Day of the Triffids

Dunno where they got all the extras from. The St Neots Second XI Darts League Knitting Circle, at a guess. Choreography of crowd scenes straight out of The Muppets.

Those of us whose childhood was chilled by John Wyndham's Kraken and the one with the blond kids with glassy eyes, not to mention Nigel Kneale's Quatermasses in black and white, the ones with the wobbly cardboard sets, are completely baffled by tonight's genetic modification of the Triffids book. It was obviously made for the X-Box, X-Factor generation for plot is completely subservient to action and SFX.

It must have cost a fortune to make, but, like Wicker Man, it's going to become a cult classic of pure ham and misjudgement.

Can't wait to see the concluding part tomorrow - of Hamlet on Ice - the Musical.

The O Antiphons

If we were having Vespers this evening, we would be saying or singing the first of the seven O Antiphons, O Sapientia, just before the Magnificat, today being 17 December, the first day within the octave of Christmas. Tomorrow it's O Adonai. The texts are of twofold importance - the opening of each antiphon is a title for the Messiah, and all are taken from the prophecies of Isaiah. The hymn O come, O come, Emmanuel is a poetic expression of the antiphons.

The sequence was cunningly arranged by the Benedictines, so that the first letter of the second word of each, taken in reverse order, spells out 'Ero cras' (tomorrow I will come).

More on that symbolism here:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0374.html

We don't make so much of the O Antiphons in the CofE, although we did once add an eighth, O Virgo virginum, to form the acrostic 'Vero cras' (truly, tomorrow), though that one was ditched in 2000 with the publication of Common Worship.

A pity, though, that in translation the acrostic doesn't work any more. Perhaps nobody had noticed.

Where the bee sucks

Now I do have to reverse the uninformed opinions of 30 years or so, and say unequivocally that if Gordon Sumner happens to be passing through Knotty End (especially if Mrs Sumner is with him) there is a chilled bottle of Moët waiting (we've had it years - hope it hasn't gorn orf), a prawn curry with all the trimmings, and an unreserved apology for once calling him a 'bloody pop singer.'

Gordon is contemptuous of humiliation-TV (specifically, the X-Factor), and the appalling state of musical education for youngsters in the UK, where expectations of what children can actually do are so cringeingly low. Egad - we are of like mind!

Tell you what, Gordon - I'll buy another copy of your Dowland CD to replace the one I broke by accidentally stamping it to death, and I promise this time to listen to it with a more open mind, if you'll persuade Mrs S. not to bring the camel when you drop by. Well, fair's fair.

The evangelising Christian Institute, not a body which you could ever accuse of being non-fundamentalist, is cock-a-hoop because two hoteliers have been 'cleared' of offences with which they had been charged under legislation normally used to dole out ASBOs - offences against public order.

The fact that this case was ever brought to court, and under this particular bit of legislation, is a disgrace. It was not a clash of faiths, but of personalities, and hoteliers who want to stay in business need to remember that the paying guest is always right.

The baying mob of placard-waving hirelings demonstrating outside the court do no service to Christianity, but serve only to further the twin causes of secularism and barbarism, which thoughtful Muslims as well as thoughtful Christians and Jews - people of the great Abrahamic faiths - fear and despise.

So once again the zealots have handed a great story to an increasingly secular and sneering press. Well, jolly well done, CI. Where did you all go to school? Little Rock?

For 'secular and sneering' I slightly misquote Richard Morrison, Times columnist and music critic, but his piece today is well worth reading.

Trailers in books

"I say, Jeeves. Look at this!"

"Sir?"

"In this bally book I'm reading, Jeeves. Curve the spine, lower the optics, and take a hook of the proverbial butcher."

"Yes, Sir. It appears to be Page 1 of a novelette, Sir, or so I infer from the presence of the numeral 1 at the bottom of the page."

"Yes, but dash it, Jeeves. I've just read the bally book, and pretty spiffing it was too, but there's a bit of another book here, yet the publishers, no doubt on the advice of their attorneys or their accountants, have only given the first chapter."

"Indeed Sir. If I might elucidate?"

"Pray do, old chap. If there's one thing about you, Jeeves, it's the old grey matter. Never been known to fail, what? My ear is at your disposal. Out with it, then. Agog is what I am all, not to mention at the bit champing."

"You are too kind, Sir. It would appear that your eye has stumbled across what is known in the lower echelons of the publishing trade as a Tizer."

"A what, Jeeves. What's orange pop got to do with this stuff at the end of my book? Elucidate on, there's a good chap."

"A Tizer, Sir. A regrettable contraction of the noun 'appetiser', or possibly 'enticer' - scholars are divided upon the precise derivation. If I might put it in plain words - fearing that its readers might desert to more reputable houses, the publisher in question has adopted a device more commonly encountered in the Television; the, ahem, Trailer."

"Well, dash it all, Jeeves, I mean to say. I bet that chap you're always on about, that Shakespeare chappie, didn't blot the last page of Romeo and Juliet and then think 'I'll just bung in a chunk of Julius Caesar for good measure.' I mean, when all's said and done, when is a book not a book? Who said that, Jeeves?"

"I believe that you are the first to put it in that particular nutshell, Sir. Rem, as I have so frequently had course to remark, acu tetigisti. And if I might say so, you have turned a phrase that verges upon the sublimely epigrammatic."

"Gosh. Well, if you say so, Jeeves. Sublimely epigrammatic, what? Must write that down. Meanwhile, my faithful old retainer, what do you think I should do with this book?

"It is hardly for me to say, Sir, but Cook has been complaining that the kitchen fire has been proving recalcitrant in the ignition phase of late. If you would allow me, Sir...?"

"What, burn it? Burn a book, Jeeves? Never thought I'd hear those words from your learned fish and chips."

"But as you so neatly put it, Sir, When is a book not a book? This object, I venture to suggest, is, without argument, a non-book, and as such it has no place upon the Wooster shelves."

"You win, Jeeves. Daresay you're right, as usual. Here you are then. Take it away and do with it what you will."

"Indeed Sir. And thank you Sir. Generations of future bibliophiles will undoubtedly be indebted to you, as will Cook."

"Bibbly-what? Oh never mind. Right then, toddle off and do the dastardly deed. Oh, and Jeeves..."

"Sir?"

"About that hat. The one with the purple feathers. You might as well take that to Cook, as well."

"A very wise decision, Sir, if I might say so."

"You might, Jeeves. You jolly well might, at that."

Novus Ordo, geetars, and RC bling

I just couldn't resist this one - Damian Thompson at his wittiest.

But just listen to the baying of cousin Francis's hounds in the Responses - and start worrying.

Parish Mag, December

Valiant readers in such far-away place as Hamilton (Scotland, not Bermuda) and Valparaiso (a parish a bit west of Betwys-y-Coed) are always complaining that our parish mag doesn't always reach them, and remind me that this blog was started to accommodate the stuff that tickled them under the kilt (or poncho) but which my (highly esteemed) editor frequently sees fit to spike, even though many parishioners claim it is only thing which helps them survive four sermons. (Well, OK then, two parishioners, but it's a start.)

Amazingly, this piece made it into the December mag, while other far more worthy pieces didn't.

By the time you read this I am going to be heartily sick of Christmas carols, or at least the sort of stuff that shops start blaring out at you from about the week after Easter. In fact the sooner someone invents a carol-cancelling ear-muff for shoppers the better, as far as I am concerned.

The reason you become a grumpy old git is that you’ve been around long enough for things to get on your wick, like for instance greengrocers apostrophe’s, income tax returns, anything to do with the NHS, the adulation of blokes who kick balls round fields for a living, and, worst of all, syrupy versions of Little perishing Donkey blasted out of tinny speakers in shop doorways when you are unfortunate enough to have had to to nip out to purchase a seasonal cabbage or something for your tea.

It is therefore always a joy (to this GOG, anyway) to discover a carol you haven’t already heard and sung 93 trillion times before, and so I have made it my life’s work to track down those elusive carols, or at least carols unknown in the English-speaking world, which don’t ever use the words Wenceslas, Herald, or Figgy Pudding.

The carols of a nation tell you something about the national character. Austrian carols sound like an oompah band. Scandinavian carols are extremely serious and can give you frostbite. French carols are un peu gamin and flirty, and I imagine carols as a genre are frooned on a wee bittie in the Ooter Hebrides. Heaven only knows if they have carols in Wales, but if they do they’ll be written in the style of Handel for a choir of a thousand (and there’ll be lots of repeats.)

My favourites, actually, are Polish carols. We sing one in England, Infant Holy, although the original is even more ambiguous about where the musical stresses should be, and the better for it.

In choirs in England we’re quite used to new harmonisations of traditional carols, and the melody is always left strictly alone. But the curious thing about Polish carols is that the tune is often changed as well as the harmony, though the essential character of every koleda is always retained. A friend at the University of Warsaw, who was very knowledgeable about the old language still used in the texts of some traditional Polish carols, warned me that these texts are pretty much untranslatable. They also use a couple of characters from old Church Slavonic which don’t appear in the fonts your home computer comes equipped with (even in Poland), so preparing performing editions for an English choir was a nightmare, but between us we did it. Two carols made their English debut at a service in West Yorkshire in 199-something, and I thought the choir made a pretty good job of the phonetic language Anna and I had worked out between us. A Polish lady in the congregation was greatly moved by the music of her familiar old carols. But she thought the choir had sung them in Welsh.

Oh, and but. As well as having the best carols in the world, Poland has the best strawberries. Or so lovely Anna says, in her impeccable English.