Stand by me

2020 (top two) and times gone by (bottom three)

Baby Harriet Rose
And so, in the middle of a gradually-relaxing Pandemic Lockdown, it was time to celebrate the birthday of the adult daughter formerly known as Baby Harriet. And there is much to celebrate in this unsettling period of history. For a start, we’re all alive. So what to do to celebrate a birthday in June 2020?

Tramping in Wharfedale
Less industrial than Airedale, not as dramatic as Malhamdale, Wharfedale is a lovely place to walk. And so we did. The dale was formed in the last ice age, and named from the Old Norse Hverf that became the Old English Weorf, both meaning winding river. Small settlements date back to Neolithic times, working farms have been established for generations and local people and tourists alike have tramped meandering paths across the moorland countryside. Above Burley in Wharfedale we climbed up the side of the valley to enjoy cows, sheep, fields, meadows, scrubby bushes, wild foxgloves, streams, rivulets, stiles and views…. Oh, the views.

5,000 miles
We managed around 6 miles up and down, along and beyond. The 5,000 miles in the sub-heading refers to the estimated length of all the dry stone walls in Yorkshire. You can’t beat the sight of a dry stone wall: such a familiar sight, so welcome and reassuring when returning from elsewhere in the world to "God’s Own County."

Birthday 2020 and "at home" at Versailles

Picnic and Prashad
Sitting on big rocks somewhere high we revelled in a picnic with fizz (is there anything better than eating and drinking in the open air?) And later, socially distancing in the garden, we had a Gujerati Indian takeaway from the excellent Prashad in Drighlington. The main glory was being together, being healthy, reminiscing, looking forward, blowing away the cobwebs during the day and putting the world to rights as the sun set.

2020 feast from Prashad and snapshots from America, France and Italy

Stand by me
Songwriters: Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, Ben King
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid
Oh, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
So darling, darling
Stand by me, oh stand by me
Oh stand, stand by me
Stand by me
If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
Or the mountain should crumble to the sea
I won't cry, I won't cry
No, I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

The Walls of York

The Walls of York, Clifford's Tower and the Parisi Hotel

York
And so, to the first of two minibreaks with Sally, presents for her 2019 birthday – both in or near York and both culminating, I have to confess, in the partaking of wine. The first, in early June, found us in a beautiful boutique hotel in central York, the Parisi, with a book-lined library and a room with a roll-top bath. We’ve been many times to York, so some events were reenactments of previous activities: for example, the National Trust’s Treasurer’s House and Garden (one of our top spots in York.)

The Parisi Hotel and sites in York

Spring Light
York is particularly lovely in the Spring and the light was stunning as it fell on The Minster and the Walls of York as we circumnavigated the astonishing remaining sections of the medieval defences punctuated by evocative landmarks: Robin Hood Tower, Monk Bar, Harlot Hill Tower, Fishergate Bar, Micklegate Bar, Barker Tower, Multangular Tower, St Mary’s Tower, Bootham Bar…. Clifford’s Tower is the remains of a 13th century tower built to replace an earlier wooden Norman keep which was firebombed in horrific Anti-Jewish riots in 1190, resulting in the deaths of at least 150 Jews. The existing quatrefoil tower was damaged twice more in the 17th Century during the Civil War and later in an accidental explosion. It’s a miracle there’s anything left.

The Minster, the Walls of York, Clifford's Tower

My Life in a Museum
Jorvik is worth a return visit if you haven’t been for a while. It was revamped recently, and its time capsule tour of “Viking York” is famous for good reason. Aside from the headline-grabbing poo smells, there’s plenty of intriguing information about the nature of archaeology and its astonishing and intricate methods. Like much of York, the Castle Museum is a building that has had multiple uses throughout history and there are original signs of the Debtor’s Prison from the early 18th century as you meander through the presentation of rooms from different periods of history. What I like about the York Castle Museum is that the focus is on social history and the lives of ordinary people. It’s a sobering experience to see objects from your childhood and teenage years being displayed in a museum attraction!

York Castle Museum and the Jorvik Viking Centre

4% African (where birds fly, so can I)

Spot the Finn, the Italian, the Nigerian, the North African, the Englander, the Celt....

Temba Dance Company
At some point in the mid-1980s, in my first teaching job, in the middle of a sweaty, hectic, inspiring dance workshop at Leek’s Westwood High School, an African performer spoke prophetically to me. She was an older, hefty, charismatic woman who was a senior figure in Temba Dance Company (now sadly disbanded I believe). We’d just run through some energetic routine and she had been a circling observer, wandering around the room, encouraging, cajoling, cheering, whooping at the staff and teenagers – all age groups, all abilities – who were being put through their paces. She clasped my hands and, publically and loudly declared as the room felt silent – “My God, My God, Mr Johnson, I swear you have African blood in you.” People laughed. I laughed. We carried on. But it lodged as a significant moment in my life and, yes, I’ve told it as a story many times since, especially at times when my moves on a dance floor have been on the agenda…. and usually as a story to amuse. But I hardly dared tell people that I believed her at the time in a weird supernatural way.

She was telling the true truth
And so to our DNA tests. (I have the right to believe what I want to believe!) I expected to have Scandinavian DNA because of my Viking surname. I thought there might be Celtic in me from an instinctive set of feelings. I romantically hoped there’d be Italian because of my love for that country’s history, food and drink. And what came up? (See above.) 4% African (3.2% North African and 0.9% Nigerian.) The wise Temba dancer was right all along…. I always thought Sally and I were drawn together by our love of Yorkshire, shared political values, sense of humour, instincts for generosity and open-mindedness and desire to build a nest…. but looking at our DNA results, could it have been my ancestral 0.9% Nigerian DNA calling to Sally’s 1.2% Nigerian DNA?

Endeavour and Hadrian’s Wall
There was a great moment in a recent Endeavour on TV at an imagined Oxford Union debate where a black student invited the racist person who was arguing that all people who were not originally in England should be repatriated to their country of origin and the black student delivered the punchline “after you!” Humans are migratory animals. History, archaeology and anthropology have all proved this long ago. Accents and language demonstrate it. Customs and religion colour it. If President Trump were to send all the immigrants in the United States back to their own countries, then only Native Americans would remain. In the UK the earliest people we know about definitively were the Celts and we know they bred with Belgians, Germans and French before the Romans arrived. But Hadrian’s Wall had a massive impact. For over 400 years, troops from all round the Roman Empire manned the Wall (and womaned the settlements around the Wall.) Many bred. Many never left when the Romans retreated. We’ve been a mongrel, immigrant nation from the very earliest times. (Any alt-right readers who want to argue this point should read this hyperlinked article first which has its own links to supporting evidence.) So I’m proud of my African ancestry. It shows I belong. Here on planet Earth. Where boundaries and borders are imaginary human constructs. Where birds fly, so can I.

Celtic/English woods (at Bolton Abbey), candles imported from Scandinavia, vinegar and oil and wine from various parts of Europe and textiles and table mats from Africa....?

Hallowe'en

All Hallows Eve
And so 31st October comes around again. How will I be celebrating Halloween this year? Handing out treats to avoid being tricked? Bobbing apples? Dressing ghoulishly? Putting on Wiccan robes and taking part in Samhain rituals along with other pagans? Dancing naked round a fire in a forest, daubed in symbols to deflect evil demons?

Celtic beliefs, All Saints, All Souls, Hallowtide
Like most celebrations in the UK the origins of All Hallows Evening lie in our Celtic past: pre-Christian, pre-Roman, preAnglo-Saxon, preViking, preNorman, pre all the other invasions that make up our mongrel culture. The Celts believed demons, evil spirits and ghosts roamed the earth more frequently at the “turn” of the year when the leaves fell and it seemed as if nature was dying. In the 7th Century Pope Boniface IV created All Saints’ Day on November 1st and in the 11th Century Benedictine monasteries added All Souls’ Day on November 2nd spurred on by St Odilo of Cluny at Cluny Abbey in France. The three days (the Eve, the Saints’ Day and the Souls’ Day) became collectively known as Hallowtide and praying for the dead fitted in well with the pagan beliefs about spirits walking at that time of year.

American? Not.
There is a myth in England that we imported trick-or-treating from America, but strictly it’s a re-import because European immigrants introduced it to America in the first place. The practice was common in both Germany and Ireland – appeasing wicked spirits with sweets. Throughout Europe, in medieval times the Catholic Church encouraged congregations to go house to house on Hallowe’en asking for food in return for a prayer for the dead. (In unscrupulous parishes the priests would keep the food, whereas in more “Christian” areas the gifts were distributed again to the poor, or, on 3rd November, turned into a community feast.) Masks, costumes and pumpkins were all features of the attempts by pre-1500 folks to scare away the dead. The candle inside a pumpkin represented a soul trapped in purgatory; only later did pumpkins acquire carved “faces.” So America can blame Europe for all the trappings of Halloween. And we can blame the Celts for believing in demons and the Catholic Church for “inventing” Hallowtide to pray for the souls of the dead. (Of course we can still blame Capitalism for making it into a commercial money-spinning phenomenon, instead of its original pagan spirit-slaying manifestation.)

October November December
Goodbye to my birthday month, get ready to welcome the fully Autumnal month of November in preparation for that crucible of love & despair & excess & glitter & feast & fun & regret & peace & joy that is....

December....

Up North Again

Everything Old Is New Again
Sometimes when you return somewhere you see things anew, see things you didn’t see before and think things you didn’t think last time. So it was a pleasure to take Harriet to see Chatsworth: House Style on a less crowded day than last time. With the added bonus of a family picnic for Emily’s birthday.

Summer jaunts
Those who know me well know that I’m a fan of pavements and buildings, cityscapes and hygiene. Yes, I love the countryside – walking, enjoying views and smelling fresh air – but I like to walk on designated paths covered in woodchip and not be too far away from the nearest running hot water…. I’m not a typical Yorkshireman in being psychologically allergic to mud. So I even surprised myself by wanting to go to this year’s Great Yorkshire Show where the animals were real and the smells of the animals even more real. And the animals thought nothing of pissing and shitting in front of me. How rude. Of course some of them – like Atkinson’s Action Horses – were dressed up like the film extras they were and well drilled in their theatrical behaviour.

Protect and Survive
Somewhere I’d never been before was the Cold War Bunker near York, now looked after by English Heritage. It brought back memories of the booklet Protect and Survive which households were issued with in the early 1980s. I have strong memories of taking part in a touring T-i-E project at the University of Manchester called Going Up which attempted to make fun of the leaflet. Visiting the Cold War bunker recently it was clear how extensive the preparations were for monitoring nuclear fall-out in the event of an attack or accident. Our perky guide had plenty of startling anecdotes about the Royal Observer Corps who staffed the bunkers and who were only completely decommissioned in 1996.

Bring Me Sunshine
A return visit to Morecambe is always welcome – the vast bay and extensive promenade provides plenty of opportunities to stretch legs and blow away cobwebs. The difference this time is that we visited on a very sunny day unlike previous occasions when the waves crashed onto the footpaths and the views across to the Lake District were obscured by mist.

St Patrick’s Chapel
The walk along from Morecambe to Heysham is always worth doing to visit the atmospheric church of St Peter’s with its graveyard overlooking the bay and its Viking hogback stone. A few more steps take you to the ruins of elevated St Patrick’s Chapel looked after by the National Trust. The enigmatic rock-cut coffin graves are startling.

Nostalgic memories
A new Retirement game is to chase the sun on a day out. So we made the west coast sun in Morecambe and more recently found the east coast sun in Bridlington. Another oft-visited place seen through new eyes at a new stage of life. Bridlington was the “big town” when we spent childhood holidays at nearby Reighton Gap caravan park. Later on I took my own children when they were tiny to build castles on deserted beaches when British seaside towns had, for a time, become unfashionable. Now the beaches are busy again and “staycations” have become more popular. The North beach is quieter than the South beach and walking on the sands by the North Sea is one of the top pleasures in life.

The grand old Duke of York

City walls of York
The walls of York began as an earthen and wooden stockade surrounding Eboracum (the Roman name for York.) Stone sections were added during the Roman occupation of Britain and a few of these remnants are still visible. During the centuries of Anglo-Saxon and Viking York (Eoferwic and Jorvik) it is likely that the walls were patched up in places but generally left to the weather’s ravages as the city focused on Christianity and Trading. During medieval times, though, when York became the York we know today, the walls were enlarged and reinforced and it is mostly these walls that have been renovated enough to walk on when you visit the city in 2016.

Barley Hall

York has a formidable distinction of being a thriving contemporary city (with its forward-thinking EU Remain-voting populace.) It is also a place that exploits its past for the tourist pound, but in a mostly respectful (and academic) fashion. Barley Hall is a prime example of the potential for forging new economic possibilities from a building that was about to be demolished – until the archaeologists realised how much of the original medieval structure was still intact under the layers of additions and alterations. In a recent visit I enjoyed a vivid display of the costumes from the BBC’s adaptation of Hilary Mantell’s Wolf Hall. Even without the headline-displays Barley Hall is evocative of a distant past that, in some ways, reveals itself to be unnervingly similar to today, even though swans and peacocks rarely feature on 21st century dining tables.

O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!

I’ve always loved York since learning at a young age that the castle nearest my childhood home in Wakefield, Sandal Castle, was the site of the nursery rhyme

Oh, the grand old Duke of York!
He had 10,000 men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again….

Tragically, of course, the grand old Duke of York also had the blood of his son, Edmund, smeared over his face by Margaret of Anjou, the wife of Henry VI and effectively the commander of the Lancastrian army at Sandal Castle during the Wars of the Roses. To add further humiliation Margaret placed a mock paper crown on the Duke of York’s head before slaughtering him and removing his head to be hoisted on a pike above Micklegate Bar in the city of York. Is all that true? It’s not in the nursery rhyme, that’s for sure, but Shakespeare has it covered in Henry VI Part Three. Ah, the good old days….

Margaret of Anjou kills the Duke of York (in Shakespeare's version) at Sandal Castle, Wakefield

Kynren

Glen Coe

Glen Coe

An epic drive back from Drimnin was broken by a geocache stop at beautifully grim Glen Coe. Apart from the brutal massacre of Glen Coe in 1692 (in fact three simultaneous slaughters in different locations along the Glen), the site it also familiar to film location hounds: (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban, Skyfall and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

Skyfall, The Massacre at Glen Coe by James Hamilton, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban and Monty Python and the Holy Grail locations

Inveruglas and Hermitage Castle

Pretty Inveruglas where we later stretched our legs and had a cuppa had a view across Loch Lomond with an imposing hydro-electric station as a backdrop. Hermitage Castle was a further stop just before the Scottish-English border where ghostly memories of Mary Queen of Scots haunted the massive monolithic castle and chapel.

Inveruglas and Hermitage Castle

Bishop Auckland, near Durham – The Eleven Arches Company and Kynren

Our final stop before heading for home was an extraordinary event in the shadow of Auckland Castle. Around 1000 volunteers on a 7.5-acre site took part in a £30m specatacular pageant of the history of England. We were in an audience of 8000! Jonathan Ruffer, a city hedge fund manager, philanthropist and art collector grew up in the north and was inspired to spend some of his fortune buying the castle and some important art works and then investing in restorations and in this theatrical enterprise. The script focused on the history of the North East and the style of the show is influenced by the Cinéscénie at Puy du Fou in France. Jonathan Ruffer has managed to create an astonishing infrastructure of parking, food and drink stalls, toilet facilities and dazzling flower-strewn walks down to a state-of-the-art 8000-seater performance arena (the Tribune) with hydraulics, pyrotechnics, hundreds of costumes, props, sets and those unbelievably well-drilled, well-choreographed volunteers.

Kynren, the flower meadows walking down to the arena and, in the centre, philanthropist and creator of Kynren, Jonathan Ruffer with the Chief Executive of Eleven Arches, Anne-Isabelle Daulon

How was the Kynren experience?

The nearest thing I’ve experienced to Kynren is watching a big Disney show in America, but in Kynren’s case there were more people on stage – and they were all local amateurs! There was a true sense of Kynren (a word that means generation or community or kindred or family.) A cavalcade of English history paraded in front of our eyes:

• Romans
• Vikings
• King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
• St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels
• the Normans at the Battle of Stamford Bridge
• a medieval festival
• the Battle of Neville’s Cross against the Scots
• Henry VIII and the Field of the Cloth of Gold
• Elizabeth I and Shakespeare
• Charles I’s beheading
• the Georgian Renaissance
• the Industrial Revolution (especially an astonishing steam train and a moving account of the Trimdon Grange mine disaster)
• Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee
• the Christmas Truce in World War One
• the Roaring Twenties contrasted with a Miner’s Gala
• World War Two’s “Finest Hour.”

A young Geordie boy Arthur was whisked through time by Bishop Hensley Henson; water fountains suddenly revealed a ghostly projection of Durham cathedral’s arches; thundering horses with knights charged across the backdrop; cows, horses, sheep, goats, ducks and geese joined in the action; the Glastonbury Holy Thorn emerged out of the water like Excalibur. The script was sometimes a bit hard to follow, partly because the ever-changing spectacle meant it was hard to “keep up.” Filmic music by Nathan Stornetta and jaw-dropping lighting effects gave the whole event a rousing and emotional core which was impossible to resist. The plan is to revive the event every couple of years and I for one have signed up on the website for future updates and ticket sales.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Shakespeare’s humanity
We are all the same under the sun. Britons, Europeans, Asians, Americans, Africans. We have all arrived by meandering means in the countries of our birth through migration, intermarriage and emigration. The descendants of “true Brits” are now largely in Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The rest of us in England are the mixed-race children of Celts, Romans, Frisians, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans, Flemings, Africans, Jews, Huguenots, Poles and Indians – all in significant groups of invaders or immigrants before 1960. Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Donald Trump-like, rejects compassion, love and hope. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice reminds us, Eddie Izzard-like, that we are all “healed by the same means.” I’ll be Voting Remain because that’s what Shakespeare would have voted and because I’m persuaded by History, Culture and my Hope for the Future of Mankind, never mind Europe.

The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe

Be moved at nothing

Christopher Marlowe’s main character in The Jew of Malta is Barabas. What actions does Barabas take during the play, that make him such a villain?:

• he murders his own daughter, Abigail, along with a whole convent of nuns
• he engineers the deaths of two young friends in a duel
• he murders two friars, two prostitutes and his own servant
• he burns alive a Turkish troop of soldiers and galley-slaves
• and he delights in his evil plots and is unambiguously hateful.

The only thing you can say in Barabas’s defence is that everyone around him is equally corrupt. (Maybe not the poisoned nuns or the incinerated galley-slaves….) His overall message is pitiless:

First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.

Shylock, the sympathetic villain in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

If you tickle us, do we not laugh?

Comparing Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice with Marlowe’s treatment of Barabas in The Jew of Malta seems to me one of best illustrations of why Shakespeare has risen so far beyond his contemporary writers. Marlowe has created a character whose villainy would directly feed into the prejudices of the Elizabethan audience against Jewish people. Shylock, though villainous in some of his behaviours, elicits genuine sympathy both from the story, the structure and the language of The Merchant of Venice. On the one hand he pursues a bloody revenge course by insisting on cutting away a pound of a man’s flesh and he treats his daughter like a possession equating her to his gold; but on the other hand he provokes audience sympathy because he is spat upon, is insulted openly and, in the famous “merciful” trial scene he is brutally forced to renounce his faith and lose all his possessions in a verdict far more punitive than he deserves. Shakespeare gives him the most powerful speech about how all humans are the same under the sun:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

Probably the brainiest man in Europe Votes Remain! - good enough for me!

Vote Remain!

Secret Santa

Alex in Wonderland....

Christmas and New Year
I think I might have broken free of the academic year cycle. Approaching this year’s season of good will, I have a definite sense that I am approaching the end of the year, a chance to reflect, look back and look forward. I spent the best part of 50 years thinking of September as the beginning of the year and August as the end of the year. From 1985 when I started teaching in secondary schools, the beginning of the year switched to A Level results day – usually the third Thursday in August – from that point on a new school/teaching/working year began…. But no longer. January is (for me now) the beginning of the New Year. I feel glad about that.

Christmas Dinner Number One: Joyce, Janet, Michael, Emily, Harriet, Sally

Secret Santa

Last weekend I had my first Christmas dinner courtesy of our friends in Badby. A log fire, great company, a trip to the Royal Shakespeare Company for Wendy and Peter Pan and Secret Santa presents (now half way through Srsly Hamlet and playing regularly, perhaps more than I should, with my wind-up toy of Shakespeare.)

My Secret Santa presents!

Origins of December 25th becoming Christmas Day

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Bernard Cornwell recently – borrowed from the library.  His Stonehenge and the trilogy about King Arthur, The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur have been fascinating about the way early Christianity compromised with paganism in order to increase followers. Choosing December 25th as the Nativity of Jesus was a canny move on the part of the early church to get pagans on board. It happened to be the birthday of Mithras, the Indo-Persian-Roman Sun God (belief in whom stretched back to 1500BC and who had a virgin birth, recruited 12 disciples, was born in a manger, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and visited by shepherds, became a travelling preacher doing miracles, promoted baptism, had Sunday as a sacred day, was described as the “Way, the Truth and the Light of the World,” who ascended to heaven and who died to save the world.) December 25th was also near the winter solstice which had long been a time for Celts and Vikings to bring greenery into the house, to wander through fields and orchards singing songs (carols) to ward away evil spirits and guarantee a good harvest and burn (Old Norse) Yule logs on the fire to gather families and friends together. The date was also near Saturnalia, the Roman feast of gift-giving, candle-lighting, mistletoe-hanging (to promote fertility) and feasting. Even further back December 25th was also the birthdate of the Ancient Egyptian god, Horus.

Pretty pagan but no less wonderful for that.  Joyce off to Canons Ashby

So when was the historical Jesus born?
Historians use a number of factors to seek an accurate birth date for the historical preacher who became known as Jesus of Nazareth:

• non-Christian historical evidence from Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Josephus, the Babylonian Talmud, the Greek satirist Lucian 
• the gospel accounts of the Nativity in Matthew and Luke
• the reign of Emperor Augustus
• the reign (and known death date) of Herod the Great
• the census of Syrian governor Quirinius
• the conception of John the Baptist (since there are records of his father Zacharias who was a temple priest
• the likelihood of shepherds being on the hills watching their flocks on December 25th (nil likelihood)
• the possibility that the star followed by the Magi was in fact an astronomical phenomenon. 

Dates suggested range from 12BC to 1AD, usually narrowed down to 6BC to 3BC and the months have been (most convincingly) suggested as May, June or September.  But I can’t see the Christian world ever changing the date of Christmas day any day soon…. But then again, I imagine the medieval world would never imagine a King of England would one day create a breakaway church because he wanted to get divorced. One teacher at my (Roman Catholic) primary school called the Church of England – “The Henry the Eighth Club” like it was a hobby rather than a religion….

Old Norse tradition or Victorian Germanic import? - it smells good!

Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Whatever the origins, I find it impossible not to enjoy the Christmas season, as long as I can avoid thinking about it before December 1st and as long as, at least once, I can watch White Christmas and, like Bing Crosby, count my blessings.

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.