I Feel a Great Disturbance In the Force
Times Online - England win Ashes after 18-year wait
Aussies, at home and abroad, are given a month’s R&R to recover from their grief… I still don’t know what happened, but I sense that this is a Very Bad Thing. Unless you’re English.
September 12th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Yes indeed, The Empire Strikes Back.
There are five sports-oriented channels in my hotel room. Not one so much as even mentioned the cricket. Come on Americans, do you want to be part of the Anglo-sphere or not? We have standards.
September 12th, 2005 at 12:21 pm
Oh but don’t you know? We ARE the Anglo-sphere. And everyone knows the only sports ANYone cares about are the ones where you’re the most likely to get arrested after a game.
January 9th, 2006 at 6:11 am
Still getting used to the idea of your having noted the Ashes win! Is there anything you miss? It was a Very Very Good Thing. This is only the fourth time since World War II that England have regained the Ashes. The team was lead by Michael Vaughan, a Yorkshireman. In 1953 it was lead by Leonard Hutton, a Yorkshireman. In 1971 it was lead by Raymond Illingworth, a Yorkshireman and in 1981 it was lead by Mike Brearly, not a Yorkshireman but whose father played for Yorkshire. A pattern emerges. I spent two whole days of the recent Christmas break watching the DVD of the Ashes win - brilliant. Aussies should be beaten frequently, it’s good for their humility.
January 9th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Heh.
Poor Brett was stuck in a hotel in Erie, Pennsylvania for two months, and, as he said, could find no coverage of the event. Very traumatic.
However, as much as I agree with you that this sort of thing is good for their humility (from what I could gather, a lack thereof played a key roll in their losing), as you say, they’ve only lost four times, which is hardly “frequently” and this may turn into another one-off. Next year should be interesting.
I don’t know how much you’re reading in my archives, but it was a few weeks before this, I think, that I discovered that I might actually be, what, genetically predisposed? to watching cricket. Because lord knows I can’t watch any other sport.
January 10th, 2006 at 2:04 am
Erie Pennsylvania!!!! Haha!! Forgive my laughter, but that’s so funny!! Hoot!!! Tie me kangaroo down, Sport!!! Who gave Whitlam the push, Mush?!!! Erie Pennsylvania!!!!! Lucky country my ****!!!
The Ashes are retained until the side holding them is beaten in a series, and a draw means they’re retained. England won series in 54/5, 56, and then lost in 58/9. Australia and England drew in 61, 62/3, 64 etc until losing in 70/71. And so on. England lost the Ashes in 1989 to a vastly superior Australian team - they’ve got the world’s greatest-ever bowler - and ever since they’d been miles ahead of us, thereby inducing the over-confidence which as you observe played a part in their defeat - they didn’t think we’d keep at them the way we did.
Couldn’t find your explanation of how you might be genetically predisposed - help?
Being a Yorkshireman, I’m positively programmed to watch cricket, and just days before he died my father was reminiscing about the days we’d spent at Scarborough watching Yorkshire when I was little. Nowadays, since I have no immediate family in the UK, we take a cottage in the East Riding every summer and do ethnic Yorkshire things - visit old churches, go to the county show - and me and my cousins and friends all spend a day at Scarborough watching cricket. Even cousins who ususally only follow football think it’s a wonderful day out - we watch the cricket, drink quite a lot of beer rather slowly, eat the nearest thing to the Platonic ideal of a pork pie. Or dressed crab. Or lobster. (Good idea to take one’s own wine.) And talk about stuff. Fun.
This year we’re going to be condescending towards any Aussies who might be playing - even though two of them play for Yorkshire.
Beating the Aussies is almost of the same order of enjoyment as would be learning that bin Laden has been arrested, blind drunk, in a pork butcher’s shop, in drag: Bob Hawke!! Rolf Harris!! Dame Joan Sutherland!!! Patrick White!! Barry Humphreys!!! Sydney Nolan!! Mel Gibson!! Kylie Minogue!! Are you listening? Your boys took one hell of a beating!!! (paraphrase of a famous bit of Norwegian football commentary.)
January 10th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Oh that sounds lovely. Your planned day out of pork pie, beer, and condescension, that is.
I meant that since I cannot watch sports (I spent four years in the marching band sitting through every home and half the away games and I still couldn’t tell you anything but the most basic rules about football (american), and yet what little I’ve seen of cricket not only kept my attention (attention usually isn’t my problem, I just don’t absorb much) but I actually stayed interested and absorbed quite a lot of the rules. That’s very unusual for me. And since it was such a fleeting glimpse of the game, compared especially to how much time I’ve spent watching football (american) and basketball (my high school and Gonzaga were both very athletic schools, my high school most of all), I think that can only be explained with some sort of genetic predisposition, or perhaps has something to do with a past life.
Okay obviously I meant Eire, but honestly, wouldn’t you want to spell it Erie?
I borrowed your email address from Arthur’s comments last week to send you something but it got bounced back. Since this is buried rather far back in my archives, it went something like this:
Greetings, Sir Red!
Since you reacted so nicely to my simple “Bravo!” I thought you might like to see something you might otherwise miss:
http://wheatandweeds.blogspot.com/2006/01/papal-clerihews-from-edinburgh.html
Cheers,
[signed]
(ps - I got this email from Arthur’s comments. I hope it’s alright.)
January 11th, 2006 at 3:54 am
I can’t see how I could possibly object! JPII will be written about for ever, but I hope we never forget what a salutary shock to the world he was at the time. So very unexpected - it’s impossible not to suspect God had a hand in his election. I visited his tomb in St Peter’s in November and said a prayer. He was a Very Great Man Indeed. And very loveable with it.
Football, of whatever kind, and basketball have never done much for me. Baseball offers moments of balletic grace. Cricket, if only because it goes on so long, requires resources of patience and humour, dignity even. An ability to hold an enjoyable conversation during the dull bits. To drink beer in some quantity and not get drunk (being drunk at cricket is entirely pointless and a major faux pas). That’s why it appeals to the sort of people I like.
I should point out that I’ve liked almost all Aussies I’ve met as individuals very much - “some of my best friends” etc - but I can’t resist the (very!) occasional gloat at their expense in the collective.
I do enjoy your blog, though I’m so jealous of your way with a headline! I’m regarded as being quite good, but you leave me in the dust. Keep it up!
January 11th, 2006 at 4:06 am
PS More particularly “I feel a great disturbance in the Force” just captures precisely how I hope Brett felt when we won!
“Wheatandweeds” is now in my favourites too. What interesting people you know.
January 11th, 2006 at 9:34 am
Why thank you! Praise from Caesar!
See I wondered, and you must be one of the Great Northern Catholics, eh? Yorkshire, and all that. You’re lucky you got to go to Rome, you dirty cheating European (grumble).
I do know interesting people, especially since I’ve started the blog. I’ve got friends (or at least contacts, to be perfectly honest, although it’s not how I think of them) scattered nicely around the Anglosphere, now. Although RC2 of Wheat and Weeds is the only person I actually know. Her husband is a political appointee and she used to be rather high up in DC Catholic circles so she keeps anonymous firstly to avoid having to not say anything at all in case she compromises her husband somehow, but also she doesn’t want to comment somehow on religious matters and have it taken as sort of the official church position on whatever the matter is. But I told her about my blog rather early on, and then she started her own, and she’s extremely smart and funny. But I don’t see how she could get really famous without being outed somehow.
But yeah, it seems wherever I am (even stuck here in Seattle with no money) I meet interesting people. Foreign people too, mostly. In college I hung out with Eastern Europeans and Russians, in London I hung out with Aussies and Arab immigrants, et cetera. It’s not something I noticed until Peter pointed it out a couple months ago. I’m hoping it’ll come in handy for me.
You see I wonder if that’s why I like cricket, because I’ve always wanted to spend my leisure time in some …civilised way like that, but it’s very hard to do here. Here if you’re at a sports event you can’t hear anyone (even if the energy is exciting, I like to talk), unless it’s a baseball game, but really that boredom isn’t worth anything, or else you go to a bar and screech at each other over loud, bad pop music or hip hop, or even if you can find someone who enjoys the arts, you can’t talk in a museum either. So then I entertain myself by burying myself in various BBC dramas, the ones that most Americans look at and say “Lord how boring” and I just sigh…
So you write headlines? And here I had you pinned as a politician in the journos vs. politicians quiz with Magnus.
January 12th, 2006 at 5:27 am
I suppose I’d call myself a journalist who indulges in a little recreational politics. Not all that notable in either sphere. I’ve been told by some quite senior people that I’d be perfectly electable, but what they don’t know is that, with my sense of humour, I’d last maybe two days before the press retailed one of my jokes and I’d be out on my ear.
You’re spot on about sports events. Years ago a friend of mine prevailed upon me to go and watch Hibernian play Falkirk at football. To do this properly you have to buy a seat in the main grandstand. So we did, in with the football equivalent of the upper crust. It was freezing cold. The referee blew his whistle and the players kicked off, at which point the people around me (friend included) rose as one and started bellowing in the most appalling language, which they kept up until half time. I just sat there, quietly reading my Times Literary Supplement, before slipping off to the pub at half time. Couldn’t quite see the fun of the event.
I wish I was a Great Northern Catholic. My mother, who was the most ferocious snob, God rest her soul, would have just loved it. Unfortunately her family came to Yorkshire from a spectacularly boggy bit of Ireland in about 1855 or so, so there was no chance.
The part of Yorkshire I come from was the hotbed of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 - an event which might just have stopped that bastard Henry in his tracks. The village I come from has had a priest continually from 1307, right through the penal times. At the height of the Titus Oates plot in 1681 the priest, Thomas Thwing by name, was arrested and dragged off to York and hung after a pretty iffy trial.
The reason why the village has always had a priest is that the local aristocrats really are Great Northern Catholics. (How do you know about those, eh?) My father got on particularly well with the chap who was the current Duke of Norfolk’s grandfather, a man who literally died of a broken heart after his wife of 57 years died. (After she died my father says the chap carried on praying for the grace of a happy death, as he had done all his life, but added the rider that he’d appreciate it sooner rather than later if at all possible. And so God arranged it.) There is, now I come to think of it, a very accurate account of the family and the house in Evelyn Waugh’s diaries, July 1939, dateline “Carlton Towers”. (Waugh’s diaries are an utter delight, by the way.)The house has an authentic priest’s hiding hole, something that gave me a bit of a frisson as a little boy as I gabbled off my latin responses when (very occasionally, the chap used to prefer to do it himself if at all possible) serving Mass in the 15thC chapel there.
The family had a fair bit of pull with Rome, which is partially why a local chap, Arthur Hinsley, became Cardinal of Westminster in the 1930s. Though he himself was a tough nut - his motto when Rector of the English College in Rome was “Work or get out!” which has a certain simple charm to it. You knew where you stood….
Actually, that reminds me, I have to do some work now.
Toodle pip!
January 12th, 2006 at 7:05 am
RC2 is indeed “extremely smart and funny”. Could you present my compliments to her?
January 12th, 2006 at 10:39 am
My home parish was founded in 1956. It used to actually be designed on a linear plan (although not cruciform and lacking transepts) but has recently been rebuilt in a semi-circular pattern, though not domed, similar instead to the structure of St Anthony’s in Edmonton which my mother’s family affectionately called “Tony’s Round House.”
That football thing reminds me of the funniest thing I heard… Oh lord I think I blogged about this guy once so I should be able to search for his name but I can’t remember what the context was… But at any rate he’s a journalist, I believe, with a nice posh accent, and has written a book about the sort of fall of society, and was doing a radio interview last summer and was talking about the British habit of traveling all the way to Germany to sit above a football pitch for a few hours screaming the foulest words in the language and generally making complete asses of themselves (arses, if you like) and what on earth could be the attraction of traveling all that way just to be such jerks. And then of course there are the bannings, but yeah.
How do I know about the Great Northern Catholics? Well, I know everything, don’t I? My secret passion is history and, well, I try. I don’t know if I would classify Henry a complete bastard, would you?
So you’re a journalist. Do you freelance? Or if not, whom do you write for?
One of my greatest wishes as a child was to have a secret passage of some sort. But I knew perfectly well that to do so properly in my house at home would be impossible… It was very sad.
January 13th, 2006 at 3:30 am
Hmmm. Difficult to keep a passage secret when it requires major reconstruction of the house. I settled for a secret corner in the garden, between a tree and a shed. Secret treasures and such.
I do freelance, but I chiefly write for a small political magazine over here. Book reviews, jokes. I also run a small but perfectly formed news agency on policy issues. I am largely unknown and that suits me fine. I’ve only been at the journalism lark for a few years - before that I worked in a series of advertising agencies, some of which some people have heard of, but then I grew up.
Even though I accept you do know everything I was still taken aback a bit to be asked about Catholic Families. It’s not something I’ve thought about in ages, and it feels really strange to think back to those days. One’s viewpoint changes. The past is another country and all that. Actually, now I think, have you read “The Go-Between” by LP Hartley? They made a terrific movie out of it with Alan Bates and Julie Christie. It has the best cricket match on screen ever, for one thing - a central event.
I used to take a strictly academic view of Henry VIII as is only proper, much informed by Geoffrey Elton’s work on the Tudor bleedin’ Revolution in bleedin’ Government. Nowadays I allow myself more emotional latitude - the great ruined abbeys of Yorkshire might have had something to do with it. He was, I reckon, pretty disastrous, and that’s what people thought at the time. His treatment of the great Robert Aske was beneath contempt. (I come from quite near where Aske came from, a neglected corner if ever there was one. But I like it.)
January 13th, 2006 at 9:42 am
You see, that’s typical. There you are growing up with a real and physical history, priest holes, even! And you just leave it behind! Shuh-eesh!
Of course you have the luxury of leaving it behind for a place like Edinburgh or London, so bah.
I haven’t read nor seen that book/movie, but I’ll look for it. This week people keep recommending books for me and I’m getting behind writing them all down.
Were you a copywriter? At your advertising agencies? But your own news agency. My. I almost went into journalism. It’s something I mention here occasionally. Then I decided I wanted to write but not in newspapers and went on a very circuitous route, losing hope and forgetting entirely about my plans along the way.
If you’re going to allow yourself emotional latitude, you have to feel what it must of been like for him. His own was the first peaceful succession in a hundred years, and very much relied on his maintaining that peace, and it wasn’t going very well for him, so I think it’s understandable that he was a little preoccupied with stability. And he couldn’t have a whole army of rebellious monks backed by all of Catholic Europe on his hands. Plus I think he was under some influence from whassisface, Cromwell, who, well, wasn’t completely openhanded in his efforts. Plus I think he did quite a bit for England’s stature in Europe, which allowed Elizabeth to really knock ‘em dead… So I dunno. Maybe it’s because Americans get “Ew he was the big fat guy who killed all his wives so he could get new ones” I tend to be a bit defensive of him.
January 13th, 2006 at 10:26 am
That’s a very mature way of looking at Henry by any standards, and I really like your putting him into context like that - your exercise of the historial imagination is seriously impressive, even when compared with someone like my nephew who wants to be an academic but has a fatal talent for irrelevant anachronism. And yes I agree the succession imperatives must have weighed heavily - well, we know they did, it wasn’t just an excuse.
I certainly don’t buy into the catholic chauvinism line and that’s for sure. On the other hand there’s no doubt that whenever it came to a conflict of interest between Henry and the more general good, Henry always came down on Henry’s side. No surprise there, but certainly in my part of the country the benefits of the Dissolution were pretty well disguised. Can I have a think about it all? Read about it again?
Recommending books to people is something I take a dim view of when it’s done to me, so I feel a bit rueful at inflicting them on you. My only excuse is that the Go-Between strikes me as being the sort of book you might enjoy. Yes, it’s set in an Edwardian country house in Norfolk (second favourite county in England) but it has the most chilling ending - grown-ups don’t always realise precisely what they’re doing.
I was, laughably enough, a media planner, sorting out when and where ads should appear, and how much I’d pay for them. I was regarded as being quite good at it and then I got bored - the people were really remarkably dull on occasion. So I then went into doing research and such like and by the end yes I was writing stuff. Eventually I started writing copy that parodied the creative brief (boredom again), and clients bought it regardless -were enthusiastic even- and I knew it was time to move on. I think the time I wrote a headline about a pop concert -”Whitesnake: The Band That Carved Its Name in Solid Rock” and the client just lapped it up - was when I knew it was time to go.
Don’t lose hope. You have everything to hope for. Everything worth having anyway. You’ve got talent in buckets, if your blog’s any guide. And you know interesting people.
I’ve just had a bruising encounter with your visa people. I’ve been visiting the States on and off since 1970, and I think that, were I ever to commit an outrage I’d have got round to it by now. Fact is, I’m besotted with America, or at least my version of it. So I get very hurt when the authorities mess me about. I only want to cover a bloody conference, after all. I’ve just been told there’s a glass of analeptic champagne poured in the next office, so that’s me off!
Have a great weekend!
Phil
Have a great weekend!
January 13th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Oh, hope springs eternal. I was just at the library flipping through Estate Gardens of California and brought home Mick Hales Gardens Around the World: 365 Days (a garden per day, but it’s not a calendar, just a clever organizational device, I suppose). Just in case, y’know, I ever end up in possession of a couple of acres that need formal landscaping. Even in my despair I plan my future estate.
Why on earth do you need a Visa to come here? And you’re besotted with America, are you? Walking home I was stopped by an immigrant (north-east Africa, I’d guess) cab driver with very little English looking for directions, quite out of place on this residential hill, and I was suddenly filled with patriotic feeling, as I always am whenever I encounter immigrants. Then I got thinking about the Mexican border and how anyone who wants to fix that (low on my priorities, nevertheless) gets called anti-immigrant and I spent the last half of my walk railing against imaginary political foes who dare utter that word in my presence. Sorry, tangent. Why are you besotted, particularly? I’m a transnational perspective watcher, much like people sitting outside a cafe are people watchers. It fascinates me, what two different people think of the same thing. I’m a nerd like that.
So, Henry. I completely understand why a Northerner and a Catholic (though not a Northern Catholic) would feel particularly resentful of Henry, that doesn’t surprise me. If you’re giving it a good rethink, wasn’t Cromwell a closet Puritan? Plus, think of what the dissolution of the monasteries did for gardening: that most English of pursuits.
But isn’t it fun to called mature in my point of view, and by a Cambridge grad!
What’s your nephew’s plans? And how on earth did he end up in Cincinnati?
January 15th, 2006 at 9:25 am
I’ve found a use for football! Mrs Red went to visit her ailing mother yesterday, and I went to the pub to think about Henry. Normally I take a newspaper so I don’t look like a derelict sitting over a pint, but that doesn’t really work - you can’t sit gazing at the same page of The Scotsman for half-an-hour at a stretch without looking a bit odd, after all - but yesterday there was football on the television, so I gazed at that instead, and looked like everyone else, thinking of Henry betimes. I wonder what the score was.
Henry had three basic policy aims: to secure his dynasty, to settle the Scots and to cut a dash in Europe. (Correct me at any point if you disagree. As if you need to be told that.) He succeeded with the first, laid the groundwork to settle the second, and made a complete hash of the third. (He wasn’t the first nor the last to do that.) The first was by far the most important so yes, in that respect he was a success. Taking the Church’s wealth and giving it to a new set of would-be aristocrats like, say, the Russells, was a terrific way of binding the ruling class to the dynasty, and had the secondary benefit of sidelining the great northern families who’d made such nuisances of themselves the previous century.
How well did it work in the longer term? Not quite so well. Once he’d dished out the land and the cash, the Monarchy was still left with the job of running an expanded state apparatus and sustaining his foreign ambitions, at a time when such things were becoming rather more expensive thanks to inflation. By the middle of the 17thC the money just wasn’t there, and we had to have a civil war to sort out who pays for what and how much say the people doing the paying have in how the money’s spent. Had Henry held onto the cash and the land this might not have been necessary, or at least not so necessary. On the other hand, had he done so, there wouldn’t have been that cadre of aristocrats who’d done well out of the Reformation and who came in so useful during Elizabeth’s reign. You can’t spend the same money twice, after all.
Socially the dislocation caused by the Dissolution is reflected in the vast amount of Poor Law legislation the Tudors passed. People who’d had secure livelihoods from the monastery estates became landless labourers. The monasteries really had been “the wall of the weak”. The sheer productivity of the monasteries had made them real engines of growth in the more backward parts of the Kingdom - my patch - and it can’t have helped. Though that has to be balanced by the thought that the freed-up land market did ultimately greatly help get the agricultural revolution under way.
So the quick answer is that there isn’t a quick answer to the question Henry, A Good Thing? Though the Catholic view - “Reformation? Boo!! Hiss!!” doesn’t work, and that’s for sure. That’s what the pub thoughts came up with. A bit limp, really. Can I think some more? Maybe do some reading.
If you ever get the chance to visit Woburn go and look at the astonishing Gloriana portait of Elizabeth that the grateful Russells commissioned. It’s stupendous, awe-inspiring. While you’e at it, take the opportunity to look at their roomful of Canalettos (Canalettoes? Canaletti?). Now that’s what I call conspicuous consumption.
Cromwell was in it for money and power, but ’twas ever thus.
I need a visa because journalists need one nowadays if they’re going to be writing anything in the States. Grrrr! Getting same requires me to take a trip to Belfast, no hardship in one sense, I like Belfast a lot, but damned inconvenient.
My sister married an American and they now live in Cincinnati. That’s where the nephew fits in. I first came to the States as a teenager, and spent what’s now called a gap year there. Saw quite a bit of it. Harvard to Santa Monica. Cornell to San Francisco. Leaving aside the more obvious components of a transnational perspective - the food was strange and luxurious compared with what I was used to, and there’s some pretty impressive scenery in places - there are certain things that that really give me a jolt. The Lincoln Memorial, for one thing. When you read the Gettysburg Address and then reflect on how we were running things over here at the time then you get that sense of adventure, and of the sheer effort of imagination it’s taken for America to become what she has. His second inaugural speech always breaks me up too. While we’re on the subject of the Civil War, standing at the Bloody Angle at Gettysburg is a severe jolt to the system. One of those spots where what happened really doesn’t need to be spelled out.
Most Americans I know are thoughtful and intelligent types, some of them given to elaborate displays of courtesy or acts of generosity. One of them’s an utterly brilliant church musician, but he has an air of humility that that makes me goggle. Had I his gifts I’d be obnoxious. And I admire the way that even people who don’t have all that much, for whom life really can be quite hard, seem to get on with life, making the most of who they are and using institutions like the churches to make life that bit more bearable for each other rather than whining for George Bush to sort everything out for them, as happens (mutatis mutandis) over here. And I like the idea of there being a place where a bunch of English settlers decided that, hey, there are better ways of doing things, and giving it a try and then, once it had proved successful, opening itself to whole new peoples.
Oh golly, I like America.
January 15th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Yes, sitting alone in a pub staring unconvincingly at one page of The Scotsman is more likely to make you look like a, ah, well, like you’re up to no good where the women are concerned. Do that in a playground and you’re likely to get beaten over the head with a stroller. But I do agree with you on the conveniences of football on pub televisions. I used to meet a friend at a hotel bar after she got off work at a restaurant on the other side of the hotel lobby every Saturday night, and regular programming never takes the feeling of ridiculousness, because no one can pretend to be that enraptured in something one cannot hear properly, no matter how talented one pretends to be at reading lips. Football, on the other hand, American, at least, and normal, for that matter, has the combined benefits of being visual enough for a perfect alibi and to keep the eye genuinely occupied.
So you like America for its historical and idealistic origins. I guess I do too, obviously, but find them a bit useless compared to the practical uses of those by individual people, if you know what I mean. Like your Englishmen who thought, “Oh bugger this let’s just go over there and do it our way,” but also the ones who said “Oh bugger this let’s just go over there where they’re doing it better.” That always leads me to the frustrating friction between the common knowledge of “…over there where they’re doing it better” and the “…but why CAN’T we be more like the Europeans!” I mean, there are also the lines in Europe of “…over there where they do things so badly” while their own citizens pack up and move “over there” but I can’t get upset about that attitude, much (unless of course it makes it more likely that we’re over here going to get blown up, for instance) because as long as they do it their way and we do it our way people can choose which they prefer. But if we do it their way then where will people go?
So I find myself very irritated with “more like the Europeans” crowd, especially on a local level, because with the exception of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Quebec City, Montreal, and the older bits of places like Charleston, you get city planners that think they can run a city the same way Paris or London can, when they have neither the population density nor the diversity to pull it off. Today I have to go to our Indian grocery store to stock up on paneer and frozen parathas, which means that we have to get in our car and drive into the suburbs, because all the immigrants move to the suburbs, which are run like cities should be run but with cars so with completely untraversable streets, so the city turns into an empty shell for businessmen during the day, yuppies at happy hour, and the social alcoholics after that, while the suburbs reach further and further away, separating everyone from their neighbors and turning people into strange, lawn-obsessed hermits, clinging to their televisions for human interaction.
Then there are my irritations with various classes of Americans, like Walmart Americans (though not, of course, Walmart, because I’m intelligent enough to see the difference between the two unlike most politicians) but I’m not naive (or unhappy with my country) enough to think those people don’t exist in Europe, the difference is (on the flip-side of that lovely Manifest Destiny idea) that in England, for instance, no matter who your neighbors are or where they prefer to shop, you’re only ever a short drive from a place like London.
So, now onto Henry. I won’t disagree with anything you say, but I think it’s a little unfair to hold his decisions responsible from the unintended consequences of a century later. Would you hold a young Victoria responsible for WWII and the Welfare State? His immediate aims were to secure his succession enough that no part of the country should feel like it needed to kill another part in order to put its own earl on the throne, and in order to do that he needed to ditch his wife, and in order to do that he needed to ditch the church, and after doing that he needed to make sure that he didn’t replace that earl’s part of the country with everything Rome had to throw at him, so he needed to weaken the monasteries (bad luck to the peasants, indeed (oh did you ever see Lady Jane?)) and make sure that none of the nobles (self-interested, natch) would take up where the monks couldn’t so he gave them a lot of really lovely homes and knick-knacks so if they ever wanted to go back they’d have to give those things up which of course they never would. Which was really rather canny (he didn’t keep them for himself which would have guaranteed a lot of rebellious and sudden champions-of-their-religion nobles, who again came in so handy, as you say, during Elizabeth’s reign.
The fact that he failed so utterly at Europe and France makes no difference, really, except the waste of money, since everyone did it. He did, however, have a good nose for style and how to impress people, and did a good job of making England into something equal with the rest of Europe rather than just another cold little northern place with very drafty old castles.
The way the Lincoln Memorial gave you a jolt, I take it you mean in a good way. The thing that I love about it, and I haven’t seen it for years and years, is how utterly different it is from any other statue. It wasn’t built till 1915, and I don’t know when the sculpture was designed, exactly, but if you compare it to all those statues of Victoria, which is a little hard since she was a she, but it’s very singular, isn’t it. All of Washington is, really.
The closest I got to Elizabeth when I was there was when we went down to Greenwich one day as sort of a class trip. We had lunch at Britain’s oldest pub, I took photos of the wall that was left of where she was born, and lots of photos of the naval college and I had one taken of me standing over the Prime Meridian, and then I lost that roll of film. And of course I saw all the portraits in the Portrait Gallery. Woburn shall have to wait.
Canaletto is a proper noun so I imagine it would be Canalettos.
January 16th, 2006 at 5:09 am
“so he gave them a lot of really lovely homes and knick-knacks so if they ever wanted to go back they’d have to give those things up which of course they never would.” Mmmm. Never seen it put quite like that before. Write history, people would read it. Lincoln Memorial’s a place I just sat for an hour, maybe more, thinking about him and how wise and human he was - the two don’t always go together. And then later going past it in the dark when it was floodlit, and he was still sat there thinking. Goosebumps. One feels a sort of pride, even though he wasn’t English. Greenwich is some place, eh?
January 16th, 2006 at 10:34 am
I loved it. I would have loved having my photographs of it, as well. Damned gnomes.
Yeah it does do that, goosebumps. And there’s no reason not to feel proud. I was all come over with it just looking at Mr Seats photos of St Petersburg, and I’m neither Russian nor an 18th century architect. It’s all about the idea of being human and what we can do, I think.