Riding by myself

Posted on 30th December 2021 by 192.168.1.1

“What did you get for Christmas?”

Even after the passing of just five days, how many people could accurately recall all that they were given? By the beginning of December 2022, who will remember even a small fraction of what they received this Christmas?

There are few Christmas gifts that I recall with a clarity sufficient to be able to say the Christmas at which they were received.

One Christmas gift remains clear in the memory, fifty-three years later.

For my eighth birthday in October 1968, I had received a bicycle – an RSW 14.  The small wheeled bicycles were the rage at the time, and were ideal for country lanes and tracks and the odd field and rough ground.

The problem was that the winter days were so short, there was hardly time to ride it around.  Getting out of school at 3.30, by the time we got home there was not much daylight left.

For Christmas 1968, I was promised lights for the bicycle.  It was a great gift, it meant that hours of time that were otherwise lost – even children’s television in those days lasted just one hour – could be spent out on the bicycle.

To suggest that getting lights for your bicycle was a brilliant gift would sound odd to people now.  Do kids even ride around on bicycles for no reason other than just riding around? Maybe it would not even be safe now to allow an eight year old to go off riding country lanes – 1968 was still an age of innocence in rural Somerset.

Maybe though, more joined up thinking by parents might prompt very different choices for Christmas presents.

Instead of responding to demands of children created chiefly by slick marketing and social media campaigns, thinking what might really make a difference might create very different Christmas shopping lists. Enabling children to do and to achieve things for themselves would seem a gift with far greater potential for long-term good than the latest version of Grand Theft Auto or model of smartphone.

The creating of capacity for autonomous action, the allowing of people to freely make their own choices probably applies to much more than Christmas presents.

Looking at the billions poured into overseas development aid programmes without any noticeable improvement, you would wonder if my Dad had more idea about how to do something that might make a real difference for someone than legions of aid agency staffs.

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The last days of conversations

Posted on 28th December 2021 by 192.168.1.1

The landlord of The Woolpack pub on Emmerdale, was worried at there being no customers in his bar, times being what they are.

For many pubs, the times now are not new. I recall sitting in an empty bar in the week after Christmas, overhearing a conversation that carried across the empty room.

“Over the years we’ve had some bad cars. The engine fell out of one of them. I was taking the children to school and there was this “bang” behind us and it was the engine in the road. It was a car with the engine at the back; I didn’t expect that the engine would fall out. We stopped and I looked back and there it was. The cars aren’t like that now.”

It was a struggle not to laugh aloud as the lady continued her monologue on the ways of motoring, not that she seemed to find it amusing, the tales were told with a deadpan face and flat voice. Perhaps her companions had heard before her tale of the misfortunes of the motor cars.

The conversation moved on to the soaps they watched and those they avoided – Coronation Street and Emmerdale were favoured, Eastenders was disliked. It seemed a reasonable estimate of the qualities of the programmes, surely there is nowhere in the real world quite as miserable as Albert Square?

The three companions were of mature years and, judging by their questions, they gathered on a weekly basis, presumably on a Friday night. Their friendship was clearly long-standing, they were at ease, sat in a line on a bench, feeling no need to face their companions. How many times before had their lines been rehearsed? How easily might one person have picked up the story begun by another?

Sat alone, unnoticed, it was intriguing to eavesdrop on the Friday night gathering, two women and a man, relaxed in their own company and comfortably ensconced in the bar of a very quiet pub. Perhaps they had come here, sat in the same place for decades, perhaps their party had once numbered four. Perhaps Friday evening had represented the end of a working week, and the end of a week driving the children to school in a bad car. Perhaps it no longer mattered on which night they gathered, but out of habit they still met on a Friday evening.

The fact stories were being retold was of no consequence. Weren’t songs sung time and again without anyone complaining that they knew the words? Perhaps familiar stories were the best ones, those that had stood the test of time, those that had been refined by the passing years.

Draining the glass, I took it back to the bar, nodded to the landlady and stepped out into the night air – as invisible to the companions on departure as I had been on arrival.

When the last pub, has gone, will such conversations ever take place?

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A fox hunting man on sixty pence an hour

Posted on 26th December 2021 by 192.168.1.1

Were it not for the pandemic, these days would be a time for hunt meets all around the country. Hunting foxes with hounds might be illegal, but riding to hounds seems as popular as it ever was.

Fox hunting was part of the Romantic world of two centuries ago imagined by Mike. His passion was the poetry of the time. He would have been able to narrate the life of Wordsworth, especially the years when the poet and his sister lived near Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset in the 1790s.

Mike loved the Romantic poets. Although regarding himself as a novelist, he would have been capable of a lyrical turn of phrase. An affection for Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was perhaps common among those of a literary inclination who had emerged from the psychedelic era of a decade before.

It would have been hard to have guessed Mike’s age (to be honest, when one is seventeen, it is hard to guess the age of anyone over the age of thirty). He might have been in his thirties, a fresh faced chubbiness disguised any lines there might have been; he might have been older. His clothes were those of a former generation. Plain white shirt, dark trousers, a sleeveless brown leather jerkin, he could have walked out of a wartime drama. Mike’s home was in a small village tucked in a fold in the hills, he lived with his parents, a quiet couple whom I once met.

Reading was Mike’s passion, reading and writing. He had written his first novel at just fifteen years of age. The manuscript lay in a drawer in the desk, it was stuff about fox hunting and romance, not much entertainment for a seventeen year old.

Mike liked the solitude that came with his job. Deep in rural Somerset, the work provided time for thought, reflection, reading, even scribbling a few words.

Had I possessed the literary knowledge and the critical vocabulary, there might have been interesting conversations; having neither, we exchanged only pleasantries.

Encounters with Mike came at one o’clock each Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, I arrived at one o’clock and worked until closing time at eight o’clock in the evening, on Sundays I arrived at opening time at eight o’clock in the morning and worked until one o’clock. Taking over from Mike and handing over to him each weekend lunchtime, we would chat about nothing in particular.

Working as a petrol pump attendant for sixty pence an hour provided me with pocket money while I was studying for my A levels. Working as a petrol pump attendant for sixty pence an hour was Mike’s full time work. Even  in 1978, it was very poor pay. He would have believed that it provided him with the space he needed for his writing.

Falling customer numbers did not inhibit the owner of the filling station from coming in and taking rolls of notes from the till to go horse racing. Bills went unpaid, the oil company cut off supplies and the garage closed. Mike took it all with a poetic stoicism.

I never discovered his surname, never discovered whether his work was ever published.

Perhaps he would have been at a meet tomorrow, remembering the fox hunting days in his first novel.

 

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Perfectly wrapped

Posted on 25th December 2021 by 192.168.1.1

Wrapping Christmas presents seems to demand a degree of manual dexterity that I have never possessed. Buying good wrapping paper this year and a fresh roll of Sellotape, I had thought to make my gifts look more presentable. As it was, there were still uneven edges, bits of paper at odd angles, and a general appearance that suggested an inexpert hand.

My sister’s wrapping skills are at the other end of the festive presentation spectrum.  Being of an ecological mind, each gift is wrapped in brown paper and raffia and each looks the work of a master of the craft.

Contemplating a wrapped gift prompted thoughts of the film Love Actually. Only ever having seen the film in parts, I have never been sure what it is about, that’s if it is about anything other than a series of cameo performances.

Anyway, there is a moment in the film when the character played by Alan Rickman goes to a department store and attempts to surreptitiously buy a necklace for his wife. He is served by an assistant played by Rowan Atkinson, a character closer to Mr Bean than Maigret. Atkinson makes wrapping the present a work of art. No present wrapped in the way I wrap them would ever have left the store.

Pondering the film, I recalled the character played by Colin Firth, a writer living in a farmhouse deep in the French Midi. The character’s daily life seemed an embodiment of perfection, to be in gentle French warmth whilst nations further north sank into rainy grey gloom would have been a wonderful prospect.

Of course, it was a wish that could never have been fulfilled, writing a novel is as impossible a task as wrapping a present. Yet contemplating the gift on the table, there was an awareness that an Advent spent in France is not so remote a possibility.

Having turned 61 this year, I am only allowed nine more years before the Department of Education says, “that’s your lot.”

Money will never be plentiful, but with bits and pieces of pensions from here and there, life in France would be feasible. Colin Firth’s farmhouse would be in an ideal area. Var is the home of RC Toulonnais, a leading club in the French Top 14 rugby championship. Rugby, French cuisine, autumn sunshine and landscapes from dreams, there would be little else that one could want.

Then there was the sudden thought about what I would do all day. The attraction took on the crumpled appearance of my wrapping paper. Perhaps the government will raise the maximum retirement age.

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A rug on my knees

Posted on 23rd December 2021 by 192.168.1.1

“Ian, do you remember going around in the car with a blanket over your knees?”

My mother looked at my sister and suggested it was a very odd question, why would I have gone around in a car with a blanket over my knees?

“Yes,” I said, “it was the day after Nan’s ninetieth birthday party.”

“But you flew over,” said my mother, “you didn’t have a car.”

“That’s why I was able to travel around with a blanket over my knees. I sat in the back and we did a tour of the local places and I was offered the chance to sit in the front and I said that I would sit in the back with a rug over my knees and look out the window at everything we passed.”

The party had been the previous afternoon in the Langport Arms Hotel. I had left the morning service in the south Dublin church where I was rector at 11 am. A parishioner had whisked me to Dublin Airport where I had caught a flight to Bristol. My brother in law had collected me at Bristol Airport and we had arrived at the hotel at 3 p.m. Four hours from Dublin to Langport had seemed an efficient piece of travelling.

It was January 2003 and I remember feeling overwhelmingly tired and being delighted at the opportunity to just sit in a car and watch the world pass by.

I was forty-two years old at the time. There was no cause to feel tired. Yet there was also a feeling of never escaping from the parish, never being certain that there would not be bad news.

It was in the nature of the job, playing a pastoral role means assuming pastoral responsibilities. To complain at being called would be as silly as a farmer who suggested that the livestock could only receive care between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

I remember us passing through Langport and leaning my head against the window as a child might and looking at the buildings I had passed countless times in my life without giving them a second thought.

There had seemed an intensity about everything I saw. Colours brighter, buildings finer, even the winter landscape livelier.

It was one of those moments that would be unrepeatable. The emotions and sensations of that journey could not be replicated.

Why the rug? I think it indicated an internal desire to be driven, to have someone else responsible, to have decisions taken for me. Perhaps it was also a sign of a wish for the wisdom of age, for the wisdom of those who can look back over long lives.

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