Birthday Reflections

So I am now 62.  It is hard to believe this.  I am still active, love to walk and enjoy the outdoors, and love to read although I now rely on a battery of glasses.  I have my TV watching glasses, my normal everyday vari-focals,  my reading glasses for all reading (including computer use) and my special reading glasses, for very close work, eg sewing or looking at small maps.  That's four pairs.  I have also got a magnifying glass for looking at maps, and two pairs of sunglasses in different prescriptions.  One for driving and one for reading.  That's six pairs of glasses in all.

On a recent trip to a National Trust property, a display asked what is the thing you most value, your treasure.  Several people put "my husband" and kids put their tablet or I-pad.  I reflected, and realised that it is my reading glasses.

Last week, we entertained my 90 year-old mother-in-law.  She expressed an interest in going to the sea-side, so after my husband drove 120 miles to fetch her from her home, we then drove a further 70 and stayed in a caravan on the North Norfolk coast.  She absolutely loved it.  It's so inspiring, that she still has such zest for life.  We hired a wheel-chair in case we needed it, but in fact we went everywhere in the car (including the ten-minute walk from the caravan to the actual sea-beach).  We sat in chairs with our coats on, looking at the waves, and we visited a real-ale shop.  She still has a great appetite, and fully appreciated the food we bought from local shops, which my husband cooked. 

Looking back to when she was my age, she seemed very old to me, then.  By the time she was my age, 62, she already had a gorgeous little grand-daughter, (our elder child) and another one expected.   We are not so fortunate, but at least both our girls at last have steady partners, with whom they live.  It may be another couple of years or more, by which time I will be in my mid-sixties, but we may yet have grandchildren.

Looking at the other families in the street (we have lived here thirty-one years), none of the children who were babies or toddlers when we moved in have had a child.  Two are married, a third is status unknown, but no grandchildren.  The eldest is now 35.  This is the way people do things now.

Thirties - double income, no kids yet - DINKY.

Sixties -  no grandchildren yet - NOGY

Nineties - Survived a World-War, Incredibly Tough, And Loving Life - SAW IT ALL.

I am happy.

Altars, Duffy, Finished at Last

Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York

I won't refer in my heading to the full book title, "The Stripping of the Altars", because I don't want to attract people looking for references to seedy clubs.

The final page (593) has been turned.  I have spent a long time reading this book, and have to record my grateful thanks to the Lincolnshire Library Service, which allowed me to borrow from its reserve stocks, even though I do not live in Lincolnshire nor pay Council Tax there.  Lincolnshire is an enlightened county as far as libraries are concerned.

I have read about the ancient Medieval church rituals, which were abolished over the period from the 1530's to the 1580's.  The abolition starts with the so-called "Reformation" initiated by Henry VIII, mainly as a means of getting his own way. (Religiously, he retreated somewhat in his last years , but not in terms of despoiling and seizing church goods).  The reign of his son, Edward VI, took things much further, and abolished the Chantries,  (Chantries were chapels set up and equipped, with lay priests funded by parishioners' wills, to pray for the souls of those who left money, and their families).  The Chantries' goods and lands were also seized by the Crown.  New prayer books were published which went further than ever before in removing references to traditional services.

Mary's reign attempted, with considerable success, to reinstate traditional religious practices. A good part of the success must be attributed to underlying loyalty among parishioners, their fondness for the old ways, and the fact that they had hidden, or otherwise preserved, the images, vestments and books on which the old religion depended for its physical forms. Many parishes re-adopted them with enthusiasm.  Mary's reign did not last long enough for the reinstatement of traditional religion to become embedded.

Elizabeth, despite her vow not to "look into men's souls" went the whole hog in removing and searching out images - this involved breaking stained glass, and burning, chopping up or profaning the objects, statues and goods which Catholic services used.  This process was still going on in the 1560's and 1570's.

A new generation grew up which had known nothing else, and so the Protestant Reformation became embedded. 

A sad by-product of the process was the abolition of the Medieval Mystery Plays, which were too closely related to the Catholic religion, and hence had to be first censored and cut about, and finally abolished altogether.  Thus a central part of English town life, the civic pre-occupation with the cycle of plays and their associated processions, was also lost.

I have bought a ticket for the Everyman NT Live production, and have bought a copy of the text (in an Oxfam shop, naturally) to read beforehand.  Looking forward to that.

What surprises me most, after reading about all this iconoclasm, is that anything was left at all for us to gawp at, (mostly in tourist mode).  There are stained glasses, restored of course, as is the one at the top of this post.  There are painted carvings, as shown in my post below.  There are some wonderful illuminated manuscripts in the British Library and a few other collections.  Most treasures were stripped and swept away.

As a result of reading this book, I have now got some new objectives - apart from having a look at Mystery Plays.  Firstly, a long list of Norfolk churches, referred to in Duffy, to visit over time.  A thought about how the huge expansion of Elizabethan drama, most popularly seen in Shakespeare, must have been in part a response to the vacuum left by the destruction of the images of the church and the religious plays. A development of this thought is a plan to read more about the death of Marlowe, who is thought by some to have been assassinated because of his atheism, rather than merely being the victim of a tavern brawl. 

It's all so exciting.

Poem Wot I Wrote

 

 

Song of Evening

 

Colours fade

Pushing time

Beyond the line

Stars appear

In hemisphere

 

Night is never pitch dark.

Who said it was?

Who mired their soul in pitch?

It’s not so bad.

 

Moon hands back the sun’s gift,

Currency exchange

Gold for silver

Is that too little?

 

Don’t forget the million stars

The world will turn.

Hope return.

 

 

 

 

Medieval Journeys

Morris Dancers

 

Here's a picture from my medieval journey last weekend.  I've been reading a book called "The Stripping of the Altars" by Eamon Duffy. 

Eamon Duffy was interviewed recently on TV.  He took part in a debate about "Wolf Hall".   This book, as I wrote in my last post, includes depictions of Thomas More, (and Catholics) as bad, bad people.  Eamon Duffy is a Catholic, and a Cambridge Don.  His book is scholarly (by which I mean very detailed, and not an easy read).

Professor Duffy also contributed two letters to the debate in "The Times" (I refer in my post below). Perhaps needless to say, he defended the reputation of Thomas More. 

In the book are some black and white photographs portraying aspects of medieval pre-reformation worship.  Of course, it was not called Catholicism then.  It was just national worship.

I noticed that a lot of the photographs were from churches in Norfolk, which is a county reasonably accessible for me.  Last weekend, on a return trip from Wells-next-the Sea, I made a detour to find the parish church in North Elmham.  The picture in "Altars" shows part of a wooden screen, called a "Rood Screen".

I was stunned by the colours, having only seen the rather faded black and white picture in the book.  Above is just a very tiny part of the screen, some decoration filled into spaces in the carving above portraits of the saints which make up most of the screen.  Isn't it glorious?  And this is after more than 500 years, and at least three sets of iconoclasmic attacks -

(1)  the "Reformation" - Henry VIII's personally motivated attack on traditional church worship.
(2) Elizabethan reversal of her elder sister Mary's restoration of the traditional church.
(3) The "Puritans" who "won" the Civil War and fiercely opposed decoration and pictures in churches.

The screens apparently survived by being turned upside down and used as floorboards, where the pictures stayed safe until the nineteenth century, when some antiquarians dug them up. 

What I also like, is that the pictures are not restricted to religious themes.  The Morris Dancers, while not pagan, are a fun thing.  People enjoyed them.  Of course, the Puritans repressed them, but Charles II restored the tradition.

English history is so endlessly fascinating.

Wolf Hall (2)

There is an interesting continuing debate in the letters pages of "The Times" concerning the re-branding by Hilary Mantel of two icons of the Tudor period.  She casts Thomas More as a heretic-hunter who killed and tortured (admittedly only a very few) Lutheran heretics.  She shows Thomas Cromwell (factually responsible for the torturing and killing of far more) as rather an interesting person, who had various good qualities, and is shown in the TV series as "cuddling kittens".  The latter image sparked a debate among present-day bishops about the relative merits of the two Thomas's.  This debate was reported in "The Times" and provoked the comment below.

'The historical records of who burnt whom during the Tudor reigns are worth revisiting.  In our country (England), in 1538, a heretic named John Lambert, after being pronounced guilty by Thomas Cromwell, suffered as follows:
"When Lambert's thighs and legs had been burnt off to stumps, the fire sank lower and two officers lifted up his still-living body on the points of their halberds and let it fall back into the flames.  As death finally came to kindly end his sufferings, he cried out: 'None but Christ, none but Christ!' (sources Gilbert Burnet ed 1841, John Foxe, Book of Martyrs, ed 1837-41).
Cranmer, who was Cromwell's friend and ally, suffered his own final fate in 1556, being chained to a stake and burned alive on the orders of the Catholic Queen Mary. (Foxe, Book of Martyrs).
Whatever spin Ms Mantel puts on it, believers of all faiths were burnt for heresy if the people currently in power opposed their beliefs."

What we should be taking from this is a lesson on how tyrants, their power-hungry lieutenants, their numerous followers comprising fearful sheep, foolish sycophants, and others merely wishing to preserve their own families, combine to wield a disgusting and sickening power which includes barbaric forms of execution.  Reports in the last few weeks show that the syndrome is alive and well in the world today."

Vocabulary

Here are some words I came across in my Poem for the Day yesterday. I actually read four, all by George Mackay Brown, a poet born in Orkney in 1921.  The poems are all infused with images of the sea and sea-life.

I had to look all the following up in a dictionary:

Ichor -  Blood (Greek)
Skerry - A reef or rocky island covered by the sea  (Old Norse)
Smirr - Fine rain, drizzle  (Scandinavian)
Haar  - A wet mist or fog (Old Norse)
Selkie  -A seal, or an imaginary sea creature which resembles a seal in the water but able to assume human form on land.

I've always loved the power of a dictionary, and held faith in the goodness of learning to triumph over the evil of narrow-mindedness and sectarianism.

In the light of events in the last three weeks, I've had to re-examine these ideas at length.

In The Guardian this week, writer Neil Gaiman and illustrator Chris Riddell put down their thoughts on the subject. 

"I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will eventually win, because the ideas are invisible and they linger, and sometimes they are even true  ....."

In these uncertain times, I do hope that they are both right.  I would not presume to have a more definitive answer myself.

A Poem A Day Keeps the Cobwebs Away

I actually made my new year's resolutions on Monday 12th January, because that was the day that I finally made it out of the post-Christmas morass of cleaning, washing, ironing, using up left-overs, and arguing with hubby about what happened on New Year's Eve (oh, the poison of alcohol! how it loosens tongues and brings out a person's weakest points!)

So first resolution (as mentioned in the post below but one) is to write something every day. I've also set myself various reading goals, which include to read a classic short story every day (I'm currently working through Katherine Mansfield starting at the end of her output, and working backwards), a modern short story every day (John Cheever but working forwards) and to read a poem every day. 

Reading a poem every day is the shortest work in time span, but by far the most interesting.  I haven't actually read any poetry seriously since I was at university, 40 years ago, and had shied away from it, wondering where it would fit in my life.  When you look at the idea as a personal goal, instead of entertainment (which it really is not) or an academically imposed task (which kills it stone dead), the project is extremely liberating.  I open a book of poems at random.  The one I'm using is "The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, 1945 -1980", which I've had since 1992, as inscribed on the flyleaf.  I don't recall that I have ever read any of them.  I then pick one off the page to read, and give it a bit of thought. Then I might go back to it later in the day, and often another aspect reveals itself.  I'm just loving it.

And then I spotted Hilary Mantel's tip, item 3 in the list below, so I feel even better about it!