life and opinions of andrew rilstone

SPECIAL AWARDS

2012-01-27T07:00:00.000Z

THE META-AWARD FOR PERSON MOSTCERTAIN TO BE MADE FOLK SINGER OF THE YEAR AT THE RADIO 2 FOLKAWARDS

The award goes to Jon Boden, for being the onlyperson to have recorded a new folksong every day for 365 days. Someof them deserved to be consigned to oblivious (I am looking at YOU,Big Rock Candy Mountains, and YOU King of Rome) but many of them ( Four Angels, O'Hamlet) were worthrepeated listens, and he introduced me to lots of cool songs (e.g TheMistletoe Bough, A Chat With Your Mother) which I didn't know, which was presumably the pointof the excercise.

THE "TAKES OUT AN ONION"AWARD FOR MAKING THE JUDGE CRY

Sean Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts
for Joe Peel at Bristol Folk Festival

Steve Knightley, Fisherman's Friendsand the entire company, but this time chiefly yourselves,

for Cousin Jack, also at Bristol FolkFestival

Chris Wood
for Hard, Jersualem, and Hollow Point (duh!) at Colston Hall, 21 Oct 2011

WINNER

That miserable bastard Chris Wood.

SPECIAL "WELL HE OUGHT TO BE MORE CAREFUL WITH HIS BOATS" AWARD FOR BEST FAMOUS DEADCANADIAN SINGER SONGWRITER WHO EVERYONE ELSE HAD HEARD OF BUT THEJUDGE ONLY STARTED LISTENING TO THIS YEAR

Chris Ricketts
for Stan Rogers'Northwest Passage (on Port of Escape)

Blackbeards Tea Party
for StanRogers' Barret's Privateers (on Tomorrow We'll Be Sober)

Jon Boden
for Stan Rogers' Loch Keeper (on a Folksong A Day)

WINNER

Stan Rogers for Stan Rogers'Mary Ellen Carter, which, in a rare show of unanimity, the readers ofthis blog voted "single best song ever written by anyone about anything ever".

SPECIAL AWARD FOR THE JUDGE'S COOLEST MUSIC-RELATED MOMENT OF 2011

* Lustily and tuneless singing alongwith Fishemen's Friends singing Cousin Jack in the mud at the Pyramd Stage at Glastonbury, and noticing that Steve Knightley wasstanding next to him

* Standing on York station,desperately hoping that the old gentleman with the guitar case to whom he has just said "We really enjoyed your set, sir, such a shame you were so far from theaudience" really had been Martin Carthy. (Or if, indeed, he had dreamt the whole incident.)

* Hearing the astonishing Emily Portman singingwonderful mysterious whispy ethereal fairy tale ballads in the upstairs room of the Louisiana Bristol, and realising that theaudience consisted of eleven people, including the judge, Bristol's Leading Citizen Folk Journalist, Peter Lord and Jim Moray.

* The aforemetnioned Martin Carthy singing Bob Dylan's Dream on the Radio 2 tribute programme. (Bob Dylan having originally based the song on Martin Carthy's version of Lord Franklin's Lament.)

* Hearing The Pentangle doing a setconsisting entirely of traddy classics at Glastonbury, unaware thatthis was the last but one performance Bert Jansch would give.

WINNER

No award. You can't give an award for something sad.

THE JUDAS AWARD FOR BESTLIVE PERFORMANCE OF A BOB DYLAN SONG

Phil Beer
for Seven Cursesat Bristol Folk Festival

June Tabor and the Oyster Band
for Seven Curses at St Georges Hall Bristol, Nov 1

Martin Simpson
for NorthCountry Blues at Chapel Arts, Bath, Oct 22

Ralph McTell
for Girl from the Noth Country at St Georges, Bristol, 29 Sep

Bob Dylan
for Man in the LongBlack Coat at Cardiff Arena, Oct 13

WINNER

Martin Simpson.

It's shameDylan didn't sing Seven Curses, so I could have had an award for "thebest live performance of Dylan's Seven Curses."

THE GELDOF AWARD FOR THE BEST LIVE PERFORMANCE BY AN ARTIST NAMED BOB

The judge unanimously gave theaward to Bob Dylan's show in Cardiff Arena.

The first night of anopera is generally judged a failure unless a sizable proportion ofthe audience boo; similarly, the Poet Laureate of Rock and Rollwouldn't have done a show unless some people claimed to have walkedout of it. It is widely believed that Bob's promoters fill the back rowswith an anti-claque who are only there so they can leave after the opening number.

It must be admitted that, in order to understandDylan's current approach to his muse (a.k.a "whatever the hell it is hethinks he's doing nowadays") you need to

a: have heard at leastthree albums since MTV Unplugged

b: Be reasonably familiarwith his lessor known material (NOTE: Knowing some of the words to Like a RollingStone doesn't count)

c: Be sitting or standing in the front fiverows.

If you fulfil all those criteria, than you will be treated toa Robert Zimmerman becoming in his autumn years the artist I am convinced he has alwayswanted to be – the bluesy, rock-a-billy song and dance man,grinning and mincing and riffing and colluding with the audience.

In short: this was the gig I am most likely to tell my non-existent grandchildren about.

"But Andrew,would you have praised this very strange show so highly if you had never heard ofBob Dylan?"

"If I had never heard of Bob Dylan then I would never have heard any of Bob Dylan's songs. Under those circumstances, if this grizzled old man in a sweaty cowboy hat had snarled into a small venue andstarted growling, I would have said 'What marvellous songs...getme a pen and paper, these may be the greatest lyrics that have everbeen written...what fantastic tunes...what a weird-arse way ofsinging them."

Which is precisely what everyone has been sayingabout Dylan since approximately 1959

THE MUDDY WELLINGTON BOOT AWARD FOR THE MOSTIDIOSYNCRATIC VENUE

The Canteen, Stokes Croft

The Canteen, a sort of perfectly legal squat in a disused open plan office, is allegedly the creative hub of the coolest, most creative street in England, or, if you believe the Bristol Evening Post, the place where crusty hippy commies hang out who ought to get a job and be forced to eat Tescos sandwiches and Banksy ought to be flogged like they did to that kid who painted graffiti on Singapore. I digress. One of the Canteens U.S.Ps, apart from real ale and very decent food at very reasonable prices (you get a free bowl of soup with a meal, which is a really civilised touch) is live music -- I've heard both the aforementioned Pilgrims' Way and the not yet mentioned Hoddamadoddery there.

Well, "heard" is a slight overstatement: it's a bar. People are right up near the stage trying to finish designing their websites on the Macbooks, or with their course work on Brecht spread out in front of them; or else they are drinking and trying to have a conversation with their mates, wondering when the distracting noise at the front is going to stop. This probably works very well with that loud electrical rhythm stuff that the young people allegedly like but which no-one actually wants to listen to in the first place, but it's really not the environment in which to hear Pilgrims' Way telling you about the hand weaver who fell in love with the factory maid. Not sure what the solution is. Shame.

Scarborough Open Air Theatre

Plastic, football stadium styleseating. Numbered seats, although this didn't make much difference,because the arena was about ¼ full. A river, possibly the river Derwent, running through the complex,separating the audience from the stage. The impact of Bellowhead is slightly numbed when they are several miles away from you, and with the best will in the world, its hard to get the nuances of the aforementioned Jim Moray doing the aforementioned Lord Douglas in that environment. During the Demon Barber's set, a man with a guitar ambled through the audience who were, by this time, standing on the tarmac near the rail. He turned out to be Martin Carthy.

Green Note Cafe, Camden Town

About 100 yards from Cecil Sharp Houseitself. Fits 50, of whom about 20 can sit down. Admission onlygranted to people who know a special hand shake (I made that up). Ifyou want to sit, you need to buy a ticket AND book a table and eat. If you want a table near the stage, you have to form a queue at 6, and take you seat at 7, in plenty of time for the music at 9. In return, you get to hear MartinCarthy, Alasdair Roberts, Robin Williamson in surroundings thatredefine the word "intimate". I love this place to bits.

AND THE WINNER IS:

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. .

CHAINS OF THE SEA AWARD

2012-01-26T01:00:00.000Z

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR BEST NEW SONG OF 2011 ARE AS FOLLOWS

The Reckoning

by Steve Tilston

There are a limited number of performers who would use the word "misbegotten" in a song. But then there are a limited number of performers who combine a gift for melody, poetry and actual thinking in the way that Steve does. (He is in the category of "you may not have heard of him but you have probably heard some of his songs".) The Reckoning is a deeply reflective piece about the kind of world that we are leaving to the next generation. Refreshingly free from obvious target hunting or jerking knees, it has a melody which manages to be memorable without actually being catchy.

"I offer you this toast should these troubles come to roost / for we ate the golden goose and left the reckoning to you."

Never Buy the Sun

by Billy Bragg

Thank God for Billy Bragg. Literally, thank God for Billy Bragg. I may or may not have mentioned before that Tony Blair became the the godfather of Rupert Murdoch's baby, in a ceremony which took place on the banks of the River Jordan. The nauseating -- literally nauseating -- hypocrisy of both teams -- the "socialist" politician in bed with an empire that is committed to destroying everything he stands for, the empire cultivating the personal friendships of politicians they pretend to "hold to account" -- more of less guarantees that nothing honest or indeed coherent can ever be said in any parliamentary debate, op ed columns or media talk show. So it is left to people like Billy Bragg to use music and plain speach to tell it how it is. Or how they think it is. It hardly matters if you agree with him: it's enough that he uses words to to convey meaning, instead of to obscure it. He eschews triumphalism at the wounding of the Murdoch empire, and instead offers a lament. How did we let it come to this?

"No-one comes out looking good when all is said and done / And the Scousers never buy the Sun."

What If, No Matter

by Tom Paxton

Joe Hill is supposed to have said that a leaflet, however well written, will be read once and thrown away, but a song will sung, and passed on, and repeated, and remembered. Tom Paxton's instant response to the Arizona shootings are a case in point. There were acres of newsprint and hand wringing and speculation, but Tom said all that really needed to be said in five verses.

THE WINNER

Billy Bragg and Steve Tilston are cleverer and more complicated, but the judge has no hesitation in giving the prize to Tom Paxton. Songs like this are the reason I started to listen to this stuff in the first place. (There is still absolutely no excuse for the Marvellous Toy.)

FINGER IN THE EAR AWARD (LIVE)

2012-01-25T13:44:00.001Z

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR BEST LIVE PERFORMANCE OF AN OLD SONG ARE AS FOLLOWS

The Two Sisters

The Emily Portman Trio (at the Louisiana, Bristol, Nov 8th)

Oh, there are lot of things to say about this song. That it's a truly beautiful, rounded fairy tale. That the sound the trio created in an upstairs room in a pub was astonishingly close to what is on the CD. That the song runs to something like 20 verses, and the group use that space to create a small epic; full of different musical textures; more a symphony than a ballad. That Emily has made a tiny surgical change to the traditional lyrics (changing "yonder sits my father the king" to "yonder sits my lover the king") which gives the tale a tragic logic and inevitability that it never had before. I found I had eight different versions of this song (Child Ballad 10, I looked it up) on my I-Pod. This is by far my favourite. A person on Youtube says it makes them imagine themselves "in the middle of an elvin forest, morning dew kissing greenery". Well, quite.

Little Sally Racket

Bellowhead (at the Scarborough folk festival, 8 Aug)

Understand this: if you have only heard Bellowhead on CDs, then you haven't heard Bellowhead. They aren't only about music; they're about musical theater. You have to be there. One of my Folkbuddies, who hadn't heard them before, said Jon Boden was like a musical John Cleese. I see him more as a swaggering musical Captain Jack Sparrow. The CDs don't really convey how tall he is. Little Sally Racket is an infinitely long sea-shanty about local prostitutes, with the obligatory "haul away" refrain. Boden turns in a passable impersonation of the Johnny Rotten (or some fella of that kind) producing a sort of folk-punk hybrid with a hymn embedded in the middle. There are better Bellowhead songs. There are better Bellowhead songs about prostitutes. But this is always one of the highlights of their live act. The performance could scarcely be more over the top (and Bellowhead know about over the top) and coming in between two more restrained, or at any rate sane, pieces, it never fails to bring the house down, even when, as in this case, the stage was three quarters of a mile away from the audience.

Lord Douglas

Jim Moray (at Chapel Arts Bath, June 10th)

Jim diffidently presented this astonishing piece as work in progress. (There are more polished versions on the Cecil Sharp Project CD and on his new album, Skunk, to which we are likely to be returning at some point.) It's one of those traditional ballads (Child 7, I looked it up) which exists in dozens of different versions. Man elopes with girl; someone betrays them; they are chased by the girls family; man is killed; girl dies of sorrow; foliage grows out of their respective graves, as is more or less obligatory for lovers in folk songs. I can't imagine how Jim went about combining, and rewriting, the different versions, and apparently incorporating a sub plot from a similar Icelandic saga. It's a complicated story that I've had to listen to several times to get the hang of; one of those sagas which you always seem to be lost in the middle of with feuds and love affairs and curses taken for granted before the story starts. And the tune seems to have drifted in from another world.

THE WINNER

The Two Sisters, by the merest wisp of thistledown.

FINGER IN THE EAR AWARD (CD)

2012-01-24T01:00:00.000Z

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR THE BEST NEW RECORDING OF AN OLD SONG ARE AS FOLLOWS

The Bonny Bunch of Roses

on Ragged Kingdom by June Tabor and the Oysterband

I think of June Tabor as "thatlady who sings the rather distant, mournful, depressing songs aboutScotland and the sea, often without accompaniment", which rangefrom "my favourite songs ever(*)" to "oh, get on with it, for goodness sake!" In case you were wondering, her new album, Ashore failed to get nominated for the Nautical award because while it was undoubtedly brilliant it was also a teensy weensy bit how can I possibly put this boring. But of course, she can also more than hold her own providing the lyrics while the Oysterband are rocking out like it's 1990. There is a productive incongruity between the traditional text and the electric arrangement. Hardly any band can mess this song up: how can you fail with lines like "I'll raise a numerous army/ And through tremendous dangers go /And in spite of all the universe /I'll conquer the bonny Bunch of Roses, O". June Tabor sings it like she's going to personally cross the channel and give Young Napoleon a jolly good talking-to. This song would have been nominated for the BEST TRACK FOR PEOPLE WHODON'T THINK THEY WOULD LIKE FOLK MUSIC award, should such an awardexist.

(*) King of Rome, Place Called England, Unicorns, A Proper Sort of Gardener, Hughie Graham, Best Patrick Spens Ever, etc

A Pilgrim's Way

on Wayside Courtesies by Pilgrims' Way

Pilgrims' Way are the probably the most exciting newband of 2011. ("New" is here defined as "band I first heard perform in" by which definition, admittedly, Steeleye Span would count as "new" but let's not get bogged down at this stage). They're essentiallytraditionalists, with the touch of electricity on some songs not nearly as distinctas the jews harp (a.k.a "that thing which goes twang?") on others. Lucy Wright's vocals are forceful but sweet sounding ever-so folkie without ever drifting into nasal cliches.

A Pilgrim's Way is also a pome by Mr Rudyard Kipling which was set to music by Mr Peter Bellamy. If you aren't careful it can go on for ever. (Jon Boden, and indeed Mr Bellamy himself, were not careful.) Pilgrims' Way (the band) give it a light, musical feel, free of trickery or fireworks; and Lucy navigates "Amorites and Erermites and general Avergees" as if she had some idea what it meant.

Ithas been mentioned before that many of us in the blogsphere could beimproved by a judicious application of the precepts of verse 3.

Bold Sir Rylas

on The Works by Spiersand Boden

I have to admit to being slightlydisappointed by The Works -- much as I love Spiers and Boden, Iwished they could have given us an CD of new material, rather thannew takes, however high quality, on material we already know pretty well. That said, any one trackon the album is great, and this one is just about my favourite. The story of how Bold Sir Rylas cut an old lady in half is agreat Pythonesque yarn with a sing-a-long chorus the singing alongon the album is no lessor a person than Maddy Prior. (Martin Carthycontributes to Prickley Bush, but you’d hardly know.) All togethernow: He split her head down to the chin! You should of heard seenher kick and grin!

WINNER:

Pilgrims Way by a country mile. (BUT NOTE: It’sreally “The People, Lord, thy People” not “The people, oh, thepeople.")

NAUTICAL BUT NICE AWARD

2012-01-23T10:49:00.000Z

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR BEST NEW CD WITH SOME CONNECTION TO THE SEA ARE ASFOLLOWS:

Hold Fast
by the Sail Pattern

The Sail Pattern are on the rockier end of folk rock compared with what I usually like, but when your first album is as good as this, you are welcome to be at which ever end of anything you choose.They have attitude They can play.They have their own voice. If they decide to sing Farewell And Adieu To Your Spanish Ladies then by god, you know you're listening to a Sail Pattern version of Farewell And Adie To You Spanish Ladies. There's a convincing machismo to the vocals offset by themerest hint of immaturity. (They look all of about 17.) They show every sign of caring about thefolk tradition, and every sign of having grabbed it by the throat andthrown it overboard. Hard to know where their lyrics start and Anon's lyrics end. ("A puppet's on the throne of Spain and Bonaparte's in Cairo / With Nelson's ship we sailed away and fought him on the Nile-oh.") Their signaturetrack, Hold Fast, wot they wrote themselves, oozes naval atmosphere; it isn't ashanty, it isn't a ballad, but it's fundamentally itself.

Port of Escape
by Chris Ricketts

Chris Ricketts claims to sing seashanties with a twist. I am not quite sure what the twist is. I thinkit may be "good singing". He ooozes authenticity and sincerity. He sings Hanging Johnny (a relatively meaningless worksong) with a mixture of melancholy and menace. ("I'd hang the holyfamily...'cos hanging is so bloody funny.") He sings Bound For South Australia with straightforward honesty and a didgereedoo, which mysteriously causes youto forget that such a band as Fisherman's Friends ever existed. Hesings the full dress version of Spanish Ladies with guitars and seagulls and no lyrical concessions to landlubbers ("till we strike the soundings in the channels of old England"). He sings North West Passage, which might actually be a step too far. I heard him open for Martin Simpson, which is something noguitarist should ever have to do. There's something modest and warm and real in his voice; as if a hundred year old sea dog has somehow got stuck in the body of a hobbit.

Tomorrow We'll Be Sober
by Blackbeard's Tea Party

Last years EP, Heavens to Betsy blew meaway. This year's follow up is even better. The choice of songs isimpeccable: you can't not love an album which includes Barret'sPrivateers, Chicken on a Raft and Landlord Fill the Flowing Glass.The latter may be a rollicking bollocking drinking song with dirtywords (which may owe more to the reenactment circuit than to Cecil Sharp)but it bears repeated listenings because of the wit of thearrangements (the musicians finding increasingly silly things to accompany each verse with). The finest, and least subtle moment onthis, or perhaps any, album comes at the end of the colliers song I Can Hew.(Sweetly and mournfully): "And when I die, I know full well, I'mnot bound for heaven I am bound for..." (rock-out explosion)"HELL!"

WINNER

HOLD FAST

It was a dem close run thing, but the judge awarded the prize to Sail Pattern so he could claim to have liked them before they went mainstream.

THE MONTYS

2012-01-21T11:50:00.000Z

Welcome to this years Montpelier Station Music Awards (affectionately know as The Montys) in which a panel of judge, chosen from a short list of blogger living in big pink houses right near Montpelier Station selects its favourite musical moments of 2011.

And now without further ado: please pass me the plain brown envelope.

That appears to be letter from the gas company, threatening to take the tenant who left in 2005 without leaving a forwarding address to court.

Please pass me the other plain brown envelope...

2012-01-19T15:18:00.001Z

Is Tolkien Actually Any Good?

Did Gandalf Torture Gollum?

Did Susan Pevensie Go To Hell?

Who Wrote The Poems of C.S. Lewis?

Do Balrogs have wings?

Andrew Rilstone answers thirteen important questions about C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien -- their lives, their books and their worlds.

Reviews and critiques of books, plays and those god-awful movies

Every Inklings-related word that Andrew has published since 1999.

Never-before published material, including

* a detailed response to Planet Narnia

* thoughts on Jack's Life and Lenten Lands
* a new, definitive essay on the trillemma

* a commentary on the internet furore which engulfed my essay Is Tolkien Actually Any Good

Lost Usenet essays and other rare fragments of Rilstonia.

Thirteen or so years in the making

About 300 pages

Around 100,000 words

Available now from Lulu.com.

Available from Amazon and in E-Book format in due course.

2012-01-15T21:43:00.003Z

Public service anouncement

To the person who googled "Woody Guthrie one eyed banker story" and landed on this page, it goes like this:

There was once a one eyed banker, who went to the finest optometrist in the country, and paid him a small fortune to make the best glass eye money could buy. He was incredibly pleased with it. The next day, a poor farmer came to the bank to ask for an extension on his loan. Before getting down to business, the one eyed banker said "I bet you a dollar you can't tell which is my glass eye". 

"The left one" says the farmer. 

"How could you tell" said the banker, very disapointed. 

"Because that's the one with a tiny glint of human compassion in it" replied the farmer.

To the person who googled "Cuddling your father's willy" and ended up on this page: please go somewhere else. 

Personally I prefer the one about the two rabbits.   

2012-01-07T00:30:00.000Z

I think that in retrospect, everybody could see that Tom Baker was just too good. He wasn’t necessarily the best actor to play the Doctor. He wasn’t the first to think he owned the role, or even to get himself and the character mixed up. But he was the most charismatic incumbent. His ad libbing made him a de-facto co-writer. The credited writers naturally played up to his sense of humour. They wrote Tom-lines, and the audience tuned in to see Tom in a way they never had to see Jon or Pat or Bill. The TARDIS became less and less a fictitious space craft; and more and more a stage set or a TV studio. When Tom was discovered learning oil painting or playing chess with K-9, it didn’t occur to us to ask why, or what he was doing before, or what he did the rest of the time. It would have been like asking what Geoffery and Bungle did in the Rainbow House when they weren't singing songs or reading stories or making finger paintings. We understood, from a very early age, that people like Tom Baker and Rolf Harris and Zippy didn’t exist when the camera wasn’t pointed at them. Tom’s bundle of mannerisms and surrealism and jokes and gestures and one liners held the series together as the narrative around it became less and less coherent; less and less relevant; until it all but ceased to exist. You could have dropped Jon Pertwee into Web of Fear or Wheel in Space, or Pat Troughton into Silurians or Curse of Peladon, and very little about the story would have changed. Horns of Nimon or Nightmare of Eden or Armageddon Factor couldn’t be imagined without Tom Baker at the center. “Story” had become nothing more than a series of corridors to run along, monsters to offer jelly babies to, villains to deliver hammy speeches to. And it was all wonderful because Tom was wonderful but once Tom wasn’t there being wonderful any more it all started to fall apart: not because Peter Davison was a poor actor, but because Peter Davison was only an actor, and he could only deliver the lines he was given, in the script that was written. Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee were leading men in mostly well crafted costume dramas and thrillers; Davison, Baker II and McCoy floundered around in a star vehicle without a star. (McCoy could, in fact, have saved the series. But he didn't.)

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.” As a wise man once said: “Piece of shit. Walk away.”

An Unearthly Child

2012-01-06T00:30:00.000Z

Teach me how to grow in goodness,
Daily as I go;
Thou hast been a child, and surely
Thou dost know.

So. Folk songs about the childhood of Jesus. Subversive, hereticalstories; alternative Jesuses; hidden, suppressed traditions; lostspiritualities that the church doesn't want you to know about; hintsfrom which we can reassemble long lost truths about the lost boyhoodof Christ.

Well, no, obviously not. Pious folk inthe olden days read the New Testament and wondered what washappening "off stage". When did Joseph propose to Mary? How did hefind that she was pregnant? What did they do in Egypt?What happened when they go home? The four Gospels didn't tell them. So they made stuff up. Outof their heads. And the stuff that they made up is, in some cases, sooff-the-wall that we read it and think: :"Were they readingthe same Bible us we are?"

But they were. And that's what makes it so interesting.

Think of one of the more familiar songs. Think of Once In RoyalDavid's City. We've heard the song so many times that we've probablynever listened to it. Cecil FrancesAlexander (Mrs) evidently also had a bunch of questions about little babyJesus, and also found that the Bible didn't answer them, so she also made stuff up.Out of her head. And her made up stuff is actually a good deal lessconvincing than the off-the-wall stuff in the "apocryphal" sources. "And through all his wondrouschildhood / He would honour and obey / Love and watch the lowlymaiden / In whose gentle arms he lay." Never mind that the oneactually canonical story about the boy Jesus shows Mary practicallyloosing her blessed temper with him ("Son, why hast thou thusdealt with us?") "Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as he." We know that this is what the boy Jesus was like, because this is what the boy Jesus must have been like. It doesn't occur to us that it no more comes out of the Bible than do the stories about Psycho Jesus bringingtoys to life and striking playmates dead. We know that Mary andJoseph were the poorest of the poor, and that there was a donkey andan innkeeper and a stable. But if a different set of pious legendshad taken root, we'd know that Mary was rich -- a Queen orPrincess who lived in the Temple and had taken a vow of celibacy. And that Jesus was born in a cave.

Stephen Green (a lunatic) pretended to be very offended bythe dramatised retelling of the story of the birth of Jesus that the BBC did last year. Idon't think he'd actually seen it. Lunatics never go and see thingsbefore they get offended by them. It looked to me as if the NastyMail phoned him up and said "The BBC's new Nativity filminsinuates that Mary was raped, what do you think of that?" andhe replied "That's just typical of the BBC. All part of aCommunist plot to undermine the Christians basis of our civilisation I shouldn't wonder."

In TonyJordan's actual script, Joseph is shocked to find out that Mary ispregnant. Mary says "It was not my doing". Joseph replies,in horror "You were raped?" He's not slandering Mary, buttrying to make excuses for her.

One wonders how Christian Voice would have reacted to thedramatised retelling of the story of the birth of Jesus that the craft guilds of Chesterused to present during the fourteenth century. In that version, oneof the two women who Joseph has found to take care of his wife and his new baby decides to test the claim that Mary is physically a virgin. The stage directions don't leave anything to the imagination. "Tunc Salome tentabit tangereMariam in sexu secreto" they say: "Then Salome tries to touch Mary'sprivate parts". Salome's hand is struck with leprosy aspunishment; but she says sorry to the newborn Jesus and it gets better.

Obviously, there is not a word about this in the Bible, but it's avery ancient legend. What would an ordinary human midwife have doneif she'd been told that the lady who'd just given birth was literallya virgin? What would a pious man have thought if his absolutelytrustworthy wife returned from a visit to her cousin obviouslypregnant? It isn't only 21st century soap opera writers who ask these sorts of questions.

So. In the first of our folk-songs, Mary, the Queen of Galilee, iswalking in an orchard with her elderly husband Joseph. She asks himto pick her some fruit: "Go and fetch me some cherries Joseph,for I am with child." This seems to be the first he knows about the baby, because he snaps back "Let he pluck you the cherries thatbrought you now with child." That's the lovely thing about theseold songs. It starts out being pious and beautiful and rather courtly-- we're surely supposed to imagine a medieval lady and her lordperambulating through a beautiful English orchard -- and suddenly wehear the voice of a medieval carpenter saying just what a medievalcarpenter would say if he thought his wife had been cheating on him. The unborn Baby Jesus immediately says "Bow down then,tall cherry tree, for my mother to have some." The tree does so;Mary picks the cherry; and Joseph is sorry for having doubted her.

At one level, its a simple miracle story: how did Joseph come to findout that the Mary had a supernatural baby? Because he performed amiracle even before he was born. But for those able to see it, there's also a hidden meaning: if we believe in the Trinity, thenGod is both the father of the Baby, and the Baby itself. So Joseph'swords come true literally, though he presumably doesn't know it yet.

It is rather hard to see where this incident would fit into the story of Jesus birth in Matthew and Luke's gospels. The Bible doesn't tell us how or when Joseph finds out about Mary's baby: it just says that it happened after they were engaged, but before they were married. [*] I suppose shemight have blurted it out while they were taking a walk in a cherryorchard. The Bible saysthat Joseph subsequently had a dream in which an angel told him that Mary was, infact, still a virgin. He would have to have been quite obtuseto have needed an angelic messenger after he'd seen local trees worshippingMary's unborn son. He'd have to have been positively perverse tostill be sulking after he'd had his chat with Gabriel. So when doesthe story happen? Doubtless, you could harmonise it with the originalstory if you really wanted to. We Doctor Who fans are good at comingup with post-hoc rationalisations of blatant contradictions. But ifyou'd pointed out to Anon that his song contradicted the Bible, Ithink he would have said the medieval equivalent of "Duh --hello! It's a song. I made it up for the wassailers to sing."

Or possibly, he didn't care very much about "the Bible".Possibly, he couldn't read, or couldn't read Latin. Possibly, he knewabout Joseph and Mary and Baby Jesus only as stories:stories told by the priests, acted out in mystery plays, sung invernacular songs. Possibly, he thought that "making up a newstory about Joseph and Mary" was no odder than "making up anew story about Robin Hood." Or perhaps not exactly "makingup": telling the same story in a new way. His story isn't thatdifferent from the Biblical one after all: Joseph is cross; becausehe thinks Mary had been cheating on him; something supernaturalhappens; he starts believing. They aren't characters in a soap operawhere one thing leads to the next thing which leads to the nextthing: they are characters from the land of Story where everything isalways happening over and over again for the first time. Possibly,when the Bible got translated into English and someone invented theprinting press, people like Anon stopped thinking of it as a body ofstories, and started thinking of it as a big blackbook. Perhaps they didn't feel as free to make stuff up about stories in a big black book. Nowadays,when people make stuff up, like the Three Kings and the Stable and the Innkeepers Wife and Family Values, they pretend that it is really in the Bible, and get very cross, or pretend to get very cross, if you point out that it isn't. Because once you have a big scary black book on your shelf, the last thing you are going to do is actually read it.

"But Andrew...Anon wasn't really making stuff up out of his head, was he? There were other written down lives of Jesus apart from the four 'official' ones, weren't there. And some of those included stories about his wondrous childhood, didn't they? But the Church wouldn't put those in her big black book because they were heretical and feminist and gnostic and contained the secret whereabouts of the Holy Grail. Anon was working from that hidden tradition. The carols show us a secret Jesus that the Church would rather we didn't find out about."

Well, up to a point.

The Cherry Tree Carol doesn't appear to have been drawn directly from any of the so-called apocryphal gospels. There an old book purporting to be St Matthew's long lost prequel to his Gospel (which it certainly isn't) as translated by St Jerome (which it almost certainly wasn't). That book includes a story in which the Holy Family are hiding from King Herod in Egypt.Mary fancies some figs from a very tall fig palm. Joseph says he'smore worried about water. So Baby Jesus make the tree benddown, and where it touches the ground, a magic spring pops up. Marygets her figs, Joseph gets his water, and Baby Jesus says that tocommemorate this, people who win competitions will be given palms asprizes from now on.

I'm not making this up. But somebody clearlywas.

It is quite possible that Anon was familiar with the fake Matthew book. But he evidently didn't regard it as anauthentic alternative tradition, to be handed down from master toapprentice and thus concealed from the Big Bad Church. It looks more like he read it and thought "Magic fruit true...cool idea, but I could have put it to much better dramatic use."

M.R. James, who knew about this kind of thing, thought that thefake Matthew prequel might be as early as the 9th century: that putsit as close to the real historical Jesus as Errol Flynn was to thereal historical Robin Hood. Granted, most of the text (though not the fig tree incident)comes from the books of James and Thomas, which are much older. M.R James thought they were from around the turn of the 3rd / 4th centuries --about as closeto the events as we are to Bonny Prince Charlie. [**] You only have to read them to see that they are not independentalternatives to Matthew and Luke: they are written by people who had read Matthew and Luke over and over and written their own stories to expand them. They are, in fact, nothing more or less than fan-fiction. "James" is a prequel about how Mary and Joseph got married, and the details of Jesus birth. (It introduces a midwife called Salome, but doesn't say she molested Mary.) "Thomas" is about Jesus "missing years". It starts with the boy Jesusin Nazareth making clay sparrows and bringing them to life; it ends with him being taken to the temple at the age of twelve. That's an obvious hallmark of fan fiction. The official text is indeed completely silent about the period between the flight into Egypt and the trip to Jerusalem, so the fanfic writer feels justified in inventing something to plug the gaps. Luke's story of the boy Jesus giving his parents the slip so he can spend more time showing off to the rabbis in the temple finishes by saying that he went back to Nazarethand obeyed his parents from then on. So a story about a teenage Jesus getting into trouble would contradict established continuity. A story about an eight year old Jesus being a naughty little deity is just about permissible.

Which brings us to the second of our folk songs. In this one, you will recall, Jesus goes out to play ball with somerich kids, who poke fun at him and make insinuations about hismother. So he performs a miracle: he makes a magic beam of lightacross the river, walks across it, and asks the other kids to followhim. They do, but not being Sons of God, they fall through theinvisible bridge and drown. When Mary hears about this, she smacksJesus three times with a stick. (Which seemspretty lenient for murder: Mickey Harrington got six for riding hisRaleigh bike across the cricket pitch.) In the same way that heblessed the date palm, Jesus curses the stick he was hit with.

Maddy Prior, who knows a thing or two about folk songs, thought that Anon was offering an alternative to orthodox dogma: "Thisstory of the boy Jesus portrays him as all too human, and does notaccord with the given Bible Image. It strikes me as a parableconcerning power and the need for everyone to learn how to use it." Possibly she also had access to a missing verse in which Joseph tells Jesus that in this life with great power must also come great responsibility.

Jesus is not the Tot of Steel. He isn't even Harry Potter. He is a little boy who is also God. And that is something which it is completely impossible to get your head round. So the fan fiction writers don't even try to get their heads round it. They don't offer clever explanations of the paradox. They don't explain to us that since the second person of the Trinity and a human being were combined into a single person, there is no problem with saying that Jesus both knew everything there was to know and had to go back to school and learn stuff. They run with the paradox. It's the illogicality they find delightful. They tell us that when Jesus started school, he told his teacher "I am ALPHA and OMEGA so how dare you try to teach me the alphabet". He got slapped for that as well.

Some people are tempted to describe this stuff as "gnostic", in the sense of "weird". ("Gnostic", as a wise man once said, is a word used to describe any passage in the Bible which the present writer doesn't understand.) Cecil Sharp, who also knew a thing or two about folk songs, mentions another carol called The Holy Well. In that version, some kids are horrible to Jesus, and Mary Mild encourages him to punish them. But he won't, because he's not that kind of Messiah. "From this" explains Mr Sharp "We may conclude that the Holy Well is a comparatively modern recension of the Bitter Withy, modified so that it shall the better accord with a truer conception of the character of Jesus." People in the olden days thought that Jesus might have stuck the bullies dead, but we Victorians know what he must have really been like.

But in fact, it's allperfectly orthodox. There's is nothing theologically odder about theold song in which Jesus has to go across his mother's knee for asmack than the newer one in which he always honours and obeys thelowly maiden in whose gentle arms he lay. The idea that God who madethe universe does whatever Mary tells him to is no odder than theidea that God who made the universe doesn't always do what Mary tells him. Maybe it seems odd to us that Mary Mild wouldcorrect Jesus harshly, but then Mary Mild is another thing we made upout of our heads. The Mary of the Bible is anything but mild. She's into casting down themighty from their seats and exalting the humble, which is like,commie talk. The idea that Mary has to say "mind you don't getinto any trouble" to Jesus only strikes us as odd because we were raised withthe Victorian toy-doll version of Jesus. Of course Jesus won't getinto trouble. He's Jesus.

But we wouldn't, I think, be nearlyas freaked out by a story in which Joseph had to say "No, lad,if you carve your dove-tale joint like that, the whole wardrobe willcollapse". (Or maybe we would. Charles Dickens, who didn't really believe that Jesus was God, still thoughtthe Milias' painting of Christ in the Carpenter's shop was almost toodisgusting to be exhibited.) If learning stuff is part of being a child and Jesus was really a child, then Jesus must have really had to learn stuff. If learning to be good is part of growing up and teaching your child to be good is part of being a good parent, then there must have been times when Mary had to, in the jargon, teach Jesus the difference between right and wrong.

Or maybe not. St Augustine, god bless him, says that if an adult were toscream for his food and cry if he doesn't get it, we'd say that hewas being selfish; and that we try to stop children from being selfishas soon as they are old enough to teach. It follows that a crying babyis, in a technical sense, "sinning"; a perfect, un-fallenbaby in the Garden of Eden would not have behaved like that. So if,theologically, Jesus represents what human beings would have beenlike if not for the Fall then maybe itfollows that the boy Jesus would never have tripped, ordisobeyed, or accidentally injured his hand with one of Joseph's tools -- and baby Jesus would never have cried. In which case, we would have to saythat Jesus and Mary are literally unimaginable alien beings, and thequestion "What would Jesus do?" is hardly worth asking.

And perhaps hymns like Away in a Manger and Once In Royal David'sCity are delighted by that side of the paradox: the utterly unimaginable un-fallen human baby. And maybe we need to hear both sides of the story. But Away in a Manger is the one which flirts withheresy. Because if you believe inlittle-Lord-Jesus-no-crying-he-makes, you are in danger of thinking"God didn't really become a baby -- he just pretended to."

One day, I intend to read St Augustine. But not yet.

If Mary never needs to say "Mind you aren't naughty" tothe creator of the Universe and if the creator of the Universe neverwanted to play catch then he wasn't a human, he was justa holy spook temporarily animating a child shaped zombie. But that'swhat the folk tale has such fun with. In so far as a he is a child,it's natural for him to go out playing, and be bullied by other kids.In so far as he is God then it's natural for him to strike people whoblaspheme against him dead. In so far as he is a Boy, its natural forhim to get punished for being naughty. In so far as he is God, itsnatural for him to put a curse on the naughty step. By showing asmall child behaving like God and God being treated like a smallchild, we are being encouraged to get our heads around the idea ofthe god-child. Or to entirely fail to do so, which is the best we canmanage.

"That's all very well. But wasn't it rather hard luck on theother kids, who didn't know who it was that they were taking themickey out of? Getting drowned seems like an awfully harsh punishmentfor bad manners."

"I thought we'd already covered this. No children were harmedin the composition of this song. Because, it's like a song. I made itup. Couldn't you tell?"

Mind you, if you were a poor medieval dude in a tavern, not being quitesure where your next turnip was coming from, then it would probablyhave forgivable to laugh at three rich snobs getting thrown in theriver because they didn't understand that you shouldn't mess withbaby Jesus. And people in Merrie England with it's infant mortalityand bubonic plague and what not probably found it easier to believethat God had a bit of a temper than we do.

Actually, I can think of three other possible theological readings of the Bitter Withy song, all based around the fact that the drowned children didn't know who they were taunting. But if I start down that path we'll still be here next Epiphany. Let's just say that Anon really does fit an astonishing number of levels of meaning into his songs. He's very nearly as good as Dylan. [***]

If any biologists have read this far, I know well enough what they will say. "Well, there you are then. The nasty church decided that from June 325, Christians would have to believe two completely inconsistent things and Christians have had to twist their heads into all sorts of silly contortions before breakfast every morning ever since. When they use words like 'paradox' they really mean that they know its all a load of rubbish but are pretending that it isn't. Sky-fairy! Sky-fairy! Sky-fairy!"

So itis probably worth noting that the moment at which I personally stopped thinking of the story of Baby Jesus as one of those dull fables that grown ups went on and on about and started to think of it as something exciting and fascinating was precisely the moment at which I perceived that the paradox was a paradox.

Another little lyric by Anon sticks in my mind.

A God, and yet a man?
A mayde, and yet a mother?
Witt wonders what witt can
Conceave this or the other.

A God, and can he die?
A dead man, can he live?
What witt can well replie?
What reason reason give?

God, truth it selfe doth teache it;
Mans witt sinkes too farr under
By reasons power to reach it
Beleeve, and leave to wonder!

[*] In the BBC film, Mary's condition is obvious to Joseph when she comes back from her three month long visit to Elizabeth. I think that is probably implicit in Luke's Gospel, actually.

[**] If Matthew's Gospel is from AD 100 then its as close to the real events as we are to the First World War: plenty of time for myths to develop, but the last eye-witnesses have just died off.

[***] a: It's an allegory of the last judgement b: It's an allegory of the atonement c: It's a rather nasty example of the "blood libel.".

....AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2012-01-05T00:30:00.000Z

(possibly my favourite new record of 2011, and a fine New Year's resolution for us all) 

Two Nips of Gin.

2012-01-04T00:30:00.000Z

Three French Horns

2012-01-03T00:30:00.000Z

And if one green bottle, should accidentally fall, there'd be four green bottles, hanging on the wall.

2012-01-02T00:30:00.000Z

Five Rings For the Elven Kings Under The Sky

2012-01-01T00:30:00.000Z

Six, six, the Lilly White Boys, Clothed All In Green, You Know.

2011-12-31T00:30:00.000Z

Seven swans a swanning

2011-12-30T00:30:00.000Z

Maids a milking. Almost Definitely.

2011-12-29T00:30:00.000Z

Nine lords a leaping, no, hang on, we've had that

2011-12-28T00:30:00.000Z

...Ten ladies dancing....

2011-12-27T00:30:00.000Z

Eleven lords a leaping...

2011-12-26T00:30:00.000Z

Twelve drummers drumming....

2011-12-25T00:30:00.000Z

2011-12-08T20:28:00.001Z

Not As Good As Bellowhead

2011-12-01T18:29:00.000Z

Blackbeard's Tea Party

The Croft, Bristol

26 Nov 2011

Blackbeard's Tea Party are not as good asBellowhead.

On the other hand, Bellowhead do not play inthe back rooms of pubs at the bottom of my street (while young people playspeedcore in the front bar). Although, come to think of it, I did hear MrSpiers and Mr Boden perform on this very stage back in 2007. And Mr Carthy.Still, it's the least folkie venue ever. All the young people were in black. Iwas in my floral waistcoat. The pub was smashed up during the pretend riots last July. Ithink they thought I was a hippy bouncer.

As I was saying: Blackbeard's Tea Party are notas good as Bellowhead. But they generate an energy, a physicality, a sense ofmusical theatre (completely improvised, I think) and a spontaneous responsefrom the audience which I have never seen any folk band apart from Bellowheadcome within a hundred miles of.

They do, in pretty much every conceivablerespect, rock.

They came onto the stage at 9.40, after theusual local support who we will tactfully pass over. Stu the singer –not the singer on the albums, a new singer who has joined the band in the lastmonth -- asks if there are any miners inthe audience. Someone is related to one. He launches into "I can hew". ("And when I die boys know full well / I’m not bound for heaven, I am bound for hell /My pick and shovel Old Nick he will admire / and he’llsetting be hewing coal for his hell-fire”). There is a thumping drumbeat and an electricguitar which, I shouldn’t wonder goes up to 11. And Stu, I swear,doesn't stop moving for the rest of the evening. He encourages the audience topogo dance by leaping three feet off the ground. He gesticulates in thenarrative bits. He nips back stage at one point and re-emerges in sun glassesand pink tie-dye shirt. The whole band follows him into the physicalspace. Yom Hardy the cajun drummer bangs his head in time with the rhythm sohis long black hair flaps up and down like a muppet. When Martin Coumbe theguitarist does a solo, the band get down on their knees to worship him.

The sound mix, I have to say, is perfect: toooften in this kind of thing I have said "I believe that there may havebeen a folk song going on somewhere, but all I could hear was the drum".Tonight you could hear every one of Stu's words. The songs are stories or jokesplayed with a camp twinkle in his eye. Folk rock with the emphasis firmly onthe folk.

Oh, and there was rappa dancing. In a pub. At the bottom of my street.

I now need to tread carefully. One of the manyexcellences about the Tea Party's first E.P (Heavens To Betsy) was the nuancedvocals of Paul Young. Young credits his Barrack Street (version # 94 of the storyabout the sailor being robbed by the prostitute) to the singing of Nic Jones,and it was a close match in vocal style. If you are going to swipe, swipe fromthe best, said I. Paul Young appears on the new album and he remains excellent.The album version of Stan Rogers Barrat's Privateers (sadly not in the liveset) is quite stunning. He tones down the "roar" from the originalrecording, plays it as a ballad, not a shanty, tells the story, while the groupweave in and out and all round the tune, even interjecting hornpipes a couple oftimes. But I note that Paul claims to have learned two of the lighter and moreraucous pieces on the album from Stuartand there is a perhaps a sense that Paul isn’tfully comfortable with them. Not as loud and mad as Stuart is on stage at anyrate. But that may just be me being wise after the event.

Landlord Fill the Flowing Glass is a venerableEnglish drinking song with lyrics that get progressively filthier in each stanza.“I wish I had another brick to build my chimneyhigher /Stop the neighbours pussy cat from pissing in the fire”.It’squite lovely how Blackbeard’s Tea Party stay close to the basic beauty ofthe melody and then put the heavy stuff behind it without the one swamping outthe other. Too often this kind of thing is done with a nod and a wink; isn’tit funny that we’re singing “thee”and “thou” while the electric guitar is drowning us out?But this just seemed to just be a song. The drunken Landlord is followed by theendlessly sobering Chicken On Raft, possibly my favourite song about egg ontoast. ("I sing "woo-woo" and you sing "chicken on araft": and then I sing "aaa-aa" and you sing "chicken on araft" and then I sing "woo-woo" and you sing...")

I never saw the original line up live and it may bethat their stage act was always this extreme. It may be that audiences in York are holding placards saying "Bring back Paul". When I first heard the album Isaid that their musical arrangements were reminiscent of Mawkin and it strikes me that Stuart’smanner is not a million miles away from Jim Causley. (Actually he's like the the bastard offspringof Jim Causley and Jon Boden.)

I wish Paul Young all the best; I hope he left topursue a brilliant solo career and not (say) because of a quarrel about whotook the last slice of cheesecake. And it would be reckless to start saying"gig of the year" in a year which has included Alisdair Roberts and Show of Hands. And that old American man who sings Bob Dylan songs. But it looks to methat the addition of Stuart has propelled a band I was already very excitedabout into orbit.

That's not a metaphor. He really does jump thathigh.

Blackbeard's Tea Party. Not as good as Bellowhead. Yet.

More Sea Men Than I Could Cope With

2011-11-30T18:19:00.001Z

Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends

Colston Hall, Bristol 25 Nov 2011

Fisherman's Friends do what Fisherman's Friendsdo very well indeed. But that really is all they do. The trouble with seeingthem headlining their own gig (as opposed to doing a set at a festival) is thatyou get twice as much Fisherman's Friends for your money. And it turns out thatthere are only so many rollicking bollocking buggering shuggering however itgoes songs of the high sea a man can cope with in a single sitting.

There are some attempts to change the tempo. Inbetween the shanties, we get a medley of Methodist hymns. From Sankey's Hymnal:"We used to find that name funny when we were kids....we still do,apparently." The trouble is that what Fisherman's Friend's are doing isbasically chapel singing (er, "a capella") and the chosen song is aspiritual with a nautical theme. (“Row for shore sailor, row for the shore, heednot the rolling waves but lean to the oar”) So itisn't really that much of a change of tempo. "The Cornish Methodists were likethe Taliban, only without the sense of bonhomie and good fun".

When you go to hear the same bands more thanonce, you naturally expect to hear the same jokes as well as the same songs. (Iprobably know Robin Williamson’s story about putting his harp in the lift as well ashe does.) But Jon's patter has become an elephants graveyard of doubleentendre. "We asked if we could appear on the Parkinson show. He wroteback and said 'No, you can't.' I didn't know he was dyslexic." Despitebeing famous, they haven't acquired any groupies. There are application formsfor us to fill out in the foyer "And for the ladies as well." To theleast tall member of the group: "Are you happy?" "Not really,no." "Well, which one are you then?" And, every time someonecoughs "Do you want to suck a Fisherman's Friend?....That joke alwaysleaves a nasty taste in the mouth."

The role call at the end of the show pointedlytells us what the boys day jobs are – fisherman, ex-fisherman, ship builder,potter... Now, I don't know what songs Cornish Fishermenreally sing at work, but I'm guessing not ones about South Australia or Mexico.I imagine they listen to Radio 1. These are songs from the British and Americannavies that have become standards. There aren’tabout fishing. There is a song about whaling, but it's a modern thing showingsympathy for the poor ickle ~~cephalapod~~ cetacean. (“Last night I heard the cry of my companion /the roar of the harpoon gun and then I was alone.") Any melancholy mood isimmediately dispersed by Jon: "It's all right, it's only a big lump ofsushi.” His schtick is to apologise that some of thesongs are too depressing. The sad ones are actually welcome relief from all therollicking and bollocking.

Jackie "Jim's Brother" Oates openedwith a nice trad folkie set, including a Cornish version of the sublime TheTrees They Grow So High – "my pretty lad is young, but he'sgrowing". It sounded exactly as if someone had heard "my bonnyboy" once and reproduced it from memory, not quite getting the point. Youcan really imagine some fishwives singing it while working on their lad's nets.There is more authenticity here than in any number of roared out choruses ofWhat Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor? The Captain's Daughter was a whip:"Give him a taste of the Captain's daughter." Not "Throw himinto bed with the Captain's Daughter". (Have you seen the Captain'sdaughter? Ha-ha.)

But anything they lack in authenticity the makeup for in volume. When they get going on Bound For South Australia or ASailor's Ain’t A Sailor Ain’tA Sailor Any More it would be churlish not to say "Arrr" and join inthe actions. ("Don't haul up the rope, don't climb up the mast, if you see a sailing ship it might be yourlast.") Or Pay Me My Money Down. Or Woo Woo Bully In the Alley. Or thepenultimate encore, Sloop John B. ("The Beach Boys sang this, and now we'veimmortalized it.") Last time, I mentioned that Les Barker once raised aquestion which has always troubled me: what happened to the Sloop John A? Butit now occurs to me that this was Nassau, and it was probably actually theSloop Jumbie. A Jumbie being a corpse that a witch doctor has brought to life.Prone to dancing back to back belly to belly. Serves you right for payingattention to me.

There is a big Cornish Flag over the stage. Theyplay up to Cornish stereotypes straight out of central casting. It's notsurprising they ended up advertising fish fingers: Cleave’sstage persona is basically Captain Bird’s Eye. So, they are staunch local people whowant us to laugh with them at they grokles and turrists and Americans who visittheir village in the summer. "Tin-taggle? Can you imagine King Arthur riding out of Tin-taggle?That's where a fairy would come from. It's Tin-taj-il" "Yes dear. Butput the fish knife down." (A pedant would point out that King Arthurdidn't ride out of Tintagil, although in the most militantly Welsh version ofthe story, he was conceived there, so I have.) On the other hand, they play up to all the nasty jokes that the rest ofEngland makes about Wesk Untry. Port Isaac has just been made a world heritagesite for inbreeding. High six!

This makes their rendering of Cousin Jack alittle uncomfortable. Steve' Knightley's a serious singer; he's allowed to dragyou through dark places in his songs. Fisherman's Friends are a novelty band,and arguably shouldn’t. Steve imagines a 19th century emigre seeing modern Cornwall anddespairing "I see the English....living on our house...I see theSpanish....fishing in our seas...." (Although he often now changes it to"these seas".) The Fishyfriends put it back into the main singalong verse"the English they live in our houses / the Spanish they fish in ourseas". If anyone is allowed to be annoyed about international fishingregulations, its a working fishermen. Peter Roe, the oldest member of the group(he's 78, as we keep being told) does a song he wrote himself about how thefishing trade ain't what it used to be due to European regulations. It's noTiny Fish For Japan, but it comes from the heart. But in the context ofrollicking, bollocking, swuggering and buggering, it feels a littleuncomfortable for Cleave to put his hand over his heart when he get to"the Spanish they fish in our seas" and very uncomfortable for another member ofthe group to make what seems to be a clenched fist salute.

I assume you all all saw Jamie Oliver doing hischirpy cockney thing from St Pauls last week? The lady with the stew sells me mycoffee in the library canteen, so she does, and sometimes banana cake as well.There's only so many times you can say "vibrant" and"multicultural" in one cookery show; but I did think he was spot on.Saffron doesn’t grow anywhere in England. Think of a famousstory set in Cornwall: Jamaica Inn. Think of a typical Jamaican street food:patties. St Piran's flag seems to be an invention of 19th century Cornishlanguage revivalists.

There comes a point where irony gives out.After seventeen or eighteen jokes, you start to think "That's not part ofa jolly jack tar persona; that's simply a dirty joke." And then you startasking yourself to what extent the audience are in on the irony. They arecertainly enthusiastic. A lot of them stood up at the end. I didn't stand upfor Chris Wood. I'm certainly not going to stand up for what is basically aquite good male voice choir.

As a 45 minute festival band, there's no-one totouch them.

2011-11-23T19:58:00.000Z

Also, this:

2011-11-16T18:35:00.000Z

Carmina

Colston Hall

12 Nov 2011

Not my cup of tea at all. They were Celtic folk jazz fusion. There were moments of perfectly nice songs. It's hard to do Lord Franklin's Lament badly, after all. But I don't get jazz. Pippa Marland does a perfectly good rendering of the song: bit too much shutting of eyes and having Emotions for my taste, but that's her style, fair enough. (Proper folk singers are dead-pan and let the song do all the work.) But then somewhere in between verse four and verse five, the violinist (she seemed to be doing long classical violin bow strokes not short stibbly fiddle player ones) starts making some long up and downy noises which don't seem to relate to the song and go on for several hours, after which the audience claps. In the middle of the song. The man next to me particularly claps the pianist, who seems to tinkle tinkle tinkle from one end of the keyboard to the other at the least provocation. (Chico: I can't-a think of the end of this-a song." Groucho: That's funny, I can't think of anything else.) The opening number was about birds of paradise. It seemed over lush, over sweet, over done. Dan was selling BOGOF tickets as if he was fearing an empty hall, but in fact, it seemed full of fans who had seen many permutations of the group and seemed to like them very much. I enjoyed the support act. His name was Mike Scott. He sang oldest-swinger-in-town observational lyrics with strong narratives and clever rhymes. (She sings bad falsetto on the number 14 bus / 'Rock of ages cleft for me', though she sings 'Cleft for us'.) I do not generally review acts I haven't especially enjoyed: not playing or singing myself, I could not begin to explain coherently what someone was doing wrong. It is demonstrably clear that people who like this sort of thing found that this was the sort of thing that they liked, since they clapped and demanded an encore. The forgoing is as much as to say "Andrew doesn't get jazz." Or possibly "Avoid anything that involves the word Celtic" (as opposed to say, "Breton" or "Cornish".) And possibly also "Avoid like the plague anything that involves the word Fusion."

Hodmadoddery
Canteen, Stokes Croft
13 Nov 2011

Hodmadoddery, once described by Bristol's leading folk blogger (i.e me) as "two men with guitars who sing folksongs" presented a set guaranteed to please all the traddy folkies in the bar (i.e me). When First I Came To Caledonia; John Barleycorn; that one which starts out as King George Commands and We Obey and end up as Spanish Ladies; a really powerful Shoals of Herring. (But then you can hardly get Shoals of Herring wrong, can you?) The loud hairy one strums while the quieter balder one plucks, but there is clever, even witty stuff not drawing attention to itself. Tony goes all Spanish Guitar in Spanish Ladies. Steve introduces Fair Annie (surely the most beautiful song ever written about father-daughter incest) as "copied from Martin Simpson copying from Peter Bellamy" and sure enough Tony's fretwork ([C] Folkbuddy) really is lovingly copied from Martin Simpson. Particularly notable was a very decent Black Waterside, with creditable tinkly guitar that genuinely evoked the ghost of Pentangle.

As well as any ghost can be evoked on a Sunday afternoon in a bar on Stokes Croft where no-one is actually listening.

The Power of Myth

2011-11-15T18:22:00.001Z

The Emily Portman Trio

Louisiana Bristol

8 Nov 2011

A search for the Facebook page of theLouisiana bar in Bristol directed me to the town of Bristol inLouisiana. Well, there’s a thing.

Not been to the Louisiana before. Tinylittle room above a nice pub, just far enough away from thewaterfront to be quiet, but not far enough away for it to be a faffto get to. George Orwell would have liked it there. The music spaceis very small and felt “exclusive” tonight: me and Folkbuddy and about 15 of the (presumably) keenest folkies in Bristol. (I spent an interesting ten minutes before the band came on chatting with Jim Moray about Bob Dylan.)

Emily and her trio (Rachel Newton fromthe Shee, and Lucy “did a tour with Bellowhead” Farrell) finishtheir set by coming down off the stage and doing an acoustic encorefrom the floor. Brand new song. Acoustic. An adult lullaby. It wasgoing to have a werewolf in it, but Emily’s mum persuaded her toleave it out. It’s in harmony, not that close harmony whereeveryone is singing the same thing a tone or two apart, butcomplicated harmony where everyone is singing different things andthe phrases keep echoing backwards and forwards between voices. I think we’resailing off to sleep in a boat; I think there is a monster of some kind that weare going to put to sleep; I think it’s a riff on Where The WildThings Are, but it could just as well have been In the Night Garden. Fairy tales are what Emily Portman does. We’ve already had a song about a drunk lady who has physical wingsand learns to fly, based on a novel by Angela Carter which I haven’tread. Angela Carter apparently used to come to folk nights at theLouisiana.

In between the songs, they bubble likeschoolgirls; Lucy mentions that a character in one of the songs can"apparate" and admits that they've been listening toHarry Potter audio books in the car. Emily spends a bit too long tuning her banjo; Rachelwonders how she would cope if it had thirty four strings like her harp But the music is astonishingly developed and mature. This doesn'tsound like the second album of a very young singer-song writer, butsomeone has been doing it for years. It doesn’t sound like a gig ina pub, either. The detailed harmonies, the other worldly melodies,hardly seem to be coming from the actual stage.

Emily’s songs take the merest idea orsuggestion of a plot from a traditional tale, approaches them atright angles, twists them like a Rubik Cube. It’s intense,immersive writing: these are fairy tales which drop you into theheroine’s head in the middle of the story, and leave you to workout where you are. Who would identify:

Tongue Tied, I am bound

To weave my words with thistledown

Sickle moon, on the moor

Turns thistledown silver and fingersraw

as being the opening of HansAndersen's “The Wild Swans”, about a princess whose brothers havebeen turned into a ducks by their mother. (Emily says she’s made them ravens toavoid any unfortunate rhymes. I am sure she knows perfectly wellthat it’s ravens in the Grimm's version of the story.)

It takes nothing away from Emily’ssong writing to say that the climax of the evening was her version ofthe folk staple The Two Sisters. (We have had cause to discuss it inthese columns before: rich suitor favours little sister; so big sisterpushes little sister into river and drowns her; passing musician cuts up herbody and turns it into a magic harp, as you do.) Emily has found anAmerican version in which the refrain is “oleander yolling” asopposed to “oh the dreadful wind and the rain” (or "bow and balance to me" or " or “by the bony bony banks of London".) Although it's American it's still all about knights and kings and minstrels. MartinSimpson says there version where it’s a banjo, but I’ve neverheard anyone sing it. This version ends:

And he took the harp to the kings highhall

There was a court assembled all

And he laid the harp there on a stone

And the harp began to play alone

It sang "yonder sits my lover the king

How he’ll weep at my burying

And yonder sits my sister the queen

She drowned me in the cold cold stream".

I don’t think I’ve heard a versionwhich makes it explicit that the king in the final verse is the richlover of the opening, which makes the harp's vengeance far nastier.(Carthy’s version has the King and the Queen as the mother andfather of the murdered girl, even though she’s not a princess inverse one.) I don’t know to what extent Emily’s version is acomposite, but it seems to turn the ballad into one of the mostperfectly formed fairy tale plots I’ve ever heard, up there withGawain and the Green Knight and Rapunzel. Chris Wood was right. Anon really isthe greatest writer who ever lived

And Emily has clearly studied Anon’s work: her songs are too complex to betraditional, but the sound traditional. Perhaps she holds thetradition at arms length in the way she arguably does with fairytales; not immersed in them or in love with them, but scrutinizingthem from a distance, twisting them, taking them apart, even, dare Isay it, deconstructing them.

With a lovely tunes and lovelylovely harmonies.

Ce n'est pas un poppy

2011-11-11T11:00:00.000Z

All Tomorrow's Celidahs

2011-11-10T23:00:00.000Z

June Tabor and the Oysterband

St Georges Bristol

Nov 1 2011

One reaches for words like "statuesque"and "stark" to describe June Tabor. Once one has exhaustedones like "wonderful" and "astonishing." There'soften something cross in her delivery; as if the bonny bunch ofroses-oh is telling off youngBonaparte for his silly idea of conquering Europe. (What. A. Great.Song. "O, son, look at your father for in St Helena his bodylies low /And you may follow after, so beware /Of the Bonny bunch ofroses”.) She plants herself on stage, head on one side, and thencomes to life and declaims at the audience. She doesn’t do herthing of reciting poems between songs tonight, but her spiels oftensound like recitations. She says that she chooses songs for theirwords and their imagery before their melody. Whether it's the teenagegirl who wishes she’d listened to her mother (“But if I hadkenned what I no ken / and taken my mummy’s bidding oh / I wouldno’ be sitting by our fireside / Crying hush to my babby-oh”) orthe sailors saying fairwell to their Captain, she has an empathy withthe characters in the songs. Even the utterly bizzarre pagan Christian thang about the Kent farmer who names his smallest bonfire after Judas Iscariot.(She’s good at different dialects.) She has great respect for thesource singers, and never approaches songs ironically (in the waythat Jon Boden or Jim Causely arguably do). She introduces asentimental Easter carol about the Virgin mourning her son with thematter of fact observation: "Gypsys are very religious people;today many of them are born-again Christians".

The pairing withthe Oysterband is not an obvious one; perhaps. She is minimalist,narrativist, a voice which is expressive and dramatic rather thanbeautiful. They are at the rocky end of folk rock, drums and guitarsas well as fiddles and squeeze boxes. She wears a dramatic openbuttoned long red coat and stands at the front of the stage; withaging folkies in eighties suits behind her. The one acts almost as acounter melody to the other, as if the Oysters are riffing off themeldoy of Bonny Bunch of Roses or My Captain Calls and June's strippeddown singing is hovering in front of it.

There are pointswhere it doesn't perfectly come off. The words of June's ballad aboutthe man who pretends to be dead so that his lover, who won't answerhis letters, will have to come to his funeral gets slightly lost inthe arrangement (we were, admittedly, towards the back of theauditorium.) There's some cheeky non folky stuff, notall of which I get. June loves the Tradition, but she also lovesSongs. On the record All Tommorrows Parties (which I understand to beby one Mr Underground) is dominated by June’s echoey voice, theinstruments providing not much more than drum beat. Tonight there’sa more pointedly folkie instrumental. (“We have our own Nico, whocan actually sing”). It stands as a song, not as a pastiche. Iwasn't sure if the show finishing White Rabbit (by a Mr Aeroplane) merrited its inclusion, except as a joke which everyoneapart from me got. But by that point in the evening, everyone,including me, was eating out of the band’s hands to the extent thatthey could have sung Baa Baa Black Sheep and got a standing ovation. (Chris Wood sometimes sings One Man Went To Mow, come to think of it.)

But the songs. Ican be at a gig, admiring the technique and enjoying the noise itmakes, and then a song comes and punches me in the solar plexus. Thefirst half ends on a barnstorming rendition of the practicallyobscene Bonny Suzie Cleland. The last time I heard this song,Alisdair Roberts whispered it to his guitar and left the audiencegenuinely horrified. Today,if you weren’t paying attention, the sweet refrain (“there liveda lady in Scotland / oh my love, oh my love / there lived a lady inScotland / oh my love so early oh”) could be any ballad or any lovesong, and you are brought up short by where it goes “there lived in a ladyin Scotland / she fell in love with an Englishman / and bonny SuzieCleland’s to be burned-ed in Dundee.” The fiddle adds a sweetdiddly-dee between the stanzas. This is an almost celidah version ofa song about a woman being burned alive by her own family becauseshe’s married “out”. But angry. None of the horror is lost.It’s in the story. And the tune.

Her father dragged her to the stake

Oh mylove, oh my love

Her father dragged her to the stake

Oh my love so early oh

Her father dragged her to the stake

Her brothersthe fire did make

And Bonny Suzie Cleland was burn-ed in Dundee

And then in thesecond half, June quits the stage and leaves the Oysters to do TheBells of Rymney. Who could have guessed that this was going tobe the evening’s climax? A decent enough song, Oranges and Lemonsrewritten by a distinctly unjovial Welshman and set to music by Pete Seeger duringhis Union Sub-Comittee Agenda Blues phase? It outstays itswelcome even when Robin Williamson warbles it, and my tolerance forRobin Williamson warbling is considerably greater than the nextman’s. But here, the lyric, done pretty straight, competes with araucus, twangy reggae-ish drum-led background racket. "Who madethe mine owners says the black bell of Rhonda; and who killed theminers cries the grim bell of Bliamma?” Mr Seeger, being a folksinger, sang the poem, which is not exactly short, twice. Here itseems to stall or freeze on the first repeat. "Who killed theminers, say the grim bells of Blaimma. Who killed the miners. Whokilled the miners.” This, rather than the second encore, was thepoint in the evenign where I felt like doing a spontaneous standingovate.

And the lastpre-encore number was Seven Curses; morphed from a whining lamentinto a rhythmical country hoe-down; with the final curses givenmultiple repeats. A lot like Phil Beer's fiddle cover of the samesong now I come to think about it - is there, I wonder, anintermdiate version I don't know?

"So this isthe Oysterband and June Tabor playing Bob Dylan, back together"said front man John Jones. "What could be better than that?"Well, quite.

Come Gather Round Friends And I'll Tell You A Tale

2011-11-09T23:00:00.000Z

Martin Simpson

Chapel Arts, Bath

Oct 22 2011

"Why aren't you all at MartinSimpson?" asked Chris Wood on Friday in Bristol. ("Becausehe's also playing in Bath on Saturday" replied Folk Buddy #1.) Chris said that he was Martin'shouse guest a few weeks ago, and that he appears to do nothing allday but play his guitar.

It shows.

I don't know anything about guitartechnique, but I can see the way his fingers run up and down thefret, and that he's doing obviously tricksy things involving smallre-tunes mid song. Trying to describe his guitar sound makes onegrope for words like "ethereal" and "subliminal";on the record you could mistake him for a harpist; and as everyonesays, it sounds as if there are at least two guitars playing. Hecomes onto the stage and seems to go up and down the scales, as ifhe’s improvising, sounding as if it’s going to be Spanishclassical guitar, with a hint of some tune you know from somewhere beneaththe surface, and then starts to sing “They used to tell me I wasbuilding a dream....” He’s just made a record of standards. I’drather envisaged that Chris Wood would be the dark, depressing partof the weekend, but Brother Can You Spare A Dime sets the mood ofMartin’s set. Before we leave, we’ve had unemployment(North Country Blues) natural disasters (What Has Happened Round Hereis that the Wind Has Changed) and ship wrecks (Patrick Spens.) “Whatabout the happy tune about the old man who played the harmonica everyday until his 92nd birthday” I ask “You mean, the onewho was kicked out of his home when his daddy died in the first worldwar?” replied my Folk Buddy #2.

He doesn’t have the greatest singingvoice: tonight I felt, more than usual, that he was speaking some ofthe songs rather than singing them; but this hardly matters becausethey are perfectly phrased and beautifully felt. One wonders if he’sgoing to do a whole album of Dylan covers one of these days: I’veheard him tackle Boots of Spanish Leather and Masters of War.Possibly, tonight's North Country Blues didn’t quite ascend the heights oflast year's Mr Tambourine man, where I felt that he was (tentatively,even falteringly) creating his own version of the song. This was verydefinitely Martin Simpson singing Bob Dylan’s version of the song.But no-one can doubt the craftsmanship with which he retells HisBobness’s depressing story, and how much thought has gone into thesurgical changes he makes when the original words just can’t besaid in an English accent. (“One morning I woke and the bed it wasbare; and I was left all alone with three children”.)

He’s a very autobiographical writer; he can sing a blues as well as anybody("loo-weeze-anya, they’s tryin' to wash us away..") andspring back into his own (slightly idiosyncratic for my taste)versions of British ballads like Patrick Spens; but the voice heseems most comfortable with is that of the Englishman abroad; theScunthorp lad who can’t quite believe how far he’s come. (He never fails to sings "I've been to Gary Indiana, Bethlehem P.A....but the furnace never burned as bright as down East Common Lane".) Thereare wonderfully observed vignettes about a pissed English actor hemet in a boarding house in New Orleans; and the Tom Waits-y accountof a series of a chance encounters over coffee:

Love never dies, lust loses itsshine for sure
Friendship can fade or be forced to a close
Frostfollows clear skies in the flat lands I come from, but
At thatArkansas truck-stop, love never dies

Anyonewho can write a lyric that perfect has clearly studied long and hardat the feet of almighty Bob.

While he is by some distance thefinest musician I’ve ever heard perform [*] I think Folk Buddy #2 iscorrect that he doesn’t quite reach Chris Wood’s level as a songwriter: he hardly ever gets beyond the specific. It's a personhe saw in truck stop; an eccentric Englishman he met inthe Deep South; the incredibly unlikely story of the shepherd whotoured the world playing the mouth organ at the very end of his life.This is even true of the monumental Never Any Good, a song whichloses little of its power even on the tenth or twentieth listening.He says that it's so personal and specific that he didn'texpect it to resonate with other people. Well, it depends what you mean by"resonate". It isn't universal; it hasn't told us anythingabout Fathers and Sons or War that we didn't already know. But it has told us, in six or sevensimple verses, a very great deal about Martin Simpsons' father, anda very great deal about Martin Simpson himself.

You showed me eye-bright in thehedgerows

Speedwell and travellers joy

You taught me how to use my eyeswhen I was just a boy...

"You taught me how to use my eyes...." Theseare the songs of a man who notices things; you or I would probablynot have spotted, or thought to put in writing, that the fellowfixing his car had “two skeleton’s screwing” on his teeshirt.

It's unhealthy, of course, to imagine that you've got to know someonebecause you follow their Twitter feed, but I smile every time Martintweets something like "Beautiful day for dog walking.There was a pair of Great Spotted Woodpeckers in the pine tree thismorning. Makes me feel good.".Some time ago, someone tweeted a review to the effect that Martin isthe best finger-style guitarist in the world. "I amnot the best finger-style guitarist in the world"he riposted "But I mean what I play".

What a lovely man.

[*] Well, there’sKathryn Tickell, but she doesn’t count. Too many notes.

Songs of Innocence and Experience

2011-11-08T23:00:00.000Z

Chris Wood

Colston Hall, Bristol

Oct 21

I'm sure Chris Wood would hate itif I described him as a prophet. He hates absolute truth and isdeprecating about his own talent. "Little folkie me" hecalls himself at one point.

We're a very long way from Christmas, buthe opens his set with While Shepherds Watched their Flocks By Night.Perhaps he's telling us that tonight won't be an evening of highseriousness? Or perhaps he just likes the tune? He fills the lineabout tidings of great joy with a rich, smiling warmth.

Isn’t thisthe man who wrote Come Down Jehovah?

But he's an English folksinger, so thegreat big important subjects keep cropping up. Love. Marriage. Death.Childhood. War. And England; above all England. There is no gettingaway from England.

His songs start from theheartbreakingly specific; not "childhood", but hischildren:

hard, my little girls hard;

she's only six but don't cross her

look out here she comes; lock up yoursons;

she takes right after her mother

not “marriage”, but his wife:

just last wednesday evening

she kicked off her work shoes

i pour her a large one, and I tell youno lies

she swigs and she shimmies, she looksto the bedroom

and then she looks at me with thosegreat big beautiful downsized eyes...

And not “England”, but particular abit of ground, a particular street, and a particular point inhistory:

their's was a gritty England

Workers Playtime saw them through

and an oily rag or two

But he has an astonishing knack ofturning a song in the final line, so he's suddenly talking aboutsomething bigger and more universal. There's an unbearable intensitywhen the whimsical anecdotes about his daughter give way to

hard? 'course it's not hard

oh there's no better reason forliving....

And I really do mean "unbearable":there's a reflective depth in the way he sings the word "hard"which I found genuinely difficult to listen to. "Last time Isang it, this song sneaked up and bit me on the arse"he explains, and suddenly his is talking about his own childhood,about having been a choir boy. You wait for the cynical punchline,but there is none: he’s just remembering singing Jesu Joy of Man’sDesire at weddings. Didn't he call Handmade Life "church musicwith drums"?

It’s hard to work out who to compare him with. The Colston Hall's blurb calls him thebest English song writer since Richard Thompson, and one can see thecomparison: very personal, strong narratives, songs that you couldalmost, but not quite, mistake for traditional. Chris has anendearingly naive habit of using traditional "tags" in thefirst lines of songs, almost as if he needs a jingle to get him going("all the kings horses and all the kings men, I'm sorry but theyhaven't a clue") but he keeps bringing youup short by lapsing into an unaffected vernacular. Not many linesseparate "Awaken arise you drowsy sleeper; awake arise, it'salmost day" from

from the front door they'd had himcovered

they were right behind him from thestart

and though the video was buggered

someone decided he looked the part

The more obvious comparison, the onewhich he himself makes, is with Martin Carthy. Carthy was the firstperson he looked up to, he says. You can see the influence in thevery un-rock-and-roll way he jerks his guitar in time with the music;with his habit of singing the melody to himself while playingdifficult guitar riffs (“come on”) and the way that he isprepared to let the song tell its own story. His tongue twistingdelivery of the throwaway joke song Up in The NorthThere Lives a Brisk Couple almost seems to be channelling Martin onthe stage. But most of the traditional songs he makes his own. In thehands of the Imagined Village, Cold, Haily, Windy Night is a sing-a-long rabble rouser where you thump your real-ale glasses intime with the chorus. Chris recasts it as an understated, sinistermurmur. ("The English traditional version of Sexual Healing",he assure us. “Just let it work for you.”)

He thanks the sound engineer at thebeginning of the set, rather than at the end of it because it sounds“so fucking brilloiant” tonight. I don't know what was done toHall 2 during the refurbishment, but acts keep commenting on how goodit is. The acoustics seems to give Chris the confidence to do a morethan usually subtle, understated performance. ("He's in the zone tonight" I whispered to my Folk Buddy.) He goes straight intohis only instrumental of the night, a traditional tune and one by hisfriend and squeeze box expert Andy Cutting. "It’s a crackingtune, but it’s a bastard on the guitar." He uses the guitar asif he's having a conversation with the audience. I was about to say"as if he's making love to the audience" but that would beimpolite to one who sings so much about marriage.

He's a big fan of marriage -- notMarriage in the politician's sense, but the love between husbands andwives. Before going into My Darling's Downsized he quotes Jake Thackray . [*] Thisparticularly pleased me, as Jake's name came to mind the first time Iheard My Darling's Downsized, a "grown-up love song" ofdomestic commonplace which keeps on raising laughs from the audience

my love for her can't be overstated

it's deep and it's not final salaryrelated

while remaining a powerful celebrationof love for a long time partner, and the concept of marriage ingeneral.(He quotes his friend Hugh Lupton on the subject: "I amnot your partner. I am your husband. We are not a firm ofsolicitors.") He shares with Thackray a very English virtue ofsensibleness. (I ower this point to my Folk Buddy.)

Indeed, "England" sometimes seems to be aprivileged, incantatory word in his singing. I note that the MP'sexpenses scandal has gone from being "such a quiet revolution"on the CD to "such an English revolution" here. MentioningEngland is probably enough to get you labelled “right wing” fromsome quarters, but he’s very clear that the idea-of-England can bemanipulated in bad ways:

sometimes I hear the story told

in a voice that's not my own

a land of hope and glory voice

and anglo-claxon over blown

rule brittania? No thank you

And when he chooses to lay intoEngland, he doesn't spare any punches. The always devastating HollowPoint tonight became a quiet, understated, chilling exercise in forensicrage, a dissection of an appalling injustice by a man who is almosttoo fatigued to be angry any more, coming to life to delivery thedevastating final lines

just a brazillian electrician

christ only know what he came here for

but hollow point was the ammunition

it's our turn now for some shock andawe

The words "hollow point" aredelivered with a maniacal glee, like the punch line of a joke, and healmost seems to jig during the final guitar riff, like some musicalfolk-devil. The song really is almost too intense to listen to.People ask me how I can have made the transition from opera to folkmusic so suddenly, but Chris Wood shares with Wagner the trick ofstarting from silence ("awake arise you drowsy sleeper")building emotional intensity until you think he can't go any higher,and then laying on some more ("and through the hourglass thesand is falling / and there is nothing they can do") and, then,crucially, taking you back down to where you started, calm of mindall passion spent, as the fellow said. It's hard to think that he, or anyone, has ever performed this song, or any song, better than he did tonight.

Martin Carthy, Jake Thackray, RichardThompson, English church music, Jesu Joy Of Man'sDesiring...a choir boy who doesn't believing in God singing aboutgardening and small children and little fascists and wrongfulexecutions. Ever since I first encountered Chris (singing the songabout the man who loved his own little bit of England too much tosell it, back when we were still allowed to have folk music on thewireless) I have felt that the closest comparison is really withWilliam Blake. And not only because he occasionally calls England "Albion". The combination of sentimental romanticism andsometimes brutal social realism; the depiction of children andhearkening back to his own childhood; the sense that we are in thepresence of a specifically English revolutionary prophet. A few songsinto the set, Chris told us he had been working on some new songs,but "they hadn't quite come" yet....and seemed to go off onanother of his tangents. He's been reading about English history, hesays, and it's mostly horrible. Wonderful moments like the inventionof the National Health Service were blips in a long history ofviolence and robber barons, and we are now reverting to type. Andthen he started to play a strange, almost melodyless elegy, anotheraching tune of homesickness for a country you never quite knew, sung intothe middle-distance almost as if he was improvising it on the spot.

And the words? What else could theypossibly have been?

and did those feet in ancient times

walk upon england's mountains green

and was the holy lamb of god

on england's pleasant pastures seen....

[*] "There may be better looking, better cooking women / better slung and better at buns that you..../ but they've all got as like as not / better taste in men than you have got / so darling I'll just have to make do with you."

Dear Andrew, Have you in fact stopped going to folk music altogether?

2011-11-07T23:00:00.000Z

Actually, I have merely become Remiss in writing up my notes.

A swift catch-up of the ones which I should have reviewed would include:

Back in July I heard the aforementioned Martin Carthy at the aforementioned Green Note in London. Carthy always leaves me breathless. There aren't too many performers who would play a few bars, and then say "I can't remember how that one goes, I'll play you this instead" – and then, when he gets to the encore, say "I've remembered it now" and embark on all 22 verses of Sir Patrick Spens (Scottish fella whose ship went down.) He also did a full length Famous Flower of Serving Men, which runs to about 30 verses. He thinks is about May festivals and not cross dressing and burning people at the stake after all. And Clyde Water, singing the whole Child Ballad version, including verses of exposition that usually get skipped: He thought it was his darling dear / Rose up and let him in / He thought it was his darling dear / But it was no such thing / It was the voice of her mother / She sounded just the same... This is why I will go and hear Carthy over and over again: he seems to know every verse of every song in the world and always be able to pull one out of his hat one that you haven’t heard before.

The following night I heard the aforementioned Alisdair Roberts at the same venue. I was almost hoping to be disappointed by this: I felt he couldn't possibly be as good as my last review said he was. But I was disappointed, in the sense of not. I don't know how he does it; I really don't. Utter faith in the material, I think. He presents Bonny Suzie Cleland absolutely unflinchingly; detatchedly; when he comes to the end (“her brothers did the fire make and her father dragged her to the stake”) there’s a palpable gasp from the audience and an uncomfortable pause as if we couldn't quite decide whether you were allowed to clap or not. He manages to present the corniest song in the repertoire, Barbara Allen, as if no-one had ever heard it before – as if the tragedy makes perfect sense as a thing that might have happened. And then does one of his own songs which include lyrics like "the people that we know as heroes / are those who walk the line twixt thanatos and eros" and get away with that too. Not so much a genius as a phenomenon, in the sense of "force of nature".

First week of August was the Bath Folk Festival in the Widdcombe club in Bath. Rather improved in format compared with the last year, I thought, with three acts doing shortish sets each night, and odd surprises like an invasion by a mob of unseasonal Mummers. My notes appear to be rather patchy: I definitely recall hearing Steve Tilston singing songs of his new album, including the soon to be standard The Reckoning and an excellent young traddy ballad singer called James Findley who I want to hear again; and lots of instrumental music of various ethnicities.

Following weekend was a one day mini festival in Scarborough, imaginatively called Scarborough Fair. An odd one, this. The open air arena was barely half full, despite a programme made up entirely of headliners: one of the organisers rather plaintively asked us to call up our friends and tell them that they could still turn up on the door and hear (the mighty) Bellowhead. It was one of those venues with plastic, football stadium style seating and a very large stage, separated from the audience by 40 feet and a river. You could have sunk several Green Notes in the space between the audience and the front row. Which would have been a shame, because they would have drowned, but it’s the principle of the thing. With even (the mighty) Bellowhead struggling a little to put themselves across, what chance did a man with a guitar and a man with a fiddle have. Even if the man with the guitar and the man with the fiddle happened to be Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick? Jim Moray (see what I mean about headlines?) fitted in a lot better, although even he struggled to get the diffuse audience joining in with the village and city girls by the quayside. I give him a lot of points for tackling Lord Douglas -- his ongoing work in progress reworking of a traditional ballad, I think it comes out of the Cecil Sharp project – which is not a festival crowd pleaser but gets better and better every time I hear it.

I was introduced to two bands I'd never heard before: Duncan McFarlane and his band are very solid folk rockers who would probably like to be Show of Hands when they grow up: there's something of the pub band about them, but the guitars and drums don't swamp the fiddles and squeeze boxes. I wrote "Hoddamadoddery with amps" in my note book, which is probably not fair to either group. They finished on a rip-roaring Cold Hard Haily Night. No ones roar can fail to be ripped with that song.

I had also not heard the Demon Barbers before, which was remiss of me. I was about to say "sub Bellowhead" but checking the dates, I think possibly (the mighty) Bellowhead are sub Damien Barber... They do a nice a line in cheeky treatments of fairly familiar folkie fair: "Captain Ward" (which t.m Bellowhead also sing) has acquired a superheroic chorus which goes "Captain Ward...Captain Ward..Captain Ward". And they wound up with A Friend of the Devil Is a Friend of Mine which isn’t strictly traditional, I don't think. But they also (this being the Demon Barbers roadshow) had bevvys of clog dancers and rappa dancers on the stage and in one wonderfully audacious coup d'arena had two male morris dancers peforming morris steps in the style of a ballet recital. As if to make the point about just how graceful and skillful that kind of dancing is once you take away the bells and the hats. Or possibly that the rest of the troup hadn't showed up.

And there is, of course, nothing in the world like Jon Boden singing Port of Amsterdam with the serried ranks of the mighty Bellowhead behind him. Unless it is a Bellowhead audience using hand signals to agree that our hero has gone UP to the rigs, DOWN to the jigs, UP to the rigs of …. you know the song.

But in a funny way, the thing which made the festival for me was the tiny second stage. Nice bit of planning, so that you could wander to the other end of the arena and watch local bands while the sound checks were being done on the main stage. One such was a very young group called The Sail Pattern doing a combination of semi-traditional sea shanties and weirdly authentic self written material in a sort of hyper-rock style, rather as if the Pogues had taken to doing English sea songs. And as if they were fresh faced seventeen year olds with teeth. I am not sure if someone that young ought to be allowed to sing something as grim as Hold Fast (“sew me up / wrapped in sail / commit me to the sea / hold fast boys / hold fast boys / put the last stitch in me”.) . And it takes lots and lots of chutzpah, in a good way, to sing your version of Haul Away (“a puppet’s on the throne of Spain and Bonapart’s in Cairo / with Nelson’s ship we sailed away and fought them on the Nile-oh”) half an hour before Bellowhead are going to take to the main stage. And winding up your short set with the tongue twistering Mary Mac’s Mother’s Making Mary Mac Marry Me, My Mother’s Making Me Marry Mary Mac is just showing off, frankly. Rather endearingly, they seemed surprised that anyone wanted to buy their CDs and hadn't brought enough. You can download their stuff for a fiver from http://thesailpattern.bandcamp.com/ Go on: they deserve your encouragement and you can claim you were a fan before they became famous. Which they are so going to do.

Robin Williamson did a gig a gig in the crypt of Woodlands Church, Clifton in September. Bob Dylan, you may have noticed, hardly ever plays in church halls. You hardly ever get to say "Thank you for a great set, Bob," after the show. And yet the Incredible String Band, in their day, were as great and as important as Bob, and I am not sure which I would choose between The Big Huge and The Times They Are a Changing if condemned to share a desert island with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Williamson seems to like doing small, community venues, I think it suits his image of himself as a bard or shaman or storyteller. (He sees himself as too Christian for the druids but too pagan for the Christians, apparently.) He’s accompanied by his wifeand muse Bina, who plays the bowed psaltery (I looked it up) and contributes Punjabi wedding songs in which Robin and the audience can only discern the word "tandori". (She encourages the audience to sing along with everything. "Only in the chorus" says Robin, pointedly.) Robin, as we've seen before, has eclectic tastes; this isn’t a "religious" concert but he’s slanting the repertoire to the location. He does a bluesy spiritual which, he points out, was also in his granny's Presbyterian hymnal; the audience sway along to "hide me in the blood; hide me in the blood; hide me in the blood of Jesus". He does a Latin version of Psalm 24 delightedly pointing out that although the Psalms are by far the oldest songs still in actual use, no-one knows what tunes they were originally sung to. (There is, apparently, an ancient document claiming that they were sung solemnly, "in the Egyptian style", but since no-one knows what the Egyptian style is, Robin says that he's going to sing it joyfully in the South American style.) He tells a folktale about three soldiers who make a bet with the devil, and does a perfect imitation of a hot Gospel evangelist. “If you’ve never met the devil face to face – if you’ve never met the devil face to face – if you’ve never met the devil face to face – then maybe it’s because you’re headed the same way he is.” He has us all singing his version of the old Irish riddle song

Greater than god, worse than the devil

Dead men eat it, if you eat it you’ll die

Come from nothing, go to nothing

If I tell you nothing then I’ll tell you no lie.

There is chocolate cake and nachos in the interval; the church sticks to a "give whatever you like" rule for refreshments, which puts everyone in a happy mood and probably means they make more money then they would have done if they'd charged. Robin has shaved his beard off since the last time I saw him.

Heard Swarbs again and Carthy again again in the much more congenial surroundings of St George's Bristol. "The programme notes say we're the best loved duo since Morcambe and Wise" says Swarbs "So we're going to play all the right notes..." There really is nothing in the world like hearing Swarbrick's fiddle spiralling around Carthy's plinky plonky guitar while Carthy tells the story of the lady who dressed up as a highwayman to find out if her boyfriend loves her as if it has never, ever been told before. Carthy always claims that the Treadmill song is the only prison folksong in the repertoire (because the collectors didn't go and talk to prisoners.) Someone in his audience in Wakefield pointed out that he almost certainly knew the Wakefield prison song: "Here we go round the mulberry bush on a cold and frosty morning." There apparently being a mulberry bush in the prison yard. Finished with Byker Hill; guitarist and fiddler singing about geordies wanting to buy beer. Doesn't get much folkier than that.

When Jim Causley sings Summer Girls he introduces it by saying "I would tell you who it's by, but you'd just go "meh...Streets of London." I don't know if I would quite go "meh". Bristol's foremost citizen folk journalist despises the song, apparently: it's just about spoiled middle class people going out at an looking at some poor people in order to make themselves feel better. I wouldn't go that far myself: it's a little sentimental ("in the same way that the sun is a little hot") but it's a nice enough melody, has some decent images ("looking at the world over the rim of his tea-cup") and "Cheer up, there is probably someone worse off than yourself" isn't a completely contemptible sentiment. If was going to take exception to something, it might have been First and Last Man, which seems to play on all the most patronising cliches about Native Americans ("I am the willing heathen / I worship everything / I will add new words to my language / But write them on the wind."). But as we've discussed before, songs and arguments, and it's presents a powerful enough story-world while you are inside it. But overall, I was a little underwhelmed by Ralph Mctell's set in St Georges (again) at the beginning of October. I felt that I should have liked him: he opened with I Been Doing Some Hard Travelling and says he is is old enough to have been Woody Guthrie's penpal. The distance from "in the shadow of the steeple, by the relief office, I saw my people" and "have you seen the old man who walks the streets of London" isn't infinite, come to think of it. (Guthrie never wrote back to him, being incarcerated in a mental hospital at the time. A lot of his banter involves dark twists like this: he introduces an impenetrable song about his mother by saying "she lives in a world adjacent to our own" and after the laugh, reveals that he meant that she had dementia. [*]) And then it's into a decent cover of Girl From the North Country and after a short but heartfelt tribute to Bob. (He's working on a song about Suzie Rotolo, which she won't hear, because she died earlier in the year.) But somehow, the evening never caught fire for me. I get the impression that McTell sees himself as a poet and some of the writing is of a pretty high order. The London Apprentice builds up a complicated metaphor about life based on, er, the streets of London, but is rather denser than I can take in at one hearing.

I am a London apprentice I never learned her ways

When I walk the streets of London I'm constantly amazed

How a road I never was on before leads to one I know

As any cabbie will tell you that's how all knowledge grows

I enjoyed his meditation on time based on Bernstien's flashback in Citizen Kane ("it's funny the things a fella will remember"), but I question if the song actually said anything that Orson Welles hadn't already said almost as well. I did enjoy his closing number, the rocky "mythologisation" of the relationship between Bert Jansch and Annie Briggs.

Bert died a few days later, of course. When I wrote that the Pentangle set at Glastonbury in June made a weekend of sinking up to my knees in mud worthwhile, I didn't realised that this would be the last but one time they would play together.

Spiers and Boden did a pretty standard Spiers and Boden set at Colston Hall in September. Clearly, no-one can sing a ballad like Jon Boden and no-one can play the squeezebox like John Spiers and if you have never heard them you should, as they say, kill to get a ticket. But I couldn’t help noticing that the only number that I hadn’t heard them play before was New York Girls, which (the mighty) Bellowhead have made their own. Almost as if Bellowhead, which used to be about taking and embellishing songs which the duo had thrashed out is now the place where new material is being created. That's a shame, because much as I like t.m. Bellowhead, Jon's genius as a story teller and interpreterer of ballads is seen with more detail and nuance when accompanied only by fiddle, squeeze box or guitar. Maybe some of those 365 folksongs he sang last year could find their way into some fresh Spiers and Boden set? (What price a full dress Spiers and Boden rendering of the Lock Keeper, or the Mistletoe Bough, or Oor Hamlet, even? Not Rock Candy Mountains under any circumstances. That was a mistake.) Still, one should never pass up the opportunity to hear the story of Squire Willie and his psychotic hanging-mad employer; or to bellow along to the tale of Sir Rylas and the spotted pig; or to sing along to Sailing Down to Old Maui. With the exception of Carthy and Swarbs, they're the best folk duo going. I just hope the success of Bellowhead doesn't mean they are going to become fossilized.

The up and coming -- in fact very nearly already arrived -- Pilgrims Way did a free gig in the frankly uncongenial surroundings of Stokes Croft's very own Canteen, a sort of bar-restaurant-venue legally squatting in an open plan office. I mean, the whole point of the Canteen is "a bar with good live music", but I didn't think Lucy Wright's sweet vocals and excellent story telling was shown off to the best affect in an atmosphere where people were buying drinks and making a noise. Even if that's exactly the environment where The Hand Weaver and the Factory Maid, which she does brilliantly, was originally played. Although possibly not with a Jews Harp.

I also heard some old guy doing a Bob Dylan tribute act in Cardiff.

[*] I owe this point to b.f.c.f.j.

Theology Redux

2011-11-06T23:31:00.005Z

The Ju-Ju gave us these magic biscuits. If you eat them, you will live for ever.

That’s not quite right. If you do the magic dance the Ju-Ju taught us, you will live for ever. Eating biscuits is an important part of the ceremony, of course, but it is the whole dance that’s magic: there’s nothing special about the actual biscuits themselves.

III

That’s not quite right. The magic isn’t in the biscuit or the dance; the magic comes from fixing your mind on the Ju-Ju and submitting to him inwardly. The dance is just a way of helping you focus.

That’s not quite right. Since the magic comes from fixing your mind on the Ju-Ju and submitting to him inwardly, there’s no real need for anything else. Some people say that we’ve gone away from the Ju-Ju by giving up eating magic biscuits and dancing magic dances, but that’s not really true. It's just that we’ve spotted that our whole life is part of the dance, and all the biscuits we eat are magical.

That’s not quite right. The magic doesn’t come from fixing your mind on the Ju-Ju or submitting to him; it comes from living as he did, and working to put his political principles into practice in today’s world. That’s what he meant by “dancing”. And “magic” biscuits are biscuits which you share with people who don’t have any biscuits of their own; and that applies to all other kinds of food as well. And "for ever" means “in a world where no one starves or begs for bread; where everyone gives what they can and takes what they need; where health care is free at the point of need; and where countries settle their problems without wars.”

That’s not quite right. The Ju-Ju came to show people that their belief in magic biscuits, magic dances and living forever was completely wrong, and, in fact wicked: that the whole idea of a magic biscuits which makes you lived for ever is, in fact evil. He was only interested in sharing food, socialized medicine, and countries solving their problems without wars. Some bad people came along and added magic biscuits and magic dances to his supposed teachings for their own ends.

2011-11-01T16:36:00.001Z

Somewhat wishing I hadn't started this. 

SK was clearly being mischievous (a thing which has almost never happened before) when he pretended that everyone would immediatelysee that Arians weren't Christians. This left an obvious opening for Sam to pretend that couldn't see any difference between the two positions. The Dawk, after all, uses Ariusvs Athanasius as his main example of meaningless theologicaldebate. 

Sam, of course, plays the standardcounter-gambit – since the Aristotelian terms "same substance"/ "similar substance" sound obscure and strange to us, theycan't signify any real disagreement; the two schools must have beenarguing about nothing whatsoever; Christians are silly etc etc. Ifcharity were really the order of the day, he might have asked whetherit made any difference if you believed that Jesus was the Creator,or merely a sub-ordinate creature. But that would require us to ask "what do we mean bydifference"? That chap who did the History of Christianity on the Beeb a couple of years back pointed out that Arian art depicted a realistic, humanJesus who appears to age during his ministry, where Byzantine art ofthe same period depicts a more distanced, obviously divine figure. But that's a bit of a rarefied distinction. I am quite sure that Sam would beable to quite easily spot an Arian by its behaviour. It would bethe one wearing a headscarf, knocking on his front door, and asking him to buya copy of the Watchtower. Is that the kind of difference we arelooking for? 

We are of course, not permitted to saythat "Well, the positions are different because the people whobelieve in the two positions believe that they are different"because Sam could then play his "Popular Front of Judea vsJudean Popular Front" card.  

In all seriousness. Christians seem able to disagree with each other about quite big theological questions, and still regard each other as "fellow-Christians", albeit "fellow-Christians who should jolly well stop denying themiracle of the mass / worshipping a biscuit and come back to the truechurch". But Christians have found thatthe question of the Trinity is one about which they are unable toagree to differ. It's not a question of poor hard done by Arianssaying "But we are Christians, the same as you: pleaselet us back into your church." Trinitarians think that Ariansaren't Christians; Arians think that they are the onlyChristians. They knock on my door early on Saturday mornings and tryto convert me, which the Bishop of Rome, to give him his due, hasnever done. 

I don't think that the question aboutwhether the Holy Spirit proceeeds from the Father and the Son or fromthe Father alone is a question about nothing; I think I could have astab at saying what the difference is and why it seemed to beimportant. But the Pope in Romeregards the Patriarch in ... wherever he lives, do you know,I honestly don't know... not merely as a fellow Christian, but as afellow Christian who is so near to being a Catholic as practicallymakes no difference. Even though he's quite sure that he's wrong about filoque. 

So why do questions like Arianism not admit of the same kind of compromise?

Iunderstand that from a position outside of any Church, this mightlook odd; could Sam accept that from a position inside the Church, it seems obvious. (Obvious that Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormon's aren't Christians, but that Anglicans are simply fellow Christians who've got it badly wrong about infant baptism.) Could he perhaps accept on trust that the person of Christ is whatChristianity is about; infact what Christianity is (inthe way that the Koran is what Islam is)and that while there can be very great differences of opinion aboutbaptism, Eucharist and even ethics, you can't mess around with ourunderstanding of who Christ is without changing – or in factobliterating – our faith. 

Topress the analogy in a possibly ignorant direction; I don't thinkthat there has ever been a textually liberal form of Islam – the Koran iseither the actual word of God, or it is nothing, and without theKoran there is no Muslim religion. Would orthodox Jews say the same thing aboutthe Torah – that you can't be "a Jew who doesn't follow theLaw" because following the Law is what being a Jew means? But I may be wrong about that.

There arecertainly clergy who take the view that Jesus was a teacher ofethics; that he preached a radical, revolutionary message; that hisdeath was a political martyrdom; and that the resurrection is to beunderstood simply in terms of "his followers kept following hispolitical message even after he died." Does Sam genuinely notsee that this is different fromthe mainstream position that god came down from heaven, died on thecross to enable human beings to go to heaven, came back to life afterhe had been killed, and then went back to heaven? Does he genuinely not see why I, coming from the second perspective, would not be prepared to call the first one "Christian"?

Is the point "I don't think Giles Fraser really takes theliberal – modernist position that your ascribe to him."? (I am perfectly happy to concede that I may have misjudged him.)

Is the point "It doesn't matter if Giles Fraser takes theliberal - modernist position, because the liberal – modernistposition is in fact indistinguishable form the traditional –conservative position." (In which case Fraser is equally to blame, since he appears to deny that Catholics and Evangelicals are Christians in any meaningful sense.)  

Or is the point "It couldn't possibly make any difference whetherFraser is a liberal – modernist or a traditional – conservativebecause all religious positions are equally meaningless? " 

Ithink that Sam, being what C.S Lewis called a naturalist, may find itgenuinely difficult to believe that Christians are what C.S Lewiscalled supernaturalists. I think that he finds the idea that there isSomething Else apart from the scientifically observable universe sostrange that he thinks that whenever Christians seemto be talking about something supernatural, they must reallybe talking about something natural. "I know you say that yousay that you think that Jesus died so you could get in touch with God, but youcan't really mean that: you must really mean 'so that you can form a morejust society' or 'so you can overcome your psychological hangups' ".

Idon't think that any good Christian has ever quite believed in the parodyof the Atonement which Richard Dawkins and Giles Fraser abominate.This is sometimes called "Penal Substitution": I prefer to call it the Tom Sawyer theory. (God wants towhip Becky Thatcher; but Tom Sawyer, who is innocent, volunteers toget whipped instead, so Becky Thatcher gets off scot free.) As committed a death-cultist as John Stott  points out that it doesn't workbecause it's not fully Trinitarian: God is in fact both the one doingthe punishing and the one getting punished. Mr C.S Lewis starts outhis chapter on the Atonement by saying that before he was aChristian, he thought that the whipping boytheory  was the one he had to believe, and that it made no senseto him. He said that once he became a Christian, eventhe theory of one persongetting punished on someone else's behalf seemed less immoral than ithad; and if you changed it to "paying a debt" or "standingthe racket" then it made more sense; because it's a matter ofcommon experience that one one person has got himself in trouble,it's the innocent person who isn't in trouble who has to get him outof it. He then propounds a rather complicated theory, based onAnselm, about human beings needing to "go back" to God, butnot being able to, and Jesus doing the "going back" on ourbehalf. 

Again:I don't quite know whether Sam really doesn't see the differencebetween an objectiveAtonement ("Thedeath of God actually changed the relationship that the materialuniverse has to the supernatural realm") and a subjectiveAtonement ("Jesus'death was a good example of not striking back against evil, howeverhorrible it is") or whether he's pretending not to for tactical reasons. Or if I'm failing to explain it very well, which is most likely.   

If the Tom Sawyer analogy is a poor one, why do people carry on using it? Because it is a very vivid and dramatic way of picturing the idea that Jesus' death madea difference. God wascross with us; Jesus was punished; now God isn't cross with us anymore. Darnay was going to be beheaded; Carton  switched places with him; Darnaylived happily ever after. There are other versions: thehuman race owed God a debt; Jesus paid the debt; now the human racedoesn't owe God a debt any more. Many nasty imperialistevangelical tracts ask us to imagine a judge, or more probably aJudge, who imposes a fine on a certain prisoner and then pays ithimself. We were too dirty and filthy to go to heaven; we washedourselves in the blood of Jesus; now we are clean. Jesus went downinto hell, fought with the devil and smashed down the gates, sono-one has to stay in hell unless they want to. For the first thousand years of Christian history, the most popular theory involved God playing a trick on the devil to make him exceed his authority, and idea that would be incredibly alien to almost all Christians, but important if you are are going to make sense out of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  

The Bible talks about the death of Jesus in terms of "sacrifice". It is absolutely true that the idea of sacrifice is strange to us.But the idea was clearly not strange to the people who wrote theBible. Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world;he is handed over to be executed preparation day ("when thepassover must be killed"); he initiates a sort of holy role-playin which passover wine becomes "my blood of the New Covenant".Church of England churches still have a table at the front which theycall an "alter"; Giles Fraser has to perform a riteinvolving phrases like "in memory of thy perfect sacrifice madeonce for all upon the Cross" and "Hallelujah! Christ ourPassover is sacrificed for us." It is very reasonable indeed fora clergyman to say "We need to find ways of explicating thisstrange language; we need to be pretty sure we understand what"sacrifice" meant to a good Jew, and, come to that, to apagan convert at the time of Jesus." But I don't think you can say that the whole idea of sacrifice is abhorrent, and actually anti-Christian. You can only say that if you think that the people who we depend on for our knowledge of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) had utterly and completely missed the whole point of every word he had ever said. Possibly you may think that Jesus was all right but the disciples were thick and ordinary, that their twisting it has ruined it for you. Once you've said that, there isn't really anything left called "Christianity" to talk about. 

In Fraser's version, Christianity went off the rails pretty darn early. StMark pretty definitely has a story about Jesus miraculously stopping a storm. Fraser thinks that miracles of the storm-stopping kind are completely contrary to the whole idea of Christianity. That's sort of a bit of a problem.  

It may be that I misread Fraser. It may be that (like me and St Mark) he thinks that the point of the story of Jesus calming a storm is the final line, where the disciples say "Hang on...only Yahweh is meant to be able to tell the weather off. But that means....."; that he's saying "The point of the story is that Jesus really was Yahweh; the point of the story is not that we don't need to listen to the shipping forecast before going on boat trips from now on." It would have been nicer if he could have framed in as an affirmation of what he does believe, and not as a rant about how horrible we evangelicals are.  

I'm not talking here about whether we think miracle are even possible, or whetherwe ought to interpret miracle stories literally or metaphorically. I am quitehappy to debate with the fellow who thinks that Mark 4: 35-41 is not a newsreport, but (say) a commentary on the book of Jonah. But when someone says "Mark completelymissed the point of what Jesus was on about; but fortunately, I getthe point perfectly well" then I smile patronisingly and walkaway.

2011-10-28T22:32:00.000+01:00

Easter is not all about going to heaven. Still less some nasty evangelical death cult where a blood sacrifice must be paid to appease an angry God.

Giles Fraser, 22 March, 2008

The idea of an omnipotent God who can calm the sea and defeat our enemies turns out to be a part of that great fantasy of power that has corrupted the Christian imagination for centuries.

Giles Fraser 8 Jan 2005

Jesus set out to destroy the imprisoning obligations of debt, speaking instead of forgiveness and the redistribution of wealth.

Giles Fraser 24 Dec 2005

Nicene Christianity is the religion of Christmas and Easter, the celebration of a Jesus who is either too young or too much in agony to shock us with his revolutionary rhetoric....And from Constantine onwards, the radical Christ worshipped by the early church would be pushed to the margins of Christian history to be replaced with the infinitely more accommodating religion of the baby and the cross.

Giles Fraser, 24 Dec 2005

Evangelical Christianity, with all its emphasis on Jesus as friend, risks domesticating the divine, pulling God too much within the dimensions of the human perspective. With this sort of Jesus at hand, God becomes just too easy.

Giles Fraser 11 Dec 2011

For too long, Christians have put up with a theory of salvation that has at its core the idea that God requires the sacrifice of his own son so that human sin can be cancelled. "There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin," we will all sing. The fact this is a disgusting idea, and morally degenerate, is obvious to all but those indoctrinated into a very narrow reading of the cross.

Giles Fraser 11 Dec 2009

(On evangelicals who support corporal punishment): Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise. For, as evangelicals, the Pearls believe that salvation only comes through punishment and pain. God punishes his Son with crucifixion so that humanity might not have to face the Father's anger. This image of God the father, for whom violence is an expression of tough love, is lodged deep in the evangelical imagination. And it twists a religion of forgiveness and compassion into something dark and cruel.

Giles Fraser 8 June 2006

I'll know my song well before I start singing

2011-10-14T16:28:00.000+01:00

Bob Dylan

Cardiff Arena

Oct 13 2011

Everything you've heard is wrong.Literally, everything. Any rulebooks you have lying around. Tear themup.

A lot of people (including me) have,over the years, talked a lot of rot about The Almighty Bob's currentperformance style. (And by "current" we mean "what he's been doing for the last 20 years".) You know the jokes. Sits with back to audience. Growls thoughthe songs. Can't hear the words. Third verse of Blowin' in the Windbefore we worked out what he was singing

None of its true. None of it. Not. One.Word.

I can't think of the last time I saw aperformer who was so obviously having fun on the stage. This is a manof 70 who has performed on five out of the last seven nights. He doesn'tneed the money: the only possible reason for being on stage is that helikes it. That's why you are never going to hear a greatest hits set:he keeps himself fresh by playing a different selection of songs eachnight and – as explained at some length in Chronicles – bydeconstructing the songs, using a system of rhythmic improvisation which allows himto re-invent them in each performance.

Reviews of Dylan gigs tend tobifurcate; a smattering saying that this is the best they've everheard Bob sing; a thundering consensus that he's an old has-been andshould hang up his guitar; a hint of anger that he's 70 rather than17.

Well there's an explanation for that, isn't there?

The Cardiff arena was a standing venue;we arrived at 5.30 and made straight for the front when the doorsopened; a mere 2 hours investment of time resulted in a position notmore than 20 feet from a the stage. We could see ever detail of Bob'sperformance.

And its an astonishingly nuanced,detailed, joyous performance. I hadn't realised what a smallman he is. What incredibly spindly legs he has. The band are in sharpgrey suits with hats. The guitarist almost seems to be emulating theclothes of his Bobness, like a hassidic Jew. Bob is in a crumpledsuit; with a white mafiosi hat. Before long sweat is pouring off therim. It's like he's saying that he's just some hobo who seems to havewandered up onto the stage and is going to sing us some songs. Hedoes Leopardskin Pillbox Hat standing at the keyboard, but after onlyone number, he comes to the front and does the mighty Shooting Starin front of the mic and stays there for the next half-dozen songs. He evendances a little; a sort of delicate mincing wiggle. The audienceapplauds him when he stand up; when he starts playing the harmonica.They applaud him when he gets his cable tangled in the mic stand.

He still pulls the words of the songsapart and puts them back together again in an off putting way.(Remembers how, on Theme Time, he could sometimes lose himself in thepronunciation of very long words, particularly place names. His wholeacts is like that.) He still does that thing where whole lines andstanzas vanish into staccato rhythm: "Some! Bod! Y! Said! From!The! By! Bul! He'd! Quote!.....there was dussssssssst on themaaaaaaann in the loonnnnnnng black cloak?" With atentative, questioning rise on the last word, as he grins at theaudience, big wide eyes flashing from underneath the hat brim, as ifhe'd just delivered the punch line of a good joke. It's in thoseelongated vowels that he sounds most like Dylan. The darkgoth-noir atmosphere of Man in the Long Black Cloak gets lost in theperformance, but the poetry (it really is poetry) still speaks.

And yeah, maybe it's jarring if youhaven't heard it before. Hard Rain (official greatest song everwritten by a human being, from a short list of half a dozen) isinitially unrecognisable, not because you can't hear the words – Iswear I heard every word,even of the songs I frankly didn't know like High Water – butbecause the Dalek-style delivery is so weird that I found myself thinking"hmm.....don't know this one...is there a Dylan song whichinvolves asking questions to a blue-eyed boy?" But it forces youto attend to every word, to follow him through the labyrinth ofimagery as if you've never heard it before. There's a sense of releaseand climax when we finally get to"and-I'll-KNOW-my-song-WELL-before-I-start-singingggggg".

I'll know my songwell.... There is applause. He does. We do.

Itwould have been too absurd for him to talk in between the songs. Ireally can't conceive of him saying "Hello Cardiff. Thank youfor turning out tonight. Here's a song from my latest album."But it's just such a plain lie to say that he doesn't connect withthe audience. Every smile, wink, grin, tip of the hat – every timehe taps he left hand on his thigh in rhythm with his harp, every timehe continues to beat out a rhythm on the keyboard with one hand whilehalf dancing with his spare leg – makes a connection. There's an elation here that makes me feel he's happier than he's ever been; that theaddled gravelly bluesman dancing his way through old numbers is theperson he's always wanted to be. There's a deliberately rough edgedtin pan alley feel to the band; as if he wants us to feel that we'resitting in on a jam session or knocking back the Jack Daniels at aninformal hootenanny. He's more comfortable with the newer songs,certainly: there's detail and nuance in Trying To Get To Heaven Before They Close the Door and Things Have Changed which rather slipsaway when he gets back to the keyboard for the Highway 61 Revisited.

Bristol's foremost citizen folk journalist wondered if there was an irony in that wink – a sense that he's been told we wantto hear those old songs, so he's humouring us, putting them inquotation marks? I wondered if the whole slightly mannered body language saying"You want me to be a performing monkey, and I tell you what –I'm happy being aperforming monkey." Is this a legend who simply refuses to be anicon?

Did we catch him on an exceptionallygood day? Bob did a full length set – he noticed that the younglady had a brand new leopard skin pill box hat at 9PM and didn'tfinish wondering how it felt to be on your own with no direction homeuntil well after 10.30. Which makes me wonder where the idea of theMark Knopfler support set came from? I wonder if His Bobness doubtshis ability to do a full set every night, and is doing adouble-handed tour so that the audience aren't short changed if he has an off day? Has hegot some system of resting his voice between gigs so that he's been cured of the "Howmmmm mmm mmmm man mmmm down" syndrome? Or was the sound mix simply better in Cardiff than it waswhen I heard him in Sheffield a couple of years back? There were acouple of numbers (Summer Nights, in particular) where the band wentinto a completely over the top freak out mode but Bob's voice neverseemed to disappear into that improvised back yard racket?

Or has it actually always been likethis? Have those of us lucky enough to get somewhere near the frontalways felt that we've made a connection with a vibrant, fun andinstantly likable rock and roll personality – but anyonefurther back felt they'd heard some quite interesting reworkings ofmostly obscure Dylan songs? (Anyone who doesn't know his catalogueinside out is going to be lost, of course.) Which makes hisinsistence that there can't be any screens seems all the moreperverse. Assuming that the never ending tour is never going to end,one almost wishes he could give up on stadia and limit himself tosmaller venues, however much harder it might become to get tickets.

Is this tour, or some tour, beingfilmed as a documentary? I overwhelming feel that this Dylan, thelive Dylan, the showman Dylan who uses his voice as a musicalinstrument, one component in what is a actually a consummate piece ofmusical theater is the real Dylan, the one Robert Zimmerman hasalways wanted to be, and it needs to be preserved for posterity.

Noble prize for literature, indeed.

Clever Man Says Interesting Thing, Shock

2011-10-12T19:03:00.000+01:00

Earlier this year the New Statesman (a magazine) asked a group of famous people who believed in God why they believed in God. Later on they asked a group of famous people who didn't believe in God why they didn't believe in God. It turned out that the people who believed in God believed in God for all the usual reasons, and the people who didn't believe in God didn't believe in God for all the usual reasons. I give Ben Goodacre points for saying that he thought there should be a word for people who weren't interested one way or the other. The atheists were on the whole shriller than the theists. Richard Dawkins started off sounding calm and reasonable, explaining that he didn't believe in God because he didn't see any reason to believe in God, but ended up saying that "theology" was "the exact equivalent" of reading tea-leaves.

I was a lot more interested in the comments of one Steven Hawking. He was the fella, you remember, who said that when we'd filled in the last bit of physics we would "know the mind of God".

The Dawk is probably right to say that when Hawking says "God" he doesn't actually mean "God": it's just a flowery way of saying "we will know everything." I do wonder if Hawking was deliberately playing up to his own mythology. A very clever man who happens to be severely disabled fits in nicely with Gnostic ideas about Bodies being things that Minds have annoyingly got trapped in, and that we should let those bodies shrivel away so that minds can expand and ascend and get back in touch with the mind of God. That's why the most brilliant fictional scientists (Prof. X, Davros, the Mekon) are always represented as wheelchair users.

Biologists are often accused of "playing God" by people who don't understand biology, or for that matter, God. It's hard to see why "fixing the plumbing" so childless couples can make babies is necessarily more hubristic than, say, giving aspirins to people who God has decided ought to have headaches. But Physicists seem to positively like using the G-word. They pretend that Mr Higgs-Boson is the God Particle or that a grand unified theory is the Mind of God or that Quantum Physics reveals that the Creator is a big fan of Yahtzee.

Christians have a bad habit of pretending that this means that the scientists in question believed in God even when they obviously didn't. Christians have a bad habit of pretending that all sorts of famous people believed in God when they obviously didn't. Atheists have got an equally bad habit of claiming that famous people didn't believe in God when they obviously did. ("Oh, they may have said that they did, but that was the kind of thing you had to say in the olden days. If they lived today, they would have agreed with me.") Einstein, who was a scientist, didn't believe in God, and said so, although he also said that the didn't think much of atheists and was a big fan of Jesus.

I think that the tendency of some physicists to talk about their science in theological language does imply that they think that their science is the sort of thing which it is worth using theological language to talk about. I think that they use words like "God" because they like to think of themselves as discoverers of some ultimate, or indeed, Ultimate, truth, or indeed Truth. Unlike those poor benighted chemists who just mix things up in their test tubes. I think that they use the G-word because they believe in some kind of Platonic reality – that there are things that are true and would have been true even if there had been no minds to observe them being true. Unlike those people on the other side of the quad who think that everything is contingent, cultural determined, subjective, post-modern, deconstructable.

More recently, Mr Hawking has claimed that the gaps which he perceived when he wrote a Brief History of Time have indeed been filled in: "the scientific account is complete and theology is unnecessary". This works very well if God is primarily an explanation for the bits of the Universe we don't quite understand. When we knew hardly anything, there was lots of stuff for God to do; now we know everything, we can retire him. (I've always felt that this can't be quite right. So little of the Bible and the Koran and the Book of Mormon seem to be involved in saying "Why do elephants have long noses? Because God said so, that's why." So much of it seems to be about temples and taboos and morals and miracles and stuff.)

But the bombshell that Hawking drops on the New Statesman goes like this:

"I am not claiming that there is no God. The scientific account is complete but it does not predict human behaviour because there are too many equations to solve. One therefore uses a different model which can include free will and God."

Go back and read that again.

Now go back and read it again.

Now, we know well enough how the rest of this argument pans out. Like a high level chess game, the moves are planned out in advance. Some Christians are, right now, typing that God exists because the most famous scientist of his generation says that God exists, or at any rate, that God doesn't definitely not exist. Some atheists are, right now, typing "Oh, I suppose just because humans are complicated I have to start circumcising lambs on bronze alters, do I?" All the cute little Dawkinistas are typing that by "God", Hawking doesn't mean "God" and even if he does, he's got a diseased mind and can be ignored. Five comments in someone will use the phrase "sky fairy" and the discussion will come to an end.

But it is still very interesting.

Clearly, Hawking hasn't suddenly converted to anything, and isn't even necessarily talking about the "God" of religion. He may not be saying anything more than that "God" can be a useful tool of thought. That was the line taken by Phillip Pullman before he became boring: God doesn't "exist" but she's still worth thinking about, because she allows us to think of things we couldn't think of without her. (There is no such number as the square root of minus one, but calculations involving the square root of minus one have useful real world applications.) It was also the line taken by Terry Pratchett: maybe it is good to teach children to believe in things that don't exist, like the tooth fairy, because they are going to need to believe in other things that don't exist, like "love" and "freedom".

It isn't quite clear what Hawking means by "model". He may mean "It could sometimes be useful to pretend that there is a God in the same way that it is sometimes useful (when you are trying to find your way home without a compass, say) to pretend that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun moves round it." Or he may mean: "When we are talking about the human mind, and how it interacts with the universe, and whether it makes real choices, it is perfectly valid to construct hypothesis which includes God. At some point in the future, we may think of a way of testing those hypotheses."

He seems, very interestingly, to grok the idea that "God" is not, and never way, primarily a very inefficient way of explaining why elephants have trunks; but is, and always was, a way of thinking about how us minds go about existing and interacting with other minds which also seem to be embodied in this physical universe thing.

Since he has (so far as I know) no particular religious axe to grind it will not be possible for the atheists to reply "Oh, look at the contortions which these Christians will go to to salvage some part of their nasty barbaric bronze age did I mention Fred Phelps stoning apostates sky fairy sky fairy sky fairy." This doesn't mean that they won't say it. And if he is serious (about not claiming that God does not exist) it will suddenly become awfully hard to maintain the imaginary line between science (which is always atheistic) and faith (which is always anti-scientific.) Which doesn't mean that people won't carry on saying it.

Science has explained everything; but human minds and their apparent ability to make choices are not really part of the "everything" which science has explained. We may need to think of them in some other way. Some way that may include "God".

Excuse me: but wasn't that exactly the territory over which C.S Lewis and G.E.M Anscombe had their celebrated theological spat in 1948?

These Ones Are Pretty Awesome As Well

2011-10-12T11:54:00.000+01:00

And now, here is some music

2011-10-06T21:02:00.000+01:00

is this possibly the best song ever written about anything

I lied (3)

2011-10-06T16:52:00.000+01:00

--Are you through with politics?

--I should say vice versa

Citizen Kane

I think that when I ask questions aboutthe logic of a political speech or interview or leading article ortalk show, or wonder how the speakers theories might apply to the“real” world, I am making the same mistake as the man who askedwhat the piece of string did after it left the bar.

I think that allthose webpages which explain at some length that no, actually,Birmingham City Council has not banned Christmas are on the samelevel as the webpages which ask why the Death Star didn't just ignorethe fourth moon of Yavin and blast the gas giant that it wasorbiting.

It’s not supposed to make sense, you dunderhead. It’sa story.

Seeing little redspaceships whizzing around shooting at little black space ships is meant to makeyou feel excited; hearing the word "winterval" is meant tomake you feel cross.

Star Wars is for people who like feelingexcited; politics is for people who like feeling cross. There is literature for people who like feeling scared and for people who like feeling sad, and good luck to them.

I thinkit will be infinitely more profitable to approach any speech, anyinterview, any column, any talking heads show (and any Internet blog) as a self contained, abstractstructure of rising and falling sounds and disconnected images than to imagine that the speaker or writer is actually saying something

Because they hardly ever are.

Didyou happen to watch the panel of apparently grown-up individualsdiscussing the recent lynching in Georgia on Question Time? The panellists were required to pretend to answer the question “Doescapital punishment have a place in civilised society?” Readers willimmediately spot that this is not actually a question at all. It’s only abit of question-shaped-noise. The man in the front row you sir with the glasses might as well have asked “do some people wear pink ties?" or "does cheese exist?" Many civilisations -- the Greekcivilisation, the Roman civilisation, the Egyptian civilisation, the whole of Western civilisation up until the 19th century – practiced capital punishment with great enthusiasm and some imagination. The questioner was at best making aman-goes-into-a-bar pun. Have you noticed how we use the word“civilisation” to mean “a complex political and legal culture”(“civilisation began in ancient Babylon”) and “couth, wellmannered behaviour” (“don’t chew your meat with your mouthopen, darling, it’s uncivilized”)? Isn't that funny, in a way? At worst, he wasn't saying anything at all. He was just making a noise, and inviting the panel to make a noise.

IanHislop noted that his magazine had reported at least one miscarriage ofjustice every week for the past 25 years, at least 100 of which related to wrongful murder convictions. If the asphyxiation lobby had its way, those 100people would all be dissolving in quicklime right now. Leaving allother considerations to one side, he said, this demonstrates why ritualasphyxiation will never be restored in this country.

Now, there are clearly only two sensible responses to this point:

a: Itdoesn't matter if you execute an innocent person: what matters isthat the “cost” of murder should be as high as it can possiblybe, otherwise the “value” of life is insufficiently high, likefinding bananas only cost 5p a pound in Sainsburies and deciding thatthey can’t possibly be very good bananas. And anyway, the death penalty doesn't hurt much nowadays so it hardly even counts as a punishment. [*]

b: Itdoesn't matter if you execute an innocent person, because executionsprevent murders, so the total number of people killed in a societywith capital punishment is always less than the total number ofpeople killed in a society which doesn’t have capital punishment.

c: Thestate, while terribly bad at running schools and hospitals, isinfallible when it comes to determining guilt or innocence, so it isin fact impossible that any innocent person could ever be convicted. Which must be a huge comfort to Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley.

No-one made either of these arguments. A lady on the panel who claimed to be a Tory MP made the following noise:

I do actually think that when we have a criminal justice system that continuously fails in this country and where we’ve seen murderers and rapists and people who’ve committed just the most abhorrent crimes in society go into prison and then are released from prison to go out into the community to re offend and do the type of crimes that they’ve committed again and again I think that’s appalling and on that basis alone I would actually support the re-introduction of capital punishment to serve as a deterrent because I do think we do not have enough deterrence in this country for criminals and lets not forget that murderers and rapists and criminals of that kind chose to commit the crimes that they commit.

Hisloprepeated his point about executing innocent people: were his 100people all guilty? "No, I’m not saying that." "Then they would bedead." But apparently, this wasn't the point:

The point is as I said earlier on this is about having deterrence. If you have strong deterrence like that, capital punishment will act as a deterrent. To have capital punishment would act as a deterrent. That’s the first point here....And also I put this in the context of I think far too many politicians run away from debating issues like this because they don’t want to associate themselves with an either or position and I think the other point to make here and this comes back to the issue about a deterrent in our criminal justice system is that we see the revolving door with murderers and rapists and paedophiles as well and nobody thinks about the human rights of the families and the victims and the people that have really suffered.

WhenDavid-or-Jonathan opened it up to the audience, a slightly differentpoint of view was presented:

This is about having a deterrent. It’s not about the ultimate taking of a life. It’s about having deterrent....Because if you’ve got boundaries which are set then people understand the parameters of the crime that they’re going to commit, be it a murder, be it rape, if you’ve got a deterrent in place for that then it may make people think twice about what they’re actually going to do in order to commit that crime...I’m not saying it’s particularly right, but what I am saying is that, as a deterrent sometimes with the system that we have and the way its backed up and prisons are full I think that really and truly it should be looked at....I remember when I was at school, in Birmingham, and I remember that the cane was a deterrent. Just the thought that you may have the cane, you may get the cane, was a deterrent. For you not to do certain things.

Now, you see, theold me would have been inclined to approach this gibberish logically.Are there many actual examples of people who have been convicted of first degreemurder, and then released from prison to commit a second first degree murder? Isn’t Priti Patel’s “revolving door” really about people serving a few years for some lessor crime and committing a more serious one on their release from prison? Isn't the logic of that position that you would have to have the death penalty for second degree murder and house breaking and common assault? Whydo we keep talking about rape and paedophilia, when rape hasn’tbeen a capital offence since 1841? Did the man in the audience envisage having a rusty gallows in the basement of Wormwood Scrubs to represent the fact that the state could kill you if it wanted to although it isn't actually going to -- like having a vault of gold to make people believe in paper currency, even though it would use it's value if you actually spent any of it. (That’s the only sense I canmake out of his schoolboy analogy. I think some teachers did keepcanes in the cupboard as a sort of symbol and threat even when they had not the slightest intention of actually spanking anyone.) Or is heconfusing “deterrance” in the criminal sense with mutualdeterrence in the military sense – that nuclear weapons will neverbe used because both sides have got nuclear weapons and are therefore all tooscared to use them? Or does he think that “deterrant” is a magicpanacea, and once you say “Anyone who writes rude words on thewalls will get the cane” the whole school becomes magically free ofgraffiti for ever after? (I wish Jonathon-or-David had asked him "Were you ever caned, sir?" I would bet several pounds on the answer having been "Oh yes, many times, and it didn't do me any harm.")

But in fact it isperfectly obvious that there is no meaning behind the words, any morethan there is in Jabawocky or Visions of Johanna. The word "deterrent" was like the pun at the end of a joke -- it has a visceral effect on some members of the audience (making them feel vaguely good about killing people). The rest of speech "the reality is" "the main point" "I really believe that" "moving forward" were just like the scaffolding in the joke that gets us to the point when you can amusingly reveal that some words sound like other words.

[Well the point isas I said earlier on this is about] having deterrence. [If youhave ]strong deterrence [like that] capital punishment willact as a deterrent. To have capital punishment would act as adeterrent. [That’s the first point here....]

I have the kind of brain which is inclined to read this sort of ga-ga as if it were an argument, in the same way that once I've noticed that "piece of cod" sounds like "peace of god" I can't help thinking of a story in which a vicar might confuse his fish with his benediction. (Pete Ashton suggested, not unkindly, that I might have a kind of high-functioning autism. I've never been diagnosed as such, but I have seen Star War forty four times.) But it's not an argument and there is no thread. They are just saying "deterrence" over and over again. "Deterrence...deterrence...deterrence" means "This is an argument in favour of hanging people" in the same way that "Come all you young fellas and list unto me" means "This is the first verse of a folk song."

People sometimes talk about politiciansusing "dog whistles". The idea is that in the course ofa speech, the politician smuggles in some words or phrases which areinnocuous to normal people, but carry a special meaning to aparticular claque. Hardly anyone could possibly object to "moralvalues", but if you say that you want to teach "moral values"to school children in the right tone of voice, a good proportion ofyour audience will understand you to mean that you want to promotehomophobia. Clearly this happens. George Bush was apparentlyparticularly adept at working regimental jokes into his speeches,(which isn’t a terrible idea when you are speaking to soldiers). But Ithink that political debate is much more like Glen Larson’sold joke about human-dog communication. The human says "GoodRover! Good doggie! Get off the sofa and you shall have a nice juicybone!" and the dog hears "Blah Rover! Blah blah! Blah blahblah blah blah blah blah."

This is also the only way of making sense of the Daily Express's front page article about ritual child-beating. (The substantive point, you remember, was "Someone asked some people some questions, some of them said one thing, some of them said another thing".)

"Toughdiscipline... blah blah... the cane... blah blah..... strong leadership.... blah blah..... authority.... blah..... power.... freedom.... discipline.... corporalpunishment.... smacking.... caning...... more discipline..... unions,wishy washy.... detention..... writing out lines..... more power.... poordiscipline.... using force..... restore order".

And it’s obviously the only way of looking atDavid Cameron’sspeech-shaped-structure about Teh Riotz. Obviously, his was morenuanced, because it was written for him by a professional speechwriter and practiced in front of a focus group, but you search invain for concrete statements like “the riots happened because halfthe police force were in their offices filling out paper work; as ofnext Tuesday, I am hiring 10,000 extra secretaries who will be ableto do most of the routine paper work for them”. Instead, I found alot of shout-phrases.

“Responsible majority... thiscountry... determination... mend our brokensociety.... stronger... terrible mess we inherited... strongersociety... stronger... stronger... stronger... stronger society..... mendour broken society... mend our broken society... humanrights... personal responsibility.... health and safety... common sense.”[**]

It's literally clap-trap: sounds which are there to make the audience applause, and for no other reason.

And that, you will be glad to know,really is all that I have to say about politics.

When someone says something I try to work out what must have been going on in their heads. When someone tells me that they have encountered and had dealings with fairies, I assume that what they are saying makes sense from their point of view. If someone says a wrong thing, I believe I can usually show why it is a wrong thing, unless it turns out that I believe a wrong thing myself. I really want to tell you what I think about the revelation that Daily Mail journalists write reports of trials before the verdict has come in, complete with descriptions of how the accused looked and what the defence council said afterwards. I really want to tell you what I think about the British Home Secretary using a fictitious story about a cat as grounds for abolsihing the Human Rights act, and that when policians say "I am not making this up" they mean "Someone else made it up for me." I want to tell you what I think about the last Archdruid lying about the BBC BC/AD thing, and his apparent belief that Jesus was born on January 1st. Or the American lady who thinks the unfortunate Troy Davies must have been guilty because every one executed in America since 1950 has been guilty. Or...

But no. There's no point trying to work out what is going on in their heads. There's no point trying to work out what they mean. They don't mean anything. Nothing is going on in their heads. It's only noise.

Time to stop. Time to do something else.

In a media age, there can be no political debate, and to pretend that there can be merely perpetuates the noise making.

“Piece of shit." as a very wise man once said. "Walk away.”

I’m not going to swear to dress up as a bat andhunt down my father’s killer for the rest of my life, although, barring one cheese andtomato sandwich, I really haven’t been in any branch of Tescossince the riot. But I am going to stop reading newspapers, at least until Christmas. Until the election, if I can manage it. And that means no radio or TV news, and no Eyeand no News Quiz and no HIGNFY. And pruning my Twitter feed. If I ever feel the urge to pick up the Guardian, I'll get magazine about science or guitars or birdwatching instead. Instead of watch Newsnight, I'll watch Smallville or Merlin or something with some vague connection to the real world.

If Boris Johnson becomes PrimeMinister, please could someone write and tell me.

To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!
Nay, that's certain. They that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton.
I would, therefore, that my sister had had no name, sir.
Why, man?
Why, sir, her name's a word, and to dally with that word might make my sister wanton. But indeed, words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them.
They reason, man?
Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words; and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.
Twelfth Night

--Shakespeare said some rather good things.
--I understand that he has given uniform satisfaction.
Much Obliged, Jeeves.

[*] Guess which national newspaperseriously put this forward as an argument, in almost exactly thosewords. Go on. See if you can guess.

[**] “Ihave the very strong sense that the responsible majority of people inthis country not only have that determination; they are crying outfor their government to act upon it. AndI can assure you, I will not be found wanting. In my very first actas leader of this party I signalled my personal priority: to mend ourbroken society. That passion is stronger today than ever. Yes, wehave had an economic crisis to deal with, clearing up the terriblemess we inherited, and we are not out of those woods yet – not by along way. But I repeat today, as I have on many occasions these lastfew years, that the reason I am in politics is to build a bigger,stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger society. This is what I came into politics to do – andthe shocking events of last week have renewed in me that drive. So Ican announce today that over the next few weeks, I and ministers fromacross the coalition government will review every aspect of our workto mend our broken society. On schools, welfare, families,parenting, addiction, communities. On the cultural, legal,bureaucratic problems in our society too: from the twisting andmisrepresenting of human rights that has undermined personalresponsibility to the obsession with health and safety that haseroded people’s willingness to act according to common sense.”

I lied (2)

2011-10-04T23:00:00.000+01:00

Star Wars is a story. A guy goes somewhere and does some stuff. But lots of the stuff that he does stops making sense when you start to think about it. Fascist empires with crack troopers who are renowned for their pin point accuracy but can't hit a barn door at point blank range; cowboys who don't believe in magic even though the slaughter of the wizards took place, at most, sixteen or seventeen years ago. Military empires that show ever sign of having invented the wheel but persist in putting legs on their tanks. You know the drill.

But what if it didn't matter that Star Wars doesn't make sense as a story, because Star Wars isn't a story, but a collection of sounds and pictures which were much more about making me feel a particular way – excited, nostalgic, patriotic, whatever – than about conveying information?

We know that George Lucas did, in fact have collection of scenes and images that he wanted to use to put into his movie-film; and that those scenes and images came first, and the chains of cause and effect – or apparent cause and effect – which linked those images together kept changing, right up until the final cut of the movie. And for thirty years thereafter. And we know that George Lucas wanted us to attend to those images as images, because he considered making Star Wars a silent film, and he considered filming it in some foreign language, or some made up foreign language, or getting children to play the main characters to make it seem strange and distanced. It didn't greatly matter whether Luke stole the robots from his uncle or whether R2 just runs off into the desert, provided you have a scene where the hero left home and travelled through a dangerous desert. It didn't matter whether our heroes escaped into a sewer on Coruscant (at that stage confusingly called Alderaan) or a garbage shoot on the Death Star, provided they were caught in a garbage masher.

I don't think we are meant to react to the opening moments of Star Wars by saying "How long ago? Aren't all galaxies are long way away? Would it have made a difference if the story was contemporary, but in far away galaxy, or if it took place a long time ago in a galaxy which was in astronomical terms, realtively close." I think "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away" means "I want you to feel as you did when you were very small and someone you loved was about o tell you a story" or more simply "This is fairy tale". *I don't think that the opening fanfare primarily conveys the information that the film was manufactured by a company founded by William Fox. I think that says "I want you to feel as you did when you used to go to the movies in the olden days, before there was any such thing as TV, or as you imagine that Dad did when he used to go to movies in the olden days" or more simply "This is an old fashioned film."

And so on: the opening crawl ("it is a period of civil war") convey very little information. It is supposed to convey very little information – it is supposed to confuse you, to make you think "hang on, slow down, which Empire, what rebellion, princess who, have I come in in the middle." But it's primary purpose is to be anachronistic. No film has started with an opening caption like that for forty years. It says "feel as you did when you used to watch repeats of Flash Gordon on BBC2 during the school holidays".

I am pretty sure that you could go through the film, scene by scene, note by note, and dissect it in this way: not in terms of a character called "Luke" who is making decisions and choices which are plausible based on his personality and the possible world he find himself in (he isn't and they aren't) but in terms of a film maker creating a visual symphony. Wondering who owns the ships and why it has come out of hyperspace near Darth Vader's home planet is a category mistake on a level with asking where the man in the bar found the leprechaun and what pieces of string do with their beer. The meaning of the opening scene, surely is that it a great big ship is "eaten" by a much bigger ship. You are meant to say "wow! big...big...big...even bigger!!!". If you say "that's a class CR90 Corellien Corvette, you know" then you have missed the point. It is not a co-incidence that the opening scene of Star Wars is a direct lift from the opening of the Jupiter sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey -- a scene that also set out to impress you with the Jupiter probe's size, or at any rate, length. "Remember the huge, huge ship in 2001" it says "Look! We've just swallowed it like a whale swallowing a bad tempered ladybird."

I think that a lot of the "plot" of Star Wars is transparent glue which is only there to glue one part of the visual and emotional collage to another part of the visual and emotional collage. If Darth Vader is really tracking the Millennium Falcon, why doesn't Han Solo at least try to find the bug and remove it? Or fly to some location other than the Secret Rebel Base? Are we to imagine that the Stormtroopers who are shooting at Luke and Leia as they swing across the chasm are under orders to miss? Someone complained that the invention of midichlorians retrospectively destroys the first three Star Wars movies. If you were interested in narrative logic, this scene would do a much better job of retrospectively destroying the first hour and a half of Star Wars. But it doesn't, because the Empire didn't really "let them go" because the Empire doesn't exist and its only a movie. Leia little speech "They let us go, its the only explanation for the ease of our escape" as a bit of noise which gets us from "the scene which is a bit like one of those old movie serials" to "the scene which is a bit like one of those old world war II RAF films" as quickly as possible.

Is this the only way to watch a movie?

No, of course not. In fact, if you were thinking about this kind of thing while you were watching the movie, then the movie isn't doing what it's meant to be doing.

Does this approach come much closer to describing and explaining what watching a movie is actually like than any number pseudo-historical works which explain why building the Death Star was a perfectly logical military tactic and where the toilets were on the Millennium falcon?

I think it may do.

Would it work for all fiction?

No. I think that a lot of Great Big Novels depends on us pretending that we are, at some level, watching real people in real situations doing things because those are the things they really would do. I think that the emotional power of the Great Big Novel depends on us feeling sympathy with Dorothea Brooke or Jean Valjean as if they were friends of ours. (Although how that works: how we can think that Dorothea is a "real person" and believe that there is this invisible "author" floating around her who can jump from one person's head to another is a question for another dissertation.)

But I think it applies much more often than you'd think.

I think that when confronted with pictures or sounds or words the human mind will think that there is a connecting thread -- a story or an argument or a chain of course and effect or some logic -- even when there isn't.

The relevance of this to the Daily Mail is, I hope, perfectly obvious.

I Lied

2011-10-03T23:30:00.000+01:00

"It seems very pretty", said Alice when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!...Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate--"

A "man" is an adult humanmale. The word "man" is still sometimes used to mean "humanbeing", although some people think it shouldn't be.

A "bar" is a place whichsells alcoholic drinks. In English English, "bar" is to"pub" as "boat" is to "ship": you canput a bar in a pub but you can't put a pub in a bar. In AmericanEnglish "bar" is more likely to refer to the wholeestablishment, not just the counter where the drinks are served. (Thisdiscrepancy also applies to other facilities, incidentally. If youask an Englishman "Where is the toilet?" he will probablyreply "Upstairs, first on the left." If you ask the samequestion to an American, he is more likely to reply "In thebathroom; where else would it be?")

To "go" is a verb denotingmovement from one place to another. At one time it meant "walk": Lear's fool says that when everything is in the proper order "goingwill be done with feet". At another time, the normal word forwalk was "wend" as in "The Plowman homeward wends hisweary way". For some reason the different tenses of the wordsgot mixed so you say "I go" in the present tense but "Iwent" in the past tense.

So: there is nothing at all hard aboutdefining the words "man" "bar" and "go".

But put them together in the sentence"A man goes into a bar...." and they cease to have anythingto do with a human male walking into an establishment licensed forthe sale of intoxicating drinks. If I say "a man goes into abar..." I am saying "Please don't pay any attention to thelogic or plausibility of the story I'm about to tell you: pleasedon't ask me whether it's at all likely that barmen really havegenies in magic bottles or whether health and safety officers wouldallow you on to premises where food is sold if you really did have aduck on your head." In fact, "man goes into a bar"means "I am about to point out a possible ambiguity in theEnglish language which may not have occurred to you before", or,in short, "I am about to tell you a joke".

The really clever puns are the oneswhich exploit a genuine ambiguity in language, or at least a doublemeaning that could occur in real life. It will be remembered thatwhen Oscar Wilde boasted that he could think of a joke about anysubject, someone proposed "The Queen". Quick as a flash,Oscar replied "The Queen is not a subject." That's quite acomplicated wordplay, because the two senses of the word "subject"– a citizen of a monarchy and a topic for conversation – aredistantly related; and because the two meanings of Oscar's sentence both make perfect sense in context: the joke is that he's used the same words to give two different reasons for not telling a joke. C.S Lewis's joke about the vicar who goes to the local girls' school drama society's production of A Midsummer Nights Dream and finds himself saying "Well, I've never seen a female Bottom before!" is much less clever, but it is based on a mistake that someone could just possibly make in real life. On the other hand, there's no linguistic or semantic significance behind the fact that "I'm afraid not" soundslike "I'm a frayed knot": it's pure linguistic coincidence, and it's pretty hard to imagine that it could ever give rise to a misunderstanding. But the similarity of sound somehow becomes funny -- but not very funny -- if you embed it in a story about how three pieces of string went into a bar and ordered a drink. [*] We laugh at the pun just because it is a pun: it wouldn't occur to us to say "A peice of string went into a bar? What kind of gibberish is that? How could a piece of string possibly consumealcohol, since they have no mouths? Can they become intoxicated? Dothey use the gentlemen's toilet or the lady's one? Is there a ghettoin the town where all the pieces of string live, or are these recentimmigrants from piece-of-string land?" It's almost like, once we've spotted that two phrases sound the same, we create a story-shaped collection of words around them. The moment I noticed that the phrase "Piece of cod" sounded a little like "Peace of God" then the picture of a rather confused little vicar in a chip shop jumped into my head. I just couldn't stop it.

Admittedly, some people do insist on taking this kind of non-story literally. "Suppose you and I were ina restaurant..." you say, hoping to illustrate a point about goodmanners, or safe food handling, or English consumer law."But why would I be in a restaurant with you?" they reply"I hardly know you. And anyway, I'm a vegan and you're not, Idon't think we'd like the same kind of food. And on my salary, how can I afford to eat out?" I really wish theywouldn't.

Some people, possibly the same people, are also confused by the whole idea of fantasy. They think that "fantasy" really means "mistake": that you read Watership Down because you were under the impression that rabbits really do have human personalities, and once they have set you straight on this point, you won't need to read the book any longer. "But Japan didn't win the second world war," they point out, calmly, "And phone boxes can't travel through time and sapce. And we shouldn't teachchildren about Cinderella, because they idea that a pumpkin couldspontaneously evolve into something complex like a coach goes againstthe whole idea of natural selection." (In fairness there are other other people who are equally confused by the whole idea of there being books which are not fantasy. "But there really are lots of poor people living miserable lives in dingy bedsits" they say "So why on earth would anyone want to make up a story about one of them?")

Curiously, the anti-fantasy brigade think it is perfectly okay for mainstream writers to steal fantasy elements and use them as plot devices. Shakespeare writes mostly about things which don't exist -- magic islands, ghosts, witches, wizards,fairies, identical twins, the divine right of kings, true love -- but that doesn't mean he's not a realistic writer, okay? And it is quite permissable for whichever Bronte it was to use thoughttransferance as feeble deus ex machina at the end of Jane Eyre.

Some of those people who don't getfantasy, oddly, admire the works of Richard Wagner. Some of thembelieve, correctly, that Parsifal is the best thing that Wagner, andtherefore anybody, ever wrote, but also believe, wrongly, that youcan detatch the musical form from the mythological and philosphicalcontent and still be left with a great work. Parsifal, they say, isn't really about retrieving the holyspear from the wizard Klingsor in order to heal the wounded grailking -- it and it certainly isn't about Buddhist ideas ofrenunciation and attatchment, whatever the libretto might say. Itisn't actually about anything at all: it's a sublime andsophisticated collection of musical notes, which follow an internalpattern and logic. Close your eyes, ignore the actors in suits of armour and the surtitles, and just listen to noie. The phrase "tone poem" turns up a gooddeal.

I understand that some music really does works like this. I get that Mr Beethoven's symphonies aren't about anything, except the way in which you can go "dit-dit-dit-DAH" slowly, twice; and then quickly three times; and then quickly three times again; and slowly slowly twice, and carry on that like for an a hour and a half. And very pretty it is too. The big deep "dit-dit-dit-DAH" at the beginning makes us feel sad; and the great big "dah-dah-dah-dit-dah-dit-dah-di-dah" at the end makes us feel happy. But asking "what are we happy about" would be like asking where the man in the pub found the duck that he had on its head . The music isn't about anything apart from the music. It may not be a coincidence that the opera which lends itselfbest to this approach is the one I like least. Tristan and Isolde is,it seems, at least as much about whether it is possible to avoidresolving a chord for five hours as about whether anyone could reallybe stupid enough to order "love potion" when what theyreally wanted was "poison".

Last year,when we were young, we talked about Mr Bob Dylan, and wonderedwhether it was a mistake to read the lyrics of his songs as coherentnarratives, or even as coherent language. We agreed that there wasvery little point in wondering in what sense the lady in question was"jelly-faced", where she had lost her knees, and what mightbe done to help her find them again. We decided that a line like "theghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face" probablyderived its emotional effect from sound and rhythm, and that noamount of looking up the words "ghost" and "electricty"in the dictionary, let alone the close questioning of Bob Dylan,would allow the words to have a meaning in the way that "I amsitting in the cafe drinking coffee and typing" arguably have ameaning. We went so far as to speculate that the song is reallychanting words: "ghost... electrictiy... howls... bones....face" and all the little words like "the" and"of" are just there to glue it together into somethingwhich looks a bit like a sentence, but actually, isn't. We decided, in short that a Dylan lyric is more like a Beethoven symphony than a Wagner opera.

Are all poems and songs like that? The question "who were these twoladies, Johanna and Louise, and why was Bob thinking of one whilecuddling the other" is literally meaningless, like "whatdid the piece of string do after it had left the bar". But surely, if we asked "Who was the artistic lady with theinterfering sister who Bob had the romantic tiff with" then all theDylanologists would reply "Suzie Rotolo". I think that wecan all agree that there exists such a lady, that Bob did date herfor a while, and the song Ballad in Plain D was written after thislove affair had come to an end. (I believe that Bob even said later that it had been a little caddish of him to have written a poem about a break up andput it in the public domain.)

But I am not sure how far this takesus. I don't think that the point of Ballad in Plain D is that it convery inforamtion -- informationwhich we could equally well get out of a biography or a gossipcolumn. I care as much about Dylan's love life as I do about the lovelife of any other elderly gentleman who I have never met. But I do like the song; quite a lot, actually. I grant that it is less abstract that "Visions of Johanna", but I don't think that I would get much further analyzing "with unseen consciousness I possessed in my grip a magnficent mantlipiece though its heart being chipped" than "the one with the moustaches says "jeez, I can't find my knees'." I think that the point of those kinds of lines is that they are cryptic and ambiguous, and that it is the puzzle-like quality of the lines, not any solution that we may come up with, which gives them their affect. I concede that the song has a narrative like form, but at the end, I think that our feelings are very much like Alice's: "Well, somebody left someone over something -- that's clear, at any rate." I think that the opening line "I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze" mean "This is the first line of a romantic folk-song" in the same way that "Twas ~~brilling,~~ brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the ~~wove~~ wabe" means "this is is the first line of an epic poem" and "Man goes into a bar" means "This is the first line of a joke". I don't think that any discussion of the etymolgy of "toves", or whether Bob was specially attracted to sun-tanned women, and whether fawns are in fact well-known for being innocent, or whether pieces of strings can get into bars without having legs can possibly make the line mean anything else. I think that the line about the mantlepiece sounds like the sort of thing an angsty self-important lover might say in a song, without telling us anything about mantlepieces. I think that the point of the closing lines:

My friends in the prison the ask unto me
How good, how good does it feel to free
And I answer them most mysteriously
Are birds free of the chains of the skyway

mean "this is the last line of a romantic folksong." They mean "I want you to feel that I feel the same kind of maudlin, self-important self pity as the anonymous singer who wrote:"

My friends friends they ask unto me
How many strawberries grow in the salt sea
And I answer them with a tear in my eye
How many ships sail in the forest?

They mean "I am the sort of man who is so up himself that he quotes old English ballads when describing actual breakups."

The last time I said all this, a dissenting voice said that it was all very well to do this kind of thing to lyric poems and romantic ballads, but it didn't work nearly as well with, say, Star Wars because Stars Wars is, well, a story.

But I'm not quite sure....

[*] "I suppose you are also a piece of string" said the barman. "No" replied the piece of string "I'm afraid not."

Five

2011-10-02T00:37:00.000+01:00

We know that we don't know,
So let our vision still be pure;
We are Agnostic Fundamentalists;
We’re fundamentally unsure!
Peace, my sisters and my brothers;
The Agnostic does not smite;
We are tolerant of others;
There’s a chance they may be right.

Les Barker (The Church of Wholly Undecided)

If we believe wrong things, we will dowrong things. It is therefore sensible to try to believe rightthings, and to encourage other people to believe right things.

But none of us is infallible: we all believe some wrong things and are bound to sometimes do wrong things whether we mean to or not.

That's just howlife is. The only alternative is doing nothing at all. No point worrying about it too much. I think that the "not doing anything at all"experiment might be worth trying for a few days, though.

We can minimize the amount of harm wedo by always keeping in mind that there are two sides to everyquestion (apart from the one about who created the Silver Surfer) andthat the other guy might have a good point.

But obviously, this approachonly applies to everybody else. You have a perfect right to your opinions. But I don't have any opinions. I see things the way they actually are. "How lovely to think that all round the world, different groups of people are worshipping God in their own way, while here we are, worshipping Him in His way" as the fellow said. Now, if Melanie Phillips and Polly Toynbee, and Richard Dawkins and the Rowan Williams could both agree to say, and really mean "The other chap might have a good point" we wouldbe getting somewhere. But we're not.

Anyway there are some things which it is just not possible to be tolerant about. And I'm not going to go all smartarse and postmodern and say "I'm not sure if tolerant people have to tolerate people who tolerate intolerant people, you know." If I were pacifist I really wouldn't see any difference between the dead boys being brought home to Brize Norton and the foreign boys they murdered. A murderer in uniform is still a murderer. I might very well spit on their coffins and picket their funerals, like that nice man in America. Who we should be tolerant of, because there's a chance he might be right.

I'm not a pacifist, in that sense. I'm a pacifist in the sense of thinking that peace is nicer than war, but so's everybody else.

If Ireally believed that there was an institution on the high street whose only purpose was to massacre large numbers of small children then I would tie myself to therailings, picket it, throw rotten fruit at the staff, sell all mypossessions and dedicate the rest of my life to closing down thisinfant death camp. I would certainly refuse to have anything to dowith anyone who worked for the baby killing centre, in any capacity. I would hardly say "Oh, this is Mr Smith. He works as a receptionist in a concentration camp, you know. I don't quite approve, but if you set that aside, he's a very nice chap." I might even try to blow up the baby killing center and assassinate the staff. Given that I'm not a pacifist.

For the avoidance of doubt: I don'tthink that there are institutions in this country which kill babies. And so far as I can see, neither do those people who a have a real, strong, moral, thought-out, principled objection to abortion (who you should be are very tolerant of, because there's a chance they might be right.) They certainly don't behave as if they think that every single person who works in the health service is on the same moral level as a concentration camp guard.

You might very well think that humanbeings ought to be much kinder to the other animals we share a planetwith than we are at the moment. You might very well be right. But you don't really think that atrainload of cows being taken off to be turned into hamburgers is thesame as a trainload of Jews being taken off to Auschwitz. You might say that you do, but you don't. If you did,you'd be advocating us sending Spitfires to carpet bomb McDonald's. Andyou aren't. At least, I assume you aren't. Meat is not murder, whatever over-excitable vegetarians might sometimes say.

Of course, "Meat is murder" sounds much better than "The production of meat sometimes involves unnecessary cruelty". And "Sainsburies makes life taste better" is snappier than "Sainsburies is a shop which sells stuff." There is nothing wrong with slogans; there is nothing wrong with rhetoric; there is nothing wrong with exaggeration. I have used exaggeration to make a point, on millions of different occassions.

But we need to be fairly clearwhen we are engaging in legitimate political exaggeration and whenwe are talking dangerous rubbish. You may very well thinkthat the clerical child abuse scandal is a scandal, and one for which theCatholic church can't and shouldn't be forgiven. But if you start tosay, and appear to actually mean, that the Roman Catholic church onlyever existed as a means of supplying fresh young buttocks for gay male celibates toinsert their penises between; that the Catholic Church is the greatest criminal organisation in history; that every priest is achild abuser and every Catholic an accessory to child abuse -- then youprobably shouldn't be too surprised if someone starts killing priestsand setting fire to churches. Because if every village in Europe hadan institution which really was only a sophisticated paedophilegrooming centre, then burning them down would be a perfectlyunderstandable thing to do. Unless you were a pacifist.

Ohhh....but when I said that theCatholic Church was the biggest and worst criminal organisation inhistory, then I didn't actually mean that we should treat theCatholic Church as if it was the biggest and worst criminalorganisation in history. I only meant that we should all write jolly stiff letters to the Independent.

English Kings have got a nasty habit ofsaying very loudly and in public that they wouldn't be at all sad if some individual met withsome nasty accident, and then being very surprised when the aforementioned individuals actuallydo meet with nasty accidents, often at the ends of swords belongingto the people the king was talking loudly in front of. You would thinkthat they would learn to be more careful of what they say in front ofdrunken, angry knights. Careless talk costs archbishops.

Many of us couldn't help experiencing asort of morbid schadenfreude when it turned out that Anders Breivik, the right wing nutter who shot 67 people in Norway over the summer, was a reader of the Daily Mail and quoted articles by Melanie Phillips.

But it wasn't actually very surprising. He wasa right wing nutter: the Daily Mail is aimed firmly at the "rightwing nutter" demographic. When a man rapes a lady, it oftenturns out that he liked sex magazines; when a man kills a child witha gun, it often turns out that he liked gun magazines; when a mankills a child with a car, it often turns out that he liked carmagazines.

And all the stupid people say, with one voice"Ooo....It was the magazine's fault. Let's ban magazines."

We are not stupid people.

It will beremembered that that stupid American lady who the Guardian isobsessed with described the attempt to link her Teapot movement withthe 2011 shootings in Tuscon Arizona as "a blood libel". Becauseobviously, if you say that members of a particular party areCommunists, Islamists, terrorist supporters, not real Americans and in extreme cases theAntiChrist, ~~and print pictures of them with rifle cross hairs overtheir faces~~ then there is no chance whatsoever that anutter with a gun might take you a bit more literally than you intended him to. Particularlynot in a country where its relatively easy to lay hands on a gun.

What if the Daily Mail was right?

What if there really was a Marxist organisationdedicated to destruction of civilisation?

What if they had already taken over the BBC, the Labour Party and thePresident of America?

What if we teetered on the brink and saying "Before Common Era" and singing hymns at civil partnership ceremonies was going to push us over it?

What if Teh Riotz were the beginning, and that was what it was goingto be like in England every night from now on?

What if there was a real danger that the free press would be banned, Lord Cricket Ground turned into a collective farm and all of us forced to live on cold beetroot soup and turnips for the rest of our lives? (I assume that this is what it will be like after civilisation has ended and Herbert Marcuse and Stalin have taken over?)

What if David Cameron really had sided with those who wish to destroycivilisation, and opposed those who would quite like civilisation to carry on?

The fantasy world of the Daily Mail has been created specifically in order to smooth over moral grey areas; to make it quite impossible to say "there's a chance the other chap might be right."

If we know in advance that the Political Correctness Brigade is on the point of destroying civilisation, then even to ask "How does Songs of Praise, The Life of Mohammad and Thought for the Day fit in with the BBC secularist agenda? How does employing Simon Schama to make history documentaries fit in with their plot to abolish history?" is a kind of treason.

The fantasy world of the Common Sense Brigade, like the fantasy world of George Lucas, is specifically constructed so as to leave no space for nuance.

In the 1980s, us students thought it was cool and ironic to read the Sunday Sport. The Sport was a not very successful attempt to market a U.S style supermarket tabloid in the UK. I think most of us realised that its storylines -- World War II Bomber Found on Moon; Hitler Was Really a Woman; Hitler Still Alive; Hitler Flew World War II Bomber to Moon Because Sunday Sport Revealed He Was Really A Woman; World War II Bomber Disappears From Moon -- were not 100% reliable. I don't think it would have been hard to read a political agenda into the Sunday Sport's made up world, either: they were selling their middle-aged readers a fantasy in which the 1940s and 1950s had never really come to an end -- the news stories of their youth (Hitler, Elvis, Vera Lynn) were still the news stories of the 1980s. In the years in between, nothing much had happened. I don't know if anyone believed in them. I guess that it was a bit like U.F.Os: people didn't believe in every two headed baby but they did feel that there was a lot of wierd shit going down, because, well, it was all in the papers, wasn't it. But it didn't affect political discourse. The Guardian didn't run news stories about what the London Double Decker bus at the South Pole said about Antarctic ecology; the Telegraph didn't write thunderous editorials about how the SAS should be sent to the Croydon chip shop to arrest Hitler, and why this showed that England was soft on Nazi war criminals and we should therefore withdraw from the E.U. The Sunday Sport never set the agenda.

But every time a columnist, or an Any Questions panel, or straw poll ora media phone talks about the fictional banning of the term "AD", or the fictional banning of the term "Gingerbred Man", or the fictional school where children sing baa-baa-green sheep, or the fictional celebration of Winterval then it allows the Express and the Mail and the Campaign Against Political Correctness to set the agenda. It decides that the Common Sense Brigade's fictional England is more worth talking about than the place where we actually live and more and have our being.

And if the Daily Mail carries on encouraging its readers to believe wrong things, surely there is a risk that one of them will one day do a wrong thing? A terribly, terribly wrong thing?

If you really thought that the Cultural Marxists were about to take over, wouldn't you take drastic action to preserve Civilisation As We Know It?

What if the Daily Mail was right?

Four

2011-10-01T00:30:00.000+01:00

TimothyMcVeigh, who we can all agree was not a very nice or a very well man,supposedly compared his bombing of the Murrah building in OaklohamaCity with Luke Skywalker's destruction of the Death Star in StarWars. There were 1,161,292people on board the Death Star, and Luke was personally responsiblefor the death of every one of them. If a genocidal mass murderer like Luke Skywalker can be a fictional hero and not a fictional war criminal, then why can't someone who killed 167 people for a cause he believed in be regarded as a hero in real life?

It'sa valid thought experiment. Some people say that killing is just wrong, and that killing in war is even more just wronger. Some people really would let that hypothetical Nazi kill their hypothetical Grandmothers,because two wrongs don’t make a right and an eye for an eye leaveseverybody blind. Well then, Mr Pacifist, let's up the ante a little. It isn't a National Socialist and a little old lady. It's a huge great machine which was specifically created in order to destroy whole planets and which is bringing its magical planet killing ray on line to destroy yourplanet. Oh, and all 1,161,292 people on board are utterly and irredemably evil -- the sort of people who torture princesses and kill teddy bears. So, Mr Pacifist, you get to choose: push the button and kill one million one hundred and sixty one thousand two hundred and ninety two people, including Peter Cushing, or don't push it and see all the surviving warriors on the side of sweetness, light and apple pie, including all your friends and your only surviving non-evil relative, evaporate in the biggest explosion Industrial Light and Magic was capable of producing at the time.

Would you push the button?

Well,of course you bloody well would. Because Star Wars is only a story, and the whole story has been set up purely in order to make it OK for Luke to push the button. Alec Guinness was quite correct when he said thatthere is no violence in Star Wars. Guns go "bang bang" andpeople fall over, but nobody dies because the people who die aren'tpeople, but extras, whose function is to fall over when the goodiesgo "bang bang" at them. To actually think about the crew of the Death Star would make the entire edifice fall apart. It would be like watching a child knocking plastic soldiers over with a nerf gun and asking him if he is going to hold a plastic funeral and what he is going to do to provide for the plastic widows and plastic orphans he's creating. It is madness to think that killing soldiers in war is harmless game because knocking over toy soldiers is a harmless game, but it would be equally mad to think that knocking over toy soldiers is a horrible moral evil because killing real soldiers is a horrible moral evil. And it's mostunlikely that Tom and Jerry cartoons ever made anyone think that itwas okay to put cats' tails in meat grinders. And Grand Theft Autoplayers don’t think that it's okay to kill cops. And most people who like dirty books aren't rapists.

Actually I wonder how pacifists do deal with something like Star Wars. Maybe if Timothy McVeigh thought of himself as a hero because Luke Skywalker was a hero, there really are people who think Luke Skywalker was a monster because Timothy McVeigh was a monster. You do come across people who can't engage with any story orsong in which a member of the English aristocracy goes fox hunting or any romantic story about a Spanish man who killscows in an arena and certainly no very long American novels about peoplewho kill whales. How can you be reading this stuff, they say – itsabout people who are killing harmless animals. For fun! Naturists andpuritans sometimes pretend not to be able to understand coarsejokes: why are you giggling because someone mentioned thatpart of the body, they say. It's a part of the body, no differentfrom any other. You wouldn't have laughed if he'd mentioned his nose,would you? So maybe there are people who sat through A New Hope dreaming that the Empire and the Rebels might kiss and make up and promise never to fight again. Imagine, killing each other over a political difference! It hardly matters whether you die fighting on the side of the Empire or the Rebellion! You are still just as dead! My friend you should not to tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory and that's why patriots are a bit nuts in the head. And incidentally, since Sherlock Holmes' and Miss Marples' main raison d'etre is to get people hanged, they are just as much cold blooded killers as the "villains".

I'm not being entirely facetious. Imyself can find the sheer casualness with which people are dispatchedin duels to the death about nothing in particular a real barrier tomy enjoyment of the swashbuckling in the Three Musketeers.

It is said that during the first world war, a pacifist was asked "If a German soldier were raping your grandmother, and you had a gun, what would you do." "But I wouldn't have a gun" replied the pacifist "Because, you see, I'm a pacifist."

There is nothing wrong with asking hypothetical questions. If you ask Ed-or-David Milliband "How would you sort out the economy if you were Prime Minister", it would be pretty unhelpful of him to reply "But I am not Prime Minister, and have not got a snowballs chance in hell of ever becoming Prime Minister, so it's a silly question." If I asked "Suppose you were on the moon, and you dropped a feather and a ball baring: which one would hit the ground first" it is not very helpful to reply "But I'm not on the moon." But some hypothetical questions are, I think, so completely meaningless that asking them really is a waste of time. If Jane Austen had had a vote on the question of Gay Marriage, how would she have cast it? Would Henry VIII have preferred David Tennant of Matt Smith? If triangles had four sides, what kind of wine would they order with their steak?

And that's why I find it so hard to separate the question "Do witches really exist" from the question "If witches really existed would it be OK to kill witches." If there were people who were utterly and irredeemably evil -- call them "witches" or "paedos" or "godless commies" according to taste -- maybe it would be OK to kill them. But it's a meaningless question: there aren't and there can't be. Your choice to pretend that you exist in a world of utterly and irredeemably evil people is part of your morality.

The world is not like Star Wars; war is not like a child's war-game. People who can't tell the difference are called "psychopaths".

Three

2011-09-30T00:15:00.000+01:00

Weall agree that murder is a bad thing. Some of us believe thatadultery and fornication are bad things. But, once you've permittedthe killing of animals and bacteria, and the killing of human beingsin war and self defence and euthanasia; and accepted that people maysometimes choose to commit suicide; then "Thou Shalt Not Murder"turns out to mean "You are not allowed to kill anyone exceptthose people who you are allowed to kill". And even if you agreethat the only permissible sexual intercourse is between marriedpeople, you can hardly to fail have noticed that society keeps onchanging its mind about what counts as "marriage". Cousinsare sometimes allowed to marry and sometimes not; the age of legalmarriage can be quite young or surprisingly old; societies can't evencome to a firm decision about how many husbands and or wives a manand or woman is allowed to keep on the go at once. So "thoushalt not commit adultery" turns out to mean "you areforbidden from having sex with anyone except those people who you arepermitted to have sex with": a variation on "you should dowhatever you should do".

Icame across a person on the interwebs who affected to be genuinelyastonished when I suggested that the Christian church, and thereforevery possibly the Christian God, approved of some kinds of killingbut not others. I said that it would be rather odd for YHWH to givedetailed instructions about meat preparation if by "Thou shaltnot kill" she had meant "Thou shalt not kill anything,ever, full stop". I said that since YHWH shows no sign of beinga pacifist; and seems to think that very naughty people -- witches, for example -- should be executed, she probably things that the killing of one soldier by anothersolider in a properly declared war, or the killing of a criminal byan executioner after a perfectly fair trail wasn't murder. So there was no necessary inconsistency in being a Christian warrior or a Christian supporter of capital punishment.

Butit says "thou shalt not kill" in the BIBLE, he kept saying,and yet these Christians support WARS. Haven't THEY read their ownBOOK? HAVEN'T they READ their own book.

("Can you imagine Jesus in any army uniform" is not a very helpful contribution to the debate. I can't imagine Jesus playing cricket, and, come to that, I can't imagine the Queen going to the toilet. A clever person on the interwebs recently remarked that if you can't imagine Jesus with an erection, you a probably really a docetist.)

Somepeople believe, or pretend to believe, that no-one ever reallybelieved in witches. The whole concept was dreamed up by sadindividuals who had a bit of a thing about setting fire to old ladiesand needed a flimsy pretext to indulge their rather specializedproclivities. Mrs Thatcher (speaking of witches) used to comicallyand ludicrously claim that there was nopolitical elementbehind the campaigns of assassination and bombings by the IrishRepublican Army: they blew people up because they were the kind ofpeople who liked blowing things up.

A world of bad people who were bad because they wanted to be bad; where no-one ever does a bad thing for a good reason, or a bad thing for a bad reason which looks like a good reason from their point of view. How nice it would be if life were that simple.

I know: let's pretend it is!

Two

2011-09-28T23:00:00.000+01:00

Youwill remember that, in his wartime radio broadcasts, C.S. Lewis arguedthat Right and Wrong were a clue to the meaning of the universe. Hesaid that nearly all human beings have at nearly all times agreedthat there was a difference between Right and Wrong. They even mostly agreeabout what kinds of things were Right and what kinds of things wereWrong. That, said Lewis, suggested what kind of a Universe we wereliving in – one in which Right and Wrong really existed, and wouldhave existed even if humans hadn't come along and discovered them.

Nogreater person that Terry Eagleton scoffs at this idea. "Unchanginghuman nature?" he says. "Unchanging human bollocks, morelike." (I paraphrase.) People in olden times used to burnwitches at the stake. We don't do that any more, except possibly inTexas. Morality has changed beyond recognition.

Notat all, sighs Dr Lewis, anachronistically. If we really believed in witches – if wethought that there were really people who, as part of a real pactwith a real dark power, were really causing plagues and famines andcrop failiures then we would probably think that they should really be executed. We'vestopped hanging witches because we disbelieve in their existence.That represents an advance in knowledge; not a change in morality. [*]

Ithink that that one's morals include what one does, as well as whatone thinks one ought to do. I would not be inclined to say "Johnis a moral person because although he cheats outrageously on hiswife, he believes adultery is wrong; Fred is an immoral personbecause he cheats outrageously on his wife while espousing aphilosophy of free love." If fidelity and promise-keeping areGood Things, then infiedelity and promise breaking are Bad Things,whatever may be going on in the head of the love-rat. Iam uneasy with a definition of morality which says "People inthe past thought it was moral to execute children for petty theft;not because they differed from us about morality, but because theydiffered from us about certain material facts (say, the degree towhich children could make moral decisions, the degree to which theybelieved in predestination, the degree to which they thought God would make it up to them in heaven after they died.) The fact remains that they killed kids and wedon't. Except maybe in Texas.

Bythe time you've excluded "witches exist" and "witchesare bad" from your definition of morality (along, perhaps, with"throwing old ladies rivers is a good way of determining guilt"and "burning alive is an appropriate punishment for bad people")morality ends up meaning not much more than "you should dowhatever you should do."

Itmight be that "we should do whatever we should do" doesrepresent an essential core which all humans have in common and nothing else does. I personally am inclined to doubt that giraffes, pebbles and sea monkeys have even this minimal moral sense:I assume that all human beings have it. Lewis flirts with this ideain one of his interplanetary essays. It is possible to imagine analien being which is very adept at building cities and atomic bombs,but is not (in a theological sense) a person because it has no senseof what it "ought" to do, no sense that "good"can mean anything other than "good for me". It is alsopossible to imagine a hamster or a maggot that does have that crucial"person hood", because it does have a sense that there arethings which it "should" and "should not" do.In his fiction, Lewis uses the terms "hnau" for such ensouled beings. (Tolkien found it a useful term, and used it occassionally.) It is in this sense that I have sometimes wonderedif certain newspaper columnists, liberal democrats, and (in particular)former prime ministers are really "people". Some of thembehave as if they do not have a concept of morality which goes beyond "whateverI have an impulse to do at the present moment." Some of thosesame politicians may have the same thing in mind when they say thatpoor people are sub-human and bestial.

But(as is relatively often the case) Mr Lewis's argument remainscompelling and thought provoking even if it doesn't quite stack uplogically. If there really hadbeenwitches, would Matthew Hopkins still be a monster? Or would hesuddenly become a hero? If there really had been a widespreadcommunist conspiracy in the 1950s, would we conclude that history hasslandered Senator Joe McCarthy? What if there were no witches and nocommies but Joe and Matt had honestly thought that there were?

Or: aquestion which has been worrying me more and more during a summerwhich has seen the closing of the News of the World, a massacre inNorway and three seperate riots at the bottom of my street.

What if the Daily Mail were right?

[*] Itis interesting, if entirely irrelevant, that the great game ofChinese whispers which is the internet has widely disseminatedLewis's observation that if we believed in witches then we would probably believe in executing witches in the form "C.S. Lewis approved of the Salem witch craze" or "C.S. Lewis thinks that wiccans should be hung." Certain segments of the internet has also transformed "Ishall use the Chinese term, Tao torefer to the core of morality which all religions have in common"to "C.S Lewis renounced Christianity and died a taoist". See also under lisptick, nylons and invitations.

I PROMISE THIS IS MY VERY LAST AND FINAL, THIS IS IT, THERE IS NO MORE, ESSAY ON POLITICS, FOR QUITE SOME TIME, ALLMOST DEFINITELY

2011-09-27T23:50:00.001+01:00

PART ONE

I don't mean to say "I told you so", but,

I told you so.

I TOLD YOU SO.

I SO TOLD YOU SO.

The improbably named Jame Delingpole, writing in the Daily Mail, has explained, and stop me if you've heard this before, that Political Correctness and the BBC are part of a plot by cultural Marxists to destroy civilisation.

Just to be quite clear: this is not something which I am wittily reading into his article. I am not doing one of those clever "deconstruction" things where you take what some one says and show that if you took it to its logical conclusion, it would lead to an absurd place. I'm not exaggerating. I am reporting what this man actually said. HOW THE BBC FELL FOR A MARXIST PLOT TO DESTROY CIVILISATION FROM WITHIN. There was a photograph of Herbert Marcuse and everything.

There are days of the week, I don't mind admitting, where I feel a little like Dave Sim. Why are we still having this conversation, I feel like saying. I have told you what is going on. Are you not hearing me? Political Correctness doesn't mean going out of your way, maybe too far out of your way, to avoid offending the other guy. It never did. It is, and always was, a paranoid fantasy about a Marxist Plot to destroy civilisation, invented by an right wing academic called William Lind and sold to the British press and thus to the British political parties by one-man pressure groups with names like the Campaign Against Political Correctness.

"Gee Andrew, that sure is interesting," you say. "But my sys. admin really did ask us to stop referring to the computers as "master" and "slave" units, which I thought was going a bit far. And heteronormative is a pretty unwieldy word. "

No. No, no. That isn't the point. That isn't what we are talking about.

It might be that it's bad manners to ask a Muslim or a Jew "What is you Christian name"? It might on the other hand be that Muslims and the Jews should bloody well get over themselves and stop worrying about that kind of thing. It might be that Christmas is a mostly Christian festival and it might be that it isn't. If it is, it might be that it's okay to celebrate religious festivals in the public sphere and it might be that it's not. There are probably sensible arguments in favour of slippering serial killers and sending children who talk in the dinner queue to the electric chair. It might even be that "nigger" isn't a very offensive word and never was and even if it is it could be that the whole idea of "offence" is not something which the law can or should deal with. There are two sides to every question, apart from the one about whether Jack Kirby created the Silver Surfer. (If you don't think that there are two sides to every question then you are probably a fundamentalist or a bigot or a twit, and I mean that in a very caring way.)

But those aren't the questions that I'm asking. The question that I'm asking is "has the BBC fallen victim for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within" and the answer is of course it bloody well hasn't.

It turns out that now the BBC has banned presenters from using the designation "BC" and "AD" when talking about dates again. This is another example of the sort of thing we could probably have a sensible discussion about, but aren't going to. It would seem to me that "AD" and "BC" are commonly used in colloquial English, and that we are going to carry on having comic books called "2000AD" and bad movies called "Six Million Years BC" for as long as we say "he was inching up the road" rather than ""he was 2.5 centimetreing along the road" and "and that's worth a few bob" rather than "that's worth between 5 and 15 pence" and "pull the chain" rather than "depress the little button thing on top of the cistern." Americans still have "dime stores" even though you can't actually by anything for 5c cents. On the other hand, we are likely to carry on, in more formal, technical settings like history text books, to say "C.E" and "B.C.E" has we have been for the last fifty or sixty years, because it is, in fact, a little odd to say that Mohammed was born 570 A.D because that's not the dating system that Moslims use. It would be very confusing to say that "Jesus was born 5 years before the birth of Christ" and completely barking mad to say that a particular dinosaur thrived in the year 64,997,989 BC. But it would be a little pedantic to say that the Battle of Bosworth field happened in 1485 C.E because Henry Tudor and Richard of York both called the year 1485 AD.

But that isn't the question. The question is why are we even talking about this. Because the BBC have not, in fact, banned the terms A.D or B.C. They just haven't. This isn't one of those cases where you can say "oh they kind of sort of have" or "Andrew has an opinion that the terms A.D and B.C don't appear on BBC websites any more, but other people think they don't. This is one of those interesting disagreements, and I guess BBC-AD believers and BBC-AD denialists will just have to agree to differ." Go to the page. Have a look. It hasn't happened, in the same way that Birmingham City Council haven't just banned Christmas again and never did. Hitler Diaries; Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Piltdown Man; Holy Blood and Holy Grail; Stan Lee created the Silver Surfer. Not differences of opinion. Lies. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. Lies.

Cleverer, or at any rate calmer, people than me have already pointed out that what the Daily Mail is objecting to is that people on the BBC are permitted to use the secular designation if they want to (Jeremy Paxman tends to; Andrew Marr tends not to) and that what the extreme right is saying is that they shouldn't be allowed to. The terms C.E and B.C.E should be banned and the terms B.C and A.D mandated, on ideological grounds. The Daily Mail is in fact doing precisely what it's fictitious political correctness brigade would be doing if it really existed, which it doesn't -- it just doesn't -- banning words banning words which it doesn't like.

BUT THAT ISN'T THE POINT. The point is that they are talking about an IMAGINARY ban which they made up out of their own head in order to promote their EQUALLY IMAGINARY story about how COMMIES are trying to DESTROY CIVILISATION.

And isn't it only fair that we should be a bit more considerate to the sensitivities of other races, religions and creeds? No, it's an act of cultural suicide. Most of us may not realise this but the ideological Left certainly does, for it has long been part of its grand plan to destroy Western civilisation from within. The plan's prime instigator was the influential German Marxist thinker ('the father of the New Left') Herbert Marcuse. A Jewish academic who fled Germany for the US in the Thirties, he became the darling of the Sixties and Seventies 'radical chic' set. He deliberately set out to dismantle every last pillar of society – tradition, hierarchy, order – and key to victory, he argued, would be a Leftist takeover of the language....

My old sparring partner from the Yorkshire Evening Post the "rev" Peter Mullen is a more straightforward

To be honest, I don't think the BBC's undoubted loathing of our Christian heritage is the main issue. They just loath anything that smacks of tradition and value and Englishness, of all that most of us were brought up to respect. Like Stalin or Pol Pot, the BBC would like to abolish all reverence for the past and for the institutions created by that illustrious past, and to make policy from year zero - a desolate, heartless, rootless public realm dominated by the banal celeb culture, pop music and the banal display of depravity which fills the air wave....

Just how many history shows has the BBC put out over the last twelve months, you pathetic little arsehole?

The made up fact about the new dating system is only one of large number of made up facts which the Common Sense Brigade have made up this week. Melannie Phillips assured us that (sit down, please) that "Christmas has been renamed in various places Winterval". It is, I suppose, just possible that Liz Jones really believes that there is no recession because a waiter wouldn't give he the seat she wanted in posh restaurant and lose fitting trousers caused the riots. You can be stupid without being dishonest. But it is not possible that Mel really believes in Winterval. She is circulating a lie which she knows to be a lie. she must be be.

We have also had this kind of thing:

Yet Britain’s response [to the pacific economies] is to adopt the faddish fixation with man-made global warming, for which no shred of reputable scientific evidence exists, and thus to sacrifice prosperity on the altar of New Left green ideology along with Old Left class war.

I said above that there were two points of view about every question. But when there is complete unanimity among experts (about highly technical and specialist subjects) you do have to say "the is complete unanimity among experts about this highly technical and specialist subject" which is very close to saying "this is true". But not if you are part of the Common Sense Brigade. If you are part of the Common Sense Brigade you make up a story in which all the real scientists agree with you but the MARXISTS are suppressing the real truth. (Mr Delingpole's article assuring us that homeopathy works and the scientists who keep explaining why it can't are a bit like witch-finders is worth hooting with derision at, as well.)

The Marxists. Herbert Marcuse. The Frankfurt Group. Stalin. Poll Pott. End of civilization.

I told you so.

I TOLD YOU SO.

2011-09-26T21:15:00.001+01:00

For no particular reason, I thought it might be nice to see what I was ranting about almost exactly seven years ago to day.

-o0o-

Arr, it be international talk like a pirate today, apparently, arr, and you may lay to that etc etc

2011-09-19T10:59:00.001+01:00