Beryl Williams 1949 - 2020

Beryl Williams was a dear friend for thirty years, who I got to know from the days when she managed a shop in the Royal Exchange to her life in Fethiye (Turkey) to which she emigrated in 2004 to ease her MS. She was a wise, bright and beautiful soul, and leaves a loving family of her daughter Amanda and Kirsty and son Paul and their offspring, as well as Peter, a former London insurance broker who she lived (and sailed) with for the last 12 years.

Beryl Williams on her boat in Turkey

The Story of the Raphael Seat

The Raphael Seat and brick piers

The Raphael Seat is, in fact, a large piece of sculpture, and now occupies the space in which for some time I had intended a sculpture or garden feature to stand.

The upper lawn area has always lacked a focal point - the Tang horse is off to the side under the tree and is easily missed and the quince tree is not yet ancient enough - and I had originally thought that some kind of sculpture such as a piece from Rachel Bebb's Garden Gallery would be perfect. But the cost was always much more than I wanted to spend. I did consider buying an old stone bench but those with age such as sold by Travers Nettleton at Garden Art were also prohibitively expensive,

I was, therefore, delighted to be directed to Haddonstone, the makers of good quality pressed stone garden ornaments, and there find a sculpture with an interesting provenance as well as being on sale. The seat in question was a 'Raphael' seat designed by Bob Haddonstone in the 1980s for the Drapers' Livery Company, so-called as it has Raphael drawings in bas relief on the back panels. An exactly similar seat (on four Drapers' Ram's bases) stands in one of the courtyards at Drapers' Hall today and given the family's long links with the Drapers, this provenance was an added attraction.

The area for the seat to stand required some preparation, as it weighed half a ton (but came in pieces on three pallets) and so Brian Dibley put in a concrete base topped with old York stone flags. Imagining the seat in place I also thought that it would need some additional masonry support, and decided to put in two brick piers topped by old stone caps that would reduce the dominance of the seat and also frame the view under the hazel tree in both directions. The result can be seen at the top of the page.

The seat covered with pond silt to encourage wethering (May 2020) 

At the moment the seat stands out too much due to it being so white, but when it has weathered to a decent patina, it should look as if it's always been here.

Hannah Arendt on Lies and Propaganda

When I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, “probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities.”

How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterwards. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member... is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements":

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”---writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy---including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.... Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”

Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed. 

The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveller to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”

“We too,” writes Jeffrey Isaacs at The Washington Post, “live in dark times"---an allusion to another of Arendt’s sobering analyses—“even if they are different and perhaps less dark.” Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Isaacs remarks, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt's analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.

King James' Bible and the Book of Common Player

The King James' Bible at Litchfield

Having attended a meditation on the life of William Tyndale at Bossington Church recently, I have become even more aware of the place of the King James' Bible in our culture. And when last week I attended an otherwise lovely carol service at St Katherine Cree Church in the City, I was saddened to hear the beautiful and time-honoured phrases in the lessons replaced with modern English.

I realise of course that I have been conditioned to hear the King James' version of the Bible over the past 70 years. Like many of my friends, I have attended school services since the age of five of six and since going regularly to my church at Litchfield for the last thirty years I am steeped both in King James and the Book of Common Prayer and have never heard any other. I love their cadences and phrasing. Any variation, however well-meaning, is a small psychic shock, akin to changing the words of a Beatles song.

The words used at church services make up the major party of the liturgy of worship and as such are imbued with deep significance and energy. It's not fanciful to imagine the words imprinted into the fabric of churches where they have been intoned without change for the past 400 years.  I am afraid that I agree with those who ascribe a fall-off in attendance at traditional church services to the lessening of the use of such glorious language.

See also - Litchfield Church - St Cecilia's Prayer 

See also - William Tyndale - the Translator of the Bible

William Tyndale - the Translator of the Bible

The Authorised Version of King James' Bible, published in 1611, was translated from the Latin and Hebrew by six committees of scholars, and remains, with some later amendments, the most authoritative text of the Bible as far as the Anglican Church is concerned.

However, the original translation of the Bible into English from Latin and Hebrew was undertaken by William Tyndale, who produced the first printed translation of the New Testament in 1526 while being sought and harassed by both the Church and Henry VIII in the form of Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. Any translation into the vernacular was regarded as heresy, and in particular, Tyndale's translation further aggravated the Church by choosing to translate the Greek 'ekklesia' as 'congregation' rather than 'Church' and 'presbyteros' as 'elder' instead of 'priest'. Working in secrecy in Antwerp, he made over 5000 revisions to the New Testament in the 1534 edition, which became 'the glory of his life's work'. The King James' translators left most of his work (said to be 93%) untouched - though, of course, not the two examples above. He also translated the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) including Genesis and Deuteronomy, but while working on the rest in 1536 he was betrayed and executed.

Melvyn Bragg has written a useful short biography of Tyndale, and he concludes:

Genius Discarded

Yet in this country, the King James Bible has been allowed to fade away over the past few decades. While Shakespeare and all his Elizabethan and Jacobean pageant of language is played, filmed, televised and read more and more and in the original without dissent, it was decided that Tyndale was too complicated! This has proved to be a dreadful mistake, We have discarded a genius and are every day poorer for it. I see it as no accident that Anglican congregations have fallen away since the King James Bible was abandoned.

The Anglican Church has more or less outlawed then King James Version. It pops up now and again but with far less regularity and authority that it deserves. Why not have Tyndale / King James services in every church and every school on the first week of every month. For non-Christians, it would be a feast of language, adventure and argument,. For all who listened it would be to hear and understand the deepest spring of our cultural history through the mind of a unique genius; William Tyndale.

Melvyn Bragg - William Tyndale Postscript

There is also a film of Tyndale's life made in 1986 called 'God's Outlaw'

See also: The King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer

Favourite Paintings - Peter Breughel Netherlandisch Proverbs

Peter Brueghel the Elder - Nederlandisch Proverbs

I am sometimes given to complaining that modern paintings seem to have no meaning or significance. The same can not be said of Brueghel, and this painting - Nederlandisch Proverbs, painted in 1559 - is replete with illusions, some more evident than others. It is said that there are more the 100 proverbs illustrating human foolishness in this scene, the meanings of many of which have been lost. The principal figure of the woman draping her husband with a blue cloak is said to show that she is having an affair. A full list of those that can still be identified can be found on Wikipedia here.

See also Favourite Paintings - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

See also Art and What it Means to Me

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Favourite Paintings - Landscape with the Fall of Icarus - Peter Breughel the Elder

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The old Masters: how well they understood 

Its human position: how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: 

They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

See also Favourite Writings - Ovid 

Some Inadequate Words on Grief

I am not able to write with any authority on grief as I have never experienced it. But others have and do. Instead, I often give friends who have lost loved ones Joan Didion's book: 'The Year of Magical Thinking', which seem to capture the condition most truly.

This also seems to be a fine piece

See also Dirge Without Music

Do You Understand Climate Change?

Katrin Juliane Meissner

27 September at 21:49

With so many people hitting the streets for climate strike and all the recent attacks on Greta Thunberg, I would like to make a statement. I am a Professor in Climate Sciences, I have been working in this field for over 20 years.

1. Climate change is a fact, based on data and equations. It’s science (not politics).

2. Humans are causing climate change.

3. CO2 concentrations are rising at a rate that is 10 to 100 times faster than any other time in the past (and we are talking millions of years back).

4. CO2 concentrations are now at levels Earth has not seen since 3 Million years. That’s when Lucy was roaming in Africa.

5. Both speed of change and magnitude of change will have catastrophic consequences for the world we know and rely on.

6. Ecosystems will have (and are already having) a hard time to adapt with these fast changes. Current extinction rates are far above the normal background extinction rates.

7. We rely on ecosystems for our survival. We are part of ecosystems.

8. For example, speed of change is important for ocean acidification. With slower rates of CO2 rise there are geochemical feedbacks that kick in and mitigate acidification. This is not the case now. It is also important for adaptation to new living conditions. Coral reefs for example are our canaries in a coal mine.

9. The climate system is mainly water and therefore has a large heat capacity and is slow to react. The climate is not in equilibrium right now, it is still catching up to current CO2 concentrations. Last time the climate was in equilibrium with today’s CO2 concentrations, sea levels were much higher (order of magnitude of 10 meters), temperatures were well beyond the Paris Agreement. This is what the world will look like if we keep CO2 concentrations constant. If we continue to emit at current rates, then:

10. We will end up in a climate last seen 50 Million years ago. No ice, completely different ecosystems. The transition will be fast and deadly.

11. Climate change is the largest threat humanity has ever faced.

12. We need to act now. 

13. The question is not “do you believe in climate change?”. The question is “do you understand climate change?”. Greta is just a messenger. Don’t shoot the messenger. It does not matter what you or I think about her. What matters is that we stop wasting time. We need to act now.

For the Love of Dogs

I have long been troubled by our attitude to dogs, but it's heresy to question extreme dog-centric behaviour and I content myself with not having one, even though it would seem natural to do so.

Herry and Danny at Stocks c.1953

I had dogs from an early age. The first was Danny, a cocker spaniel that to begin with, I looked after, but when I went to school, of course, he was looked after by my parents, principally my father, who always had dogs, usually several and generally labradors. I remember Fuff coming back from Scotland with Caron (named after Loch Caron where he had found her), and there was Flax, Bonnie and Bosun, Charlie and others that I can't now remember. And we had a sheepdog (a border collie) for as long as we had sheep (ie not in later years) that was actually used to round up the sheep. 

All our dogs lived outside, first in the stables and later in a purpose-built shed with an outside 'run' full of straw. It was next to the farmyard so they could watch all the comings and goings - though in the daytime they were almost always free to run around as they wished.  The first thing my father did when he came down to talk to the men in the morning was to let the dogs out - and they stayed with him as he went around the farm - on horseback, on foot or in a van - all day. If he drove up to the cottages on the down, they would run after the van in both directions. They accompanied my father when shooting and picked up when he shot with others.

The dogs did come in and out of the house, but never went upstairs and weren't allowed on the furniture. Feeding them from the table during meals was discouraged. And at teatime - an unvarying ritual with my mother behind the teapot -  they were given a ginger biscuit. At about 6pm they were fed a simple and unvarying diet of meat from the local butcher, with a handful of dry biscuits with an egg mixed in. Tinned food wasn't used. Bones were always available to gnaw on the lawn and in their shed.

Our dogs were supremely healthy and happy and I don't remember them ever needing the vet - nor did they have fleas (though sometimes they had to have ticks removed). They were perfectly matched to their environment. Few people, of course, have farms and a lifestyle where they are outside all day and their dogs can accompany their master everywhere, and therein lies the problem. People don't always choose dogs for their environment and instead chose them for spurious reasons such as the way they look, or the impression their owners want to portray to others. Highly intelligent breeds like sheepdogs are used as pets when they have been bred for centuries to work, and they suffer if they can't. Gundogs have likewise been bred to pick up birds but few are given the chance and become fat and lazy unless given frequent long walks. As for the many breeds that have been disfigured to create a particular look favoured by their owners, like pugs, their lives have been shortened and their breathing made more difficult. Why this isn't regarded as cruelty, I can't imagine.

Recently, breeding dogs to match modern lifestyles has improved and dogs such as the poodle/spaniel crosses successfully match equable temperament and sociability with ease of looking after, but almost all dogs need two good walks a day and they should never be left alone for long. as they suffer greatly. If owners can't meet their dogs' needs, they shouldn't have them.