A Great Farewell

 Last night Call the Midwife – the BBC's cosy, corny, sentimental, occasionally brilliant Sunday-night drama – finally came to an end, after 14 years. Well, it might be back with a prequel or even a spin-off, but it's certainly over for me, because Sister Monica Joan – the oldest nun and by far the most interesting , with all the best lines – died. And a beautiful death it was, perfectly staged, with a serene Sister Monica Joan happily embracing the end of her sublunary life. To the end, she had all the best lines, speaking in perfectly formed sentences and drawing on a lifetime of reading good literature, by no means all of it devotional. Listening to her, I suddenly realised that most of the time she was speaking in a loose iambic pentameter, the rhythm that comes most naturally to an English speaker – that's why her lines always sounded so good. Judy Parfitt, who is now 90 years old, played the ancient Sister to perfection. If this was her last role, she has made a great farewell. 
 With Sister Monica Joan's death and funeral, we saw more on-screen religious ritual than has been seen in a drama for years, and I hope it might have been eye-opening for some who never think of such things. At the funeral, Sister Julienne (the ever lovely Jenny Agutter) read a poem, 'The Old Astronomer to His Pupil', which I had never heard of. In fact, it was two lines – 
   'Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
    I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night'
– from a much longer poem by one Sarah Williams, an English poet who died at the age of 30, in 1868, the year of its publication. Heavily influenced by Browning, it remains by far her best-known poem, if only for those two lines. I suspect they will become popular for readings at funerals now – and, who knows, perhaps there will be a new appreciation of the beauty and healing power of a Christian funeral...

Finch Update

 A few weeks ago, I lamented the lack of finches and other songbirds in the garden. Since then, happily, the goldfinches have returned in good numbers, along with chaffinches and – a particularly welcome return – greenfinches. No blackcaps or siskins, alas, but they were only occasional visitors at best. 
I don't know what was keeping all those finches away, even in the cold snaps, but I'm pretty sure I know what has brought them back: the feeder is now full of sunflower hearts, an irresistible treat, with a scattering of mealworms for those who like that kind of thing. I guess my previous birdseed mix was just not good enough for the finches. I spoil those birds.

'The French fog machine'

 You can say what you like about Facebook – and many of my acquaintance won't go near it, indeed flinch at the very name – but I find that it does throw up some unexpected gems from time to time. Here's one that popped up today –  

'Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, including Levi-Strauss, write the muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucauldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knocking down the pins.'

That's Camille Paglia in full flow, giving us what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed. 
I first became aware of Paglia when I heard her deliver a lecture on Radio 3, an audience event chaired by Bea Campbell. It was strong stuff, in the course of which Paglia, among much else, declared that feminism had been unfair to men, intimidating 'sad, pallid and puny' boys and making them desperate to satisfy female sexual demands, and that girls develop eating disorders because motherhood is no longer their primary goal and they grow up in ambitious, demanding and overprotective families. There were gasps, laughs and cheers at various points, and the lecture ended well enough, followed by some questions from Bea Campbell. But then came questions from the floor, and Paglia became increasingly impatient with their banality, until finally, emitting a furious hissing growl, she walked out, striding from the stage and leaving Campbell to wrap things up as best she could. It was terrific radio, and I've admired Camille Paglia ever since. Of course I don't agree with everything she says – could anyone? – but I love her outspokenness, vigour and take-no-prisoners directness. As in the above.

Larkin's Administration

 Here, to lower the tone, is a little something that Philip Larkin wrote on the, er, challenges of personnel management...

Administration

Day by day your estimation clocks up
Who deserves a smile and who a frown,
And girls you have to tell to pull their socks up
Are those whose pants you'd most like to pull down.

It seems Larkin wrote these lines after discovering one his prettier library assistants canoodling in the stacks with her boyfriend. 
It's a piece that could have found its way into either or both of the little anthologies I bought the other day, being both short (and actually rather sweet) and funny. 

Who knows the fate of his bones?

 At the risk of turning this blog into a calendar of saints' days, I must, as a Mercian and now a Lichfieldian, note that today is St Chad's Day, marking the death in 672 of Chad, Bishop of the Mercians and Lindsey People, and founder of the church that is now that tri-spired wonder Lichfield Cathedral. Chad's death was heralded by the beautiful sound of angels singing joyfully and telling the saint (he was already regarded as a saint) that they would return in seven days to take him to his heavenly reward. They flew back, punctual to the day, and, still singing, took his soul to its rest. Egbert, a friend of Bede's, related that someone in Ireland (perhaps Egbert himself) had seen the heavenly host coming for Chad's soul and later returning with it to heaven.   
   Chad's body was buried in the nave of his church, but his head was preserved in a specially built Head Chapel beside the south choir aisle, where it became a revered object of pilgrimage. 'But,' as Sir Thomas Browne asked, 'who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?' Sadly, the chapel was destroyed at the Reformation, and Chad's relics were passed, as it were, from hand to hand, turning up in the mid-17th century under a farmer's bed, then being divided, with some bones sent to St Omer in France, before the relics returned to Staffordshire, and were finally given to the new Roman Catholic cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham, where they still reside in an ark designed by Pugin. Happily, one bone was returned to Lichfield cathedral in 2022 and is housed in a new shrine in the retrochoir. 
   It is thought the famous, and beautiful, Lichfield Angel might have been the end piece of a shrine containing the bones of St Chad.

And this year St Chad's Day also turned out to be the day I saw my first butterfly of the year – a Brimstone (unusually a female) flying vigorously over the garden. It begins again – hurrah!

Llanddewi-Brefi

 The first day of Meteorological Spring, and the sun has been sighted here in Lichfield, though it seems to have disappeared again now. It is also Chopin's birthday (born 1810) – and St David's Day. To mark the last of these, here is a poem by R.S. Thomas – one that requires a word of explanation. First, the title: Llanddewi-Brefi, long before it found fame as the home of Little Britain's 'only gay in the village', was the scene of a sixth-century synod, at which the Welsh saints and bishops (pretty much the same thing in those days) gathered, and various miracles were performed, some of them by St David (Dewi). While he was preaching at the synod, the ground mysteriously rose under him, elevating him to a position from which he could be heard and seen by the large crowd that had gathered. It is this miracle that Thomas is recalling in his poem, which begins with a surprising echo of 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' – 

Llanddewi-Brefi

One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,
And buy a cottage and stand at the door
In the long evenings, watching the moor
Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall
Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.
And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall
Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,
And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood
Preaching to the people from his secret mound,
A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.

PS

 Here's something I wrote about J.L. Carr for the excellent Engelsberg Ideas. Follow the link...

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-man-who-gave-books-away/