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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.

Woe! Woe! and thrice Woe!

If I is to start this post by quoting thou a line of verse, will thee forgive I?  This line what I quoteth are practically unique, and on Thursday last some of we had to sing he no less than three time: 

"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.'"

This contemptible couplet (or quatrain) comes (or cometh) from a recent, and quite otiose, translation of the 14thC poem "Angelus ad Virginem". Dost, my friend, or do you, my friends, know it?  Dost raise thy cap to it, friend, or at it thine eyebrows?

What utter, abject, ill-informed, meretricious drivel it is, this stuff.

What I am talking about, if you haven't already twigged, is what happens when ignorance, in this instance of the use of the mediaeval suffixes -eth and -est, is no bar to publication. The supposedly archaic English of these quoted lines is utterly, mind-bogglingly, breathtakingly, bogus.  It would be funny in Up Pompeii! or a Carry On film, but in a purported translation of a fine Latin poem - published, mark you, and no doubt copyrighted to the hilt - it makes you a) squirm with embarrassment when you have to sing it, and b) wonder why you bothered learning anything at all when people can get away with writing tripe like this.

It takes about fifteen seconds to learn about the two mediaeval suffixes and the correct use of thou and thee.  It isn't something to argue about - there is a right way and a wrong way, period, full stop.  So if you get it wrong in the public prints you proclaim yourself to be a twit and a laughing-stock and precisely the type for whom the pillory was invented, and serve you jolly well right when you get a faceful of rotten tomatoes and a pageful of contumely.

There is even more of this sort of linguistic bilge in the same volume: sentences which don't have a main verb; strings of ecstatic utterances which lack any sort of coherence and make you wonder what the writer had been sniffing; a description of the infant in the manger as a "love-child", a term which has rather a different meaning in colloquial English; and other horrors.  There is so much good Christmas poetry, and good Christmas verse, that we need illiterate and poorly written doggerel as much as we need three left shoes to the pair.

But the truly awful thing is that this is a book of Christmas music and words - from a major publishing house that really ought to know better - that is aimed at schools, as though children are too stupid and pig-higgerant to know any different, or care.  I rant, and I hope will continue to rant until I'm 110, about the mediocrity of much of the language and music used in churches today, and for one good reason - I really do believe that only the very best that we can offer is good enough for God.  But don't children deserve the very best we can offer, as well?  There is a wonderful Latin phrase coined by the philosopher John Locke - tabula rasa.  It means "scraped slate" - a writing tablet cleaned and ready newly to be inscribed, with words that inspire, and give cause to aspire, and excite curiosity, and educe.  Fill that slate with pap and illiterate nonsense if we will, but don't let us then moan that today's young people are ill-educated, because we only have ourselves to blame, as parents, as teachers, as guides and mentors - and as publishers.

 Now you might think that it doesn't matter all that much if someone who earns a living by his (or her) use of language gets it wrong occasionally, in the same way that it doesn't matter all that much if the gas man (or woman) looks for your leak with the aid of a candle.  We have become inured to mediocrity and incompetence: they have become a way of life, and we have lost our righteous and rightful anger (for which, you will remember, that is ample precedent in the New Testament - see Matthew, 21:12.)  I am rather fond of the expression dumbing down, but I offer another useful little phrase that sums it all up: educational entropy.  Entropy happens when the universe runs out of steam and starts to degrade.  Educational entropy happens when every successive generation of children - whence cometh the future teacher and parent - knows a little less than its predecessor.  Amen.

 

"When ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise" - Thomas Gray

 

 

 

 

 

It's a Small World

I bet you a pound to a penny that you know somebody who knows somebody whose sister/brother/auntie/dog has a friend who used to be on Corrers or Emmers. It is a statistical certainty, as inescapably true as the fact that most people in Wales have more than the average number of legs*, as pointed out in a letter to The Times by my dear brother Bertie. It is also very probable (a 70.6% chance) that in any class of 30 children there will be two with the same birthday. I mean, imagine a class of 366. What are the chances that all of them will have a different birthday? The odds are astronomically against. Well, this sort of stuff ties my poor head up in knots, for maths and I, as well as Latin and Greek and I, decided at a very early age that we were never going to get married, so we parted company.

Bertie, on the other hand, does Latin, and maths, and statistics, and clever stuff like that; he was a Vicar Choral or Lay Clerk (ie he sang in a cathedral choir) for 20 years, and when he lived in Mauritius he actually had servants. And yes, both of us know people who know people who know people who were on Corrers or Emmers, or even both, for I can’t tell them apart any more, what with all those villains from the Smoke getting in on what used to be an essentially northern act.

The thing about chaps who’ve done time in cathedral choirs is that they tend to look down upon us oafs who’ve lived rough in parish church choirs all our lives. Cathedral choir chaps are always called Nigel or Jeremy or Miles; they never fidget or scratch their bottoms during the sermon; and when they go to the pub (or “hostelry”) they don’t talk about football or ladies, because they are too busy comparing the relative merits of Smidgeon in E-flat and Turgid in F, and, worst of all, they are inclined to drink Pimms, whereas your average parish choir chap is content with a pint of brown and mild and is far more likely to have heard of Mantovani than Monteverdi.

I know I keep mentioning Wales, but please bear with me, all you nice Welsh people whom we English don’t think should be allowed to speak your own language in your own country because we imagine you’re talking about us behind our backs, for there is a good reason.

How often do you hear some bonehead on the telly talk about somewhere being “five times the size of Wales”, or for that matter “ten times the size of Wembley Stadium”? Have you actually measured Wales, or even Wembley Stadium, recently? I haven’t. At least Wembley Stadium is sort of oblong so I supposed I could do a quick calculation, but Wales? Wales is a funny shape, with bits sticking out all over the place, like the Lleyn peninsula and Anglesey. I have absolutely no idea how big Wales is, nor how many Wembley Stadia would fit therein, or why anyone would want to. Why can’t telly people say “a million square miles” or “a thousand acres”, if that’s what they mean? That at least is precise, and I can understand it.

But if we’re going to talk about precision - there are times when it most definitely is NOT wanted. It tickles me when newspapers (especially) feel obliged to convert from one measuring system to another that’s more familiar. It usually produces rubbish like this:

“Mr Crump is reputed to have earned more than $1m (£631,402.49) last year alone.”

Or: “The villain is thought to be 6ft tall (1.8288m)...”

And as for crime figures - well! You can bury anything, or frighten everyone, by the clever - or ignorant, more likely - use of statistics.

“200% rise in burglaries - police baffled.”

Well, that could mean three burglaries compared with one last year in Lancaster (good news) or 3,000 in Knotty End compared with 1,000 (bad news.)

And would somebody please tell telly people that the difference between 50% and 51% is not 1%, but one percentage point? A 1% drop in a bank rate of 4% gives a new rate of 3.96%. A one percentage point drop gives a new rate of 3%.

But to return to the point about all of us knowing someone who knows someone whose auntie/sister/dachshund was once in Corrers (or Emmers). Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? What with all those disasters happening all the time and characters being wiped out at a rate at least equal to the murder rate in Midsomer, the turnover in casts must be enormous and it won’t be long before it’s our turn.

And if you do get on the telly before me - don't forget your handbag, but leave your brain at home. You might need your handbag.

*It only takes one person in Wales to have fewer legs than the customary two to bring the average number of legs per Welsh person to 1.9999999... So Welsh people with two legs have more than the average allowance.