Because...

Because that great (and long-lived) latterday Gothic revivalist Sir Ninian Comper died on this day in 1960, and because this picture shows some of his work in my parish church (All Saints, Carshalton) and because I hope to be there for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve...

Coming Attractions

If it wasn't for the icy conditions (global warming kicks in - Continent cut off), there would no doubt have been dancing in the streets last night at the news that Broon, Cameron and the other one (Clegg is it?) are going to treat the nation to three (count them) 90-minute (count them too) live TV debates in the run-up to the election. The political class is certainly all of a doodah at the prospect, and the story led the news on radio and TV - but doesn't that only go to show how wide the gap is between them and the rest of us? The rest of us really aren't interested in politics as such - 12 years of Blair-Brown has seen to that - and this election will be all about Cameron managing to persuade us that the prospect of a Tory government is that bit less appalling than the prospect of five more years of the most catastrophically inept government of the postwar years. If he can't do that, then we might as well all despair of the whole business (I suspect many already have). Will four and a half hours of Brown lying, bludgeoning and flashing his weird smile, Cameron looking serious and managerial and faintly wounded, and the other one impersonating a hole in the screen revive our interest in politics and send us to the polling station in unprecedented numbers? Unprecedentedly low, I fear, is the likeliest outcome. Brown is said to be 'relishing' the prospect of the debates... God bless us one and all!

Progress Becomes Stasis

There goes Eurostar then - yet another example of something that, when it's working, works spectacularly well, and when it's not working... Well, when it's not working it enters a state of total systems collapse - locomotive power, lighting, heating, air conditioning, water supply, and, to cap it all, even the most basic communications (never Eurostar's strong point), all gone. The accounts of what went on under the Channel are truly horrific, and many thousands are still living through the worst kind of travel nightmare. And why? Because Eurostar's highly sophisticated state-of-the-art trains found themselves unable to cope with a sudden shift from extreme cold into relative warmth. Water got into the electrical systems, and, since the whole shebang (like so many shebangs) depends on those electrical systems, every single function collapsed. It's yet another example of how progress, in the form of technological ultra-sophistication, can tip over into catastrophe and stasis, from the most seemingly trivial cause. Here, as so often, it was the weather, that ever unpredictable, ever surprising phenomenon. As extreme winter cold once again grips Europe and North America, and the curtain falls on the Copenhagen farce, how long will it be till we hear the first talk of a new Ice Age?

'An acrid cocktail...'

Radio 4's Book At Bedtime has taken another of its occasional breaks from the dreary prosing of the latest 'acclaimed' contemporary novelist - and this time it's lurched off in a gloriously unpredictable direction with a rather stylish prose adpatation of 10 of The Ingoldsby Legends. This is one of those books (or rather series of books) so popular in its time and so entirely unfashionable ever since that I never thought it would be revived in any form, let alone as a Book At Bedtime. I doubt more than a handful have read these stories for pleasure in recent times (though one of them, The Jackdaw of Rheims, was still widely anthologised in my schooldays). The Legends seemed to survive only as unsold volumes on the shelves of second-hand bookshops. The received opinion, inasmuch as there is one, dismisses them as 'an acrid cocktail of gallows humour, antiquarian ghoulishness and atrocious punning' (what's not to like?). And yet, to judge by the radio adaptation, they are richly entertaining fare - jolly tales, often of supernatural events, very similar in tone to some of the stories Dickens inserted into the Pickwick Papers (which, sadly, is probably among the least read of Dickens's works nowadays). Dickens, indeed, was a friend of Barham (the author) and his editor on Bentley's Miscellany. There's a colourful account of Barham and his corner of Kent here. And there are still five of the Legends coming up next week on Book At Bedtime.

Brrr

You can always rely on the weather gods, with their quirky sense of humour, to put on a cold weather spectacular just as we mortals are exercising ourselves with maximum solemnity over 'global warming'. With any luck, the delegates to the Copenhagen conference will find themselves snowed in, their fleets of limos standing idle, their squadrons of private jets snowbound on the runways of Scandinavia... Over here, the blizzards, whiteouts, snowdrifts and white hell scenarios painted for us Londoners by the Met Office didn't quite live up to the billing. It was - and is - very cold, that's for sure, but only a couple of inches of snow fell in my neck of suburbia, and scarce any at all in town. It was, of course, enough to bring the trains to a near-standstill and create the usual travel chaos - the infrastructure of London being so frail (wait till 2012...) - but at least, as we trudged through the snow and slush or stood waiting hopefully on frozen station platforms, we could warm ourselves with the thought that, over in Copenhagen, that nice Mr Brown was giving away billions of our money to corrupt power elites in the Third World - sorry, helping developing countries to adjust to the impact of climate change. As Scott Walker said, 'Copenhagen, you're the end.'

Happy Birthday, VSP!

On an infinitely cheerier note, today is the anniversary of that great writer and bringer of happiness and illumination, V.S. Pritchett, born on this day in 1900. There's a good recent appreciation of the short stories here, which laments how little Pritchett is read today. He has featured on this blog often enough, beginning with this post, which set me to reading (and rereading) more of his works - and led to the discovery of fellow enthusiasts across the blogscape. It also led me to buy that endlessly rewarding volume of his writings, The Essential Pritchett, which I would recommend to anyone. He might never come back into fashion, but Pritchett was surely one of the greatest critics and short story writers England ever produced. Happy birthday, VSP!

Grim Viewing

'I shall be like that tree,' predicted Jonathan Swift, pointing to a stag-headed specimen. 'I shall die from the top.' As modern medicine becomes ever more adept at keeping our bodies going, increasing numbers of us can look forward to the same grim fate, and the misnamed 'care' (often no more than a form of warehousing) that goes with it. There was a harrowing programme on TV last night in which the businessman Gerry Robinson looked into what goes on in homes that care for the demented elderly, and it was grim viewing indeed. His uphill struggle to improve matters in one home - recently, to his undisguised amazement, upgraded to 'adequate' - was finally blown out of the water when allegations of sexual offences caused it to be closed down. The sight of the bewildered and terrified residents being wheeled out to die elsewhere was one of the most hauntingly terrible things I have ever seen on TV. What will future generations make of our treatment of the elderly - or indeed of babies and young children, who are similarly regarded as a problem to be farmed out to low-paid 'carers' (those that are allowed to live, that is - the scale of abortion in this country might also appall future generations)? It seems that any activity that involves one human being looking after, caring for another human being is by definition low status and low paid (unless it can be 'professionalised' into respectability). Is this because it is 'women's work'? Or is it just that we live in a society that values getting and spending above all else, regarding the truly important matters of life and death as peripheral - though all of us know that really they are central? If you're lucky enough to be lucid as you near death, will you look back and think Gosh I wish I'd spent more time in the office? And yet, while we are working, we must all entertain the delusion that it matters more than anything else. The result of all that getting and spending is that even the relatively poor among us live at a level of luxury that to past generations would seem beyond the remotest possibility. And yet, in the midst of this unheard-of wealth, we cannot spare enough to care properly for the most vulnerable among us. Swift, by no means a rich man, gave away a third of his earnings to charity, and saved another third to found the St Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles. As he put it in his own ironic epitaph,
'He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad.'