Nasty journalism again

(Daily Express, 26 December 2008)

Predictable outrage from the distinctly unlovely Daily Express, which evidently thinks that ethics is just one of the Home Countieth.

Forgiveness of repentant sinners is a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith, so fundamental that to a Christian this is a non-story. What Christians pray for is not forgiveness itself for sinners, but their repentance - during the Absolution at Morning and Evening Prayer in the tradition of the Book of Common Prayer, we hear this description of God's purpose for us: "...who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness 

and live."

Later in the same article, Bishop Nicholas is reported to have defended his remarks, saying "One hates the sin, but one shows Christian love to the sinner." Quite.

I wanted to read the full text of Bishop Nicholas's Christmas sermon, but it seems to have been removed from the diocesan website.

Let's hope this is a technical hitch, and not craven capitulation by some minor diocesan official to the bloodthirsty mob who would drive us all back to barbarism.

What is morally corrupt here is not the Christian faith, but the willingness of some hacks and politicians to latch on to the personal tragedies and misery of vulnerable people and use them covertly to promulgate their own nasty little sets of values.

ADDENDUM 29 December

There is reason to believe that it could have been a technical hitch that prevented (and still prevents, for it has not yet been corrected) those of us who were not present in Blackburn Cathedral to hear our Bishop's Christmas address from reading the text on the diocesan website.

While we're waiting, you might like to read the article that started this particular ball rolling -

http://www.blackburncitizen.co.uk/news/3999735._Pray_for_child_abusers____Bishop/

and if you do, take the time to read the torrents of pure hate from the citizens of Blackburn who responded.

And watch this space, for I am not going to let this one go.

30 December 

The press release containing the text of the Bishop's sermon appeared on the web site today.

Click here to read it.

I think I can say that I can get by reasonably well in French, Spanish, Italian and German when ordering drinks or complaining that there is a crocodile in my bed, and I have been known to sing in Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian and Chiquitan as well, though without understanding a single word.

But to get to the countries where these languages are spoken - rich, exotic lands, with histories quite different to those of us of the English persuasion - you have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles by boat or plane.

What a pity there isn't a rich and exotic land with its own language and culture and history just a couple of hours' drive away.  Wouldn't it be wonderful?  

I know a lot of English people who can get by very well in one or two or even more of these languages.

But I know only one English person (I mean, when I say "know", known to me personally) who has taken the trouble to learn to speak Welsh - an ex-boy friend of Ann's, a good Lanky lad from Owdham, Melvyn, who moved to Mold, learnt Welsh, and became a local councillor.

Now there are possibly hundreds of English people learning Welsh at this very moment, and that is wonderful, if true.  Very, very few English people (me included) speak Welsh.  Yet English is either the first, or the second, language of every single person living west of that border.  The last census suggested that there are no monoglot Welsh speakers left in Wales, at all.  

I mention all this because on Wednesday next, Christmas Eve, I will be at Vivien's mum's funeral. Vivien is a very dear friend, even though I tease her by calling her Sister Myfanwy or Matron, and Vivien's life story (strong woman!) ought to be told, and even more so her mother's (d. 2008, aged 103).

And I am going to attempt to sing Ar hyd y nos, in Cymraeg.  And I fully expect to be booed off.

So if there are any Welsh speakers reading this who will be there at St Oswald's at 11am on 24 December and who would like to take over - please do!

I'm not sure I have the hwyl 

- being English.

All the news that's unfit to print

Yet another tea-time ruined by the crime-and-violence brigade who now run the early evening telly news programmes, terrifying little old ladies and their cats.  I don't think we really wanted to know about the Russian skinheads who go round decapitating people because they have darker skins, or about yet another baby murdered by incompetent parents (social services's fault, of course), but these people have got the visuals so they simply have to share them with us.

I cannot begin to tell you how deep is my contempt for these very very silly telly people and the little dream-world of sensational images that they inhabit.  The problem with pictures is that they are so easily manipulated.  There is no argument with a picture.  There is no way to tell whether a picture is true or a shocking lie.  The impact of a shocking picture in a news programme has less to do with the importance of the image than with the selection process which chose it, and it alone, to be a news item.  And it is the selection process we should consider when we watch the news on the telly, not the images that some overpaid clown has chosen to show us in return for our paying his or her fat salary.

I'll cut the reasoning process short to save time and electrons, but just listen to what passes for the English employed by the perpetrators of early evening news programmes (their words, not mine.)

They think that because someone has taken part in a PROtest, that therefore that someone must be a PRO-testor.  Or because someone has delivered EXports to another country, he (or she) must therefore be an EX-porter. These mis-stressings are not part of a universal development of a language: they are the tell-tale sign of a coterie that has lost all contact with the real world outside.

The debased English that these Cocos use is a private language, an argot, that might be perfectly suited to an environment in which fine distinctions of meaning are not pertinent, such as burglary, rapine, or the under-fives playground.  It is a simplistic language consisting of about 97 words, including some that begin with the letter "haitch", which adhere one to another by a process of fusion, so that the phrase "my wife and I" can serve either as subject or object.  What you might discern, if you were to observe these Cocos and Harlequins going about their private lives, is that their knuckles have a tendency to brush the ground.

And they are running our national broadcasting services.

It makes me bloody weep.

Church music

Heavens above.  I don't believe it.  It's a miracle.

There's a move back to good music in the Roman Catholic church in America, where, ever since Vatican 2, crooners and pimply and earnest egos armed with gee-tars have entertained the great admass of congregations brought up on Disney films and giant plastic mice.

This video speaks (or sings) for itself.

Sirius's 3D crossword calendar

If you can imagine a cross between Spike Milligan on E(cstasy), James Joyce on G(uinness)  and Stanley Unwin on, well, A(nything), there you have Sirius, the inventor of the 3D crossword and the worst clue writer I have ever known, yes, even including Trevor.

As I have probably mentioned several times to my loyal reader Gladys Adlestrop, who lives in that posh rest home on the promenade and who's actually worked out how to get broadband on her Sinclair Spectrum (she's in the WI, you see), I have been working, and I use the word with my fingers crossed, for the past six weeks with Sirius on his grandiose project to raise a million quid towards a new school for blind and partially sighted children in Coventry.  The ups and downs of Sirius's project have already been documented ad nauseam on this lustrous blog, but I would like just to say that two copies of the finished product thudded onto my doormat at lunchtime (the post is early on a Saturday.) And what a delight to the eye they are, if you like purple.

The volume of e-mails between Sirius and Locum over the past six weeks is such as to have sent Tiscali* and Botswana-IT delirious with joy. There have been well over 200, most of them completely incomprehensible, both to recipient and sender.

Last night's exchange, for example, degenerated into a very boozy argument about pterospondees (like pterodactyls, but even better at handling stress).

Sirius and Locum are plotting the next project - the Dicitonary of Misprunts.

Meanwhile Mrs Sirius and Mrs Locum are planning to meet, having an awful lot in common.

Sirius's 3D crossword website is, if you remember, here.

Do have a look.

* A lie.  I invented it, to protect the virtuous.

Albas, Aubades, & stuff like that

I've always been a sucker for the "love recollected in wistfulness" business, which made Dowland such a marvellous composer and melancholy old sod, and John Donne, who could have taught Malcolm Muggeridge and the man from the Pru a few things ("too late, too late", the angels' cry...), and really I wanted tonight to do a serious post about mediaeval love poems .

So I opened my Ezra Pound, Complete Pomes of, to find that wonderful Alba, and I came across this instead (and I kicked myself, because I've had this book since 1965, and it's only just dawned on me). It's from Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)", his attack on his own earlier writings and the self-indulgent wallowings of literary masturbators:

Envoi, 1919 (Ezra Pound)

Go, dumb-born book,

Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:

Hadst thou but song

As thou hast subjects known,

Then there were cause in thee that should condone

Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,

And build her glories thy longevity.

Tell her that sheds

Such treasure in the air

Recking naught else but that her graces give

Life to the moment,

I would bid them live

As roses might, in magic amber laid,

Red overwrought with orange and all made

One substance and one colour

Braving time.

Tell her that goes

With song upon her lips

But sings not out the song, nor knows

The maker of it, some other mouth,

May be as fair as hers,

Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,

When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,

Siftings on siftings in oblivion,

Till change hath broken down

All things save beauty alone.

(it's only just dawned on me, thick plank that I am, that it is a both a pastiche on, and a sly taunt at, Edmund Waller (1606–1687) 's "Go, lovely Rose", which I uncomprehendingly set to music 30 years ago for a friend, but which still, uncorrupted, reads:

SONG (Edmund Waller, 1606–1687)

Go, lovely rose -

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,

and shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired:

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! - that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee;

How small a part of time they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

Oh well. We'll do the albas and the aubades tomorrow, as the sun rises.

Gladys Ponsonby - will you still be there for me?

The Orange Brick - revised???

In an article in our parish mag earlier this year I listed a few of the glaring errors in the settings of the music of some of the hymns in the orange brick - or, to give it its proper title, Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New, from the Kevin Mayhew stable.

This is what I said then:

The peculiarities of the Orange Hymnal are not only to be found in the texts of hymns, but also in the music they're set to. Have a look, for example, at No 190, Forty days and forty nights ... in the fourth bar of the tenor line there is an A-flat. But it shouldn't be an A-flat, it should be a G-sharp. True, it sounds the same, but it jumps off the page because it is a musical illiteracy...

Or No 4, A great and mighty wonder, where not only is Michael Praetorius's well-known setting so simplified as to lose all its character, but there is also another blunder - the alto in the last chord of the first line should be a C, not a D.

Or in No 638, The day thou gavest, there is a misprint in the bass in bar 4: D instead of E.

Or in 184, For the beauty of the earth, where Geoffrey Shaw's tune England's Lane has suddenly acquired a B-natural in the melody (bar 6) instead of a B-flat.

This is what he wrote:

but this is how it appears in the Orange Brick:

You can just about understand how somebody with a little musical knowledge might have spotted the consecutive fifths in that bar and tried to disguise them (and produced notational nonsense), but nobody can justify changing Shaw's B-flat to a B-natural.

So when I read on the Kevin Mayhew website that the orange brick had now been completely revised and reset, and that it was now a fiver cheaper, I thought I'd better order a copy and check.

This is what the website promised:

This latest edition – Complete New Anglican Hymns Old & New is entirely revised and reset, and foreshadows the development of liturgy in the years to come...

Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New is beautifully produced – a clear typeface, excellent printing and strong binding. In this new edition, the music has been set in a slightly larger page format, and bound in such a way that it falls open beautifully in the hand, or to set on the organ/piano music stand.

Let me say at the outset that this is not a new edition - it is a reprint with a few errors corrected.

It has the same ISBN as the original (although it is now presented in full on the verso of the title page, so the check digit has changed) and the same publication date (2000). Only if you knew where all the errors were would you be able to compare the original and the reprint. The only discernible differences between the old and the new is the weight (1.76kg the old, 1.72kg the new) and the little KM logo on the spine. I can't detect a "slightly larger page format", whatever that's supposed to mean, but certainly some pages are printed a couple of millimetres higher.

So - "entirely revised and reset?"

I don't think so.

Certainly some errors - though by no means all - have been corrected. The first three I cited above have: others, including the Geoffrey Shaw, haven't. Indeed, while one setting of Aus der Tiefe (Heinlein) in hymn 190 has been corrected, the more elaborate (and musically much superior) original version hasn't, and it's on the facing page. For heaven's sake, who's doing the proof-reading at Kevin's publishing kibbutz - monkeys?

Other errors, which I didn't list in the original article for reasons of space, remain - for example in No 188, last line, first bar, the D in the bass should be an F.

There are other errors, no, howlers, in the music, and misprints in the texts, but I'm blowed if I'm going to tell Kevin where they are, because my church has already spent a small fortune buying his Product, and those of us who can actually read music long to go back to EH or A&M, which, although they didn't include Graham Kendrick's inspiring ditties, weren't riddled with gaffes.

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL, 2008

Guildford Cathedral is uncluttered.  Its interior is very simple - just a lot of columns taking the weight of the roof.  The vaulting is a thing of very great beauty, because of its simplicity.  The cathedral is a place for contemplation, for prayer, and for the finding of inner peace as a retreat from the complexity, the angst, the greed, and the hostility of the secular world outside.  A haven.  A retreat from the world. Somewhere to sit and think, and not be threatened, because of God's presence. Somethere to find a little moment of peace, perhaps.

A young man who suffered from severe depression sat in the safety of the Cathedral quite often. He was known to the Dean, and to the volunteers who act as guides and helpers in the cathedral for visitors.

But last week he had a bit of bad day.  Probably influenced by one of the reports that our telly media love to give us about gun-crazy America, or perhaps the lip-smacking coverage of the Bombay atrocity, he foolishly told somebody he had a gun and he was going to shoot people.

I think it was a cry for help, because of where he was.

You can read the story of what happened next in the Church Times (5 Dec). The police turned up, shot him and killed him, to the great distress of his parents and family, because he might, just possibly, have had a gun.  Equally possibly, he might have wanted to blow his nose.  The police, evidently, cannot tell the difference when a  suspect reaches into his pocket, for they opened fire, shattering the glass screen of a creche. Luckily, there were no children there.

This is the law of Wild West, and successive governments bear the moral responsibility for taking us from theism to meism.

I cannot tell you how my heart reaches out to this young man's family.  Ann and I lost our eldest son, Tim, in circumstances which still have the dark hint of cover-up.

There will undoubtedly be a cover-up over this murder.  Because that's what it was - murder, by the custodians of our safety, the police, when their victim was in sanctuary.

A young man who was ill in his head has been shot dead in a cathedral by the police.  If that was a headline in the little newspapers that like to show you pictures of ladies' tits, wouldn't it worry you a bit?

Clergy needed - willy essential

We are very lucky in our Waterside parishes. All our clergy are people! I mean, they could have been Daleks, or space hoppers, or clockwork elephants, and if they were I would have been the first to complain, believe me, for I am a traditionalist and a firm believer in the old ways.

So it was a bit sad to hear that an ordained person, A, who went to the ordination of another person, B, a few days ago was ostracised by other ordained persons (C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L and M) who obviously mistook her for a Dalek, a space hopper or a clockwork elephant. 

I have done a bit of research into this matter, because A is an ordained minister - no, let us say what we mean, a Priest - in the CofE, as well as a wise and good friend, and I can now reveal the results of this research: C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L and M have all got willies!

So A had no chance. Not possessing a willy is a guarantee that you will be treated as a Dalek, or a space hopper, or a clockwork elephant in perpetuity by those people who do possess a willy, and who thereby, and therefore, consider themselves to be the only persons fit to baptise, confirm, marry and bury the rest of us, willied or not.

Orange Brick, Mark 2

I see that, not before time, there is now a revised edition of Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New, with bigger pages and over a fiver cheaper.

Order (online) before 19 December and get a further fiver off the full music edition - with postage £16.99.

I imagine Kevin has taken my (free) proof-reader's comments to heart, corrected all the howlers and ditched the rubbish.

I've ordered my copy. I await its coming.

Shocking winds we've been having...

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How are the mighty fallen

The outfit that published this dismal tosh,

“Mary said: ‘Why chooseth me? A lowly maid am I that knoweth no man? But I will obey if what you say is God’s own plan.’” 

which I might have mentioned on 8th November, and even, I dare say, ranted about, and I hope I live long enought to do it again one day, and then again and again, was also the outfit that in a nobler previous existence published this:

LA FIGLIA CHE PIANGE

  

         O quam te memorem virgo… 

 

    

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—  

Lean on a garden urn—  

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—  

Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—  

Fling them to the ground and turn         

With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:  

But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.  

  

So I would have had him leave,  

So I would have had her stand and grieve,  

So he would have left  

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,  

As the mind deserts the body it has used.  

I should find  

Some way incomparably light and deft,  

Some way we both should understand, 

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.  

  

She turned away, but with the autumn weather  

Compelled my imagination many days,  

Many days and many hours:  

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.        

And I wonder how they should have been together!  

I should have lost a gesture and a pose.  

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze  

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.  

--------------------------------------------------------

together with pretty well everything else by one of the most influential male poets of the early 20th century, Thomas Stearnes Eliot.

Postmodernists, who appear to have taken over the teaching of Eng. Lit. in our universities, more's the pity, and whose only role in life now is to find subtexts to justify the continuation of their tenure, will tell you that this poem reveals that Tom Eliot was basically an MCP.  Feminist readers would probably agree.  And they may all be right, for the simple gloss of this poem is as follows:

Bloke rejects woman.  Woman hurt and angry.  Reader supposed to realise that heartless poet has used said woman as fuel for agonised love pome.

(Google "la figlia che piange".  The majority of critiques say just that, though not in the same words.)

But it has always seemed to me that the meat of this poem is in the last stanza: lines of almost painful honesty, which is precisely what poetry should be about - elliptical utterances with the utmost economy of means, expressed within a formal structure.  The maximum of expression with the minimum of means.

I have lived with this poem lodging in my mind for nearly half a lifetime, and for one very good reason:  I don't quite understand what it's saying, even now, but I love the sound it makes.

A near-contemporary of Tom Eliot's, and his principal mentor, identified the essential dynamics, or attributes, if you prefer, of poetry as logopoeia (meaning), phanopoeia (imagery) and melopoeia (sound). Ezra Pound was talking about translation from one set of cultural expectations to another, but I think we can usefully pinch the same terms to talk about the essence of poetry.

Two important writers from different cultures and languages to ours, Jorge Luis Borges (South American Spanish) and Umberto Eco (Italian), have been wonderfully well served by their translators, and both writers have written about the difficulty of translation, and they both, in different words, say much the same thing: sense, sound, and imagery.

This is what Eng. Lit. students should be learning about, not whether the sonnets prove that Shakespeare never washed his underpants.

There is a remnant here from a early draft of this post.  I can't remember the rationale now, but I think I was being cynical, in true Choirstalls mode, so I'll keep it.  Like La Figlia, it is a Lurv Pome.

"Gladys, sweet,

thou art the Best.

But, most of all,

I love your Chest."

(Anon; from a cave in southern France, c. 3000BC)

  

 

 

Useful car rear window sticker for traditional RC clergy

While hunting through four old hard disks for an elusive file, I came across this.

What larks, Pip!

Those percentages again...

According to early evening news programmes on the telly, Alistair Darling has cut VAT by two and a half percent.  That, according to my calculator, means a new rate of 17.0625 percent.

Do you think they meant to say "a cut of two and a half percentage points", perhaps, to 15%? A reduction of some 14.3 percent.

But don't trust my figures.  I told you I was no good at maths.

And I'd be useless as a newsreader, a job which you might think would demand of its practitioners the ability to communicate information accurately for the enlightenment of us dimwit masses.

Let's get rid of all those nasty book things

A very busy day today, but just as we were leaving the house I caught a fragment of a news item on the wireless which is so absurd that I doubled over in mirth all the way through the sermon.

I'm sure I heard the newsreader say that a headmistress of some barmy seminary for the terminally barking, possibly or possibly not in Chesterfield, is getting rid of the school library, yes, all of it, because she thinks children don't need books any more - the Worldwide Web is now all things to all persons.  This no doubt highly paid leader of a staff of highly paid people charged with the education and development of young minds proposes to get rid of all books and establish her school as a Virtual Learning Centre (click for the story).

(I was reading something the other day by someone who isn't a musician, but for whom I had until then had the greatest respect.  He preferred Haydn to Mozart, he said.  He knew all about Mozart because he'd seen the film Amadeus and it had put him off Mozart.)

When I retired from the day job, which had imprisoned my mind for 30 years, I started thinking for myself, and not according to somebody else's agenda.  But part of this process of dissociation required me to give away three quarters of the library I had amassed from the age of five, to make room for shoes and frocks (my wife's, not mine) and saucepans and egg-timers and all the other necessary accoutrements of practical living.  Many of those books I gave away by mistake - I hadn't realised I needed them so much.  When I  wanted them they weren't there, and I'm spending a lot of time I can't afford, now that I am in control of my life again, trying to put that old library back together again.

One of these days somebody, and I hope it is the employer of deranged people who for some incomprehensible reason find themselves in positions of education influence, is going to notice that the emperor is naked.

The Worldwide Web is totally democratic, and therefore completely anarchic.  It is about as useful a teaching aid as six of the best.  In order to use the Web effectively you need to be literate, suspicious, and resistant to chicanery.

And how do you become literate, and suspicious, and protected from crooks, and perverts, and loonies who tell you the world is flat, if your headmistress has just thrown away all the books from which you might, just might, have learned something?

An idle moment

       

Christmas is a-coming...

A splendid idea for curates who fancy a spot of card-making.

Click the picture for a better copy; save, then print it on acetate sheet to size, cut it out, glue it into a window card blank (available from all good craft shops) and write a funny message.  Then send it to your Bishop as a Christmas card.  How he will laugh!

Male-as-norm

Good to see the Archdeacon of St Albans leaping to the defence of Christina Rossetti, whose poem In the bleak mid-winter was trashed as "schmaltzy" in a recently published book (Church Times, 21 Nov, letters).

Not so good, though, to see her described as a "poetess".  "Poet" is quite sufficient.

Merry settings of the Mass

However much we (well, I) moan about Radio 3, there are still some gems to be heard there. And gosh, some of them even make it to the listings! And (wait for it) - some even make it to the listings before the work is broadcast! (Interesting to compare a Radio Times of 2008 with one of 1968 (for example), when you knew what you were going to hear, and when,  and could therefore make the necessary arrangements to be there in front of the wireless at the appointed time. Not any more you can't, most of the time.)

But despite the moans, today there was Michael Haydn's "Oboe" Mass, the Missa Sancti Hieronymi (MH 254).  Utterly delightful (and listed in Radio Times.)  I had not heard it before. You can hear it on iPlayer for another six days, then you'll have to go out and buy the recording, which is on the Ambronay label, AMY011.  And it is well worth the effort.

Like Charpentier's Messe de Minuit (which I'm going to devote a post to sometime in the future, if I remember, so that I can bore you senseless with musings about the pronunciation of Latin in different countries at different times, and how some people get really het up about it, like, for instance, your actual Bishops), or Rossini's Petite Messe Solenelle, which is neither, although it is a Mass setting,  or Mozart's early settings of the Ordinary, this is joyous music that gladdens the heart and sets the feet tapping whether you will or no.

Gladys Bewley

There are cynics among us who, on learning that Georg Friedrich Händel wrote Messiah in three weeks, would mutter: "Yes, and it sounds like it." Not me, of course - I'm all for it, especially the bits where he got his English accentuation a bit wrong - like "incorrup-TIBBLE."

But that is by the by.  My researches in dusty old archives have produced this curiosity, and further investigation suggests that in 1741 GFH might (only might, mind) have frequented a particular ale-house in central Dublin not for the black stuff, but for the allure of the thrusting charms of a certain buxom barmaid, one Gladys Beaulieu.

It is amazing what you can find on the Internet, isn't it?

So there!

My series of articles early in 2008 drawing attention to certain editorial failings in our hymn book didn't go down too well in some quarters.  I was accused of disliking modern hymns (which I don't, necessarily - some of them are good, and some are abysmal, for exactly the same reasons that some Victorian and Edwardian hymns are abysmal, and has anyone looked at Moody & Sankey lately?), and I was accused of being nasty about a hymn book which the PCC approved and which cost us a heck of a lot of money.

I was actually more concerned about sloppy editing than matters of musical or literary taste, which are personal and subjective - the hymn book is riddled with errors: typos in the texts of hymns, and wrong notes in the music.  It is because the hymn books which our churches buy have to last us a long time that it seems to me important that publishers get the words and the music right. It is a simple matter of paying a proof-reader.

And I was concerned, too, about the Americanisation of the English language in this hymn book.  "In your arms I would lay" might make sense to an American, but to me it sounds like a line written for a hen to sing.

So it was with a sigh of relief that I came across these words:

Something stinks to high heaven about the way commissions are doled out to composer-liturgists (often possessing only the most modest talents) who then rake in fees via their private companies while also acting as official advisers to the Church. These individuals use diocesan workshops to flog their music and hymn books to parishes. Congregations have no idea how this cosy system operates. Let them find out by means of an independent inquiry into the commissioning, sale and circulation of liturgical material.

(full text of Damian Thompson's article here).

Incidentally, I tried to get Damian Thompson's permission to use his words.  So far he has not replied to my e-mail, but he's probably busy fighting the Devil and the divisions in the Roman Catholic community  (divisions? sh! Not supposed to talk about them.)

So I'm jolly well using them anyway.

Who make the best jam - Catholics or CofE?

An interesting question. Out Rawcliffe (a farming community) used to be the leaders on the cake front, but after the unfortunate scandal attendant upon the appearance of an pineapple at the Local Produce stall at Harvest last year, which knocked their confidence for six, Hambleton have edged into the lead. At St Oswald's we don't mind waiting with bated breath. We only do stale biccies and ecclesiastical tea, so we look forward to outings to Out Rawcliffe and Hambleton with much smiling and rubbing of bellies. As we look forward to the all-too-rare Churches Together services at St Bernard's (RC) - fancy biccies (fresh), decent tea, and jolly nice tablecloths. Nearly as nice as ours at St Oswald's (terracotta, in case of spills.)

But it seems that the matter of ecclesiastical nosh has now engaged the minds of higher authorities than our own humble parishes.

To find out why you'll have to click here.

(But I do wish Damian would stop calling Anglicans Protestants. We are not Protestants. We are Anglo-Catholics.)

WOSS'S BOSSES KNACKER NEEDY NIPPERS

It really was a matter of unfortunate timing. Sirius, whose 3D
crossword project to raise funds for children with impaired
vision I mentioned last week, has had his pips crashed.

One consequence of the abysmal behaviour of Woss and the
other bloke, whose name I have forgotten but I won't lose any
sleep over it, is that everyone at Auntie is very nervous and
keeps looking over his, her, or their* shoulder and boning up on
the producer guidelines.

It now appears that Radio 4's Today programme (which is as far
removed from the tritery and tripery dished out by the
scandalously overpaid Woss as my outside lavvy is from the
planet Pluto) has felt obliged to pull out of a scheduled
interview with John Graham (Araucaria of The Guardian - a
contributor to Sirius's project, and one with the requested Clout)
in case mentioning a specific charity in a news & current affairs
programme breached those guidelines.

Shame nobody thought to mention to Araucaria that his taxi to
the studio had been cancelled.

But what really causes the nostrils to wrinkle, as at rotting
material in the public drains, is that only last week Children In
Need (an Auntie fund-raiser, you will recall) persuaded Sirius to
cut them in on the deal, to the tune of 50% of the revenues
from sales of his crossword calendar. Innocently, Sirius thought
that the massive publicity that involvement with CIN would
bring would more than compensate, in added sales. So he
agreed.

Pause for hollow laughter.

What it has actually done is to cut in half the money that the
planned school in Coventry for blind children will receive from
sales of the calendar. Where CIN's share of the loot will go is anybody's guess.

But I do hope it won't go to the Retirement Home for Disgraced
Celebs With a Speech Impediment.


*sorry, Mr Humphrys. I loathe it too.

Reconciliation? Perhaps not just yet

Pursuant to the earlier post - I've been reading the comments on Damian Thompson's piece about Graham Kendrick (and I told you they were scary!).  If I were to reply in that exalted place, where they know they're all right and everybody else is wrong, which I can't and wouldn't even if I could, I would be saying something like this:

Dear fellow Christians in the Roman Catholic Church:

We may not have unity in the Anglican commnion, but we've got most of the best hymns, especially if you take the great Methodist hymn composers (the Wesleys) into account as well as those of the CofE such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and even Sidney Nicholson, founder of our Royal School of Church Music.

But shouldn't this ongoing argument, sorry, discussion be about the appropriateness (or otherwise) of "high" or "low" music at different moments of a service?  I have always had a sneaking feeling that the only reason we (and you) allow music at all at the most holy moments of the Mass is that otherwise the congregation would chatter among themselves.

In the CofE we don't do "Ita Missa est" - we have the children in from Sunday School to tell us what they've been doing, and we usually recess to something fairly bouncy, like "Shine, Jesus, Shine", and we do it for them, because we think that Nun danket alle Gott might be just a wee bit over their heads seeing as how they are only five or thereabouts. And yes, there is a bit of arm-waving, and even mild leaping, because happy, bright children have that effect on you.

But if anybody expected me, as a choir person, to sing that song during Communion, they would have a war on their hands.

Actually, I don't dislike "Shine" that much (and I hope Brother David isn't reading this!) . There is a lot that is much worse out there, lurking in dark corners. Of its type it is a very acceptable example, unless of course it's wailed AT the congregation by earnest young persons with pimples and that most execrable of all instruments that neither you nor we have yet had the sense to ban, viz. and to wit, the geetar.

The real problem with music, any music, in church is that it can  very powerfully engage us in realms which might be described as spiritual, uplifting and ennobling. But it can for that very reason create emotional climates which can be distracting, and the church has from time to time in its history felt so threatened by such beguiling distractions that it has sought to limit or even ban them (cf the Council of Trent, or the Russian Orthodox Church.)

Another thing we try not to do in the CofE is sneer at Christians who share the same faith but happen to have different bosses in the boardroom.  Our liturgy closely parallels yours: when yours changes, ours changes.  Your bishops and our bishops make sure of it, because the ultimate prize will be reconciliation.

But there is still too much patriarchal garbage in the way.  There are serious issues to resolve, which won't be resolved if we keep hurling insults at each other.

We don't have "priestesses" in the CofE: we have clergy who happen to be women (50% of humankind).  We call them deacons, and priests, and one day, God willing, bishops and archbishops. Many of us, though sadly not all, do not distinguish between God's anointed servants by whether they've got funny little dangly bits or not but by their wisdom, their compassion, their godliness, the strength of their will, the power of their words, and their capacity for spiritual leadership.

Just the qualities that you'd expect from a bloke in a frock, really.

The ferret, at it again

ADDENDUM 22 MARCH 2009

I have reluctantly taken out the RSS feed from Damian Thompson's Holy Smoke blog

because of offensive anti-Anglican rhetoric from a few zealots who regularly respond

to his postings.

If yours is a stronger stomach than mine, you can find the Holy Smoke blog here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/damian_thompson/blog/

Copy and paste the URL into your bookmarks.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Assiduous readers of Choirstalls in its previous incarnation (within the parish mag) will know that I am not overfond of Graham Kendrick's sort of evangelism, which tends to be full of wrong notes and other typos, to say the least, not to mention ecstatic leaping.

So it was with Joy (yes, her again) that I read these words from the pen of Damian Thompson, religious blogger for the Daily Telegraph and editor of the Catholic Herald.

Damian - a feed from whose blog Holy Smoke graces these very pages (right at the bottom, above the clock) - has been described by our own ever-thoughtful and courteous Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret", an epithet which actually I'd be proud of, if I were he.  He is certainly the scourge of the loony liberal wing of the Roman Catholic church, but he is moreover a fine writer, who aims his words with precision and deadly accuracy and scores hit after palpable hit.

But read the comments that inevitably and invariably follow his posts.  Some of them are scary stuff indeed, as well as being only partly literate.

Eruvim

A few years before I became an involuntary eremite (an OAP who goes to church and can only afford to live in a hut), my daily grind consisted in producing a digest of everything in the non-tabloid press that had a bearing on local government, and then disseminating same, in order to add enormously to the workload of council officers and elected representatives while helping the afforested areas of the world to diminish rapidly in extent. Or, in the words of a relative-by-marriage in Oz, to add to the "number of bloody useless electrons whizzing round the universe" (ie e-mail and the Internet, which he thinks are a serious risk to sanity as well as public health, on account of all those dodgy little electrons.)

But during this unhappy period of a few years before, I came across a curious item in the Manchester Evening News. There was a proposal to construct an eruv in a predominantly Jewish area of north Manchester/Salford. I hadn't a clue what an eruv was, and dictionaries were not much help. And the world-wide web was in its infancy.

When I did find out a little about eruvs (or eruvim, the correct plural in Hebrew) I was fascinated. Like most of us who aren't Jewish, I knew absolutely nothing about Jewish religious practices, or Mosaic law or Halakha (a sort of statute law, continuously developing and becoming more complex, but deriving from the Mosaic law of the Pentateuch, and fundamental to Jewish life.) I'd been a guest at a wedding in a Hindu temple; I'd been in a Russian Orthodox church; I'd sung in (but been denied Communion in) Roman Catholic cathedrals in Germany and Italy; I'd even paid £5.50 to be allowed entry into that big stone place in Canterbury where Archbishop Becket was murdered; but I'd never, and still haven't, been into a synagogue. Ironic, really, considering that every Sunday the First Lesson comes from the Old Testament, emphasising a continuity of religious observance that we don't usually allow in to the conscious mind.

So here, for the sake of enlightenment, and to open a small window into a very different and very ancient world, is a piece about eruvs filched (and greatly edited) from a BBC broadcast in 2005 - copyright notice at the end.

What is an Eruv?

An eruv is an area within which observant Jews can carry or push objects on the Sabbath (which lasts from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday), without violating a Jewish law that prohibits carrying or pushing anything except within the home.

There are over 200 eruvs in the world.

An eruv must be 'completely enclosed'. The area is not enclosed by building a special wall round it - most of it is enclosed by existing natural boundaries like railway lines or walls. What matters is that the area is completely enclosed by boundaries that conform to Jewish law.

What does an eruv allow people to do?

An eruv extends the boundaries of the home to include an area which would otherwise be onsidered public space. The result is that within an eruv Orthodox Jews can follow the same rules on the Sabbath as if they were in their homes.


Jewish law says that Jews must not carry any item, no matter how small or for whatever purpose in a Reshus HaRabim (public domain - outside their home) on the Sabbath, even if they are allowed to carry them within their home.

Pushing things is also forbidden - so families with small children (who would need prams and pushchairs) or the physically disabled (who would use wheelchairs) are effectively housebound. They can't even go to the synagogue to fulfil their religious duties on the Sabbath.

But both carrying and pushing are allowed inside an eruv, because an eruv is regarded as being within the home domain. So in an eruv Jews can:

-carry house keys (but not car or office keys)
-carry a handkerchief
-carry food or drink for use during the Sabbath
-carry prayer shawls
-carry books - normally a Jew can't even carry a prayer book on the Sabbath
-carry essential medicines - for example, diabetic Jews can now carry their
insulin with them
-carry extra clothes such as a raincoat
-carry nappies
-carry reading glasses
-push a pram or wheelchair
-use a walking frame or crutches

An eruv therefore makes it easier for Jews to follow the spirit of the Sabbath by making it enjoyable and fulfilling, without breaking the rules that keep it holy.

What doesn't an eruv allow?

An eruv doesn't permit Orthodox Jews to carry things that cannot be moved at all on the Sabbath, such as mobile phones or pens or wallets, or carry things for use after the Sabbath.

Nor does an eruv permit Jews to do things that break the spirit of the Sabbath - such as going shopping or swimming, riding a bicycle or playing football in the park, or gardening.

Making and using an eruv


An eruv is created using physical features, like walls and hedges, railway lines and roads, to completely enclose an area of land. The open spaces between the existing features are filled in by erecting poles with nylon fishing line (or wire) strung in between. The poles and lines are regarded as forming doorways in the boundary - the poles are the sides of the door and the lines are the lintel across the top.

The flimsier parts of the boundary are inspected every week to check that the boundary is intact and that none of the fishing line or poles has fallen down.

Maintaining and checking an eruv is thus quite expensive

How does an eruv work?

In ancient times the rabbis decided that if several houses were built round a closed courtyard, then they could be considered a single giant house, and so things could be carried between them. The continuous boundary of an eruv effectively turns a large area into a sort of imaginary courtyard within which anyone is allowed to carry objects or push prams or wheelchairs; activities which would otherwise be forbidden on the Sabbath.

So an eruv converts an area in which there were once many individual Jewish homes into one big home, shared by one big Jewish family.

There are certain things that may invalidate an eruv:
- It isn't valid if it encloses 600,000 or more people (Jewish or non-Jewish)
- The poles must be reasonably vertical, the lines tight
- Some say the lines must go across the top of the poles (as the lintel of a door goes over the top of the side pieces)

There is nothing to stop non-Jews entering the eruv area either on the Sabbath or during other times.

(etc)

Published on BBC Religion & Ethics: 2005-02-08
This article can be found on the Internet at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/living/eruv_1.shtml

Yer Wok?

If you listen to the wireless or the electric television a lot, you will have noticed that the pronunciation of English is changing rapidly. No longer do people read a good book - it’s either a “gerd berk” or a “gid bik”. “Could” has become “curd”, “look” is “lurk”, and even the little word “to” is now “tuh”, thanks to Tony Blair.

We choir persons, you see, have to consider our diction very carefully so that what we sing is intelligible, and in the good old days (when did the good old days finish? 1950? 1960? A week last Tuesday?) BBC English was reckoned to be good enough to serve as a standard for radio and TV persons. Indeed, if you had a regional accent in the good old days you’d have been lucky to get a job. But it’s all changed. Mock-Manchester was bad enough, but now your afternoon tea is likely to spent in the company of “reporters” who suddenly all seem to come from Belfast, and it’s a bit off-putting, while you’re trying to digest your egg on toast (or your lobster thermidor if you live up the posh end of town) to be constantly harangued by the tesseraphthongs of a bunch of Ian Paisley sound-alikes, especially when they all try to be PC and say “gerd” and “curd” and “tuh.” And the cutting-room floors at Corrers and Emmers must be knee-deep in all those dropped t’s. Just as we’d got used to “yer wha’?*”, with a little click at the end, they started putting more emphasis on the little click, so now it’s either “yer wok?”, or, for even more emphasis, “yer wocker-hhhhh?”

Now this is not English as we understand it in civilised parts of the country, or even Yorkshire. It is telly-speak. But I have given this matter a lot of thought, and I believe I have come up with the answer to the question: “Why do telly-people, and especially southerners, sound so very silly?”, and here it is.

It is the make-up they all wear (yes, even the men). It is laid on with a trowel to conceal the fact that many of them are well past pensionable age, and also because of the lights. The problem is that TV lights are so hot that ordinary make-up would melt and drip down their frocks (or whatever), so they use a special make-up which consists mainly of fast-setting concrete. Now if you plastered your mush with fast-setting concrete you would very quickly notice one unfortunate side-effect - you would not be able to move your lips. And if, by some superhuman effort, you did manage to move your lips, then your make-up would fall off in great heavy slabs and Health & Safety would be round like a shot.

So rather than risk cracking the slap, telly-people have perfected the art of talking without moving their lips (a great handicap if you are stone deaf and have to rely on lip-reading, of course, though you can always watch the captions on teletext, which generally arrive five or ten minutes after the words were uttered and the screen is now showing Tom and Jerry or Songs of Praise from Llanelli. ) Hence “gerd berks”, “curd”, “lurk”, and “tuh.”

What I think proves my argument conclusively is that there are no French people presenting programmes on English telly, because French people have to have incredibly athletic lips just to keep pace with their language, which scientists have proved goes nearly twice as fast as English. In fact a trained French person can not only speak, but juggle three tennis balls and operate a remote control at the same time, just with his (or, as the case may be, her) orbicularis oris muscle, or gob, to you and me. No chance of keeping the slap intact there.


*A Manchester expression which means roughly: “I beg your pardon?”

---------------

This article appeared in our parish magazine under the Choirstalls logo last summer.  Most readers seemed to have enjoyed it as a bit of fun, but we came back from a holiday in Italy to a raging scandal.  Somebody, it seems, had taken offence at the reference to "a bunch of Ian Paisley sound-alikes", and was going to complain to the Bishop, and panic had set in.

Well, the article was a bit of fun, but what sparked it was actually something rather more serious: something which I couldn't possibly have expected to appear in the parish mag.

Early in 2008 there was a sudden influx of Ulster accents in the newsrooms of both the BBC and ITV, especially in the North West on the early evening TV news programmes.  There wasn't an influx of Brummie accents, or Geordie accents, or East Anglian accents, or Devon accents - just Ulster accents.

Conspiracy theorists, of whom, heavens above!, I would not call myself one, might legitimately wonder if the two big broadcasters hadn't been engaging in a spot of social engineering - reinstating Ulster accents in an England which had come to associate them with the long, bad years of the troubles.  If so - not a bad idea.  But to do it covertly?  And at exactly the same time?  Was there an agenda here that we know nothing about, that might, or might not, have involved broadcasters and government in bed together?

I blame the Gordons

Children in Need

3D CROSSWORDS


This is completely off-message, but my other blogs are members-only. Anyway, this post will be pulled next weekend - or not, depending on events.

Chums who know me know that in my “spare” time (when not pouring invective on anything that moves, breathes, is orange, if I may say that without causing offence, or appears on the telly) I am a compiler of crosswords, and it was in this role that I, with eleven other compilers, was approached by a fellow compiler two weeks ago (and it only seems like a lifetime.)

Brother Sirius is a crossword compiler with a vision. He wants to raise money to build a new school in Coventry (a city close to mine own heart) for children with vision that is impaired, as his increasingly is. The cost is a trifling £29,000,000.

Sirius is the inventor of the 3D crossword. Hitherto he has contented himself with rattling collection boxes outside his local Tesco or wheedling thruppenny bits for charities from his 3D crossword website -



http://www.calendarpuzzles.co.uk/


But a few months ago a small and innocent person of some six summers said “Mr Sirius Sir, why don’t you print a big book of your, like, really like cool 3D puzzles and flog it on the Internet, whence all good things flow, like loot for charitable causes?”

Now if Sirius was a normal person he would have patted that small child on the head and said “Avaunt thee unto thy playpen, dear squarker, and let us hear no more about it, or anything else at all, for that matter, until thou art at least 24 years of age and art no longer spotty about the countenance, and hast learned to speak something resembling this wonderful English language of ours that is spoken, yea, even unto Coventry, and occasionally, moreover, unto Nuneaton and Bedworth, which are an place wherein dragons dwell.”

But I can vouch for the fact that Sirius is not a normal person - not, that is, if a normal person seeking someone’s cooperation phones them up pretending to be Patrick Moore, as he did.

Sirius has a sense of humour that accords very much with mine own (although I think I am slitely beter at speling.) He is, in fact so utterly, completely barking that his project has attracted the attention of the BBC, and more specifically, Children in Need. He has, on his long march, attracted the cooperation, goodwill and advice of such luminaries as top crossword compilers Araucaria, Enigmatist, Doc, Rufus, Qaod (or Laos - I told you Sirius has eyesight problems), and others whom I have no intention of naming because I’ve been doing the proofreading, chaps, and some of your clues I didn’t understand, so it jolly well serves you right, and several highly influential crossword editors with big purses, whom no setter in his right mind would wish to offend. Oh, and his PCC. (Well, I tried to warn him. The help and cooperation of the PCC, said I, is like unto an sword that hath two edges. Both blunt. Don’t expect an answer before about March 2017.)

What for me has been so enjoyable about this last couple of weeks has been the huge exchange of completely lunatic e-mails (more than 100 each way), and the plans for the post-Calendar future (A Dictionary of Misprunts, for example, or the 4D crossword, where even if you've worked out the solution you can't enter it into the grid until a week last Tuesday or 4018AD.)

We are all on tenterhooks now. Will Doc get his clues in before the deadline? Will Sirius get on the telly? Can the make-up people do miracles? Will Sirius have time to build his mock-ups and sort out the PayPal arrangements? Will Sarah Montague (Today, R4) get cold feet? Will Jeremy Paxman relent, put on a silly hat, and engage in prattish stunts (that question isn’t rhetorical. It’s definitely a no-no. Dignity, and so forth. It’s a man’s thing)? Will Patrick Moore turn up and argue that Sirius isn’t really a star at all?

The children in need of the fruits of Sirius’s demented genius wait with bated breath.