‘Storm Antoni gatecrashed my wedding, and she was magnificent’ – article by Sophie Pavelle in The Guardian. An unusually personal article from this environmental writer and activist, about her own wedding and her unexpected desire for a large gathering of friends and family, in the teeth of the climate emergency: “as months rolled on, the world got hotter, people got sicker, and life felt finite and immediate, I soon realised that to deny the people I loved most in the world the distraction not just of unity – but the very possibility of it – was to deny joy and to reject hope.” This article was the inspiration for a homily by Br John Mayhead (Monastery of Christ Our Saviour, Turvey) on the Feast of the Holy Family (31 December 2023). I do like Br John’s homilies; about as far away from telling-you-what-to-think as you could get, he simply shares his own spiritual reflections: on holy scripture, environmental observations (he’s a keen birdwatcher) and articles from The Guardian. In this case, Pavelle’s moving article illuminated for him the gospel for the day: the story of Mary and Joseph bringing the infant Jesus to the Temple and his being recognised by the aged Simeon. “You see this child: he is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, destined to be a sign which is rejected – and a sword will pierce your own heart too – so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare” (Luke: 2, 22-40). Inspired by Pavelle’s story of hope in friends and family and the uninvited guest (or uninvited gust) of Storm Antoni coming together for her wedding, Br John came to see the text as saying something about the way the truth is revealed to us: that how we are with one another is how we truly are, and so how we are with God. The crisis in which we meet is not only the climate crisis (whose effects Br John observes regularly on his country walks) but the crisis which has always afflicted us as human beings – to love or not to be. Pavelle’s article concludes in joy: “I snuck into the farmhouse to observe what was happening from an upstairs window. By evening storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart the charcoal skies and cascaded through the orchard. I heard the first few notes of the fiddle. The ceilidh was beginning. Joy and the joining of hands is activism after all. Care to dance?” To which Br John added: “Care to worship? Care to be together – whatever?” A truly magical meeting of minds. As St Paul says: “All things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28).
Mr Bates v. the Post Office – powerful television drama series, one of a handful which have actually changed government policy. Like many people, I thought I knew the story: how sub-postmasters and mistresses were accused of theft when their accounts showed money missing, though this was actually due to faults in the Post Office’s new accounting system; how they were all told that they were the only one with problems; and how some were imprisoned, some were forced to pay back the thousands of pounds they had never stolen, most were ruined, financially and socially; and how some took their own lives. But it’s one thing to read all this in a factual news article, and to think, “that’s shocking”, or “that’s outrageous”, and another to see it played out across four hours (in real life, it was twenty years), happening to characters you grow to know and like, and you think “oh my god!”, and then when it gets worse “oh my god!!!”, and then when it gets worse still “OH MY GOD!!!” Excellent acting from Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Monica Dolan of course, but major credit due I think to the dramatist Gwyneth Hughes, who told the story so powerfully while sticking closely to verifiable facts in the public domain. What the drama brought out was the human cost, summed up for many of us by the moment when the Post Office CEO Paula Vennells appears on the television news and says “It’s about the reputation of the Post Office”, and Hesmondhalgh yells at the television set: "No it’s not! It’s about people’s lives, you moron!" See also ‘We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system – that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts’, article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian.
Frans Hals – exhibition at the National Gallery. Hals was one of my wife’s favourite artists, because of how he painted people and faces, and after seeing this exhibition I now understand what she meant. He’s famous for painting people smiling and even laughing, at a time when most portraits were solemnly formal, and for the first time (to my shame) it dawned on me why this is actually hard to do: unlike with a camera, you can’t capture a smile directly from life, because you can’t tell a sitter to hold their smile while you paint it -– or if you do, it’ll look fake and artificial. In other words, the painter has to remember the smile and recreate it in oils. Similarly with the other Hals trademark: catching people in mid-gesture. I loved his “pendant” portraits of couples – individual portraits painted simultaneously and intended to be hung side by side, some of these pairs reunited by this exhibition for the first time in centuries – and even more his single known example of a double portrait, in which husband and wife are totally relaxed, completely at ease with each other and with the viewer. As the caption said: “Few artists can represent nonchalance as well as Hals.”
Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea: My Reading, by John Plotz – a personal tribute. I love the Earthsea books, so I read this in the expectation of some pleasure in seeing someone else sharing their enthusiasm, but I found it disappointing; it told me and showed me little I didn't already know. One thing it did remind me of, though: the simple, powerful, unexpected language Le Guin uses, in much of her writing but the Earthsea books above all. “Penthe selected the smallest [apple], out of politeness, and ate it in about ten juicy skillful interested bites.” (p. 48) "A great crowd had gathered on the snowy quays and colored pennants cracked above the people in the bright, cold wind.” (p. 46) How can a bite be “interested”, or a wind be “bright”? That’s part of the magic.
How We Read Now, by Naomi S. Baron – very readable and useful digest of the results of research on the differences between reading print and onscreen. I'm not surprised by the general conclusion, that it all depends on the attitude with which people go into their reading, but this gives helpful detail and offers some important insights. I had three key takeaways. (1) Prior knowledge of the subject and expectations of the experience (how much effort is going to be required) are far bigger determiners of reading effectiveness than medium. (2) There IS a "shallowing" effect in that reading of digital text tends to be more superficial than reading of print text, though this is mostly related to (1) (for example, learners approach a digital text with the assumption that it's going to be entertaining and not require much effort). (3) Audio presentation of a text has worse results than either digital or print, unless there is some additional component such as slides. All this just reinforced for me the important of never assigning reading except as part of a learning activity; we assume at our peril that learners are going to already know how to learn from reading a text. One thing troubled me greatly: the superficiality of the discussion about evaluating information sources. It's not just a matter of deciding whether a source is trustworthy or not, although that may be an important issue, and it's certainly an entry-level question. But at university level the focus should be on reconstructing what I call the information provenance: the process by which it was selected and compiled, and even more importantly the purpose for which it is presented.
Re-Wilding the Soul – Turvey Abbey day workshop, with Br John Mayhead of the Monastery of Christ Our Saviour. As a born naturalist, re-wilding is quite his thing, and he’s careful to distinguish between the kind of re-wilding which is about returning an area to its condition at some former time – requiring a judgement about the state you want to achieve – and the kind which is about literally doing nothing and seeing what nature comes up with. It’s the latter of course which has the more important spiritual parallel: stilling the mind and the will and seeing what God comes up with. But an important part of the workshop were the guided walks around the Monastery garden and the Abbey grounds. In these Br John showed us the natural and historical world around us: a matter of stopping to observe, but (as he pointed out) observation needs to be informed by knowledge. He could say: “Listen! What’s that?” and while most of us were thinking to ourselves “it’s a bird!” Br John was hearing a green woodpecker. Or again, he would identify (at least provisionally) a distant bird by what he called its jizz (the term apparently comes from aircraft spotting): the whole gestalt of its silhouette, speed and character of movement, as well as knowledge of what kinds of bird are likely to be active in this place and at this time of day. As a teacher and former academic, I find it intensely reassuring to hear the affirmation of the role for knowledge even in radical re-wilding, or radical spiritual re-wilding. (See a version of part of one of Br John's talks.)
The Room – well-respected puzzle game, the first in a whole series. I wasn’t inspired to continue, though; for me this missed the sweet spot of being neither too easy or too difficult. Either the solution to the current problem was totally obvious or I couldn’t get it no matter how hard I tried, and neither is a good experience. Stunning graphics and animation don’t compensate for this, unfortunately.
Little Women (2019) – recent film adaptation by Greta Gerwig. For me, this suffers by comparison with the 1994 version with Susan Sarandon and Wynona Ryder, which was so good – and it’s got to be pretty cool to have a Laurie (Christian Bale) who grows up to be Batman. The only thing this new version added was the story about Louisa May Alcott being told by her publisher that by the end all the women had to be either married or dead, and even that has been told better by Tom Gauld in his cartoon, which has Jo March opting for the third possibility of both and writing a book called Attack of the Zombie Brides. Otherwise it seem to me inferior in every way, and left out the strong moral tone, which no doubt is less acceptable today, smacking of preaching, but which was so much part of the original and which Sarandon carried off so well.
Room at the Top – classic post-war film of class aspiration and class tension. Seeing it for the first time, I found it much stronger and more powerful than I expected, fully deserving of its Oscar nominations and awards. The humiliation and subordination to which Joe is subjected, as a working-class man with aspirations, by his bosses and social superiors who control pretty much everything around, was very convincing. But what I’d not expected was the deep irony that at the end of the film Joe has attained exactly what he set out to achieve – marriage to the boss’s daughter and a seat at the middle-class table – and yet is deeply miserable and unfulfilled, feeling himself responsible for the death of the women who was his real true love. A slice of history for all the ages.
Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley – highly readable biography. I gave this to my wife for her last birthday, because we’d enjoyed the television series and she loved Christie and the television Christie adaptations. It’s beautifully written, a model for how to tell the story of a life about which so much has been written and speculated: scholarly and discriminating, but accessible with finely judged personal touches, typically pointing out the feminist themes – though Christie would never have described herself as a feminist, and in fact didn’t really like describing herself as an author, preferring to present herself as a very ordinary women, although she was anything but. I’m so glad that she found happiness (and a fulfilling sexual relationship) with her second husband, Max, 13 years her junior.
Atlas of the Heart, by Brené Brown – accessible book about feelings and the thoughts that give rise to feelings. The aim is to enrich our everyday vocabulary for talking about our experiences, by enumerating and distinguishing 87 emotions and other mental states. The first chapter alone covers stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, excitement, dread, fear and vulnerability. Some of them are covered very well, with stories and research results and general good sense; others are thinner and left me wanting more. But the project as a whole is laudable, and the book is nicely produced, like what we used to call a coffee-table book, with photographs and big pull quotes to make it easy to browse through and light on passages of interest. Hmm, what exactly is the difference between shame and guilt?
Life is Strange: True Colors – good and well-reviewed immersive narrative game, though not for me as impressive as others in the Life is Strange series. (Admittedly the stratospherically good original was a hard act to follow.) The concept here is that Alex Cheung, a troubled young woman just discharged from care, is super-sensitive to the emotions of others; sometimes she is overwhelmed by them, but as the game proceeds she learns to use her sensitivity to understand and help the inhabitants of the small town to which she has relocated. All well and good, and the exploration of character and situation is fine, but to my mind there’s not enough actual story, and what there is doesn’t really hang together. I also found the location implausible; supposedly it’s a mining town, but the high street shops include a vinyl record shop and a cannabis store – which sounds to me like the culture of the game designers rather than that of miners. However, Alex is highly relatable, excellently voice-acted and animated with great subtlety of facial expression, and I very much wanted her to be all right – so I guess the story worked at that level.
Doctor Who: The Mind of Evil – another of my favourite stories from the Jon Pertwee era, watched on iPlayer. Very scary; the thing, which at first you think is a machine but it turns out to be a creature contained by the machine, destroys peoples’ minds, and it steadily grows in its power until even The Master can’t control it. At first, someone has to be connected to the machine for it to affect them; it’s supposedly a treatment for the rehabilitation of violent criminals. But then it becomes able to reach people who are just in the same room. And then it becomes able to travel, to teleport out of one room and into another, and then there’s no stopping it and no place which is safe. The other lovely feature for me is that it turns out The Doctor is fluent in Chinese, which he uses to charm the leader of a conference delegation from Red China (in 1971, still in the grip of the Cultural Revolution).
Wild Summon – extraordinary short (14 minute) film, showing the life cycle of a wild female salmon, migrating from a freshwater river to the open ocean and then returning upstream to spawn. But here’s the thing: the salmon you see is a human woman. Turn off the video and listen to the commentary only, and it sounds just like an ordinary nature documentary. Watch it with the images and you see something quite different. The film makers were following their hunch that viewers would find it easier to empathise with the salmon and and relate to its trials and dangers if it looked human. I think we can say that that hunch payed off. (The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or Best Short Film and the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.) See the film trailer and an interview with the film makers in The Guardian.
Dishonored 2 – another game I’ve started but abandoned as too hard and too frustrating. The trailer looked good, but the game experience is quite different, being first person perspective, so you barely get to see the character you’re playing. Moving around the wonderfully detailed open world is quite fun -– leaping between rooftops, jumping onto balconies and raiding houses – but the constant threat of being detected and killed by patrolling guards was just too stressful for me. You’re supposed to be able to get through by stealth, choking guards unconscious if you want to avoid killing, but I found even that hard to do reliably, and my coordination is far too poor to even consider fighting – I just pressed buttons frantically, occasionally getting lucky but mainly dying horribly. But the setting and the story were quite fun, so I watched a video walkthrough, letting someone else take the stress.
Frankinstein: The Read with Alex Kingston – dramatic reading, with the emphasis on dramatic. This is the thing to watch, if you're curious to know what Mary Shelly’s original novel was actually like but don't have the time or the patience to read the whole thing. Condensed to just over an hour, it somehow manages to cover the whole story, including the long slow scene-setting at the beginning, important for the original readership in establishing its plausibility. But the best thing about it is Alex Kingston’s full-on gothic performance, especially when she’s doing dialogue and the view cuts between different angles as she plays the different characters. A lovely production.
Three Faces of Eve – classic film study of what was then called multiple personality, now generally called dissociative identity disorder.. It was based on an actual case, with Alastair Cooke not only narrating but appearing on camera at the start to tell you that, though extraordinary, these events really did happen. Eve White (a pseudonym) was a quiet, submissive housewife, who was referred to a psychiatrist because she was having blackouts, during which she went on spending sprees. The psychiatrist discovered that during these blackouts a different personality emerged, wild and promiscuous, who called herself Eve Black and who was aware of Eve White, for whom she had nothing but contempt. Eventually a third more balanced personality called Jane emerged, who was aware of the other two and could recall the traumatic childhood event which had given rise to Eve Black. Joanne Woodward won a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal of all three personalities.
Yesterday – old but strong adventure game. The creepy and sometimes violent atmosphere (involving the Spanish Inquisition, satanism and psychopathic torturers) is mitigated by its presentation in comic book form (dialogue sequences are played out through pop-up panels) and the rueful world-weary demeanour of the eponymous John Yesterday. The story is complex; Yesterday has been cursed with immortality, and when killed comes back to life but without recollection of his former lives, so there are multiple flashbacks within the game as he gradually pieces together his past. I’m not sure the events actually make sense, if you were to put them into order, but the continual plot twist revelations keep up the pace admirably, rather like Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. It’s well-written and voice-acted (localised from the Spanish), and the puzzles are fair, with a friendly hint system when you get stuck, so despite the horrific storyline actually an enjoyable playing experience.
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