Tolerance and t-shirts

Given all the excitement of Being In Charge[tm], you might have been forgiven for not noticing that it was my birthday this week. To celebrate it, Mrs Hnaef encouraged me to buy a t-shirt from Stonewall UK - a most worthy charity, I am assured by all. It is most excellent, and as it arrived yesterday, I am wearing it today. It has an important message: that if people wish to be happy, then you should not bother yourself about it. The text is "Some People are Gay. Get over It." I cannot understand why Young Keith has been tittering to himself ever since I came down to breakfast this morning, proudly sporting this motto.

Anyway, as the Archdruid is due back soon, and in the spirit of the Parable of the Talents, I have designed a new version: "Some People are Beaker. This Should not Present You with a Problem." I think it is relevant, catchy, promotes tolerance, and looks good in pink. So I have taken advantage of a bulk order discount and put 75,000 of them on the Community Amex card, which the Archdruid seemed to have left under some unrelated papers at the very back of the locked money box within the second safe, behind the picture of her (dear, departed) parents in her locked office. She will be overjoyed with my spontaneity, I'm sure.

The Great Quagga Race

I think Hnaef's taking this whole "I'm in Charge" thing far too seriously. I mean. Eileen had wanted us to mark the death of the last quagga properly, and we clearly didn't have time to grow one from some DNA recovered from a quagga rug or something. All I suggested was that we "borrow" some zebras from the Safari Park - or, failing that, a few donkeys - and do a bit of a paint job. Nothing toxic, just something to produce some beasts with stripes at one end and plain at the other.

But it has been pointed out that borrowing - or, as Hnaef put it, "stealing" - zebras is always wrong, and so is painting them. And so once again we will have to resort to the pantomime quagga costumes. Hnaef and Daphne won the Great Quagga Race the last time  - although Eileen put that down to somebody mysteriously tying together the shoelaces of the back halves of all the other quaggas. I've no idea who she was thinking about, but the beer at the White Horse tasted particularly nice that evening.

Eileen has a habit of getting all philosophical. And she has often asked me whether, if someone ever re-bred the quagga from zebras and/or horses - and they got the DNA more-or-less completely the same as the 19th century quaggas of old - would it be a real quagga or just some kind of tribute quagga? What would have come first - the chicken or the quagga? 

Eileen likes to compare quagga recovery to Celtic Christianity. In the unlikely event, she says, that the "Celtic" Christians gave up their badly played guitars and tea lights, and instead re-instated four-hour Masses in Latin and severe beatings for misdemeanours  - would even a totally perfect recreation would be truly "Celtic Christianity"? Or, given that the people taking part in the service would be 21st century people rather than than 8th century Gaelic-speakers, and that the whole thing had been recovered - given that it would have the nature of a restoration rather than the time-worn original thing - wouldn't it still be inauthentic? Surely they would ironically still be looking at themselves recreating Celtic Christian worship, rather than actually doing so?

To which I normally say this is too deep for my mind. And can I go and paint a zebra? And then she hits me with her cricket bat.  It's very painful, is genetic archaeology.

No-one is Innocent

I've been for a walk down the cliffs at West Bay today. Amazing place, Bridport/West Bay. Setting of one of Hardy's most ironic short stories - and if it's one of Hardy's most ironic, you're certainly in irony country.

When you consider that West Bay was the setting for the Nick Berry "vehicle" Harbour Lights, it reminds you that we are all, deep down, guilty. And Robert expands on this in his consideration of societal sin - the idea that, although these days we are obsessed with individual sin and salvation, the Biblical view is one of corporate responsibility. If a window is smashed in Dalston, on this view, we all smashed it. 

Or, your might say - we put the society together where these things can happen - we share in the acquisitiveness and the get-rich-quick ethos, we individualise to the point where every man and woman is an island. But we share our human nature, we share the spaces in which we live, we share a network of humanity. Maybe the whole of society should be in the dock. Ask not for whom the broken glass tinkles. It tinkles for thee.

Undiminished Responsibility

The desire for all parties to be tough on rioters, and tough on even more rioters, is leading to a weird kind of macho culture where all parties clamour to show how tough they are. Maybe it was the reflection that Tottenham's not far from Islington that made Labour come down all authoritarian. More than anything else it reminds me of the old sketch from Not the Nine O'Clock News where the right-winger claims the only way to deal with trouble-makers is to "cut their goolies off". The left-winger (social worker, if I remember rightly) counters that she knows these kids, she's alongside these kids. And that they need their goolies cut off. But now we have the inevitable demands that we introduce National Service, cut off their benefits and throw them out on the streets. Maybe it's just me, but the thought of a bunch of homeless, moneyless ex-rioters with military training roaming the streets - with or without their more sensitive glands - is even scarier than the thought of what it must be like at home with Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper.

Have you ever considered what it would be like in the Balls/Cooper household, if they speak to each other at home like they speak to interviewers? The thought of Yvette requesting the salt, in that earnest way she has,  and Ed explaining that under a Labour government each person would have a salt cellar of their own - a salt cellar that would have been supplied by the Government, as part of its salt industry job creation scheme. And then Yvette explaining to one of the little Cooper-Ballses that hurting themselves by running into the door like that was their own silly fault - they'd gone too far, and too fast.

Sorry, a rogue thought went off there. But this last week I've seen more anti-social behaviour than the night  the posh kids let off all the fire extinguishers at a Brasenose party in the 80s. And it cost them 50 quid each in fines plus a refilling fee. Although, naturally, they paid in advance.

Nativity of Enid Blyton (1897)

You'll remember, if you're of a certain age, how many Enid Blyton books would start when the adults had somehow been ushered off-stage leaving only the plucky kids to stand up to an assortment of criminals. Who, almost inevitable, were either stage-Cockneys, or shifty-looking foreigners of undefined, but probably Mediterranean, heritage. The requirement would be for the kids to be on a deserted island, or a boggy swamp. Or maybe a reputedly-haunted castle. The kids would triumph through pluck, ingenuity and British spirit. And the girl who was most fond of wearing jodhpurs would be declared to be "spunky". An odd world, and not one we normally think of much these days.

Except the Archdruid's away. And last night, as Hnaef and I wended our way back from the White Horse to the Great House (reputedly haunted by the ghosts of the Archdruid's parents, after that incident with the hay baler) we  heard screams from the upper storey.

Naturally, we worry not about the upper storey. That's where the Archdruid's brother is kept imprisoned by his "keeper". As long as Daisy Rochester has her strength (and believe me, we keep her well nourished) we have nothing to worry about from Mycroft Fitzroy-Russell.

But still, there were shadows moving in the shadows. Which is pretty scary. If you want to see something moving in the shadows, it's not the shadows. Hnaef, however, told me that we are British and Quite Posh, and we should keep our Peckers up and Upper Lips Stiff.

Imagine our shock when we got back to the Great House to witness the return of Mr Jovanovich, the man who owned the house for six months last year when Eileen was last in Wessex. It turns out that, he was trying to claim the house on the grounds of forged deeds. Not his - they're all bona. No, it was Eileen who forged the claim, although I helped with the Land Registry computer.

So we had a shifty foreigner, blood-curdling screams from a spooky stately home, odd and amusing locals (the Beaker Fertility Folk, off for a frolic in the woods) and some Plucky Brits. The only thing we were missing was the almost-human animal that would get involved and, through preternatural intelligence and a certain amount of British Pluck, drive the dodgy foreigner away.

Enter the Earless Beaker Rabbit, lumbering back from an evening chasing foxes.

You can get a nasty nip from a rabbit at the best of times. But this one has a real bad attitude. Mr Jovanovich took one look and fled, dropping the deeds in one of those fortunate and fortuitous pieces of timing. The next thing we knew, the only document that proved the purchase of the Great House last April had disappeared, as the Beaker Bunny quickly ate it. She likes a bit of fibre in her diet. Foolishly, and imagining she was Timmy the Dog, Hnaef and I both bent down to pat her to say well done.

Which is why I'm typing this with two fingers - all the others being bandaged up.

I'm going to be lighting some tea lights in Enid Blyton's memory. I'm hoping it's the sort of foreign idea she'd have hated.

Hanging limply in the breeze

I had my evening check up with Burton this evening. Today's Semaphore Service was a bit of a disappointment. Shame really - a great idea, to have all the responses in semaphore rather than spoken.  But it was very humid and they had to cut it short. Burton said they were all flagging.

In Rude Health

I've sent Drayton a postcard of the Cerne Abbas Giant. (Warning - surprising image if you don't know what it is). I think he'll enjoy that. Or, maybe, Marjorie will.

There are many theories about how the Giant got there. Some say he's a Roman god. Some say he's a monkish joke. I would point out that the first reports of him are in the 17th Century. So I have two theories of my own.

One is that he's original and old. In which case he is, almost uniquely in English archaeology, a genuine fertility symbol. There's just something - maybe it's the jaunty angle of his club, I guess - which suggests that.

The other possibility is that he was the result of a giant piece of 17th Century graffiti. I like to think that on the downs next door it said "William Stukeley woz ere", and at the bottom of the valley somebody had drawn the words "Welcome to the Hood".

Beneath the Empty Wessex Skies

It's all Thomas Hardy's fault, I'm sure.

But every time I come down to Dorset I come down all agnostic. The constant random and unlikely co-incidences that happen to me, rather than persuading me that there's someone constantly interfering with my good in mind, instead just leaves me wondering when the Chairperson of the Immortals will have done with having his/her sport.

So I was enjoying a meal with Mrs Voss in Dorchester yesterday (I must stop calling it Casterbridge - even though little has changed) and I heard one of the locals remark to a friend that he reckoned Von Daniken was about right, and the gods were indeed. And do you know, not only did he look a bit like Chris de Bergh, but his companion was a woman (I won't say "lady" as I don't know her social status) in red! What are the chances of that?

Safely back in Lower Charmley now, of course. And I'm hoping that the Neighbourhood Watch will shortly be lifting the curfew. There was much fear last night, with people saying that the riots might spread to the village - although many were wisely spreading calm, pointing out it's a long way down here from London and the rioters might not be able to move that fast. Anyway, they confined the one teenager in the village to his bedroom, and we seem to have made it through.

Riot Voyeurs

That's the thing about a holiday, you get so much time to watch telly and surf the Net.
Like many I was glued to the riots yesterday - on the telly, not in real life. In prayerful pain, I hope. Not voyeurism. They were places I love that were being set on fire.

Unlike many I wasn't passing on information today about where all the riots were kicking off. Or weren't, in fact. If I believed what I saw on social networking sites today, I would have thought that Bedford, Luton, Milton Keynes and Wellingborough had all been entirely dismantled brick by brick by tea time. Last I heard none of this was true, and the area is in much the state I left it - maybe not always a great sight, in parts, but certainly no worse than last Saturday. Although apparently at mid-day a group of riot police were wandering round Furzton Lake - not a place known for large-scale trouble. They may have been there for the 2 for 1 deals at the pub.

Some of it seems to be the kind of hapless passing-on of information that causes people you otherwise thought  sane, to pass on shocked emails or Facebook links of blasphemous plays that don't exist, or children who went missing 12 years ago. Some of it is people trying to help in a gormless kind of unthinking way. Some of it is clearly people trying to be funny - although I'd argue funny peculiar rather than ha-ha. And some of it is people genuinely trying to scare others.

And I suspect some of it is people passing it on with a kind of cheap thrill at passing on the name of a place they know, with the word "riot" in the same sentence. They've been watching the Middle East on the news, assumed that's just a kind of video game, seen the same in London and they're now thinking the same video game may be going on near them. In the process they're scaring other people, and they may be unwittingly inciting the thing they're warning against.

Riots are bad things where people get hurt or killed, and real property gets damaged. They're not fun and they're not games. Don't get cheap thrills on them. And if you're not sure about what information you're passing on, don't pass it on. You're helping nobody and you're probably making it worse.

This has been a completely wasted message. But you can only try.

Unrest spreads

And we pray for the police
And the looters
And the media
And the politicians
And the young
And the old
And the scared
And the angry
And the apathetic
And the inciters
And the business owners
And the business burners:
And the people of our land.

Blake would be weeping.  Still

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

London

I hate seeing London like this.

And when people are suffering, I hate hearing the political points of Right and Left, as if scoring points is more important than someone fleeing from a burning flat or someone's livelihood being destroyed in an hour of madness.

So I pray for peace and comfort for the relatives of Mark Duggan,
for an investigation that is seen to be open and fair, and that delivers the truth - not what some people - whichever people -  want to hear,
for people to stop,
for justice,
for heavy rain,
for nobody else to get hurt
and for somebody - anybody - to find a way to solve the problems that neither Left nor Right has solved in my lifetime.