Glad All Over

Thousands of thunderous claps

About a recent graduation day I’ve got little to say. Neither has Sally. Those who know us, know how profoundly proud we are of both our daughters. But this day… oh, on this graduation day… there was such a realisation… oh my… And I’m feeling Glad All Over.

Don’t mention the….

And the Vice-chancellor mentioned the pandemic and used Hashtag Hero Tropes (LOL). But she did avoid mentioning the (historically unprecedented) forthcoming strikes by health professional (and many other hard-working groups of people.) Wasn’t it funny how the government helped settle the lawyers’ strike in October with very little press attention? (Look it up if you don’t believe me.) Wasn’t it funny how MPs received a no-dispute, guaranteed 2.7% increase? Wasn’t it funny how big industries paid bonuses to their shareholders? Wasn’t it funny how PPE contracts were awarded to…. Oh, shut up. What's most important?

Looking the other way

There are people who spend countless hours gnashing teeth because of some royal nonsense (and I’m a royalist, don’t forget) because the newspapers want us to focus our rage on celebrities and not on government decisions (or lack of decisions.) The government (and the majority of the newspapers) want us to focus on Meghan and Harry. So we will forget food banks, child poverty, the rotting fruit and vegetable fields of England and the understaffed, underfunded social care system and understaffed, underfunded NHS. Look the other way, everybody. We’re in this together. But just because it’s my blog, please see below:

• the Brexit bus promise (lest we forget) (LOL)
• UK hospital beds compared to Germany, France, Italy, Spain (2005 – 2019)
• a right-wing newspaper doing my statistical work for me
• UK Food Bank use (just Trussell, not independent) (2009 – 2022)
• MP’s salaries (2010 – 2022)

I’m Glad All Over for my Echo Chamber, but Distinctly Unglad for our (Potentially) Great (Diminishing) Nation.

Graphs: hospital beds, food bank use in UK, MP's salaries over time

Coral

Garden Cottage at Nun Monkton

Garden Cottage

For our (Coral) wedding anniversary we returned to a tiny AirBnB where we stayed in 2019 (when visiting the Yorkshire Heart Vineyard). The oasis “Garden Cottage” is not far from York along a road going only to a remote village where cows graze freely on the village green, a green skewered by the fattest, tallest maypole I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few, madam. Nun Monkton is the name of the village. The garden hummed with insects and wrapped us in its verdant peace. The dawn chorus was full of beauty.

Alice Hawthorne Inn

Alice Hawthorne

Nun Monkton is also home to the Alice Hawthorne Inn where we ate two nights in a row, the first with long-while friends, Sue and Brian. Stoked by delicious food (Crab Mayo, Roast Beetroot, Popcorn Prawns, Yorkshire Dales Lamb, Waterford Farm Steak, Sticky Toffee Pudding, Crème Catalan, Mini Sundae), the venue felt safe and welcoming.

Beningbrough Hall Estate

In The Moment

Our anniversary hike was around the nearby Beningbrough Hall Estate, alongside the River Ouse for much of the time, picking over gnarly roots and picnicking on tree stumps. Cooling forest sections on the walk provided welcome shelter. The house had an indoor exhibition (In The Moment: the art of wellbeing) aimed at reminding viewers to stand and stare, to pause, to slow down, to reflect, to be in the moment. Some of the pieces achieved that (for me) more than others but, on a hot day, it certainly slowed down the old heart rate.

Food and Nature

Amidst medical/political uncertainty and the competing noises of the media, some constants Remain True. The sights, sounds, smells and colours of nature continue to enchant. And eating, drinking and being merry all continue to drown out the stresses of the age. The messages about the “roadmap” towards “Freedom Day” Remain Confusing: Be Free/Be Cautious, Be Released/Continue Shielding, Do/Don’t/Maybe Wear Masks, Do/Don’t/Maybe Socially Distance, Go on holiday to a Red/Amber/AmberPlus/Green/GreenPlus Country/Staycation in the UK but Don’t Go to A Crowded Place (unless it’s a nightclub), Go Anywhere/Go Certain Places Sometimes/But Don’t Go There (small print = we might change the rules overnight and we’ll bury our heads in the sands about the understaffed, underpaid, overwhelmed NHS until we “beg” private companies to swoop in with greedy shareholders….)  But Nature and Food Remain True. And so do New Arrivals.

New Kid(s) On The Block

Welcome Earnest, my latest great nephew. Welcome Gertrude Jekyll, our climbing rose. Welcome Gabriel Oak, our potted rose. New things happen. Children grow. Roses bloom. Another day begins.

Learning to dance in the rain

GQ’s Men of the Year

Lists of “Top Ten” or “Best Of” regularly appear in many places in the media to spark debate and highlight trends. I’d have to endorse Mr William Shakespeare as a Man of the Year in every one of my lists, as he was “not of an age, but for all time” (© Ben Jonson) and he inhabits my soul every day. But I’m also happy to concur with some of GQ’s Men of the Year:

• Russell T Davies (thanks for your TV series It’s A Sin and past creativity)
• Captain Tom Moore (thanks for your past service and current inspiration)
• Marcus Rashford (thanks for your tenacity and courage)
• Josh O’Connor and Riz Ahmed (thanks for all your performances, in particular recently in Romeo and Juliet and Sound of Metal, but formerly in God's Own Country and Nightcrawler)
• And Prince Phillip, HM Queen Elizabeth II’s “constant strength and guide” and “strength and stay.” 

Falling within a bell curve

Prince Phillip’s recent death (9th April) produced much broadcast material and many column inches about whether he was the last of a particular kind of man. Such dogmatic reasoning always falls flat in my head, maybe because I’m a Libran and can usually see an alternative argument for everything. Prince Phillip was not unique despite his context and background; stastical probability (given the planet’s billions of people) suggests there will be other Prince Phillip types in decades to come. The one we’ve recently lost was remarkable, I agree, and I liked his daughter, Princess Anne’s, quotation about him – “a life well lived and service freely given.” Shakespeare has Hamlet say, of his late father, “I shall not look upon his like again” but he idolises the memory of the late king and is in a profound state of grief. More empirically truthful, I think, is Tim Minchin’s lyric in If I didn’t have you (somebody else would do):

I mean, I think you’re special

But you fall within a bell curve

Outlaw’s Cave

Robin Hood, now there’s a man! Steals from the rich and distributes to the poor…. possibly? Any road up, on the day Prince Phillip died, we met Michael and Janet to complete an undulating walk in the secluded woodland of Conjure Alders in the twin valley of the Rivers Maun and Meden, at the edge of Sherwood Forest. We walked across fields with huge horizons, through woods filled with birch and alder trees, picked over tangled roots by the river and marvelled at the sandstone cliff outcrop concealing Robin Hood’s Cave. No sign of Maid Marian or the merry men (or a reduction of income inequality) in early April 2021…. Where’s Robin Hood when you need him the most?

Waiting for the storm to pass

Spring continues to springeth and daffodils to bloometh. No-one knows exactly how Covid-19’s infection rate will spread, nor how severely, so time and tide wait for no man…. so now seems a good time to hook up (safely) with other Men (and Women) of the Year…. Thank you, Brian and Sue, for the fish finger butties and chips under your verandah in Tollerton and the inspirational message:

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass,

It’s about learning to dance in the rain

Once the pandemic is endemic and (hopefully) as ubiquitous and controlled as ‘flu, I imagine many people will continue to value nature and lobby decision-makers to tackle the global climate crisis and the over-exploitation of precious resources. Thank you, Nick and Graeme, for giving us a glimpse into the future with our proxy experiences of an electric car.

Sites opening up again

So if we live long enough to be in the market for a new car, electric will be the way to go. In the meantime, the pleasures of bread-making, flower arranging, table setting and dining at home are not to be abandoned lightly when the economy “opens up.” Buy locally? Travel locally? Save the planet? It’s been a pleasure to return to the (local-ish) Bolton Abbey Estate, and re-adding it to our repertoire of beauty spots, alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the River Aire. A Man of the Year from the early 19th Century, Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” expressed my feelings about walks and nature perfectly in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more….

River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey, River Aire near Saltaire and Leeds-Liverpool canal

 

Colemanballs

For no other reason than I think they’re funny (and I have a fondness for the perpetrators)
The magazine Private Eye coined the phrase Colemanballs to mean the funny verbal phrases and sentences that come out of the mouths of sports commentators. It was originally applied to David Coleman whose enthusiasm and involvement in his job meant he made many endearing gaffes during his 46 years as a highly respected sports commentator. 

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales - a medieval text full of language fun

Honourable History
Ballsing up the English Language has a long history with deliberate language jokes as far back as Chaucer’s medieval Canterbury Tales and embodied in the misspeaking of Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. Apparently as early as the 1949 Oxbridge Boat Race, the BBC commentator John Snagge announced “I can’t see who’s in the lead, but it’s either Oxford or Cambridge” which falls into the category of Stating The Bleeding Obvious. Some of David Coleman’s utterances fall into this category.

Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop - the "very pineapple of politeness"

Verified Colemanballs

• If that had gone in, it would have been a goal.
• This evening is a very different evening from the morning we had this morning.
• He is accelerating all the time. The last lap was run in 64 seconds and the one before that in 62.
• He’s 31 this year – last year he was 30.
• Forest have now lost six matches without winning.

A few of my favourite Colemanballs not by Coleman

• They didn't change positions; they just moved the players around.
• I don’t want Rooney to leave these shores but if he does, I think he’ll go abroad.
• He’s one of the greatest players in the world, if not one of the greatest anywhere.
• I never make predictions and I never will.
• This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother.
• Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious.
• If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again.
• He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it – in fact you can see it all over their faces.
• Here they come, every colour of the rainbow: black, white, brown.
• And he missed the goal by literally a million miles.
• He's pulling him off! The Spanish manager is pulling his captain off!
• The game is not over until it is.

RIP David Coleman

To Infinity and Beyond

Boldly going....

Bradford’s National Science + Media Museum
Guess what’s on display at the Science + Media Museum in Bradford? It’s the final parachute and the small (savagely-burned) Soyuz capsule that brought Tim Peake back to Earth in June 2016 after his six month mission to the International Space Station. The capsule is remarkable – it looks ancient, it looks small, it contained three crew members! You can take a selfie in an astronaut suit and (book to) experience a Virtual Reality descent to Earth wearing goggles, guided by Major Peake. The display has already been to London and will be going to York, Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. If you can’t make it to Bradford (between now and November 19th), then try and catch it elsewhere. It didn’t take long to see everything in the display but it filled up my imagination for many days.

"The smells of Earth are just so strong"
Tim Peake’s mission covered a distance of over 100 million kilometres and orbited Earth around 3,000 times. The pictures he sent back for publication were incredible and made a mockery of the ephemeral political intricacies of the human race. Asked how he felt after landing, Maj Peake said: "Truly elated, the smells of Earth are just so strong, just so good to be back on Earth. I'll look forward to seeing the family."


Into the stars
I’m still on a breathing space break from writing my YA trilogy after finishing Book One Draft One but, if I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ll reveal that it’s set on another planet – over a thousand years into the future when Earth has had to be abandoned. I feel confident that I’m writing speculative fiction rather than fantasy because the Tim Peake/Soyuz display and follow up research convinces me that humans could survive on a number of planets in the universe. If we rechannelled the money we spent on arms and weapons of mass destruction to the exploration of outer space we would soon be giving our future destinations names. Maybe one could be called Rhenium like the planet in my book…

Strong and stable

1974
It's very hard to make sense of Tory leaders over the years - holding elections or referenda thinking they know exactly what the outcome will be. I remember as a teenager being very muddled in 1974 with three day weeks, IRA bombings, a general strike in Northern Ireland and in February Ted Heath called a "Who Governs?" General Election. Mind you, Ringo Starr and Barbara Streisand had been at Number One (You're Sixteen and The Way We Were) so no wonder I was muddled (Terry Jacks's Seasons in the Sun, anyone?)
78.7%
Wouldja believe the turnout was nearly 79%? I don't know if that was a record but it certainly felt like all the adults around me were engaged in the arguments, eventually concluding that Ted Heath had asked the wrong question. And duly gave Harold Wilson the Labour keys to Number Ten, albeit with a minority but firmed up the following October with a majority. Wrong question, Ted: the people want you to lead, invest, care and secure not to play party-boosting games. You can't use the electorate to shore up your popularity within the party! The same mistake made by diddy David Cameron, friend of the porcine population, when he called the EU referendum; he hadn't a clue what the British people were thinking. Just as evil clown, Theresa May did, believing the country had only one thing on their mind - Brexit and "strong and stable" leadership. Never mind Education, Health - Physical and Mental, Social Care, Austerity, Cuts to Public Services like Police, Fire Stations and Ambulance Crews. There may not be a money tree, but that money comes flying out of somewhere when the banks need bailing out....and isn't it time someone took tax evasion seriously? And explained the true meaning of tax and what it does for a civilised country....

I'm worried about Theresa May's ability to hold it together with the DUP, particularly when I drill down to their policies, many of their members' attitudes to universal human rights and their approach to the border with Ireland. I've read about their robust negotiating tactics. At least Cameron's answer to a hung parliament was to climb under the covers with the benign Liberal Democrats. And May's weak and wobbly record (no matter how often you pretend to be strong and stable) reveals she is likely to cave in as soon as The Daily Mail says "Boo!". Maybe not. Time will tell.
Another General Election, anyone? Those pesky kids might turn out in even more force next time - and maybe we could get to the level of 1974 - 78.7% turnout! What a wonderful world that would be.

Solidarity, determination and love

Love beats hate
Last night there was another series of pointless murders on and around London Bridge in the capital city, following hard upon the recent murders in Manchester. These types of cowardly attack can in no way be attributed to mainstream religious belief. The brainwashed simpleton who perpetrated the brainless atrocity at the Ariana Grande show – and the chicken-hearted imbeciles who were shot last night in Borough Market – did not believe in the Islam that the majority of peaceful Muslims do.

Muslims for Manchester

One young Muslim guy stood in Manchester city centre with a sign saying “I’m Muslim and I trust you. Do you trust me enough for a hug?” (Video click here.) And guess what? He got plenty of hugs. Muslims for Manchester quickly raised over £25,000 for the victims, and the total is still growing. North Manchester Jamia Mosque in Cheetham Hill organised a We Love Manchester march, which included over 500 children, to walk from the Woodlands Road mosque to the Manchester arena. The Media finally seem to be waking up to covering the Muslim opposition to terrororism and hopefully this will go some way to counteract the rise in hate crime that inevitably follows a terrorist attack.

Astonishing reminder of love

We were in Manchester last Thursday to see a play and catch a train and we didn’t expect to spend so long in St Ann’s Square reading the tributes and admiring the quiet strength of feeling. Outpourings of personal poetry in poignant testimonials captured honest and raw feelings. The fragrance of thousands of flowers filled the air. Balloons dreamily hovered, fluttering and crackling gently in the breeze.  Everything in unison spoke of love and potential, togetherness and solidarity, memory and homage. Homage to love, not hate. All ages, creeds, colours, professions and types of people were there. As we ate our dinner at a window table overlooking St Ann’s Square, we heard and saw the crowd applaud and welcome the latest procession of Muslims arriving and laying flowers and carrying We Love Mcr signs.

Tributes to Manchester's unity and love in St Ann's Square, including Rob Lewis's statue

22 remembered

And what struck me again and again was how pointless the bomber’s actions had been and how unintelligent he must have been because the outpouring of love for mankind and determination to unite against evil has been the outcome. A few blogs ago I wrote about keeping the fear of terrorism in perspective and, despite the horrors unleashed into the lives of the relatives and all who knew the victims in Manchester, the message in St Ann’s Square is powerful and supports my perspective – these were 22 good humans who will be remembered and loved forever and their deaths have not advanced the cause of the bomber one speck. We should fear many things, but not dwell on the fear of terrorism. Focus on the victims. Focus on the solidarity, determination and love.

John Atkinson, Courtney Boyle, Kelly Brewster, Georgina Callander, Olivia Campbell, Liam Curry, Wendy Fawell, Martyn Hett, Alison Howe, Megan Hurley, Nell Jones, Michelle Kiss, Angelika Klis, Marcin Klis, Sorrell Leczkowski, Lisa Lees, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Saffie Rose Roussos, Chloe Rutherford, Philip Tron, Jayne Tweddle-Taylor

Chatsworth: House Style

Facebook-inspired trip
On a very hot day in May, inspired by a Facebook Friend set of photographs, Sally, Emily and I visited Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Of course, it isn’t Pemberley from Pride and Prejudice, though Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley pretended it was in the 2005 film. (The house and gardens also features in the 2011 Jane Eyre, the 2008 The Duchess and Kubrick’s 1975 Barry Lyndon, among other notable TV and cinema outings.)

Jane Austen’s description of Pemberley

It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!

House Style
The room guides suggest it was Laura Cavendish, now Countess of Burlington, who set the ball rolling when she was rummaging in the Chatsworth attics for a christening gown for her son. Enlisting the help of Vogue editor Hamish Bowles and talented designers, Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda, Laura has produced an exhibition of costume, fashion, social comment and insight into class, power, leisure and influence that is consistently surprising.

Themes
There are highly theatrical oases like the funereal dresses arranged in a sombre grouping; and exuberant sections like the dinner party fashions sequence. The 1897 Devonshire House costume ball gets its own ghostly room and the phrase “Traditions and Transgressions” is used about one sequence which reveals the clash of styles represented in the exhibition as a whole. Part of my interest was to feed my obsession with history but also to fuel my imagination as I approach the closing chapters of my first novel. The costume ball was useful for that!

Reasons to be cheerful

Glass half full
After three blogs about reasons to be fearful and fake news, it’s time to cheer up. Most of my life I’ve been a glass half full kinda person. I admit it can be annoying but I can’t stop myself trying to look on the bright side. Maybe it’s because I’m a Libran, I can usually find another way of looking a problem. Seeing it from the alternative point of view…. On the other hand.  My two favourite mottos are carpe diem and only connect.

Carpe diem
Seize the day is a popular aphorism, attributed in its earliest form to the Roman poet Horace in his Odes (23 BC.) I used to write on the inside cover of my notebooks when a teenager: plan as if you are going to live forever, live as if you are going to die tomorrow. Seizing the day is a tough ask when annoying and frustrating bits of living get in the way. It’s hard to seize the day when you have to buy onions at the supermarket; or hoover the carpet. But I try…. My biggest weapon for seizing the day is my imagination. When on a bus or train, if I don’t have a book with me I can’t stop myself travelling back in time and imagining myself in another place in a different period of history. The Tags list on the right will reveal which eras are the ones I flutter away to….

Only connect!
Live in fragments no longer. I used to think it was my Mum who invented the motto: Every day in every way I’m getting better and better until I learned it was Émile Coué, a French psychologist from the early part of the Twentieth Century. Deep down I think if I haven’t read something new or experienced something new every day I’m not exercising my brain or heart and I think that’s what E M Forster’s quotation from Howard’s End is all about. Focusing on brain and heart without thinking about how my body might benefit from exercise has, of course, been a significant weakness of mine. Who would guess that I was a rugby player between the ages of 11 and 18 and between 16 and 18 I played both union and league? If only I’d made the connection then with being physically fit and living a longer life…. but then again, the connections I’ve made with my brain have given me plenty to enjoy in life. We just have to connect the beast and the monk, the prose and the passion, the body with the brain and heart – see the interlinks between us all and everything else. Live in fragments no longer.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Merchant Ivory's film of E M Forster's Howard's End, the source of "Only Connect!" 

Anthony Hopkins as Henry Wilcox, Vanessa Redgrave as Ruth Wilcox, Emma Thompson as Margaret Schlegel, Helena Bonham Carter as Helen Schlegel, Samuel West as Leonard Bast, Nicola Duffett as Jacky Bast, James Wilby as Charles Wilcox and Adrian Ross Magenty as Tibby Schlegel

Reasons to be fearful

How fearful should we be of terrorism?

Answer: horribly fearful if we are caught in the midst of an atrocity. I know if I was caught up in or nearby a terrorist attack I would be petrified. But should the anticipation of an atrocity generate fear in our everyday living? If we allow terrorism to generate morbid fear, are we not fulfilling the hopes and desires of the terrorist? In statistical terms our chances of being hurt by a terrorist attack in the western world are infinitesimal in comparison to other things we should be fearful of but aren’t. We are more likely to be killed by cars or the effects of sugar or the consequences of excessive alcohol. Women are more likely to be killed by domestic violence. If we live in America we are statistically more likely to be killed by a gun, either intentionally or accidentally – and by a person we know rather than a terrorist.

Think don’t feel….

A cool look at UK official statistics should help us reconsider what we worry about:

• In the UK between 1970 and 1984 there were 2,211 deaths caused by terrorism
• In the UK between 1985 and 1999 there were 1,094 deaths caused by terrorism
• In the UK between 2000 and 2015 there were 90 deaths caused by terrorism

Look at those numbers again: in three 15-year periods, deaths from terrorism in the UK have fallen from over 2,000, to just over 1,000 to less than 100; but the Media do not portray it that way. Looking back to my years as a teenager, despite the efforts of the IRA, it would be easy to think that the 1970s was a terrorist-lite period, compared to now. But the facts tell me that it was a far more threatening time. The 1970s and early 1980s were statistically more dangerous (as far as terrorism goes) than 2017.

What SHOULD we be afraid of?
By way of contrast to the terrorism statistics:

• In the UK over 100 women every year (NOT every 15 years) are murdered by their partner
• In the UK over 1,700 people are killed every year in road traffic accidents (down from over 3,500 in 2003, which is a good news story but I don’t know why terrorism provokes more fear and outrage than our acceptance of deaths by traffic, given the statistics)
• Hidden sugars in food contribute to obesity, organ disease and diabetes; more people suffer from the food industry’s over-use of sugar than from terrorist atrocities. Why aren’t we afraid of sugar?
• In the UK over 8,000 people every year die as a result of the excess consumption of alcohol, but the scare stories about alcohol are few and far between. We are not afraid of alcohol in the same way we are afraid of terrorism.

Is it the same in the USA?

• In the US in the last decade, fewer than 60 people have been killed by terrorist incidents
• In the US in the last decade, more than 280,000 people have been killed by “violence-related gun deaths”

If you extend the statistics to include the year of 9/11 World Trade Tower attacks, gun deaths still outnumber terrorist deaths many many many more times. The countries where terrorism is justifiably worth worrying about are Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan.

Go Figure.

Why does the western Media stoke fear about terrorism? To gruesomely entertain us or increase our addiction to bad news? To generate more income for the source of the story by attracting viewing figures, readers or clickbait? Could it be, could it be, could it be, could it be, could it possibly be…. in the interests of the moneyed classes to perpetuate fear to justify financial and political alliances that prop up lucrative arms deals and justify budgets that divert money away from social care, the environment, transport, education and health? Surely not….

Our fears do make us traitors

Fear

In Shakespeare's Macbeth Macbeth himself recognizes that:

        Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings

In Romeo and Juliet Juliet imagines waking up from her death-like sleep in a tomb with the bones of her ancestors, including the recently-murdered Tybalt. She knows the bones, smells and shrieks will be in her imagination but still exclaims:   

O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears?

Shakespeare's famous exploration of the power of FEAR - Macbeth

Laughing off fears

Of course Caesar in Julius Caesar is tricked into disbelieving his wife’s prophetic dreams that harm that will come his way on the Ides of March:

How foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia!
I am ashamed I did yield to them.

And off he trots to his assassination! And, more poignantly Lady Macduff debates the actions of her husband fleeing to England to enlist the aid of Malcolm in the fight against Macbeth and she thinks being afraid is traitorous:

ROSS: You must have patience, madam.
LADY MACDUFF: He had none:
His flight was madness; when our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.

By the end of the scene both she and her young children have been slaughtered.

Imaginary fear versus legitimate fear

Macbeth and Juliet are afraid of things that have not yet happened and seem unlikely. Caesar and Lady Macduff decide that being fearful is unpatriotic. All four of them die at the end of their journey in their play. Perhaps the fears in those plays were well founded. Fear is a real human emotion but Shakespeare knew that our imaginary fears are corrosive and take away our capacity for enjoying the blessings of living. Politicians and the Media portray a world that is fearful – full of fear – but we are statistically living in a period in history when fewer people than ever before die from war, disease, violence and accident. Hard to believe, I imagine, if you are one of the people who fall under the spell of the politics of fear. I myself have to work hard to remind my heart and brain that we had more real reasons to be fearful in every century before the one in which we are currently living.

Stuffing the ears of men with false reports

Present fears are less than horrible imaginings

It’s easy to stoke up fear in a crowd of people. Orson Welles did it on a mass scale with his 1938 radio broadcast of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds when, reputedly, over one million people out of six million listeners panicked when they mistook a drama play for a news bulletin. Or did they?

Fake news

Subsequent research suggests that what really happened was that thousands of people did no more than telephone local authorities and were reassured when they were told it was a radio play. Media reports – including some started by the organisations that funded the radio station – exaggerated the level of panic and even reported suicides and heart attacks. Police were involved but mostly in the capacity of reassuring listeners. Was this the first modern fake news story? Not only because the whole thing was fictional but also because the reporting of it afterwards was exaggerated.

Antony Byrne as Rumour - "Open your ears" - in Henry IV Part Two

“Upon my tongues continual slanders ride”

Shakespeare starts Henry IV Part Two with the entrance of an actor playing the role of Rumour, a throwback to medieval mystery plays when Vices were personified on stage. “Open your ears,” says Rumour. He boasts

“Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.”

He goes on to say that he is going to lie about the battle that the audience had seen (in the prequel) and say that those who died were alive and those who were alive had died. Shocking fake news depicted in a play over 400 years ago about an event 200 years before that. Rumours. Fake news. Provoking fear in the general public.…