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.