As we recall those unlived years

100 Years of Remembrance

2021 marks the centenary of the year (1921) when different elements of Remembrance were combined to create the traditions we know today: Armistice Day, the poppy symbol, the two-minute silence, the service for the Unknown Warrior and the march-past of veterans and dignitaries at monuments around the UK, including the Cenotaph in London. Regular readers will know my admiration for the Royal British Legion and much more about the history of Remebrance can be found on their website.

Past, present, future

What I always reflect on is how inclusive remembrance is: men, women, young, old, all ethnicities, nationalities, religions and backgrounds can find a home within an act of remembrance. White, purple, black and rainbow poppy wearers can find a home. Most significantly, the grieving can find a home, “a moment stolen for a tear.” Lest we forget, we need to remember…. It is a process that should be applied to all aspects of leadership and political life…. We need to know the past to understand the present and plan for a better future.

We shall remember them

BFBS

British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS UK) aims to provide TV, radio and internet entertainment and information to Britain’s Armed Forces and their dependents. They reach people around the globe and have permanent studios in (to date) 10 countries, as far afield as, for example, the Falkland Islands and Bahrain. They began in Algiers in 1943 and have consistently transmitted military news, live sport, and movies as well as material like the BBC’s children’s content to an increasing number of bases in remote settings and to families stationed at home and abroad.

Ernie Rowe

Ernie Rowe worked for 30 years at BFBS and penned her own poem in 2019 to add to the world’s growing collection of Remembrance poetry:

Remembered still those souls that tried

To save the world, but many died.

A moment stolen for a tear,

As we recall those unlived years.

The camaraderie that flew those souls

Back home to those they knew,

And loved them dear and held them close

But for our sakes released to foes

The silence that they leave behind

Is space to calm the troubled minds

Of those they loved – and can’t rewind.

Again this day we give our thanks

For those returned from serving ranks

And them ‘as gave it all away

Forever in our minds will stay.

Previous blogs featuring Remembrance as a theme:

• In Flanders field the poppies blow – Saturday 7th November 2015

• Falling Leaves Like Snowflakes – Wednesday 11th November 2015

• Harry’s Last Stand – Saturday 28th May 2016

• Bastille Day 2016 – Saturday 13th August 2016

• There but not there – Sunday 11th November 2018

• The Last Post – Monday 11th November 2019

• Lockdown VE Day (Blog 300) – Saturday 9th May 2020

• Autumn Rain – Saturday 7th November 2020

Hope the voyage is a long one

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

John Keats, in his famous Ode to Autumn, outlines, in three stanzas the abundant harvest of Autumn, then its hard-working processes and finally its descent into the potential of Winter…. whatever Winter means. Old age? Death? And Spring will surely come again….

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run….

I’ve just about emerged from the shadow of Covid and have my booster booked (go, me!) So, I find myself once again striding out to enjoy the burnished colours and low-lying sunlight of Autumn.

Hope the voyage is a long one

As well as Keats, I’ve recently reached for the words of a Greek poet I admire, Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, better known in English as CP Cavafy. I’ve pasted below one of his poems that reminds me to “not hurry the journey.” To savour the here and now. The poem’s title, Ithaka, refers to the island home of Odysseus, the hero/antihero who took ten years to reach Ithaka (and his wife) after leaving the Trojan War. Ithaka captures the idea that life is so fleeting (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter….) that it is important to savour the journey, not to only focus on the destination. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors has themes of loss, travel, searching, finding your identity and reunion and a joyous production I saw in an outdoor theatre in summer in Stratford-upon-Avon made its way on tour to the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford. Welcome to the north, Royal Shakespeare Company! It was an uplifting return to live theatre:

“after so long grief, such nativity.”

Moving, frantic, hilarious, inspiring. Like Keats, like Cavafy. May all your voyages be long.

Ithaka

by CP Cavafy

translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbours seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Worse b4 Better

61st Birthday One Week Later Than Planned.....

Birthday Redux

And so, dear reader, my previous blog explained that I contracted 

SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2)

aka Covid-19

and that I hijacked a Craig David song to explain the Week 1 journey which largely involved coughing and a sore throat. Well, Week 2 has not been the same and involved silent hypoxia (ie low oxygen levels without realising) and a feverish temperature. Floppy boneless limbs applied to both weeks. Covid is a peculiar disease:

• Some, like me, have an “OK” first week, a shocking second week and then recover
• Some people are asymptomatic and hardly know they’ve had it
• Some people deteriorate rapidly and die
• Some people become very ill for a long time
• Some people, like me, develop silent hypoxia from which you can recover (as I did) but which can alternatively lead to a sudden plummeting of health, becoming desperately breathless and hospitalisation 
• And there are many variations and gradations between.

I’m in the recovery stage now, building up stamina, breathing consciously and deeply, increasing the walking distance each day, resting between exertions….

Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif

It is written…. Nothing is written….

A highlight of sofa-flopping has been indulging in long movies – like the widescreen version of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a still astonishing feat of cinematography, editing and design with pitch-perfect performances, overwhelming music, and iconographic moments like the above entrance of Omar Sharif in the far distance, like a shimmering mirage; and the jump cut below between a burning match and the rising sun. Lawrence’s epic journey(s) through the burning deserts were a good match for how I felt dredging through my body’s responses to Covid-19. When William Potter burns himself extinguishing a match between his thumb and forefinger, he challenges Lawrence to explain “What’s the trick, then?” Lawrence answers: “The trick….is not minding that it hurts.”

Silenzio, Bruno

An altogether jolliier experience was the film that capped my delayed birthday – the Disney-Pixar film Luca, ravishingly animated and charmingly told. The themes were clear as an Italian blue sky: helicopter-parenting, family – both blood and constructed, unconventional-friendships, deceit, bullying, outsiders, prejudice, escape/freedom….

Autumn Rain

Age shall not weary them

In November 2018 I quoted the whole of Lawrence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen which contains the famous lines of remembrance:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 

At the going down of the sun and in the morning 

We will remember them.

Since then Peter Jackson’s colourised film of footage from the First World War (with a convincing modern audio soundtrack) has astonished and moved audiences who have seen it. Watch They shall not grow old if you can and imagine…. Just imagine….

Working-class “Priest of Love”
This year my chosen tribute to the Armed Forces and their sacrifices comes from the pen of D H Lawrence, mostly known for novels like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, all very different masterpieces. He was also a master craftsman of the short story e.g. The Rocking Horse Winner and Odour of Chrysanthemums. Less well known are the essays and journalism he wrote before, during and after the “Great War” revealing his characteristic humanity and his sympathy for ordinary men and women who were damaged or destroyed by the failure of diplomacy. Lawrence also wrote hundreds of poems and one less well-known poem is an evocation of both Autumn and a metaphor for dying soldiers. The short lines and random rhymes are like raindrops pattering. “Heaven’s fields” reference the Greek land of the dead where fallen heroes live in Elysium. In the imagery of the poem, leaves are mini-deaths who mingle with the seeds and earth to be resurrected (“caught up aloft”) and rain becomes tears and rain “echoes even” in rhymes with “grain…. pain…. slain…. pain…. falling as rain….”

Autumn Rain
by DH Lawrence (published February 1917, written the previous Autumn)

The plane leaves
fall black and wet
on the lawn;

the cloud sheaves
in heaven’s fields set
droop and are drawn

in falling seeds of rain;
the seed of heaven
on my face

falling — I hear again
like echoes even
that softly pace

heaven’s muffled floor,
the winds that tread
out all the grain

of tears, the store
harvested
in the sheaves of pain

caught up aloft:
the sheaves of dead
men that are slain

now winnowed soft
on the floor of heaven;
manna invisible

of all the pain
here to us given;
finely divisible
falling as rain.

Pumpkin Trail to Bolsover

The Pumpkin Trail
It’s Autumn:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.…

(sonnet 73)
People who know me, know I love Autumn: a fresh start for the new academic term (still feel it even after retiring from teaching); birthday month; ravishing colours in the world outside; wearing jumpers; lighting fires; wandering along the atmospheric Pumpkin Trail at Bolton Abbey estate (pictures above and below)

Metaphor of Autumn
The traditional poetic view of Autumn is that it represents the dying of the year, the Autumn of life, the descent into decay and transition towards Death…. Winter is coming.  I agree there’s something in the metaphor, though my Libran Pollyanna rose-tinted specs also sees and feels the following:

• Autumn leads to Advent to Winter to Christmas to New Year and it finally leads to Spring = good;
• the Autumn colours red, burgundy, purple, gold, orange, yellow, green, brown and beige scattered across a landscape = good;
• falling leaves like nature’s confetti = good;
• warmth of a real (controlled) fire = good;
• Bonfire Night and fireworks = good;
• cosy knitwear = good;
• snuggled up indoors, hunkering down with food, drink and TV = good 

Golden Age of TV?
Everybody has an opinion about pinpointing the golden age of TV. In the 1960s I was breathless with excitement at the cliffhangers at the end of each Batman episode and had many a dream of Cathy Gale and Emma Peel in The Avengers. Was anybody as thrilled as me in the 1970s at being allowed to (once a week) stay up and watch Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R or Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius? Or the camp excesses of Dynasty or the stately poignancy of Brideshead Revisited in the 1980s? Was the 1990s the Golden Age with the first run of (weekly) showings of Friends or the weird compulsive cult of (the first season of) Twin Peaks? I could keep going, but it’s clear to me that this Autumn, in Covid Full-Semi-or-Partial-Lockdown, I’m grateful that there is so much choice on TV that it is easy to find something to while away the hours, conversing with the flowers, consulting with the bees. No such thing as a Golden Age since creative talents have always produced good stuff, but today there is a (happy) glut of choice.

How can all these things happen to just one person? 
My “birthday season” viewing has included the glorious 1938 Bringing Up Baby (from which the sub-heading above is one of a hundred quotable lines) with the astonishing Katherine Hepburn at the top of her game, and Cary Grant in one of his finest unfettered performances. I also chose to watch Tom & Kelly & Val & Anthony & Tom taking breaths away in the retro jetplane-porn of 1986’s Top Gun. And for binge-watching I'm watching Goose from Top Gun (that’s Anthony Edwards aka Mark Greene) leading the ensemble cast of the early seasons of ahead-of-its-time ER; but as a bedtime digestif, to reassure myself that everyone can adapt to change, I like to visit Schitt’s Creek, where Moira is proving to be my touchstone of taste and dignity….

Jigsaws, Meals out, Walks
I continue to puzzle through Autumn. For me, jigsaws have been a lifelong activity, not just a lockdown one. And Katherine Hepburn appears on my current jigsaw with Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter along with my own face and snapshots of selected loved ones from “The Harry Potter Film Club” and beyond. Above also features snaps of The Terrace in Saltaire, another local venue for lovely grub. And below our socially distanced birthday walk with our adopted family from Badby, this time meeting at Bolsover Castle for a wet and misty meander through muddy Derbyshire.

One man in his time plays many parts

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school.

And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.

Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth.

And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances.

And so he plays his part.

The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound.

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

No Time Like The Present

 

Approaching 60: Carpe Diem.

Whatever gets you through the night

Carpe Diem has had a new potency in these unstable times – seizing the day, appreciating the moment, living in the present. (As someone once said….) Plan like you’re going to live forever; live like you’re going to die tomorrow. The Covid-19 pandemic and its fatalities, casualties, pressures, ripple-effect economic blights and uncertainties conspire to to drag hearts and souls into the abyss of despondency. On the other hand, Captain Tom Moore, Marcus Rashford, Jacinda Ardern and millions more people have lifted our aspirations towards a better world. In some ways, I have no idea where Time has gone since the middle of February 2020 when Coronovirus started being publicised internationally. Pre-Covid seems like 10 years ago. Copying Dickens’s opening to A Tale of Two Cities, (as I have done more than once in this blog) the past year has been “the best of times…. the worst of times…. wisdom…. foolishness…. belief…. incredulity…. light…. darkness…. hope…. despair…. we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way….” And when I publish my next new post, I’ll be 60 years of age. Carpe Diem. In 1790, John Trusler, compiling proverbs, glossed the title of today’s post with “No time like the present, a thousand unforeseen circumstances may interrupt you at a future time.” So true.

Rainbows to Trumpkin, Sense to Nonsense

Yearly trick of looking new

Spring turns to Summer
As night follows day and age follows youth, so the seasons move along whether or not we humans are loving, reproducing, fighting infection or dying. Walls fall, buildings fall, whole cities and empires fall. But, for now at least, the flowers and plants and trees continue to grow, Earth turns, and after the dark comes the dawn. Further lockdown measures have been “eased” and the crowds (mostly socially distancing, but not always) are returning to beauty spots. After Summer, the Autumn will come, and Winter will be here anon. In the meantime, Phllip Larkin’s poem The Trees has been on my mind on recent walks.

Yearly trick of looking new

The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Loving Vincent

What is done in love

It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done. (Vincent Van Gogh)

York St Mary’s

The life, letters and artworks of Vincent Van Gogh were the subject of an “Immersive Experience” at York St Mary’s Church not far from the Jorkvik Centre. The exhibition arrived in York on its world tour from Naples and Brussels and will next touch down in Leicester. As well as digital projections, animations, lights, displays and audio components, there was a Virtual Reality experience which gave an impression of walking through the streets of Arles seeing inspirations for paintings: the wheat fields, the meadow, the forest, the village, Vincent’s room and a starry night over the Rhône River.

Seeing the stars

I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream. (Vincent Van Gogh)

Life in brief

Van Gogh was born in March 1853 in the Dutch village of Groot-Zundert and worked as an art dealer before taking up painting in his twenties. He produced over 2,000 artworks including around 850 oil paintings. He died in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, two days after receiving a gunshot wound to the abdomen.

Death may not be the most difficult thing

In the life of the painter, death may perhaps not be the most difficult thing. For myself, I declare I don't know anything about it. But the sight of the stars always makes me dream. Why I say to myself should those spots of light in the firmament be inaccessible to us? (Vincent Van Gogh)

Letter writer and artistic philosopher

An exploration of Van Gogh is enriched by reading the letters he wrote, many to his younger brother, Theo. In the letters he often commented on his own work, his ideas about colour and materials, art in general, his personal situation and his own life.

Life’s treasures

Close friends are truly life's treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone. (Vincent Van Gogh)

Nature’s resistance

Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who takes it seriously will not be put off by that opposition. (Vincent Van Gogh)

The language of colour

Colour itself speaks its own language, you cannot live without it. (Vincent Van Gogh)

Pure harmony and music

What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum. (Vincent Van Gogh)

Loving Vincent

In 2017, the world’s first fully painted animated feature, Loving Vincent, gave a fictionalised account of a conflicting story about the death of Van Gogh in July 1890. He certainly died of a gunshot wound but why the wound was not treated in a hospital and whether or not it was self-inflicted, or a grotesque accident, are mysteries that are unlikely to ever be solved and which the film explores using words of all the main protagonists. 

Courage

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? (Vincent Van Gogh)

Painting dreams

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream. (Vincent Van Gogh)