Temple Cloud

Probably like most people, I get a lot of emails asking me to sign petitions.  Petitions to make electric vehicles more affordable , ban petrol-powered leaf-blowers , stop housing asylum seekers on barges , speak out against children being executed in Saudi Arabia , free ethnic minorities from forced labour in China , provide safe and legal migration routes to stop people-traffickers , and many more. Sometimes I sign these.   Sometimes I know I should, but I’m too lazy.   Sometimes I think, ‘I’d need to know more about the issue before I could decide whether this is a good idea,’ or, ‘I know they mean well, but this petition is so ambiguously worded that people might use it to justify all sorts of things that aren’t reasonable.’   Sometimes, I simply don’t care enough about the issue.   For example, I’m not worried about whether someone thinks it’s sexist for a supermarket to label the tampons aisle ‘feminine hygiene’, compared with the fact that in many cou...

A few years ago, I read a Diary column in a newspaper in which the journalist described having what she called ‘old-fashioned evenings’ with her small daughter, where they didn’t use electricity.   She described how difficult she found it to enter into the spirit of imaginative play with a five-year-old, without television to keep her entertained. I remember feeling sceptical that keeping up with a five-year-old’s imagination would be the hardest part of doing without electricity.  Surely, particularly in winter (when that column was published), lighting and keeping warm would be the challenges?  Not to mention cooking, and preventing chilled or frozen food from spoiling. Friends of mine took the even more radical-sounding step of introducing what they call ‘technology-free days’ to curb their children’s fixation on television and computer games.  I remember having an argument with one of the children, who had said, ‘Fine, I’ll just go out on my roller blades, th...

‘I’ve been doing something so irrational and self-destructive that it reminds me of you,’ PDB11 said.   I couldn’t argue with that – after all, my own irrationally pessimistic thoughts are a recurring theme in this blog. Yesterday, we had been out to Trio Paradis concert.   It had been splendid, but PDB11 had found that, instead of simply enjoying the music, he couldn’t stop noticing how much better these three musicians were than he was, and feeling depressed about not being that good. The same thing had happened a few days before.   Already feeling despondent and wanting to do something together that we might enjoy, PDB11 had suggested we listen to a Vaughan Williams CD.   But by the end of the first track, he switched it off.   Again, he couldn’t stop feeling regretful that, even though music had always been his great joy and being a musician had been a key part of his identity, he hadn’t taken composition lessons as a teenager and hadn’t followed...

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...