call a "surreal" moment. I said that my inquiries had satisfied me that he had indeed been baptised a Catholic - when I'd asked Stanley about it in the summer, he said he couldn't remember - and furthermore that I had written as much in The Catholic Herald.
Oh, said Stanley cheerfully. "But I think he was confirmed an Anglican at Eton." Too late, mate. Boris is one of us. But he is not a bigot; he is not one of those embarrassingly shrill and narrow-minded Catholic apologists who carry all their worldly possessions about with them in a plastic shopping bag. Old Boris sees the other fellow's point of view. Witness his recent, rollicking After Rome series on BBC Television, about the clash between Church and Mosque.
But did he give the Muslims too easy a ride? Call me paranoid and prejudiced if you like, but it seemed to me that Boris depicted the RCs at the time of the Crusades as a bunch of hypocritical barbarians whose only purpose was to kill, rape and pillage, while the Muslims came across as more or less blameless coves who sat around all day doing algebra, reading Aristotle, eating dates, reading to one another from Candide, and performing miracles with ceramics.
Personally, I think it was more complicated than that.
***
What a terrible year it's been, and the worst is yet to come. Where has all the money gone? Nowhere. There never was any money. It was all imaginary.
It is beginning to look as though we have nothing to lose now by becoming Christians and, like Dorothy Day, setting our faces against the both so-called free market and the secular state.
Dear Dorothy. I read her extraordinary diaries earlier this year, and dip into them from time to time before I turn off the light. I should like to leave you with this sweet Christmas story about a poor alcoholic priest, from an entry for December 28 1953, the Feast of the Holy Innocents:
"Fr Elias showed up quite the worse for wear after a wet Christmas in town ... During the newspaper strike last month [he] came in before breakfast announcing that Churchill was dead - a way to distract our attention from his condition."
What resignation, what acceptance, what an eye for the absurd, what tolerance, what kindness - and all without a hint of sentimentality. Fr Elias RIP.
I sense that I'll inflict more Day on you next year. In the meantime, though, Happy Christmas and Prosperous New Year to all readers of The Catholic Herald.
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How to create a monster |
Friday 12 December 2008
'Who do this copper think he is?': Det Supt Andy Brennan described Karen Matthews as 'pure evil'
One should always keep one's shirt on, I know, but I confess that I did experience a spasm or two of irritation last week when Detective Superintendent Andy Brennan, of the West Yorkshire Police, described Karen Matthews as "pure evil". Who does this copper think he is? The editor of the Sun?
Elsewhere in the past week Karen - mother of the kidnapped Shannon - has been described as "scummy mummy", a "monster", a "sub-human". What with Shannon and Baby P, the guardians of our morality in the red tops have been having a high old time of it lately.
Let's be clear: the crimes we are talking about here are unimaginably wicked, and popular outrage is an appropriate response. So, however, if you'll forgive the piety, is prayer.
But you don't get a free rosary with every copy of the News of the World, and perhaps one should not get too agitated when red tops do what comes naturally to them: whip up anger and resentment. After all, the posh papers aren't always that much better.
Still, there is something especially revolting about the new blame culture: it is not enough these days that the culprits are vilified and banged up. Others must be held accountable, and, if possible, punished.
The collateral hate figures right now are social workers, those rather creepy, often politically correct men and women who have to deal with the intellectual and moral consequences of drugs, porn television, and a welfare dependency that they themselves (with the help of successive governments) have perhaps helped to foster.
Sharon Shoesmith, who was director of children's services at Haringey when Baby P died in the borough, may plausibly claim to be Britain's most detested public official. By all accounts, she is an arrogant and abrasive woman, and no doubt deserved to be sacked.
But the mob always wants more. Last week we learnt that Ms Shoesmith had received death threats to one of her daughters, and hate mail suggesting that she should kill herself. Hanging, as they say, is too good for her.
According to the popular account, it is not just that she was negligent in the case of Baby P; no, she was somehow responsible for his death and, even worse, she was being paid £100,000 a year by Haringey. As the Sun put it before she was sacked: "This brazen, box-ticking bureaucrat has already drawn £150,000 in blood money from the public purse since she let poor Baby P die."
***
The case against social workers right now is that they are reluctant to intervene. Once, however, they were widely attacked for the opposite vice: intervening too readily. Twenty years ago ritual satanic abuse was the rage, and social workers all over Britain were busy separating satanists from their children.
It was spooky. In 1990, for example, 21 children were taken from their parents in a dawn raid by social workers and police officers in Rochdale. There was no ritual satanic abuse, of course, and charges against the parents were dropped, but two of the children were separated from their parents for six years. (To its great credit, the Mail on Sunday exposed this scandal.)
The Government's guidelines are that where possible children should remain with their families. In most cases - though not of course in the case of Baby P or Shannon Matthews - that is sound guidance: bad parents are usually better than no parents.
Even so, more than 35,000 children were taken into care in Britain last year. Since all such cases are dealt with in secret, we cannot know for sure whether the social services are behaving sensibly. But according to Alasdair Palmer, writing in this week's Sunday Telegraph: "While no one knows how many children are wrongly taken from their parents, we do know that the consequences of being taken into care are almost universally dire. The vast majority of children emerge without any formal educational qualifications. Many end up homeless, as drug addicts, criminals or prostitutes."
Ready, in other words, to neglect and abuse their own illegitimate children.
Who knows what to do about any of this, about the Shannons and the Karens and the Baby Ps? David Cameron pulls a long face and asks questions in the House; the Government tries to show it means business by announcing another inquiry. Life goes on. We eat, drink and make merry - credit crunch permitting - and when things go wrong, when accidents happens, when terrible crimes are committed, we wonder what the world is coming to, and thank God that at least we are not to blame.
***
A couple of weeks ago at Mass my wife picked up one of those Christmas posters for the front window. "What's that all about?" I asked her on the way home. "I know what you mean," she said. "It goes against my nature. So I think I'd better put it in the window."
She didn't put it up immediately. That Sunday we were having some old friends to lunch. They are lovely, intelligent people, borderline atheists, with whom we share a love of Italy and the occasional Italian holiday, and we felt it would be inappropriate - both aggressive and twee - to place it in the window for their benefit.
The poster finally went up last Friday. I was a bit shocked when I arrived home that evening and saw it there in the window. It says "Celebrate... The Birth of Christ!" and it looks a bit Protestant, which is perhaps not surprising since it is part of a local ecumenical initiative.
Would St John of the Cross have one in his window? Would the Duke of Norfolk? Maybe I am a snob, but I am not comfortable with what the poster says about my modest suburban semi: it says that here live decent, church-going blighters, honest, respectable, reliable, who read the Daily Telegraph, listen to Barry Manilow, and belong to the Rotary club. Surely (I tell myself) there must be some Catholic printer in London who would be prepared to produce a poster with a rather most robustly orthodox message - "SUBMIT!", perhaps.
Still, the poster will remain in the front window until the Epiphany. It goes against my nature too, but my nature is fallen, and I should perhaps try to love my neighbours. Bah humbug to bah humbug!
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Dying for a bargain |
Friday 5 December 2008
An American man catches up on sleep after waiting in line from midnight at Wal-Mart last Friday (AP Photo)
'That dangerous time of the year is upon us," writes Liz Hoggard in the Evening Standard. You can say that again, Liz, but how so?
"In the run-up to Christmas, perfectly sensible women throw off all decorum and start experimenting with décolletage."
Oh, yeah, that. But if low necklines were all we had to worry about at this time of the year, we'd be laughing (while at the same time of course maintaining custody of the eyes).
The run-up to Christmas is rather more dangerous - and scandalous - than Liz Hoggard allows.
In Valley Stream, Long Island, it began with a vengeance at 5am last Friday when apparently crazed bargain-hunters trampled a Wal-Mart worker to death at the start of the Christmas sale. The dead man was Jdimytai Damour, 34, whose family is from Haiti.
Jdimytai's father said: "Life is better than a bargain, I believe so. A bargain is $40, $50, $100. A human being, forget it... He was 34 years. So far he wasn't married yet. He didn't have any kids. You know, he was a good boy."
Mind you, this sort of thing could happen at any time of the year, and anywhere, and is perhaps what you might expect when people have been whipped into frenzies of fear by a constant stream of news about what may be nothing more than an economic downturn but may equally turn out to be the end of the world.
So far, though, the violence in Britain has been cultural rather than physical. The weekend newspapers marked the beginning of Advent in the time-honoured way: with pages of "gift ideas" in which you sometimes thought you detected the hand of marketing men. The Observer offered wrapping paper designed by Kylie Minogue. The Sunday Times's Style magazine had a saucy cover flagging a feature on party frocks.
For some weeks now the bleak midwinter lights - Hindu, Muslim, and "Christian" - have been twinkling on rain-slicked suburban high streets, and Santas beam from the windows of Pakistani newsagents.
But why carp when immigrants cash in on Christmas? After all, the modern Christmas has nothing to do with the Incarnation. At best, it is a festival of sentimentality, handed down to us by Walt Disney, Irving Berlin, and Bernard Matthews; at worst, it is a time to fleece both the rich and the poor. Christmas is an equal opportunities confidence trick.
***
Which is worse: the corporate carol service or the office Christmas party? The corporate carol service by far. There is nothing more grisly than having to listen to the head of human resources, lipstick slightly smudged, reading from St Luke or Khalil Gibran, unless it is listening to a ruffed and cassocked choir singing "Imagine" and "Silent Night". At least office parties can make you laugh.
Michael Heath caught it perfectly some years ago in one of his Great Bores cartoons in Private Eye. Sad geezer is talking to a young woman amid balloons and general mayhem: "... I don't like office parties myself I hate Christmas but it does give people an opportunity to talk to people like yourself who you don't manage to get to know in an office situation my name's Donald I'm in buying my wife and I don't get on I don't know why I'm telling you this ... I feel like I've known you all my life my name's Donald I've noticed you in the canteen you sit with that middle-aged woman ... I hate Christmas no I'm perfectly alright I love you no don't go away I'll get you another drink I'm sorry I've made a complete fool of myself forget everything I've said only there's something about you that's different I think I'm going to be sick..."
It's not for us to hate Christmas, of course, or even the people who have hijacked it. But even if we love our enemies, as we must, it does not follow that we should turn the other cheek.
Christianity is a subversive religion, after all, a religion for sceptics and those who reject the consensus, and a good case can surely be made for taking up the sword of radical tradition by refusing to play the game. If you are over 18 at any rate, you might like to consider approaching Advent in a mood of aggressive, party-pooping self-denial.
"Do have a mince pie... Old family recipe. My mother made them shortly before she died last night."
"I am afraid I have given up mince pies for Advent, along with meat, bread and potatoes. Sorry about your mother. I hope she was in a state of grace."
"Let me give you a glass of champagne."
"I am afraid I have given up alcohol for Advent, and quite frankly I am surprised you haven't."
"I say, have you heard the one about the mendicant friar who walks into a pub with a crocodile and says to the barman, 'Do you serve Masons?', and the barman says..."
"Sorry, let me stop you there. I have given up jokes for Advent, and in any case I am beginning to sense that this one may be coarse."
If you kept that sort of thing up, you could lose about three stone by Christmas, and most of your friends (but what are friends for?). And yet... Perhaps moderation is more sensible, and more Christian, than in-yer-face asceticism. On earth peace to men of good will, and so on. But that's not to say that one should not always try to subvert the unChristian order.
By the way, in case you were wondering about the Mason joke... The mendicant friar with the crocodile says to the barman: "Do you serve Masons?", and the barman says: "Yes." The friar says: "OK, then. A pint for me and a Mason for the crocodile."
Tell it to someone at a Christmas party, but only if you are sure that he is not a Freemason. You wouldn't want to give offence.
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God bless you, Auntie |
Friday 28 November 2008
Would commentator Charles Moore wow the judges of Strictly Come Dancing? (Photo: PA)
The case for the BBC (in roughly chronological order): Children's Hour, Dick Barton, Muffin the Mule, Journey into Space, the long-range shipping forecast, Two-Way Family Favourites, Received Pronunciation, Edward Norman's Reith Lectures, the Today programme, the World Service, Fawlty Towers, Newsnight, Test Match Special, Gardener's Question Time, Have I got News for You, Start the Week, Spooks, and (to name names) David Dimbleby, John Humphrys, Jeremy Paxman, Robert Robinson, Harry Enfield, Robert Peston, the late Charles Wheeler, the late Alistair Cooke, the late Gilbert Harding, and, yes, Melanie Phillips, whose stern performances on The Moral Maze leave me howling in anger, if the subject is the Middle East, or swooning in admiration, if the subject is the moral state of the nation.
The case against: Life on Earth, Monty Python, Dr Who, Little Britain, unfamiliar regional accents, pious secularism, and, now more than ever, Jonathan Ross.
In my necessarily narrow world, and viewed from the perspective of great age, the "fors" have it. I love the BBC. It is the greatest broadcasting organisation in the world, and represents everything that is admirable and wholesome in British life, like the monarchy and the Brigade of Guards.
Unfortunately, it also represents much that is base, and last month showed how low it could sink when it broadcast the lewd, sniggering and bullying telephone call made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to Andrew Sachs.
Something must be done, but what? In the Daily Telegraph last Saturday Charles Moore repeated his undertaking not to renew his television licence, having earlier declared that he would only pay up if Ross were to be sacked. Here is a key paragraph in his Saturday article:
"Is there any other walk of taxpayer-funded life in which a man who rings up a 78-year-old Jewish refugee from Hitler to tell him that someone has just
'----ed his grand-daughter' can keep his job? What teacher, social worker, soldier, policeman, doctor, civil servant, what cabinet minister so mighty, what council lavatory-cleaner so obscure, could manage that?"
There is no answer to that, and the more frivolous among us can only hang our heads in shame. All the same, I have misgivings about Charles's protest. This not because I think Ross should keep his job; he should not, and should never have been employed in the first place. Nor is it because I think it is always morally wrong to break the law. Honourable men faced with what they regard as an evil or unjust law may feel obliged publicly to disobey it, though the law in this case seems arbitrary rather than unjust, and it is certainly not evil.
What really troubles me about Charles's act of civil disobedience, however, is that it seems unlikely to improve standards in public life but may contribute to the destruction of the BBC, with dire consequences for broadcasting. I am sure Charles cannot wish that. The news service supplied by Auntie is second to none, and, though the corporation's output is often bad, biased and downright disgusting, whatever replaced it would be worse.
That seems to be of no concern, however, to some of Charles's more excitable allies, who see the Jonathan Ross spat as a splendid opportunity to undermine the corporation. "They will never admit it," wrote Bruce Anderson in the Sunday Telegraph earlier this month, "but quite a few Tories are grateful to Jonathan Ross. They believe that, as a result of his edginess, the BBC is now on the edge: more vulnerable than ever before. They are determined that it should not be allowed to recover."
And then what? Who knows? It's enough that the BBC is mortally wounded. Mainstream Tories, meanwhile, are not unhappy about lewd television, and indeed are keen to have it pimp for them. One of the counts against Jonathan Ross is that he once asked David Cameron whether he had ever masturbated while looking at a photograph of Margaret Thatcher. That was a disgusting and embarrassingly unfunny question. What was even more disgusting and embarrassing, however, was that Cameron agreed to appear on the show. Presumably he did so because his minders decided it might help him with the youth vote. Charles has every right to talk about public decency, but many of his friends in the Tory party
do not.
Still, the "refuseniks" have focused attention on a national disgrace, and it is now up to the BBC to put its house in order, again, perhaps by abandoning its obsessions with ratings and youth - far from rejecting market values, by the way, the BBC has in recent years clasped them to its bosom, along with the vipers Ross and Brand - and concentrate instead on what it is supposed to do: inform, educate and provide civilised entertainment.
Failing a counter-reformation at the BBC, the pure of heart will be left with no other option but to throw out their televisions. I am not sure that I am yet ready for the nuclear option, but I recall that when the late Michael Wharton (Peter Simple) used to say that television was evil, and never more evil than when it was "good", I would feel distinctly uneasy.
***
But let's hope this all ends happily, that Charles Moore, former editor of the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph, does not go to jail, and that Ross is allowed to find his true metier, perhaps as a bingo caller in Billericay. Wouldn't it be nice, anyway, if this time next year, as a sign of reconciliation, Charles were to compete in Strictly Come Dancing?
I can see it now. After a particularly eye-watering jive with Lilia Kopylova, a sequined Charles, slightly flushed and sweating decoratively, would face his judges. The most giddily rapturous would be Arlene Phillips - "I want Moore! Gimme Moore!" - but Bruno Tonioli would be well excited too: "Charles! You are an animal! You shoulda be in a cage!"
Anyone would think that I watched television.
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Why we still remember |
Thursday 13 November 2008
Three of the last surviving veterans of the First World War are pictured at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day
On the way to Mass on Sunday morning I passed a couple making their way arm-in-arm to Balham Underground station. They were in late middle age. The man wore a navy blue overcoat and had a row of medals on his chest. His wife, an Asian woman, was in a dark coat and her head was covered in a hijab. They were going to the Remembrance Day parade in Whitehall.
It is 90 years since the killing stopped on the Western Front, and England has changed a lot since then. Demographically and culturally we are a different people. But at least we still mourn our war dead, and marvel at their heroism, especially of the poor young men who died - 20,000 of them on the opening day of the Somme alone - in the First World War.
Open Siegfried Sassoon anywhere and your heart will be pierced. Consider the "simple soldier boy", who "grinned at life in empty joy"; then:
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
After Mass I went to Whitehall myself. I hadn't seen so many people there since the big anti-war demo of February 2003. There was little chance of getting close to the Cenotaph, so I made do with a position on the corner of Great Scotland Yard and Whitehall, where I watched the show on a big television screen.
It was essentially a repeat, except for the sudden appearance in giant close-up of a grim-visaged Boris Johnson, tie fastened and scarcely a hair out of place. I gave an involuntary laugh. Others laughed too. Good old Bozza.
The Queen, of course, comported herself perfectly, under David Dimbleby's watchful and benign eye, and, to my surprise, Gordon Brown appeared dignified, even dashing. David Cameron rather let the side down, alas. His first mistake was to look tanned and fit; his second was to pull a long face and chew his lip, as though fighting back tears.
It's hard for the viewers at home not to cry, of course. Most years, I sit in the front parlour and watch the parade on the BBC. Elgar's Nimrod theme usually does the trick: the feel-good tears start to roll. I luxuriate in the pleasure of pity.
It is really rather disgusting, like getting drunk on cider. What about the people for whom tears are not a source of pleasure but of pain, the product of unendurable heartache?
What of Maureen Feely? In the little cemetery at Wetheral, in Cumbria, on Sunday Mrs Feely remembered her only daughter, Corporal Sarah Bryant, killed in action in Helmand province last summer when the vehicle in which she was travelling on a secret mission to meet an Afghan contact was blown up by an enemy mine. Corporal Bryant was in the Intelligence Corps.
Last week Mrs Feely told the Cumberland News: "I miss her. I miss telling her things, receiving her letters, hearing her news, laughing with her. She would have been home by now. Had things gone differently, I would have seen her, spent time with her. I miss her physical presence. That's the hardest thing now...
"There are good days and bad days. But nothing can stop me missing her. I'm sure the families and friends of all servicemen and women lost to war will feel the same way. We can't expect our loss to grow easier with the passing of time. We don't expect it."
Mrs Freely is a good, brave, patriotic woman. She believes that her daughter died for freedom. I grieve with her, and I admire her daughter, who was a good and brave soldier and did her duty. Lest we forget...
And yet, and yet. There are many who will say that Sarah Bryant should never have been placed in harm's way, indeed should never have been allowed to risk her life as a soldier.
We seem to be abandoning all notions of honour and chivalry. The Army is not yet an equal-opportunities employer, but may be moving in that direction. Under present rules, women may not serve in either the infantry or the Royal Armoured Corps, but may do frontline duty - and risk their lives - as pilots, medics, dog-handlers and so on.
Before long, however, the Army may be required to allow women to serve in the thick of it. According to a recent report, the Army Board fears that if doesn't permit women to serve in the infantry it could face legal challenges under human rights legislation. The board has conceded quite enough already and should not yield another inch. The law is an ass. This business has nothing do with human rights. A woman does not have the right to bear arms. Her first right is the right to life; her second right is the right to bear children; her third right is the right to be obeyed in the home.
When he was still a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger told Peter Seewald in God and the World: "... it still horrifies me when people want women to be soldiers just like men, when they, who have always been keepers of peace and in whom we have always seen a counter-impulse working against the male impulse to stand up and fight, now likewise run around with submachine guns, showing that they can be just as warlike as the men".
When young people hear this sort of reactionary talk, they grow impatient and ask: "Why is it wrong in logic and justice for women to fight in the front line?"
The answer to that is simple and easy to remember: "It is wrong because it is wrong."
***
I hope you have saved all those Barack Obama souvenir editions to pass on to your grandchildren. The tone of religious hysteria was perhaps caught best by the Mirror, which last Thursday had a one-word headline on its front page: BELIEVE.
Can you believe it? Well, yes, of course you can. When people stop believing in God, as G K Chesterton noted, they believe not in nothing but in anything. We are surely the most biddable and gullible people who ever lived.
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Farewell to the Poles |
Friday 7 November 2008
Migrant workers look for jobs in Hammersmith, an area of west London with a strong Polish presence
Will the misery never end? On top of everything else the credit-crunched middle classes now discover that they may have to get through the Greater Depression without the help of cheap and cheerful Polish nannies and plumbers. Recent estimates suggest that in the coming year as many as 400,000 Poles will flee the recession in Britain and Ireland and return home.
All that could change by the end of the week, of course, but for the time being we should perhaps look on the bright side. Notting Hill's loss will surely be Poland's gain. A nation needs its people, as many Poles long settled in England would be the first to agree
Here is another thing, though: we know that Polish popes are magnificent and Polish Chopins too, but are Polish workers really as good as they are cracked up
to be?
The magnificent A N Wilson, a man whose spleen is usually in the right place, thinks they are, and furthermore that our own workers are pretty hopeless. In his new book, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II, he writes: "Certainly, the arrival of the Poles, especially in London, with their eager, intelligent faces, their willingness to work 50-hour weeks mending the lavatories and building the kitchens of the British middle classes, made the indigenous poor seem all the more pathetic."
That's not quite been my experience. I have seen Polish faces in south London that were a good deal less than eager and intelligent, most of them belonging to the young men you find sitting at the back entrance to supermarkets drinking Special Brew, listening to their iPods and smoking roll-ups.
Mind you, and to be fair, one of the problems here is that "Poles" are not always Poles. Sometimes they are Latvians or Ukrainians, or even, and I mean no disrespect to anyone, Russians. We Brits find it hard to distinguish between one group of Slavs and another, and we have a poor ear for language.
Not long ago we had some Polish builders in to fix the back of the house, and they were hard-working and honest and agreeable, but were otherwise pretty useless. They managed to put in a casement window so that the top flap opened sideways rather than up and down. They offered to correct the mistake, but we thought it would be more trouble than it was worth.
We all got on well, I think, though there was a certain amount of mutual incomprehension. One day I asked the boss what part of Poland he was from. He said: "Not Poland. Slovakia."
"Oh," I said. "I'm sorry."
"Is OK. Is same thing," he said.
You sometimes wonder what the Second World War was all about.
In the meantime, though, I am well served by local craftsmen, who are intelligent, work hard and charge reasonable rates. At the moment I have a London-Irish plumber putting in a new kitchen, with the help of his mate and his brother (a carpenter).
The plumber, as I have mentioned here before, doubles as a robustly orthodox moral theologian, and his mate has pretty strong views too. On Tuesday morning I found myself in the middle of a four-sided debate about life, the environment, and our old friend just war theory. It was fairly heated stuff. The plumber's mate said that Sarah Palin was a friend of the environment. Whoa! You should have heard my wife! It got even worse when he said that he would like to cull all the baby seals in England because they were wiping out cod stocks.
The work is going well, and I am happy to be backing Britain, hiring Londoners, and good Catholic Londoners at that. But you have to draw the line somewhere, right? You can't allow love of country to rule your head as well as your heart. My dentist is a German.
John Paul II RIP.
***
Joshua Heller's elegant and thoughtful review of Hunger in The Catholic Herald last week was the tipping point, and on Sunday I took myself off to the Ritzy in Brixton to see it. I agree with Joshua that it is a powerful film, but I do not think it is a good one.
Hunger does not glamourise terrorism, that's for sure, but Bobby Sands is presented sympathetically, and with a touch of soft focus. There are a couple of moments when all that is missing is "Danny Boy" on the soundtrack.
The worldly Republican priest, Fr Moran, whose debate with Sands forms the centerpiece of the film, is not convincing, and his purpose in the film is to strengthen the case for Sands as martyr. To Fr Moran, it seems, suicide is nothing more than bad politics and a tragic and vainglorious waste.
Let's be clear: the Republicans had a case and a cause, but the IRA did not. It was Irish only in the sense that the Mafia is Italian, it did not represent the Republic, and it was not an army. Did Bobby Sands commit suicide? I think so. He certainly killed himself.
Bobby Sands RIP.
***
You win some, you lose some. On Monday I put £100 on John McCain to win at 13-2. But by that time my bookmakers, Paddy Power, were already paying out on Barack Obama.
Ah well. At least I was covered, having bet a friend £100 in May that Barack Obama would win.
Some will think that this is no occasion for frivolity, but my purpose is not entirely frivolous. What I did I did in part in memory of my late mother-in-law, who died long before I met her daughter.
Her name was Mary and she brought up four children - two boys and two girls - on her own, having been widowed when the children were little. She got by with the help of a small inheritance and her income as a librarian. She was a good Catholic: she drank rum, smoked Pall Mall, said a weekly novena, took her children to Mass every Sunday and most days during Lent.
In 1960, when priests everywhere were urging their parishioners to vote for John F Kennedy, my mother-in-law voted for Richard M Nixon, perhaps the only Catholic in her parish to do so.
I think she was right. Remember that Kennedy, whom I adored at the time, told the voters that he would not allow his Catholicism to interfere with his decisions as president, thus placing Caesar above God.
Mary Louise Bruton RIP. Yes, and John F Kennedy too.
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