What really makes sense nowadays?

 

 

 

 

Twelve days early morning swimming in the outdoor community pool!  Only two days to go before my local indoor pool reopens after the yearly fortnight maintenance closure.  Considering I was contemplating paying to use the Gavá pool, I’m quids in!  But it will be a relief to get back to my normal routine on Monday of next week

     In spite of the fact that I have given myself an extra hour or so in bed, to allow the sun to rise before I immerse myself in the chilly waters, I can’t say that I have benefited from the lie-in.  My body clock will not be denied, and I continue to wake up as if my swim was at 7 am, and any bedtime after my inexorable early rising time, is forced rather than easy and so, in the scheme of things, doesn’t really count.

     Apart from two startled Dutch strangers, I have swum alone since a week last Monday, and those interlopers were obviously just proving they had access to everything, as you do when you have just arrived for your holiday and feel that you must use all the facilities at once to get value for money!

     I would like to report that my lonely circling of the pool allowed my mind to drift into poetic reveries and that I, immediately on exiting the pool, rushed to my notebook, and wrote out my exquisite thoughts before they evaporated like the water on my skin.  Alas!  Not so! 

     The only time an image suggested itself was when, this morning, I (grudgingly) swum in the aftermath of a short, quasi, sun-shower, and the drips from the overarching pine trees produced little, short-lived bubbles on the surface of the pool.  Even then, when I did get out, writing in my notebook was not the first thing I did, and you might say that noting that omission is my way of encouraging myself to get on with it and at least jot down the phrases that (while swimming at least) seemed to have some poetic legs!

     I have also written nothing ‘poetic’ about the “collective hysteria” (one cousin) that has prompted actions like the laying of flowers (another cousin) to mark the death of QEII.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The royal circus has now reached Wales, and there is a service in Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff and then a meeting in the Senedd.  Welsh First Minister Drakeford has made it clear that protest by anti-royalists is something that must be allowed and has suggested that the South Wales Police will be appreciative of that right.  We’ll see how that goes.

     Memories of my first and only trip to Mexico came back to mind when hearing about The Queue – it surely deserves the capital letter as it has become a defining aspect of The British Character. 

     Our arrival in Mexico for holiday after a very long and excruciatingly uncomfortable sardine-flight was just the prelude to a series of what I can only describe as humiliations.  We had to queue to get inside the airport, then queue to join a queue for customs, and then further queue to get through the various obstacles that Mexican bureaucracy provided before we were finally allowed to enter the country. 

     Now, from the comfort of my own armchair in Catalonia, I can watch a similar queueing quandary as the Main Queue for the lying-in-state has been (allegedly) closed because the maximum length has been reached, but people undeterred by the eleven-hour wait, have taken it upon themselves to unofficially queue in a park to wait to join the official queue! This is tantamount to insanity.

 

 

 

 

 

     I am reminded also of a story I heard about The Festival of Britain in 1951.  Although the war ended in 1945, rationing would not end until 1954, so the futuristic architecture, plate glass and colour of The Festival of Britain was something extraordinary.  It was a very popular exhibition, a statement of determination and optimism in the somewhat dreary post-war years and intended to be a “Tonic to the Nation!”  In total over eight million people visited the main exhibition site on the South Bank of the Thames, and I have been told that people were employed to go around the site and break up queues that had formed spontaneously. 

     Giving rationing and the scarcity of so much just after the war, people were used to queueing, and once a queue formed, it developed its own integrity with the people at the head of the queue thinking that there must be something worth waiting for because there were people behind them, and the people behind them assuming the same things given the people in front!

     I would, of course, maintain that both the queue for the late Queen and also the phantom queues of The Festival of Britain are alike in having no ‘real’ end destination.  I know that there is the viewing of a coffin on a catafalque in an ancient hammer-beam roofed hall, and there is always an off-chance of seeing a prince or two or the changing of the guard to justify the wait, but essentially the whole thing is a nothing.  It is a celebration of absence, of a distant unknowable entity now gone.  It is a fantasy of historicism and of significance, it is an illusion tyring to pretend to be something real.  But it’s not, no matter how many people emote when they see the symbols and think that they are participating. They are as deluded as those people queuing for nothing on The South Bank in 1951, and ironically in 2022 they are back queueing on The South Bank again.

     Where are the people to break up this queue and say, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here!”

Lost and Found

 

 

I thought, as you do, of using some apposite quotation from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or that bit in Matthew of “rejoice, and be exceeding glad” to express my delight at being presented with my Lost White Notebook (the capital letters indicating the growing importance that I have placed on it while it was lost) to accompany my post swim cup of tea.  I had obviously left the book or dropped the book at or near my seat and it had been found and carefully put away by the catering staff.  “Great happiness!”  Though that is not the King James Version of the Bible, but rather King Duncan in Macbeth, and his joy has to be viewed with a certain degree of irony!

     And that is always the problem with quotations, or perhaps it is their delight – that they come with associations.  You detach them from their contexts at your peril.

     The Parable of the Prodigal Son ends with the father telling his disgruntled elder son, that his younger impoverished, wastrel brother, “was lost, and is found.”  Simple, precise, and beautiful.  Applying the ‘mere’ words to my lost notebook may be accurate, but a book of my scribbles being kept behind the counter in the swimming pool café, waiting for me to reclaim it, is hardly the stuff of moral instruction, and the spiritual baggage of the quotation overwhelms the occasion.  

 

 

 

 

 

     Similarly, with the ‘bit’ of Matthew.  The words are spoken just after Jesus has delivered the Beatitudes and he encourages his disciples and followers to accept the persecution that will follow acceptance of his doctrine as a sign of their being blessed.  Not just popping a small notebook back in the pocket that it must have fallen out of.

     At one time an ‘educated’ person would have been able to use images and language from the Bible and the Classics and have a reasonable expectation that his ‘educated’ listener would be able to follow his examples.

     Today, what is our generally shared pool of knowledge?  I would suggest that even with a parable as famous as The Prodigal Son, and even with the phrase being part of reasonably everyday English, few know any details of the story, or even that it comes from the Bible.

     When I was teaching and trying to justify (is that the right word) Milton’s use of heavy religious and Classical imagery, I would ask the class to think of a simile, to make one up, but to use a figure or event or product that they knew well, with the aim to get the simile accepted by the whole class.  So, for example, you could say, “Complete the following simile, ‘As famous as ………..’ filling in the space with the name of a person, a living person, whom everybody in the class would know.”  The students usually forgot that I was in the class too, and their favourite and very famous singers or football players or television stars, did not sometimes figure on my list of the famous, which the kids used to call ‘foul’ to and say that to get someone even I must know would be impossible!  Which was part of the point that I was making.

     It was a useful exercise to show that there were various spheres of “You must have heard of him/her” where not knowing the “famous” person by a section of the class was greeted with astonishment.

 

 

  

 I also used the expression, “As faithful as Ruth.”  Not only had most of the classes never heard of the expression, they also did not know that there was a book of the bible called Ruth and they knew nothing about the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz.

     Of course, you could say that my generation of baby boomers was the last to be brought up on a diet of significant and generally accepted Great Literature, with poems from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury featuring heavily.  In my first year in Secondary School, we read from a slim volume called Men and Gods which gave brief and readable versions of some of the more famous Greek and Roman myths, giving us a fairly easy was in to hearing some of the Classical names that would feature in the literature that we would be presented with as we progressed through school.

     The odious Johnson peppers his discourse with references to the Classics, throwing a few well-worn Latin tags into his so-called conversation to give the impression of timeless erudition.  But he hides behind the effect, he does not use Classicism to elucidate but rather to intimidate.  He aims for the same admiration that right-wing thugs gave to Enoch Powell, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

when they vaunted his linguistic ability and his ability to read Latin and Greek as a way of giving themselves some reflected kudos from his academic reputation and using his assumed intellectual superiority to justify their base behaviour.

     A shared body of knowledge is only useful if it makes communication easier, otherwise it becomes a way of excluding and reinforces exclusivity.

     So, what about the expression of my glee at finding something that was lost?  Famous quotations come ‘ready-made’, but they come with associations that are rarely exactly to the point that you are trying to make.

     The only solution, of course, is to write your own!