I will be your treasure

Detectorists
I was late to discover this gem of a BBC comedy series but became enamoured at a perfect time: my birthday month. Mackenzie Crook directed and wrote (with Andrew Ellard) this 19-episode masterpiece of friendship, love, hobbying, history, rural life and the search for Anglo-Saxon gold. The writing is understated but underpinned with quotable lines:

• We’re time travellers
• Nostalgia conventions aren’t what they used to be
• Ring pull…83… Tizer…
• Surprisingly bland
• What you’ve got going for you now is that she’s met you, Lance….
• Will you search through the loamy earth for me?

What do I love about it?
It’s a series that presents profound themes in a deceptively light-hearted way. The use of the music by Johnny Flynn and Dan Michaelson connects characters and motifs. (A brilliant cameo song by The Unthanks sisters (Magpie) punctuates a key episode in series 3.) The production values, acting and authenticity to its original premise remain loving and attentive. Lies are told, confrontations occur, but redemption happens, the truth comes out and life moves on. The huge dramas remain buried (in the loamy earth) or are in the distance, fleetingly glimpsed. I was lucky to see Mackenzie Crook live on stage in the brilliant Jez Butterworth play, Jerusalem, a work which reminded me of why I love England; and Detectorists has a similar feel, connecting to ancient truths about tolerance and acceptance, the mongrel nature of our society and how precious is the land beneath our feet. We must learn from history and nature and be better people – there’s a truth to the gold of ordinary lives…. If you’ve yet to discover Detectorists, I envy the treasures waiting for you….

I will be your treasure
The theme song (composed and sung by Johnny Flynn) contains all the themes about digging for the truth of what matters in life and how patience is a true virtue. The compassion and kindness riddling through the seams of Detectorists are patterned into pairings who are all given perfect TV moments:

• Andy and Lance (Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones)
• Andy and Becky (MC with Rachael Stirling)
• Andy and Veronica (MC with Diana Rigg)
• Lance and Maggie (TJ with Lucy Benjamin)
• Lance and Sophie (TJ with Aimee-Ffion Edwards)
• Lance and Kate (TJ with Alexa Davies)
• Lance and Toni (TJ with Rebecca Callard)

And there are telling moments between each pair variation; I’m thinking here of the arc between Rachael Stirling’s Becky and Rebecca Callard’s Toni and their scene under a tree in the final episode. If Andy and Lance are the centre of the show, all the other characters are equally vivid:

• Maggie and Tony (Lucy Benjamin and Adam Riches)
• Art and Paul (Simon Farnaby and Paul Casar), aka Terra Firma, aka Dirt Sharks, aka AntiquiSearchers, aka Simon and Garfunkel

Danebury Metal Detector Club
Then there is the rest of the club, genius characters all (hats off to the casting by Catherine Willis):

• Terry and Sheila (Gerald Horan and the sublime Sophie Thompson)
• Louise and Varde (Laura Checkley and Orion Ben)
• Russell and Hugh (Pearce Quigley and Divian Ladwa)

Detectorists is a character-driven show, though the setting (Framlingham pretending to be Danebury) is also memorable with exquisite shots of the countryside and its creatures, including some memorable aerial shots, by the technical team led by cinematographers Jamie Cairney (13 episodes), Mattias Nyberg (6 episodes) and John Sorapure (1 episode) and editor Colin Fair (all 19 episodes.)

Singer (and actor) Johnny Flynn plus Mark Rylance and Mackenzie Crook in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem

Full lyrics for Johnny Flynn’s theme song (click here to hear him sing it)
Will you search through the loamy earth for me
Climb through the briar and bramble
I will be your treasure

I felt the touch of the kings and the breath of the wind
I knew the call of all the song birds
They sang all the wrong words
I'm waiting for you, I'm waiting for you

Will you swim through the briny sea for me
Roll along the ocean's floor
I will be your treasure

I'm with the ghosts of the men who can never sing again
There's a place follow me
Where a love lost at sea
Is waiting for you, is waiting for you

Would you drift o’er the rolling fields for me
Hoard me in the highest bough
I will be your treasure

But in history’s rhyme there’s a place and a time
And a truth to the gold
That the folds cannot hold
I’m waiting for you, I’m waiting for you

Clothe yourself with love

Bride Lisa, dad Terry, groom Dan

Mr and Mrs Senior

I was proud on Saturday 16th April 2016 (16.4.16 – a neat date!) to attend the wedding of my god-daughter, Lisa Marie Billington. She married Daniel James Senior at Trinity Church in Ossett. The church is a lovely building dating from 1806 and was completed in its present form in 1865. Apart from the fabulous windows, the church has famous bells and three pieces of Robert Thompon's Mouseman furniture.

Trinity Church, Ossett

Wedding sounds

Music included The Flower Duet from Delibe’s Lakmé, Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (!), Gwendoline Nimmo singing Psalm 23, The Lord is My Shepherd, Daniel Beaumont playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune and hymns Love Divine All Loves Excelling and Blake's and Parry's mighty Jerusalem. I cannot be cynical about marriage and have blissfully blogged about it more than once.

Dan, Lisa, cousin Ann and Terry, me, Sally, sister Teresa and her family, Mick and Jessica, super-stylish Logan and Eliana stealing the show and the Reverend Clive Hicks

One feast, one house, one mutual happiness

Lisa and Dan: two joyful people, two delicious grins, two beating hearts filled with infectious optimism as they embark on their voyage together. They have, like many people, had bruising times in the past so the day’s happiness was all the sweeter. The aptly-named Valentine ends Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona with the words in the sub-heading – “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness” – and Juliet’s words from Romeo and Juliet are always worth quoting when love is in the air (especially in the week I’m celebrating the quadricentenary of Shakespeare’s passing):

My bounty is as boundless as the sea
My love as deep. The more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.

Whenever I look up, there will be you

Shakespeare had a lot to say about love but I also enjoyed Dan’s mum reading an Irish blessing and the words adapted from the dialogue of Gabriel Oak, that steadfast rock of a character (a character that amateur performer Dan could certainly play), in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd:

We are all on our own paths, all on our own journeys. Sometimes the paths cross, and people arrive at the crossing points at the same time and meet each other. There are greetings, pleasantries are exchanged, and then they move on. But then once in a while the pleasantries become more, friendship grows, deeper links are made, hands are joined and love flies. The friendship has turned into love…. At home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be. And whenever I look up, there will be you.

Terry, Logan and Ann

May the road rise to meet you (Irish blessing)

May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields
And, until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

Reading from Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians

God loves you so your new life should be like this: clothe yourself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults and forgive each other. If you feel someone has wronged you, forgive them. Forgive others because the Lord forgave you.

Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. Always be thankful. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom Christ gives. Sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts.

Reception at Hotel St Pierre

From Shakespeare’s King John:

He is the half part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such as she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.

Lisa's grandparents, two halves of one whole, and my Mum, ever present at family events

Provoking the Desire

Plenty of Henrys

Like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, another vivid image of an English drinker is Henry VIII. He was clearly a man of enormous appetites. He loved wine and ale, not to mention food, sport, music and women. There have been plenty of fictional Henry VIIIs apart from Shakespeare’s version in All Is True. Hilary Mantel created a vivid Henry in Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, as did Philippa Gregory in The Other Boleyn Girl. I also vividly remember Keith Michell in 1970 in the BBC’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Richard Burton in 1969 in Anne of the Thousand Days and Robert Shaw dueling with Paul Scofield as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons in 1966.  Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in The Tudors, Sid James in Carry on Henry and Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII have all made their mark in popular culture.

Richard Burton, Robert Shaw, Charles Laughton, Richard Griffiths, Nat Parker, Keith Michell, Damien Lewis

A few other vivid drinkers in Literature

Michael Henchard in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge starts the novel sozzled in Furmity (milk and raisins mixed with rum) – and then promptly sells his wife to a sailor, a startling beginning to a novel. Dick Diver in F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night – starts as a successful playboy and ends in a drunken stupor. On stage Maggie and Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are earlier incarnations in their drinking battles of Martha and George from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf; both are memorable and sympathetic couples, in spite of their intoxication. Dickens created the unforgettable image in A Tale of Two Cities of the Parisians desperately lapping up spilled wine in the streets and even squeezing wine-soaked handkerchiefs into the mouths of infants, prefiguring the later puddles of guillotine blood. He also gave us the tragic Mrs Blackpool’s alcoholism in Hard Times and the comic Mrs Gamp’s gin-swilling in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Mrs Blackpool and Mrs Gamp

Days of dirty water

Where does the British love of alcohol come from? In medieval times alcohol was indispensible because safe drinking water was a rare commodity. If you lived near a source of fresh spring water you were lucky but most medieval folk (rich and poor alike) relied on:

• home or locally-brewed concoctions of weak or strong wine 
• mead (using honey or fruits)
• cider (using different fruits) and
• different kinds of ale or beer. Beer had many variations by the time of the guzzling Tudors and nicknames inevitably sprouted, for example: 
• mad dog beer
• dagger ale
• tooth rot brew
• dragon’s milk
• double double beer (double double beer was eventually banned by Elizabeth I as it caused such riotous behaviour by all accounts; an early example of prohibition)
  

  Wine, women and song

Heavy drinking and drunken revelry is not a modern phenomenon: there are references to bacchanalian orgies of drinking in classical Greece and Rome; we know that the Chinese developed rice wines in ancient dynasties; the Vikings enjoyed pouring horns of plenty into their gullets; and even Noah in the Bible inspired artistic depictions of his fall from grace after too much celebration following the appearance of the rainbow.

The First Hangover (Genesis 18 – 24)

Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japeth came out of the ark…. and from them the whole earth was populated. Noah, a farmer, made a new start and planted a vineyard. He drank too much of the wine, became drunk, took off his clothes and lay down in the middle of his tent. Ham, Canaan’s father, walked into the tent and saw his father’s genitals and told his two brothers who were outside. Shem and Japeth took a large robe, threw it over their shoulders, walked backward, and covered their naked father without looking at him because they turned away. When Noah sobered up from his wine, he discovered what his youngest son had seen...

The Drunkenness of Noah by Bernardo Cavalino

“It provokes the desire but takes away the performance….”

So spake the Porter in Macbeth.

“Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things . . . nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.”

Times past and times present are not that different in terms of alcohol. It can lead to disaster, violence and death in some cases. It can also lead to happy times of great joy. On the one hand it’s a toxic, calorific, liver-destroying, addictive, hangover-provoking, sleep-disrupting activity that affects your judgement, perception and performance. On the other hand it can reduce stress, reveal truths, dilate blood vessels, promote socializing, improve the taste and digestion of meals, enhance friendship and lead to a more contented state of mind. I suppose you need to choose your drinking companions and moderate your intake. Then all will be well with the world. Cheers.