Et habitavit in nobis

In my youth the English year was given shape by the great festivals of the Christian religion. The build up to Christmas began in late November on the First Sunday in Advent. The Christmas season having ended on the 6th January, the next significant event was pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, followed around four weeks later by hot-cross buns on Good Friday and Easter eggs two days after that.
Nowadays - in our post-modern age - all these events have been emptied of significance. Christmas begins in August and has lost all pretence of being anything other than a orgy of consumerism. Nativity plays have become an endangered species, and the festival itself is embodied by ‘Santa’, as Father Christmas is called these days, rather than the Christ child. Hot-cross buns can be bought throughout the year rather than only on Good Friday, and these days Easter-eggs have as much to do with Easter as that festival had to do with the Celtic goddess Eostre from whom it took its name.
I’m not writing this in any particular spirit of nostalgia, or from any belief that the England of my youth was a more religious place than it is now. It’s simply that when I was a child I lived in a country which was still culturally christian; England - Italy is a different matter -no longer is. And that culture gave a shape to the year which it no longer has. The only festival still tied to a particular day is Hallowe’en, re-imported from the States a few decades ago. It was unknown in my youth.
However, for those of us who worship at the shrine of Cupertino the year still has a shape. Whisperings amongst the Magi of the computer industry begin in February. They claim to have seen signs and portents that a wondrous new birth is imminent in California. Then in June John the Baptist Jobs reveals the name of the saviour and announces the date of its birth. Like the Christian Advent there will a few weeks to wait and prepare for it to come and dwell amongst us.
This year, though, there was a difference. The Americans, British, French and Germans received the saviour on June 24th; the rest of the world had to wait until July 30th. Now I can understand Britain being first in the queue: after all its government’s ‘special relationship’ with the States provided the pattern for the one between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. But the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the krauts? What did they do to deserve Apple’s special favour? And then things got even worse. Unlike the favoured four, the rest of the world was not allowed to pre-order. Instead one had to wait until the official release date, July 30th, to place an order. On the 30th I went to the shop where I’d bought my 3G two years ago, not really expecting them to have an iPhone 4. To my delight they did. Then delight turned to dismay as they revealed that they only had the 16 gigabyte version. So I placed my order for the 32 gigabyte model and went away dejected. It finally arrived yesterday. After four weeks of waiting I’ve almost lost interest. I hope the Three Wise Men didn’t feel the same way by the time they eventually made it to Bethlehem.

Leaking boundaries

The inability to distinguish between fantasy and fact used to be the preserve of sufferers from senile dementia, readers of the Daily Mail, and members of the right wing of the Republican Party (click here for a case in point). Not any more.
Last year Ambridge gained a new resident: Jim. Like Lynda Snell, he’s a pain in the butt most of the time, but like her is given the occasional redeeming feature - thereby distinguishing them from Jailbird Carter and the irrepressible !!Vickoi!! Tucker who have none whatsoever. As well as sharing my name and a vaguely similar pre-retirement career, Jim likes to drop the occasional Latin tag. Last week he used my favourite - sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt - in an egregiously inappropriate way.
A month or so ago the Archers' scriptwriters killed off the character Sid Perks. Not, as in the case of Phil Archer, because the actor playing him had died, but because Alan Devereux had decided to retire. I’m sure he’s a good bloke - the amount of time the scriptwriters have devoted to the aftermath of his character’s death suggests he was important to his colleagues. But here’s the rub: Sid Perks was boring. He had the barking laugh of those devoid of a sense of humour, his great passion in life was cricket, the most tedious pastime known to man. Yet week after week vast chunks of time have been taken up by people reminiscing about him and mourning his death. Far more than was spent on the aftermath of Phil Archer’s death - a character who’d been in the soap since its inception. And of all the over-the-top reactions that of his former wife, Kathy, takes the biscuit. People don’t usually take kindly to being dumped by their spouses; turning them into some recently deceased saint is unheard of. If the scriptwriters were doing their job of delivering a consistent character, Jim would have told her so. He’s not a man who suffers fools - other than himself - gladly.
There was a time when schools saw their job as educating pupils rather than using them as fodder to climb up the meaningless league tables introduced by Snobby Roberts, and then enthusiastically adopted by the Blair Witch project. Those of us lucky enough to have been schoolchildren then know that Virgil’s words were spoken by a broken hearted Aeneas looking at the sack of Troy as depicted on the gates of the temple being erected in Carthage. The utter destruction of his homeland and with it the loss of his wife and the death of all his friends. ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ is a sentiment which, alas, could be put in the mouth of a Bosnian muslim, a Rwandan tutsi or one of those millions of poor souls who have just lost everything in the floods in Sind. But to apply it to Kathy’s situation is ludicrously inappropriate, and if Jim were a real person he’d know it. But the scriptwriters have let the boundary between real life and fiction leak. They were fond of Alan Devereux, a real person, and seek to demonstrate this to their erstwhile colleague by inflicting months of boredom on their listeners: we miss Alan, therefore you listeners are jolly well going to miss the character he played. Why don’t they just leave Alan to enjoy his retirement and let the homophobic cricketer Sid slide into well-deserved oblivion?

The not so secret life of things.

Like most small children I was cruel to many of the other non-human inhabitants of the planet. Not to cuddly mammals such as dogs and cats, but to insects, particularly woodlice. In the West Country we called them grampuses and I would while away idle moments in the garden picking off the scales of the still living creatures. Now that I’ve reached the age when I realise that my own life’s a gift that will soon be taken away I’m increasingly reluctant to kill any living creature, even rather unpleasant ones such as scorpions, slugs and Tories.
But objects were until recently a different matter. Being insensate one could treat them in the same way an eighteenth century planter would his slave, or one of Margaret Atwood’s Commanders would his Handmaid. They had no minds of their own, they were simply there to serve. Recently, however, they’ve begun to fight back. At first it was a simple matter: freshly-washed objects would suddenly slide off the draining-board back in to the sink, others would suddenly slither from your fingers and crash, suicidally, onto the floor. Now you may explain this by, in the case of my first example, the slight earth-tremors to which central Italy is subject, and, in the case of my second, to the general dodderiness of the over-sixties. But how about this, smartypants?
For some years we’ve owned one of these all-in-one coffee machine. You simply press a button to tell the machine what size of coffee you want. It then proceeds to grind the beans, pre-infuse them, and finally, having discharged the grounds into a removable container, deliver the drink to your cup complete with a thick crema. At each stage a message appears on a small screen telling you how far the process has gone. When the machine arrived, the messages were in Italian, but it was possible to change the language to English, which we did. Admittedly a slightly odd English. When the container holding the grounds needed emptying we got the message ‘Dreg drawer full’. I imagined Dreg Drawer as a slightly over-the-hill Australian porn star clutching a protruding belly, in his younger days the star of the ‘adult movie’ Skin-flick at Hanging Cock. Then suddenly this week the messages changed. Dreg Drawer had disappeared to be replaced by the much more respectable ‘Empty coffee grounds’. That was fine. Unfortunately ‘One small coffee’ now read ‘Single shot coffee’. Now I’ve nothing against American English in its proper place i.e. the mouth of an American. But to find my coffee machine addressing me in a transatlantic dialect over breakfast was a step too far. I consulted the manual and set about re-programming the machine’s language. Being familiar with the Americans’ proprietorial attitude to the language we invented, I expected to find, in addition to the Italian, English, Spanish , French and German alternatives something labelled UK English. No there was just English, an English which had started as the Australian variant, changed briefly to standard English and, having finally ended up in Central Perks with the cast of Friends, decided to stick with American English. I’ve re-programmed the machine’s language to Italian.
So how does one explain the machine’s evolving language? I guess a scientist might say that all matter is inherently unstable, that protons and neutrons don’t have to behave the way they do inside the atom, they merely do so the vast majority of the time. Alternatively, one can take the Wordsworthian view that there’s:

‘ … something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’

I hope it’s wrong. Not only could I no longer be cruel to grampuses but I’d have to be respectful and considerate to the furniture, the cutlery and all the myriad dumb objects on which I rely for my daily well-being or risk being pilloried in the Guardian for anima-centric insensitivity - or even have bricks thrown through my window by the lunatic fringe of the Things’ Rights Society.