On being a ghost in one's own lifetime

Hardy's Wessex

I went back to my old college the other week. Just a quick visit, nothing planned, on the way through to visit a site in Hardy's Wessex. And a shock it was - both Old and New Quads devastated by massive building works as they refurbish the Hall among other things. How, I asked myself, will this year's Freshers play croquet? On which lawn will the Most Annoying Fresher be staked out with croquet hoops, to be eaten by the ferocious College Ants? Oh, I reflected, had I only known, that could have been Young Cameron and not the late RJP Stephens-Sonntag BA (Seriously Aegrotat). Even at the time there was only one vote in it.

Radcliffe Square

But it's an odd thing, to return to one's alma mater, if I may slip into the traditional lingua franca of the vetus locus. Obviously to have the lawns of the quads removed (apart from the lovely, ironically named Deer Park) is a temporary thing. And some of the pubs have changed names - the Temple Bar, the Queen's Arms, the Cape of Good Hope and the Albion, to name but four. Although I realise that, two of those pubs having been "townie" in my time, most of my generation of students won't even realise they've gone - or, indeed, where they were.

But it's more that - you wander across Radcliffe Square, remembering the day you cycled your bike down the stairs in Frewin Quad after Finals. And the people wandering around the place are the same old ones you always knew - except they aren't quite the same. The place is the same - but you've changed. You're just one of the punters that wander around the place. You may as well go the whole hog, and photograph some poor bunch of students as they wander, embarrassed, down the High to the Schools in sub fusc to sit some exam. After all, when you're facing the most stressful 3 hours of your life it's best to have some gorm sticking a camera in your face. It's character-forming, after all. And the college coffee shop is called "Gertie's" after a college servant of yore. But you - you were served tea at the hands of Gertie herself.

Old Quad, BNC

The stones that make up the colleges are themselves millions of years old, of course - limestone laid down in Jurassic seas under the Jurassic Sun. And the stones and the buildings and the sun are the same, in a relative way, but you're older. Shorter of breath, and a quarter-century closer to death. It's all stayed the same - give or take a bike lane - but you're the one that's not. You may have been Tennis Club captain, star hockey striker, Maths First or Queen of the JCR. But after all these years, you're just a ghost. You flit through, and nobody knows who you are.

It's a lovely place, though. And it's solid, and steady, and will last forever. It's just we that change.

The sense of passing time

My thoughts on Holme Beach crystallised in this evening's "Celebration of Passing Time".

We have such a strange attitude towards passing time, growth and ageing.  We celebrate a baby's first word, first tooth, first steps. And yet we have a different attitude to our first gray hair, first wrinkle or the first time we forget where we left the house keys.

It is as if we want everybody in the whole world to be stuck at some "perfect" age. Yet we forget that if we were to continue to celebrate the birth and growth of children, and yet could somehow prevent the downsides of ageing, we would end up with a world with standing room only, populated by immortals with perfect skin.

And so we have celebrated the passing of time this evening. We have poured water into people's hands, to see it dribbling away. We have put "stations" around the Moot House, with egg-timers, hourglasses and countdown timers to reflect the time drifting past. We have ripped the pages from calendars and burnt them in the Beaker Brazier. We have lit tea lights to watch them burn down. We have thrown the rose petals of youth into the Husborne Brook, to watch them float downstream. We have dropped stones in the pond, to see the ripples that never come back.  And we have projected the lifecycle of a flower - a whole season's growth and death of a flower in time-lapse photography - to remember the cycle of life and death, waxing and waning, May to December.

I'm feeling a bit down now, to be honest. I'm off to get my roots done.

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"Ripples" detail from the cover of Genesis "The Trick of the Tail" by Hypgnosis
Animated gif of Moon from Wikimedia Commons by Tomruen

Holme Beach

There's a certain something about Holme Beach., Norfolk.

Sands shift, winds blow, sea changes. It's a testament to the changing world we live in. A world where nothing is permanent - nothing lasts. A reminder of beauty, of impermanence, of transience - in short, a reminder that time passes, and the ripples never come back. The face in the water looks back, shakes her head as if to say that it's the last time you'll look like today.

We can't have that, can we?  So I'm going to fix it. Give us enough cement, I'm sure we can set it permanently. Time doesn't win round here.

Does it?

The Archdruid's Birthday Sermon

Every year, one particular day comes round with its reminders of mortality.  One looks at Holbein's Ambassadors, (and surely it's only a matter of time before the National realises they've only got a copy?) and sees the skull beneath the pomp and vanity.  The girl looks into the mirror, and sees a crone looking out.  The face in the water looks back, shakes her head as if to say that it's the last time you'll look like today.  One gets a sense of Ripples that never come back.

One's birthday.

When what is before you starts to appear shorter than what lays behind, one's mind turns to other things.  It was Pink Floyd who sang:

“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.  And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.  No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.”

And indeed I know how it is.  Ten years ago, more or less, I was earning my stripes as a trainee Archdruid with the Anglo-Saxon Folk of Aldwincle.  Bright-eyed and eager to achieve my ambitions, to live my visions and dreams, to make loads of money while simultaneously making gullible New-Age types feel fulfilled in a vaguely Christian, approximately traditional, largely made-up form of religion.  A religion in which feelings and emoting are more important than doctrine and theology. And yet one day you find yourself in a running battle with the jumped-up Assistant to the Assistant Executive Druid, while your gormless followers compete among themselves for who can come up with the stupidest form of alt.worship in an attempt to be "creative" in  their spirituality, and Young Keith is still taking out the out-buildings with his bizarre and dangerous new inventions.  And still you need to raise some money for the new Moot House.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun, as the prophet said.  But where does all this running leave you?  And again the prophet tells us - "shorter of breath, and one day closer to death".

So far so depressing.  One can muddle through, but in what way does one achieve anything?  To quote the prophet one last time - it leaves us hanging on in quiet desperation in the English Way.  At least I have the comfort of spirituality.  Which is, of course, much like having the comfort of knowing God but without the certainty.  Some, like spiritual extreme skateboarders, like to live with doubt and uncertainty - find their faith on the edge.  Yet sometimes it would be nice to have some more of that wide-eyed fundamentalist certainty.

Is it better to be a simple drone with certainty or a sensitive worrier with a tendency to doubt?  The answer does not seem clear.  I must away and light a vanilla tea light, and listen to some Kirsty MacColl* in an attempt to get in touch with the Divine.  Wherever - inside, outside or beyond - He, She, It or They are to be found.  In the Divine can be found all the ultimate ends of humanity, albeit maybe not all the answers.

And, no - don't ask me how many candles I'll be having on my cake.  Or I'll break your ankles.

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* "Soho Square" seems appropriate.

An ageing population

Many thanks to Revd David Keen for his post alerting us to Britain's ageing population.  It's all very distressing.  For some.
Here in Husborne Crawley, I'm feeling rather more sanguine.  Firstly because it will improve the behaviour of our community over time.  Young Keith's not going to be half so keen on staggering back from the White Horse planning trouble when he's Middle-aged Keith.  The Fertility Folk will have to put their clothes on and come back into the fold, once they're the "Can only raise the energy once a quarter Folk".  As for the Moon Gibbon people, advancing dementia can hardly make them less coherent than they currently are.  They've now had another split, with one group threatening to leave us and join the Guinea Pig Folk because we have female Archdruids,while the others are threatening to build their own Moot House because we have female Archdruids.  Turns out the two groups hate each other even more than they hate any of us, so any evening these days the sounds of flying plates can be heard under the Gibbon Moon as they settle old scores before they all head off to their new separate lives of purity, obedience and the 19th century.
And also the demographic suits our basic philosophy.  OK, we'll probably have to hold more festivals indoors, showing live video footage of the Moon streamed in from the outside.  And we'll have to install some toilets closer to the Moot House.  But look at this correlation between age and tea-light purchase:

Basically, all Beaker-related purchases show the same pattern.  Albeit the 70 pluses are buying fewer tea lights due to a lesser exposure in their early years (they were probably rationed during the war or something).  The Beaker Shop shows a similar correlation for essential oils and holy pebbles.  And as for doilies... I tell you, the sky's going to be the limit.

Demographic timebomb?  Bring it on, I say.