Temple Cloud

A few days ago, I went over to see old friends of mine whom I will call Lily and Manly, a couple I have known for over twenty years, before they actually were a couple rather than just two friends I hung out with, and well before their three children were born.  Lily and the youngest child, aged 11, had been working on tie-dyeing T-shirts, so I joined in with that, and chatted with the parents (the two boys weren’t inclined to chat much), and had supper.  I had been hoping to see the oldest teenager (whom I will call Grace), who was out with friends during the day, and arrived home in the early evening.   She needed to go upstairs to get on with her maths homework, but had a bit of time to chat to me first, mainly about how much she hates college.   Grace is halfway through A-levels at the same sixth-form college that I attended and loved, and where my mother taught for a number of years.   I enjoyed studying there, taking four A-levels, a spare GCSE, and (m...

PDB11  and I have recently been reading The Captain’s Apprentice  by Caroline Davison.  This is a fascinating story of two people who led very different lives: Robert Eastick, a Norfolk teenager who in 1856 died at sea under suspicious circumstances after prolonged abuse by the ship’s captain; and Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer and folk-song collector, who in 1905 heard a ballad, ‘ The Captain’s Apprentice ’ , sung by a Norfolk fisherman, James ‘Duggie’ Carter, a childhood neighbour of Eastick, telling the story of a cabin-boy tortured to death by his captain. But it is more than a biography.   It is also a story of how songs and stories mutate over time and are adapted for different purposes.   Vaughan Williams assumed that because the version of ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’ that he heard contained local references, it must have been about a local event.   In fact, as Davison explains, versions of the ballad had been sung on both sides of the Atlantic si...

Last Sunday was the birthday of the Church.   Not Holy Trinity Binegar  (Christian worship site since before 1066, parts of current building go back to circa 1400), where I happened to be at the time, or the Anglican Church, but the community of believers dating back to when a group of people had a bizarre, life-changing spiritual experience one Shavuot in the early 1st century AD. Although the Bible describes Shavuot as a harvest festival, a time to thank God for His gifts of grain, it has come to be celebrated as the day on which God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses.   Christian tradition, on the other hand, celebrates Pentecost (the Greek name for Shavuot) for God’s gift of something even greater than food or rules to live by.   It is the day on which, according to Acts Chapter 2, God sent His Holy Spirit upon Jesus’s followers. But what does that actually mean? A penpal of mine, a convict in Louisiana, is a devout Christian who is currently working on a...

I had been looking forward to reading the full, book-length version of Rowan Hooper’s How to Spend a Trillion Dollars  ever since I read the shortened version that appeared as an article in New Scientist . In that article, Hooper explored three of the biggest problems that we might solve with a trillion dollars: world poverty, climate change, or disease.   A letter to New Scientist the following week commented that the only one worth doing out of these was halting climate change, as poverty would always exist as long as some people had more money than others, and there was no point in eradicating deadly diseases like polio and malaria because everyone dies of something eventually. I got the impression that the letter-writer had missed the point.   Hooper wasn’t claiming that sharing a trillion dollars between the world’s poorest 760 million people (giving them on average $1,315 each) would eradicate relative poverty and make them as rich as Bill Gates.   But it...

A year or so ago, I had a crisis of confidence about this blog.   PDB11 and I had been reading American Gods together, and there is a scene in which one of the villains makes a saccharine eulogy over someone she has murdered, in which she reflects on birth and death as two complementary sides to life.   I started to worry that whenever my blog tried to be upbeat and positive, it was just as hypocritical – and therefore proved me to be just as evil – as this character. When I asked PDB11 whether he thought my blog sounded similar to the character’s speech, he said, ‘I suppose there’s a little similarity, but not much.’   Later on, having thought about it, he suggested that part of the reason my blog could sometimes sound this way is because I try to focus on writing about the positive side of life, without writing about my struggles in depression. Well, when I’m in the grip of a major depressive episode, I either don’t have much useful to say, or – and this is an imp...