Old Men ought to be Explorers

12:41 pm: AMAZING PACE



Astonishingly, I managed to get ahead even of Stir-up Sunday (stay tuned), and start a Proper Christmas Cake today. I did promise the recipe, so here it is. The earlier one starts it, the better: 4 months ahead of time is ideal, but now will do just fine. I didn't include anything on icing: we'll get to that later. This one bakes for 4 1/2 hours, and makes the whole house smell like a dream of autumn and/or Christmas.

RICH FRUIT CAKE


Ingredients:

1 lb. currants
8 oz. sultanas
8 oz. seedless raisins
4 oz. cut mixed peel
6 oz. glacé cherries, halved
10 oz. plain white flour
pinch of salt
1/2 level tsp. mixed spice
1/2 level tsp. ground cinnamon
grated rind of 1/2 lemon
10 oz. butter
10 oz. soft brown sugar
6 eggs, beaten
3 tbsps brandy

an 8” square or 9” round cake tin.

Melt a little butter in a saucepan and with a pastry brush coat the bottom and sides of cake tin. Line with greaseproof paper and coat again.
Tie a band of brown parcel wrap (Kraft paper) around the sides so it comes at least 2” above the edge of the tin.
Pre-heat oven to 300 deg. (mark 1-2).
Put the fruit and rind in a large container with a well-fitting lid. Sieve flour and spice and salt over fruit. Place lid on container and shake well. Leave to settle for a few minutes, remove lid. Cherries tend to stick together in clumps because of the sugar syrup on them: check to see that they are all separate. Ensure all fruit is covered in flour.

Cream fat and sugar together. If you want a dark cake use dark Mucavads, it gives a rich flavour. For a lighter cake use soft brown. Never use Demerara or caster sugar.

Beat eggs together in a jug, add to mixture gradually. If mixture curdles add a little of the flour/fruit mix.

Add the fruit/flour mix and fold in. Stir in brandy – as a general rule use the brandy you generally drink.

Empty into cake tin, place on lower shelf of oven, cook for 2 1/2 hours. Then place a double sheet of greaseproof paper over top, turn the oven down slightly, cook for a further 2 hours.

Remove cake from oven and listen to it. If it sounds “bubbly”, bake for another 20 minutes. Leave to cool in tin, overnight if possible.

Remove from tin. Overwrap in greaseproof paper, leaving the lining papers intact. Keep in an airtight tin.

1st month: remove all paper. Skewer cake all over base, pour over 3 tbsps brandy. Wrap in greaseproof paper again.

2nd month: remove all paper. Skewer cake on other side, pour over 3 tbsps brandy. Wrap in greaseproof paper again.

Repeat twice more (or until cake is iced, up to a year).

The sign of a good cake is when the greaseproof paper turns green: this is the colour of the brandy seeping through the cake (not mould!)

08:59 am: TRINITY 23
Today is the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, in the Anglican Church; and as much of my working life is spent in Elizabethan England, I thought I'd reproduce two of the day's texts from the 1559 Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer: the Psalm, and the Collect. I particularly like Coverdale's Psalm -- his translations may not be as accurate as some later ones, but they have more poetry than almost any other.

¶ The xxiii Sondaye.

Nisi quia Dominus. Psalm cxxiv.

IF the Lorde himselfe had not been on our side (now maye Israell saye) : if the Lorde hymselfe hadde not been on our side, when men rose up against us;
They had swalowed us up quicke : when they were so wrath- fully displeased at us.
Yea, the waters had drouned us : and the streme had gone over our soule.
The depe waters of the proud : had gone even over our soule.
But praysed be the Lorde : whiche hath not geven us over for a praye unto theyr teethe.
Our soule is escaped, even as a birde oute of the snare of the fouler : the snare is broken, and we are delivered.
Oure helpe standeth in the name of the Lorde : whiche hath made heaven and yearth.
Glory be to the father, and to the sonne, and to the &c.
As it was in the begynning, is nowe and ever &c.

The Collect.

GOD, our refuge and strength, which art the author of all godlines, be ready to heare the devoute prayers of thy churche; and graunt that those thynges which we aske faithfully we maye obteine effectually; through Jesu Christe our lorde. Amen.

11:53 pm: BACH, BEETHOVEN, BRAHMS, BERLIN, AND ZOE
   

church of St Michael, Cordes

Spent a pleasant hour tonight -- my granddaughter's birthday --  in this marvellous old church, listening to three fine musicians (violin, cello, piano) playing Bach, Beethoven and Brahms in honour of the fall of the Berlin Wall (the French media have been going to town for about a week now on this anniversary). It occasioned a number of thoughts. Some simple -- I love Bach and Beethoven, but Brahms only in his orchestral work --; some more complex: the church's interior, largely redone in the 18th century, is still a symphony of symbols in ancient canonical order, but today certainly no more than one Mass a month, if not two months, is held there, and it is treated as a tourist site and concert hall, with not one person in 25 able to read the visual language.

On the altar there is a crucifix; just above and behind it is a large painting of the Crucifixion with the Blessed Virgin Mary, St John, St Mary Magdalene, and St Michael plunging a long lance toward a very human-faced demon who was probably a portrait of someone keenly disliked (who knows, a--gulp, snif--Protestant?). Above that is a golden triangle with rays radiating from it -- an abstract of the Trinity. Above that, again, is a statue of St Michael, with lance and demon (slightly less human). [For all this upper part, see the image below.] Above that, we enter into the ceiling, painted in pastel (the crop that made this area rich): moving straight up, a Communion chalice with wafer above. Now this is interesting: above St Michael, above the Crucifixion, are the Body and Blood of Christ -- which is serious food for thought. And above that, at the culminating point, the cross of vaults: a medallion with the Dove of the Holy Spirit. Since He is at the crossing-point, He can be read in all directions; and to left and right, respectively, Christ and Mary, in tents, worshipped by angels. On the fourth side, toward the nave, is another Communion chalice, this time with rays, like a monstrance; and it initiates a series of medallions in the succeeding vaults that depict the twelve Apostles. 

I was raised a liberal Protestant, among intelligent folk who thought deeply about the faith but had no truck with all that imagery. Wrong, I realised when I went to Oxford, and discovered churches that spoke even in silence and taught even in stillness. There is such richness for meditation in this wordless discourse, once one has learnt to read it. However, I think I was the only one even to look up, tonight. And for brief moment I felt sympathy for Muslims, who, although they are not allowed graven images, may be among the last 21st-century people to take their religion with gravity.

As for Bach, there is nothing more exquisite in music -- whoa, don't hector -- is there anything more exquisite in music than the Suites for solo cello? For me, nothing. Not even Chopin's Nocturnes. But Rostropovich's -- Berlin Wall or no -- was never my favourite version. The finest of all is Pierre Fournier.


church of St Michael, Cordes,

11:17 pm: ORIENTALISM?
  


Silly, of course, but I'm always impressed by the beauty of Farsi/Arabic script, even in graffiti. (This, in an empty university classroom, apparently reads something like "Death to Khamenei".)

11:11 am: A VILLAGE TRAGEDY
  


As I was driving home one day last week, I saw two small blue cars of the gendarmerie (the national police force) in front of the house of a couple I know slightly. In a tiny village (pop. 150) that's an alarming sight. And the next day, the man who helps do the garden told us what had happened. The daughter of the woman of the house, in her early thirties, lived a few houses down with her partner, a mason, and her two small children of 5 and 1. The day before -- an exquisitely beautiful late October day -- she had driven out to a popular swimming- and boating-lake created by the dam that provides us with drinking water, walked out on to the dam, and thrown herself off. The dam is 25 m. (82 feet) high. Two anglers saw her, and called the gendarmes.

Apparently she had been depressed for some time, but it was only occasionally noticed, and people (including her mother) had no idea that she had come to this point. These things shake up a small community, even though neither she nor her mother were 'old village'. She was cremated on Saturday. On Sunday, the All Saints' Day mass was said in the village church, and it was packed to the limit. All Saints, 'la Toussaint', is of course followed by All Souls' Day, the commemoration of the dead; and to the ordinary Frenchman the two are in practice identical. It is also a major religious festival for Catholics. So there were a number of reasons for the packed church. But on several occasions during the Mass, the young woman's name was mentioned in the intentions.

My wife, who had been to the cremation, related how dreadful such occasions are when there is no ceremony of any kind to frame them and absorb the emotion. The All Saints' Mass in some ways provided that, at least for those who consider themselves Catholics or at least believers. But her mother and stepfather were not in church, and were living their mourning on their own.

This, and a recent article in a French magazine, led us, with dinner companions, to discuss mourning. The article had related the decline in the ceremonial of mourning, at least since World War II. At the beginning of the 20th century, a widow was supposed to wear mourning for three years; by the postwar period, the custom had been reduced to one year. Then, by 1960 or so, it was three months; and now, said the magazine, there is no expectation of outward signs at all -- everyone is free.

However, someone remarked, such freedom has a price: if mourning is exclusively inward, all that weight is piled on to the mourner's own soul. Ceremony -- graveside, memorial, mourning -- has the kindly effect of absorbing some of the emotion, and spreading it among the members of a community. This is almost entirely beneficent. When society decrees that there shall be no more outward mourning, it appears to be proclaiming freedom, but it is also saying to the mourner: 'Don't bother us with your grief.' And that is beyond rude: it's a sin. 

Meanwhile, the young woman's mother, stepfather and partner are left with their grief, and with the sudden and urgent care for two small children -- to whose great-grandmother it has fallen to tell them about their mother's death. She called a mutual friend, a child psychologist, and said, 'What do I say to them?' What, indeed?

01:59 pm: 13 Aban

  
A protest poster circulated by the opposition website Mowjcamp

This from the London Guardian newsfeed just after noon GMT today:

A 60-year-old woman returned from the demonstrations to describe the violent crackdown in a call to ePersian radio, according to this translation from blogger Homylafayette.

I joined the demonstration early today and moved towards 7th Tir Square. There were so many protesters. They must have bought security forces from around Iran and they were merciless.

I've gone to all the demonstrations and I've never seen such violence. We started chanting and they chased us down a dead end. We were all crushed together and the anti-riot forces shot something like 5 tear gas canisters into the alley.

I thought my time was over and I would suffocate. Then the anti-riot forces came into the alley started beating us with their batons. I was hit on the waist and the mouth. Protesters were all over the city today. They would get beaten in one place, then they'd go to another crossroads and start chanting again.

This regime must go! It pained me to see the young people struck like that. I'm going to rest, then I'll go out again, because the protests are going to pick up again.

04:00 pm: MISERY, or: HOPELESS BUT NOT SERIOUS
   


Once upon a time, Suzy -- my 1981 Suzuki GS650G -- looked like this, and I rode her with pleasure. Then she had a problem with fuel consumption and irregular performance, and the local bike shop (here in France) showed me that the engine flanges (hard rubber tubes that run from the carburetors to the cylinders and transport the fuel/air mixture) were crumbling. They said replacement was impossible, and smeared some gunk on as a Gawdhelpus protection. So I found new ones on the Web, and decided to take apart and clean the carbs, put on the new flanges, and reinstall the lot. Ha, ha. I did manage to remove, separate and clean the carbs, but putting them together again was nightmarish, even with the muddy photos and inadequate drawings of a Haynes manual. However, managed even that (more or less), installed the new engine flanges, and gaily began trying to slot the four carbs (see them above, the left-most bright bit just under the tank) back into place, one opening of each going into the air-box (hidden by the little model plate under the seat), the other into the relevant engine flange. Oh, the misery. Nothing fits, and the photos don't show squat. Still, I do have Yamako (a Yamaha 900 Diversion) to ride, so I'm in no hurry. Just pissed off at my own signal incompetence. An exercise in humility, says my ghostly inner confessor. Jawohl, Father. I am reminded at Robert Pirsig's account of a folding Japanese pushbiike that came in a box. The manual began with the sentence, 'Assembling Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.' Ayup. I know.  



Tags: carburetors, motorcycle repair, suzuki gs650g

12:27 pm: Further to old railway stations
  


The Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg -- who, I suspect, had read 'Adlestrop' -- wrote a much harsher version about a Dutch country railway station, in the village of Hulshorst (where I spent my very first vacation with my parents when I was about 4). It lies in the 'Veluwe', a curiously sandy area full of pine forests, most unlike the rest of Holland (the name means 'bleak land' or 'bad land', as contrasted to the nearby 'Betuwe' or 'better land', full of fruit orchards). I have tried to translate it, though Achterberg uses to the full the harsher tonalities of Dutch, tricky to represent in mellow English; I give both versions here:

Hulshorst

Hulshorst, als vergeten ijzer
is uw naam, binnen de dennen
en de bittere coniferen,
roest uw station;
waar de spoortrein naar het noorden
met een godverlaten knars
stilhoudt, niemand uitlaat
niemand inlaat, o minuten,
dat ik hoor het weinig waaien
als een oeroude legende
uit uw bossen: barse bende
rovers, rans en ruw
uit het witte veluwhart.

Hulshorst, harsh forgotton iron
your name, deep within the pines,
within the bitter conifers
your station rusts;
where the train toward the North
with a bleak and godless grinching
stops, lets no one out, lets
no one in, oh waiting minutes
where I hear the whisper wind
like a hoarse and ancient legend
from your forests: baleful band
robbers rough and rancid
from the barren land’s white heart.




Tags: achterberg, dutch poetry, railways

11:58 am: Remembering old railways
   
 
Edward Thomas

I was remembering the old railways and their small country stations -- and the supreme folly that closed them all over Europe in the 1960s. The stations, in England, usually had a small well-kept stationmaster's garden, with flowers and vegetable marrows, bordered by carefully whitewashed stones. There is a lovely song ('Slow Train') about them by Flanders and Swann; and the poem that celebrates them is, of course, Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop':

Adlestrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontendly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

02:32 pm: Autumn Glory
  

  St John the Evangelist's, Montréal

Few experiences are more glorious than a sunny fall Sunday morning spent in a rich and flawless High Anglican Mass. The Church of St John the Evangelist in Montreal was started in the mid-19th century, housing the poor and un-posh not welcomed in the Cathedral. The present church was opened in 1878, in a ‘Slum Gothic’ design, simple on the outside, rich on the inside, and has been flourishing ever since.

I hadn’t been back since I left Canada two years ago, but this morning, the Feast of St Luke, found myself there for High Mass, with sunbeams falling in through the windows, outlined by clouds of apple-scented incense, while the choir sang Palestrina’s Missa Papæ Marcelli with its lovely Kyrie, and then gave an exquisite rendering of his motet Sicut cervus at the Communion, and we all intoned old Merbecke for the congregational bits. Cranmer would have had reservations, but his lovely Book of Common Prayer texts, almost all based on the Sarum Missal, adapt quite splendidly to these age-old liturgical movements.

It was a heart-lifting experience, now almost unknown to Roman Catholics since Vatican II and its insensitive trashing of the liturgy. There is a precise sequence, and every movement has meaning. Three priests – priest, deacon, and subdeacon --, a crucifer (carrying the Cross in the opening and closing processions), a thurifer (carrying the long chain with the censer on the end, used to cense the altar, the clergy, and the congregation), and in the organ-loft a small but marvellously-capable choir.

There is a place for small, simple, Word-based services (the Christian successors to the synagogue); but it would be a pity to abandon the grander sweep of such a service as this, the successor to the Temple.



Tags: bcp, high anglican mass, palestrina, st john the evangelist

08:38 pm: FIGHTING WITH BRAINS
   

  Sir Gerald Templer

Few people remember it now, but in the age of 'asymmetrical warfare' or 'counter-insurgency' not all the small nasty wars have been lost by the West. One of the first, in fact, was (gulp, snif) won. This was what Britain at the time (worried about soaring insurance rates, or so it is said) modestly called the 'Malayan Emergency'. It went on for about six years, from 1948 to 1954, and before a grip was got several thousand people had been killed. Harold Briggs devised a plan, but it was the astonishing Gerald Templer who implemented it with style and ruthless efficiency -- ruthless at least as much toward the British planters as to the local waverers. When one planter complained about the inefficiency of the troops and police to protect his property, Templer crisply asked him, 'Do you ever go down and talk with the troops?' 'No.' 'Do you ever go and have a word with the special police?' 'No.' 'Why not?' 'It's not my job.' And Templer: 'Well, it's true there are some bloody awful troops and some bloody awful police out here; but there are some bloody awful planters too, and you're the worst of them. Good day.'

When I first moved to the US, in 1966-67, I saw an ABC-TV interview with Sir Robert Thompson, a former Chindit and Templer's sidekick in Malaya, about the then-increasing US effort in Vietnam. I have never forgotten it: no one at the time knew much about how to deal with this kind of horror, and here was Thompson, talking quietly, persuasively but mercilessly about what awaited the US in the jungle, as they tried to win the war by bombing from 57,000 feet up, with napalm and other chemical nastinesses.

This may or may not be pertinent to what is now known as 'Afghanistan' or 'Af-Pak'; but the general drift appears still not to have been completely seized. There was some echo of it in the British forces' policy in the Basra area in Iraq; but it's difficult to say whether it applies to, say, the Taliban. Still, these bits of history really deserve not to be forgotten.

10:38 pm: OFFLINE
Travelling in Northeast North America, watching glorious fall colours, eating turkey, and not blogging till I get back to France. Next week.

10:12 am: HEAT OR LIGHT?
  
'Like one who, on a lonesome road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.'

Paul Krugman's column in today's NY Times lists, frustratedly, several reasons for ‘our’ lack of urgent collective action on climate change, together with some newly gloomy forecasts. On the whole, one has to agree; those who refuse what they consider the theory are in the same kind of refusenik minority as today’s Republican Party in America (and the two occasionally overlap).

But a couple of things do need to be said that qualify Krugman’s points. In the first place, a reason for the lack of enormous collective action is that the problem is just too big. In that respect, it resembles the Problem Behind All Other Problems of the planet: population growth. Notice that this is a problem (nowadays we say: an issue) virtually no one talks about. It is so huge that we turn no more our heads. China at one point tried to do something about it by limiting couples to one child; but that seems to have been quietly abandoned.

Another reason Krugman doesn’t mention is that many if not most people sense that the process is by now irreversible, and that buying a Prius instead of a Renault isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans. That can lead either to total despair (which may then give way to ‘eat, drink, and be merry’), or to an intelligent acceptance: several if not all coming generations are going to have to adapt to a warmer planet, so how can we plan positively for that fact? (An example: call in the Dutch to plan sea-defences along the Bangladeshi coastline.)

And a third reason absent in Krugman’s analysis is that while the climate problem is huge, urgent and possibly intractable, other problems abound that are less huge, equally if not more urgent, and possibly tractable. Dealing with Iran and/or its government; untangling the Afghanistan/Pakistan/Al Qaeda knot; migration problems; financial crises; so forth. 

10:46 am: IRRESISTIBLE
   


From Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish

01:56 pm: AUTUMN
  

John Keats


                           ODE TO AUTUMN

                                            1.

    Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,
        Until they think warm days will never cease,
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

                                            2.

    Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
        Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
    Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
        Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
    Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
        Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
            Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
    And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
        Steady thy laden head across a brook;
        Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
            Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

                                            3.

    Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Like all Romantic poets, Keats was uneven; but at his best he is incomparable. When I learnt this Ode at school as a boy, I was instantly swept away by the combination of visual imagery and rich, accurate soundscape. I still am. There are not many modern poets to whose work one can apply the term 'beauty'; but Keats's poems at their best are not just good, they are beautiful. They remind me irresistibly of that other young artist of the period, Samuel Palmer, and his Shoreham paintings.


Samuel Palmer, 'The Harvest Moon' 

10:39 am: ALL MEN ARE EQUAL
  
 
Irving Kristol +9-09                                             William Kristol

Thanks to Jeremy Sharp, I came across the following wonderful anecdote (which Andrew Sullivan labels apocryphal) from Rocky Mountain News, which Paul Campos heard from Harry Hopkins:

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

"The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

"With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.' "

11:18 am: THE OTHER IRAN
    


Tehran Bureau today has a moving piece by an Iranian-American woman, Setareh Sabety, about the imminent (September 23) visit to the United Nations by Ahmadinejad. Now that the MSM (mainstream media) have forgotten the Sea of Green and gone back to the simplistic Iran=nuclear equation, this plea is timely and rings true:

We need to go to New York and take a stand in front of the UN headquarters and show the world that there is another Iran.

There is an Iran who seeks freedom and justice, one who is caring and compassionate, one who rejects Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the IRGC. We inside and outside Iran are that Iran, the Iran that has no arms, no one holy book, one that is not even united under one ideology or religion. We are of an Iran that is compassionate, fair and forward thinking. An Iran that wants to move on. An Iran that wants to move out of the byzantine labyrinth of religious dictatorship, an Iran that wants to send its bright youth to schools and universities where they can learn in peace and freedom. We ARE that Iran and those of us who are outside, who enjoy the freedom that our compatriots inside are systematically denied, need to stand up.

We need to stand up for this other Iran that exists in all our hearts. (Read the full article here.)

The same goes for those who support and sympathize. This, for those in or near New York City, might for once be a demo worth joining.

10:26 pm: WHEN THE LAST TREE FALLS
   
In gratitude and admiration as always, I take this over from Laudator temporis acti:

'The Future of Forestry'

How will the legend of the age of trees
Feel, when the last tree falls in England?
When the concrete spreads and the town conquers
The country's heart; when contraceptive
Tarmac's laid where farm has faded,
Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,
And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from
Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?
Simplest tales will then bewilder
The questioning children, 'What was a chestnut?
Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,
Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.
What was Autumn? They never taught us.'
Then, told by teachers how once from mould
Came growing creatures of lower nature
Able to live and die, though neither
Beast nor man, and around them wreathing
Excellent clothing, breathing sunlight—
Half understanding, their ill-acquainted
Fancy will tint their wonder-paintings
—Trees as men walking, wood-romances
Of goblins stalking in silky green,
Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn's
Collar, pallor in the face of birchgirl.
So shall a homeless time, though dimly
Catch from afar (for soul is watchful)
A sight of tree-delighted Eden.

C.S. Lewis


I love the Old English rhythmic influences in this -- never systematic, but subtly there in the four-stress line (one idiot website calls it 'blank verse'). One tends to forget Lewis as a poet. He had retired from Magdalen just before I came up, so I never heard or met him (unlike Tolkien, whom I once heard give a memorable lecture on Beowulf). But I'm absurdly pleased that my daughter is now Chaplain of Magdalen College School, and lives in a village where the trees celebrate daily.

09:51 pm: Iran Tweet
    
This, in Tweet spelling, from #oxfordgirl:

Policeman asks another policeman: " wht do U think abt R government?" "Same as U!""If so, ive 2 arrest U!!"

12:10 am: SPEAKING OF CELL PHONES (WHOOPS: MOBILES)...
....
Long debate on the first day back to school for the primary kids in France, on the radio (portentous, pompous, ponderous), about cell-phones. What to do? Kids use them even in class, to text their friends and, yes (and they cheerfully admit it), to cheat on tests.

What to do? Some teachers demand that all CPs be shut off; except that no one bothers.

One ageing hippy said that this was more or less the modern teenager's inalienable right, and that the school should shut up (October 2109). The teachers, on the other hand, were throwing up their hands in despair, esp. the maths teacher, who plaintively said that to learn what he is trying to teach demanded real and continuous attention.

It has always struck me that this is a non-issue, if only because the school's response is, or should be, so obvious:

1) the school (not the teacher) insists that any CP not clearly marked with an owner's name and listed as belonging to that person be confiscated;
2) When the kids come into class, the teacher collects all CPs and places them in a compartmented box on or beside the teacher's desk;
3) at the end of the lesson, the teacher gives the CPs back to the kids;
4) any CP that sounds during class, or that is seen in its owner's or anyone else's possession during a class or an exam, is confiscated.
5) all confiscated items are returned to their owners by the end of the term in which they were confiscated.

This is the principle that civilized the West (for CO read Six-gun): it does seem simple.