rain keeps falling down, down, down, down....

IF YE FORGET

LET me forget—Let me forget,
I am weary of remembrance,
And my brow is ever wet,
With tears of my remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat,—
Let me forget.

If ye forget—If ye forget,
Then your children must remember,
And their brow be ever wet,
With the tears of their remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat,—
If ye forget.

G.A. Studdert Kennedy

Sadly, our memories seem to be all too short.

--

Speaking of history, did I ever tell you that the title of my Masters Dissertation was "Historical Precedent and the Deposition of Henry VI".  A real page-turner of a read, it analysed how the successive depositions of Edward II (1327), Richard II (1399) and Henry VI (1461) saw the usurping kings increasingly using the authority of parliament to legitimize their rule... and each time they did, it saw the sovereign power of Parliament increase, ultimately leading to Parliament executing a king for treason in 1649.

If any journalists want to get in touch for a comment on the current high court decision on Article 50, I can be reached through my agent.

true...

I saw this today and rolled my eyes.  You couldn't make this stuff up.  You absolutely believe that David Cameron is the kind of politician who, within the space of two months, could complete such a massive turnaround to the extent that he was now leading his own bombing campaign in Syria and calling the people who opposed him in Parliament as "terrorist sympathisers".

But, much though I want to believe that's true because it suits my narrative... I also studied history and I needed whether he really said that or not.

Here's what he actually said on 4th October 2015:

"Tragically, what has happened is that most of the Russian air strikes, as far as we have been able to see so far, have been in parts of Syria not controlled by Isil (IS) but controlled by other opponents to the regime.  So what is happening is that they are backing the butcher Assad, which is a terrible mistake for them and for the world; it's going to make the region more unstable, it will lead to further radicalisation and increased terrorism. And I would say to them: change direction, join us in attacking Isil but recognise that if we want to have a secure region, we need an alternative leader to Assad. He can't unite the Syrian people."

Here's the report in the BBC.

Context is everything: although he used those exact words, they are framed in a statement that is actually pretty consistent with what he was saying in Parliament yesterday.

I dislike David Cameron.  His repeated refusal to apologise for his remarks on Jeremy Corbyn as a "terrorist sympathiser" yesterday added insult to injury and further demeaned his office.  I fundamentally disagree that we have anything like a compelling case for airstrikes on Syria, and I find it insulting that Cameron thinks he can dupe us into thinking that somehow these bombings will make us safer.  These attacks surely increase the likelihood of an attack on British soil and they will certainly lead to more death and suffering and desperate refugees clamouring to escape our bombs every bit as much as they are trying to escape from Daesh.

But is it helpful to make a poster that obscures the truth?  No.  There are many good arguments against the bombings and we should use them and keep protesting the decision rather than just making stuff up to deliberately mislead people.  That's called propaganda and we're better than that.  Leave that to the other side.

Always ask questions.

"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." [the internet seems to assume this is a chinese proverb, but I've also seen it attributed to Mark Twain, so.... you can't be too careful, eh?]

there's more art in Burger King than the British Museum today...

Lely's Venus

If you live in Nottingham, 6pm on a Tuesday evening in Central London probably doesn't seem like the most convenient time or place for a meeting.  Well, to be honest it isn't.... but I was quite keen to attend the get-together organised by the MS Trust for the runners who will be raising money for them in the London Marathon, and I've got holiday I need to use, so I just took the day off.  Besides, C. gave me a membership to the British Museum for Christmas, and this gave me a good opportunity to start to use it.

I love the British Museum.  It's one of those splendidly Victorian institutions where admission is free and where we store many of the priceless treasures that we have stolen from all over the world.  Often it's stuff that we had no right to take in the first place, and in many cases things that we have no real justification for keeping now.... the Elgin Marbles of course being a case in point.  They're splendid, but really what on earth are they still doing in London? (especially if we're going to pack bits of them off to St Petersburg on loan).

Last time I was here, I rented an audio guide and spent some time learning about the Marbles and then following a tour of some of the museum's classical highlights.  That worked pretty well, so this time around, I rented another audio guide (10% members discount) and looked at some of the museum's Ancient Egyptian collection.  The mummies here are consistently amongst the museum's most popular exhibits, and even on a Tuesday afternoon in January, some of the galleries were positively heaving with visitors.  Ah well. It's good that it's being used, right?

Iris from the Parthenon Sculptures

Actually, the mummies make me feel a bit uneasy.  In the main, they've been treated with respect here and allowed to remain wrapped up in their linen and in their sarcophagi, but there's something very unsettling to see these human remains in this setting.  Another benefit of my membership is that it gets me into any of the exhibitions for free, and I spent a fascinating hour at "Ancient Lives", a closer look at eight of the museum's mummies.  They've used modern scanning techniques to really get inside the wrappings and to examine the bodies, and the insights are startling.  There was a lot of dental decay in Ancient Egypt, it seems, with many of the bodies showing evidence of decay and abscesses that would have caused a great deal of pain and perhaps also death.

Just look at this one (from a less enlightened time when they clearly *did* unwrap the mummies).

That hole in the lower jaw is an abscess that occurred during life and caused that damage to the bone. Ouch. I imagine that stung.

My favourites here - at least from what I've discovered so far - are the classical sculptures.  Just look at Lely's Venus (2nd century AD) and Iris from the Parthenon Sculptures (around 438 BC): aren't they beautiful?  I've studied the Renaissance as part of my degree, and although I've seen some remarkable sculptures from that time (Michelangelo's Pieta or Moses, spring to mind)... I've not seen anything that can surpass some of these sculptures from thousands of years earlier.  Iris would originally have had brass wings, and just look at the way that the fabric of her translucent tunic ripples against her thigh.  How can you get such a subtle effect from solid stone? Have you ever seen anything as beautiful?

I learned loads from the physios, former runners and nutritionists at the MS Trust get together that evening, but my day at the British Museum was a lovely way to spend a random midweek day in a dark and cold January.

I've just finished reading - on Monday night -  The Adventures of Luther Awkwright, the seminal comic strip by Bryan Talbot.  So I was mildly surprised and pleased to see a chap wearing an Octobriana t-shirt at the British Museum.

In the Members' Room, of all places!  Good heavens!

remember....

We popped to London this weekend.

We spent much of our time catching up with a pair of friends who were over from New York, but we did make the effort to get over to the Tower of London to check out this remarkable installation.

There will be 888,246 of these poppies by 11th November, each one representing a British casualty in the First World War.  Until I saw these with my own eyes, I'm not sure that I really understood how enormous a number that is.  The poppies just seem to spill out from everywhere and wash around the moat surrounding the Tower.  It's overwhelming and humbling.

I was very pleased to see that the installation seems to have generated a lot of interest and brought a huge crowd down to the side of the river Thames.  Less pleasing was quite how many of them thought that this would be the perfect opportunity for a selfie; some pouting and putting on their best seductive pose as they snapped a picture of themselves in front of a moving memorial to our War dead.  Right up there with all the selfies people were taking when we visited Ground Zero in New York.  People are weird and seem to have little idea of what might constitute appropriate behaviour in a place like this.  Still, they were there and perhaps they'll learn something.  You never know, right?

It's possible that I'm a crap citizen: I've never actually been to the Tower of London before, and we didn't actually pop in this time either.  We walked around the moat, admiring the poppies, the ravens and Traitor's Gate... but then left the crowds behind and headed off, via the unfathomable tunnels of Bank/Monument station (which are rumoured to be rearranged every night to make them more confusing).

The crown jewels can wait for another day: I had an appointment to get my beard pulled by a very precocious 4 year old, and who would want to be late for that?

rabbit, rabbit, rabbit....

As you know, I like a bit of history.

I didn't actively go out seeking history on our holiday in Dartmoor last week... well, I suppose I did a bit: visits to castles and various National Trust properties probably count as seeking out history right?  Well, anyway.  I accidentally stumbled across some history as I was browsing the little shops in the centre of Chagford.

There's a little art gallery there, and it seemed to have an unusual number of pictures and sculptures of hares.  Now, I like hares.  They're beautiful and interesting animals.  To this day, I regret that we didn't buy a lovely ceramic sculpture of a hare that we saw when we were in a cafe in Ashbourne.  I paused to have a closer look at the pictures in the gallery, and saw that there was a leaflet there too about something called "The Three Hares Trail".  It turns out that there are a number of churches - seventeen, to be precise -  around Dartmoor that all have at least one roof boss depicting an ancient symbol of three hares or rabbits running in a circle and joined by their ears to form a triangle at the centre of the design. The symbol is a puzzle for each creature appears to have two ears yet, between them, they share only three ears.  I was intrigued, and as one of the seventeen churches was in Chagford itself, I headed over to have a look.

The symbol in Chagford is on the roof directly over the altar.  The little flyer detailing the history of the church that I picked up on the way in explained that the hares or rabbits were often associated with the tin miners in the area (who bred rabbits in warrens for food) and that the three represented the Trinity.

Hmm.  The leaflet I'd picked up in the gallery had mentioned that the three hares symbol can be found all over the world and many thousands of miles apart. According to the Three Hares Project, the earliest known examples of the motif date back to the 6th Century AD and are on the ceilings of Buddhist cave temples in Dunhuang, China - an important trading post. The symbol is also associated with Buddhism, Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity.  Not to mention the fact that the hare itself is an animal with strong links to magic and to paganism and has long been associated with fertility, the moon and the female reproductive cycle.

A sign of the Trinity?  Perhaps, but it feels as though there are other meanings going on here too and that the symbol's presence in these churches does not have such a straightforward interpretation.

Later that same day, we went out to Widecombe-on-the-Moor to have a look at the church there and to go for a walk on the moor.  There's a boss of the three hares on the roof there too, again close to the altar.  Again, the literature in the church itself links this to the Tin Miners (who paid for the addition of the famous church tower) and with the Trinity.  Looking at the positioning of the boss on the ceiling here, and it is surrounded by other bosses representing images that don't seem at all Christian to me: there are several Green Men, a boss featuring Gawain (of Green Knight fame, of course), bosses of Oak, Wormwood and Myrtle.

The boss of the hares here itself is called "The Hunt of Venus"... is it just me who thinks that the whole Trinity explanation of the significance of this symbol has been added somewhat after the event?  The whole thing reeks of paganism.  Not that this is a bad thing.... surely the story of Christianity is, above almost all else, a story of the triumph of adaptability?  Where do you think the Easter Bunny comes from?  Or the Christmas Tree? Or the celebration of Christmas around Midwinter?    These links to paganism are not to be feared or explained away, surely they're to be celebrated?

We went to a family wedding in Tavistock on the Saturday, and funnily enough there was a boss with the three hares there too, only this time the creatures depicted were categorically rabbits.  I suppose they superficially look the same, but anyone who has ever seen a hare with their own eyes will know that they're unmistakably hares and not rabbits.  These were rabbits.

Still, I was intrigued by the little slice of history that I'd stumbled across.  Every day is a school day.

Especially if you're a history geek.  It's everywhere and it's brilliant.

gorgeous george....

My wife and I went for a lovely bike ride together yesterday.  Rather than dwell on the unfortunate collision that saw C. catapulted into the canal and that sent me sprawling across the towpath, both of us picking up various grazes, cuts, bruises and possible cracked ribs... rather than dwell on that, I'll tell you about something else we saw along the way.

About an hour before the incident we won't be discussing, to be exact.

We were cycling through Wilford.  Wilford is a nice enough little village just down the river Trent from Nottingham.  Well, it's a bit grand calling it a village, really.  Nowadays it's a collection of housing estates of various ages.  It's pleasant enough, and has a village green and a reasonable pub that's nice for a pint on a sunny day, although not as good with food as it used to be.

As villages now seem to do, they've got a website too (google it for yourself...if they're going to ego surf, then they can at least do a bit of work for the trackback).  It has the name of the local bobby and various local interest news stories - in this case mostly about the various traffic schemes that are taking place in the area to widen the A453 and to close Wilford Lane for the tram works.  They also have a little widget on their homepage that tracks the price of petrol against the price of oil and the cheapest local petrol station to buy it.  You know the kind of thing.  Conservative MP, conservative residents, with a small "c".  Oh, and a Facebook page... where they seem to mostly be arguing about the shoddy standards in the pub, someone's overgrown hedge and some vigilante who is spray-painting around dog poo that isn't being picked up.  Exciting times!  Good luck to them, I say.  Community is good, right?

Anyway.  I digress.  What caught our eyes as we cycled through the village green was that someone has put up a sign celebrating the birth of a new heir to the throne.  Wilford Village, it seems, were keen to share in the joy of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and to let the world know it.  Now, I'm not in the least bit excited by this kind of thing and don't really understand why, in this day and age, people seem so ready to accept that some people are just BORN better than others.  Still, each to their own.  What I can't abide though is the inaccuracy.  Unless that sign has been there since 14th November 1948, then surely the heir to the throne hasn't been born, has he?  I'm not a fan of the family, so perhaps I'm a little rusty on how this all works, but wasn't the new royal born a few weeks back third in line to the throne?  Charles then William then this one?  Surely any royalist interested enough to put up a sign would know that much, at least?  An heir, perhaps... but then again, aren't we all probably an heir to the throne of somewhere if we went far enough back in our family trees?  Hell, if Henry Tudor can be king, then you clearly don't need MUCH of a claim, do you?  Just a good army and an act of Parliament and you're in....

Or perhaps it's a statement?  An anti-Charles protest of some sort?  Now, you might not be a big fan of the current heir, but if you're going to support a hereditary monarchy, then I'm afraid you don't get to choose the order of succession.  Well, you could take the parliamentary route and chop off Charles' head, I suppose.... but think of all the lost tourism!

Other than that, you're just going to have to lump it.