The diner seemed to epitomize that age of optimism.  There was nothing in Britain to match the brightness and the brashness of the American eating place.  The traditional British café, with its menu of fish and chips and a pot of tea, had none of the glamour and excitement that seemed to imbue the chrome, glass and plastic of the diners.

Even Americans seem to perceive that period as a golden age; the chain of Lori’s Diners in San Francisco are fitted out in retro 1950s decor and reproduction artifacts. Not only are the interiors reproduced, there is a recovery of the atmosphere: good service, good food and good prices. Lori’s is the only place where I have seen people queueing in the street to wait for a table in order to have breakfast on a Sunday morning.

The diner seemed to capture a sense of the best values of small town America: community and courtesy and companionship. In Garrison Keillor’s descriptions of 21st Century Lake Wobegon, his fictional town out on the edge of the Prairies in Minnesota, the Chatterbox Café, the local diner, is still at the heart of the life of the town.

To English eyes looking from across the Atlantic, the diner stood for more than small town values; it was a reminder of the things Americans had that we lacked.

They had money. They wore clothes that made ours look drab, and they had plenty of them. They drove massive, extravagant, overstated cars; loud colours and tailfins, chrome and bright lights. Their houses were spacious, with refrigerators you could hide in and kitchens that lacked nothing you could imagine.

More than money, they seemed to have a sophistication which was absent from the England depicted on our two television channels where ‘Coronation Street’ seemed an expression of national life.

Of course, the appearance were deceptive and the realities very different. Nevertheless, the Americans were, and remain, far better at optimism and exuberance, not such bad qualities with which to approach daily life.

Eating breakfast in Lori’s Diner

The very idea of a printed telephone directory may become an anachronism as everything is moved online.  It is hard to imagine how the directory inquiry companies make any money when the entire Eircom directory can be searched with the tap of a couple of keys.  Why would anyone pay for something that is free?

It is not just the numbers that come for free – more and more, it is the calls as well. A journalist phoned from New York last night; we talked for half an hour. The conversation concluded not through fear of the cost, but because there was an appointment that had to be kept.

The fall and fall of communication costs has been extraordinary. Vodafone provide 500 minutes of calls and 500 texts for €65 a month; 500 minutes of calls to anywhere – 13 cent a minute to call around the world. Use Skype, and the costs are even less.

Visiting the Philippines twenty years ago, a three minute telephone call to Northern Ireland had to be connected through the operator, and cost 300 Pesos, a sum then equivalent to £6 Sterling; returning ten years later, mobile phone calls home were about £5 an hour.  Being at college in Dublin in the early-80s, a call to Co Down, less than a hundred miles away was 80 pence for three minutes; it is a call that is now free on many subscription packages.

It is progress that would have been viewed with delight by Alan, who died in 2004 and who told many stories from his childhood years at the cable station at Valentia. ‘There were two brothers who worked for the cable company.  One was on Valentia and the other was in Heart’s Content, Newfoundland; at night when things were quiet, they would send messages to each other’. It was a story that had a touch of the mythical, but sounded fun.

It was the cost of calls that most perplexed him. ‘Do you know how much a telephone call across the Atlantic cost when they began? Fifteen pounds!’ Ten weeks pay for a labouring man; thirty weeks of the old age pension; it was beyond the imagination of most people that someone should phone America.

A hundred years on, it is hard to imagine a world without instant communication. In twenty years time, a child will pick up a dusty telephone directory and be astonished at the quaintness of putting numbers in a book.

‘Faulks is a good writer’, a friend interjects, ‘but he is not a great writer’.

Having all of the work published under his own name, confessing a liking for his writing was the honest reaction. Reviewing texts from his novels prompts a pondering.

Faulks’ describes the moral reality of of our economic situation in A Week In December. In a few lines he captures the monstrous injustice of a world where the poor must pay to bail out the rich

‘What happened,’ said Roger, ‘is that investment banks and hedge funds created ever more arcane instruments which they could flog to one another in a completely false market. Because it was over the counter, in private, the regulator couldn’t see it. Then they could sell an inverted iceberg of bets on the likelihood of the original instruments defaulting. They were able to account a notional profit on the balance sheet on all this Alice-in­-Wonderland crap and so pay themselves gargantuan bonuses.’

Other conversations along the table were dying out as people began to sense drama or blood.

Veals smiled thinly. ‘I’m afraid it’s rather more complicated than that.’

‘Do you know what?’ said Roger. ‘It really isn’t. It’s a fraud as old as markets themselves. The only difference is that it’s been done on a titanic scale. At the invitation of the politicians. Behind the backs of the regulators and with the dumb connivance of the auditors. And with the fatal misunderstanding of the ratings agencies.’

‘That’s a cute story,’ said Veals. ‘But financial life is more-’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Roger, his voice growing louder. ‘Do you know how high a million dollars in $100 bills would come up off the table, tightly packed? I’ll tell you. Four and a half inches. And do you know how far a trillion reaches?’

‘Yes. I can work it out.’ John Veals paused only for a moment.

The whole table was now watching and listening as his fabled mental arithmetic went to work. ‘Seventy-one miles.’

‘Correct,’ said Roger. ‘That’s how much has been misappro­priated or mislaid. And all of it will have to be paid back before the world can move on. Every inch of the tightly packed seventy ­one miles. Over a period of – how long would you say? Five years? Ten? And it won’t be paid back by people like you, John, you or the bankers, because I don’t suppose you pay tax, do you?’

‘I pay what I’m legally required to pay.’

‘I think we can take that as a no,’ said Roger. ‘And the mis­demeanours of the bankers will be paid for by millions of people in the real economy losing their jobs. And in paper money, the trillion will be repaid in higher tax on people who have no responsibility for its disappearance. And the little tossers in the investment banks who’ve put away their two and three and four million in bonuses each year over ten years … They’ll hang on to it all. And they of course will be the only ones who won’t pay back a coin. which is bloody odd when you come to think of it. Because really they ought to be in prison.’

”That’s enough, Roger,’ said Amanda.

‘Why, darling?’ said Roger, sitting back in his chair, rather red in the face. ‘Is there something fundamentally wrong with that analysis?’

A good piece of populism? But it is as an incisive description of the the origins of the financial crisis as one will find anywhere.

Having spent most of my life in parish pastoral ministry, Faulks, in the space of a page, teaches more about dementia than I was taught in whole of theological training. In Human Traces a character describes the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease:

He looked up and forced himself to regroup. ‘Yes. Yes. I just have to say, while I am still able, a sort of goodbye, or at least an au revoir. Some weeks ago I … Er, I suffered a peculiar experience. I do not wish to go into it except to say that I appeared to lose my memory. I was in a police station with no recollection of how I had got there. I was not unhappy, I just did not know what was going on. I was like King Lear. “Methinks I should know you, and know this man;/ Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant/What place this is; and all the skill I have/Remembers not these garments; nor I know not/Where I did lodge last night.” Anyway, to … To cut a long story short, I have been to see various distinguished gentlemen¬at the hospital in Queen Square and it appears that I am in her early stages of some kind of senile or pre-senile dementia.

‘Rather interestingly, it has been named after Alois Alzheimer . . .

. . . He looked back to his postcard. It said: ‘Age.’

‘Yes. Age. I am rather young to have this sort of thing, though perhaps sixty does not seem so young to the children at the far end of the table. The truth is that we know very little about this illness. We know very little about anything, as a matter of fact. Never mind. It is really not important. It is just that one day I may no longer know your name, and I ask you to forgive me if I pass you in the street or on the stairs and my face does not light up with love or recognition. Please forgive me. I shall no longer be myself. I am going into a dark country and I very much wanted to say goodbye to those that I have loved before I go. . .

. . . He gazed once more down through the mist of faces until he saw the features of the woman he had loved – no longer young, but red and twisted with grief, shining with tears.

‘I have been blessed beyond what any man could hope or wish for,’ said Thomas. ‘All I ask now is somewhere safe to live. I must pull in sail and lower my sights from the horizon. I am quite content to do so because I have been so fortunate in my life. I always felt that if I had to make a speech like this I should find some Shakespearean eloquence. But it is too late and the plain words will have to do. As a doctor, I have achieved absolutely nothing. Nothing at all, though God knows I tried. But in love I have been rich. Once long ago I finished a lecture in another place by saying we should try to make our lives a hymn of thanks – or some such phrase. I do not think it was a very memorable phrase, even to someone without my difficulties. I shall do my best to follow my own advice. All I ask is for your forgiveness.’

He looked one last time down the table of anxious faces. ‘My mind may not know you,’ he said, ‘but in my heart you are remembered.’

It is a passage that can bring tears to those who have watched loved ones drift into that land of unremembering; it is an assertion of the dignity of those whose mental faculties are no more than a memory.

A profound belief in human dignity reappears in Charlotte Gray,  Faulks’ novel of the Second World War. Levade, a Catholic Jew living in Vichy France in 1942, writes in his diary:

“No child born knows the world he is entering, and at the moment of his birth he is a stranger to his parents. When he dies, many years later, there may be regrets among those left behind that they never knew him better, but he is forgotten almost as soon as he dies because there is no time for others to puzzle out his life. After a few years he will be referred to once or twice by a grandchild, then by no one at all. Unknown at the moment of birth, unknown after death. This weight of solitude! A being unknown.

And yet, if I believe in God, I am known. On the tombs of the English soldiers, the ones too fragmented to have a name, I remember that they wrote ‘Known unto God’. By this they meant that here was a man, who did once have arms and legs and a father and a mother, but they could not find all the parts of him – least of all his name.

God will know me, even as I cannot know myself. If He created me, then He has lived with me. He knows the nature of my temptations and the manner of my failing. So I am not alone. I have for my companion the creator of the world.

At the hour of my death I would wish to be ‘known unto God’.”

Maybe Faulks is not great writer, whatever that means, but there are few writers with a deeper insight into the human condition.

Arranging to meet a friend for breakfast at a pub near the ground, we disagreed about the kick off time. Checking on the team website was the first time I had noticed, the full name of the opposition is Montpellier-Hérault. They share the department, and a passion for rugby, with Béziers, but Hérault is not just rugby country, it is bull fighting country. The feria at Béziers is said to attract a million visitors. Is there some correlation between the rugby pitch and the bullring?

The passion for ruby and bullfighting is a phenomenon that is common on the Atlantic coast.

The feria at Dax might not match that at Béziers for size, but it manages a similar degree of passion. Each August, thousands of people dressed in white with red neckerchiefs, along with choirs and bands fill the bullring. It always seems sad to a sentimental Englishman that such a vibrant occasion is marred by the killing of animals.

A British visitor said he had been with friends one evening out of curiosity. He had been lucky to get a ticket, but had been mystified that it was considerably cheaper than those of his friends. Reaching the ring, he discovered that while they were in the shade; he caught the full force of the late afternoon sun, leaving him as red as the neckerchiefs the next morning. “The last time I go to a bullfight”, he muttered.

What seemed strange in looking at coverage of the feria in the newspapers was that the ring seemed a place for all the family; the crowd seemed to comprise thousands of people of all ages. Perhaps they grow up with a less sensitive disposition than their peers in Northern Europe.

Family attendance at the feria is matched by family attendance at the rugby matches; the neckerchiefs marking support for the club. Biarritz Olympique and Aviron Bayonnais, both of which, like Montpellier-Hérault, play in the Top 14, the highest level of French rugby, attract whole families to their matches; granted, some may not be wholly engaged with the events on the pitch, but it is nevertheless an event for the whole community.

But why rugby and bullfighting? Why have those sports the power to bind together whole communities in a way that might be rivalled by Gaelic sports in Ireland, but which simply does not happen in Britain?  What it about rugby and bullfighting that evoke such passion?

‘You’re right, it’s because I cannot sing’.

‘Everyone can sing’.

‘I can’t.  I was told professionally, I can’t.  The man told me that it would be better for everyone if I did not sing’.

He was, of course, right, I cannot carry a note in a bucket, my entire vocal range probably extends across three notes in the bass line, and even they would be sung in the wrong places. But I felt hurt at the time.

Singing had been a big thing in my childhood days. I could never play the recorder or the Glockenspiel, it being reserved for a very talented girl called Audrey, but I could sing along with everyone else in my primary school class. Every week we tuned in to ‘Singing Together’, on BBC radio for schools.

‘Singing Together’ is deep in the consciousness of those of us of a certain age. One wet evening in France five years ago, I texted everyone I knew who had been to a British primary school and asked which songs they remembered. I got a few sniffy replies, but my sister in Belfast came back with a list of about ten songs.

‘Singing Together’, in retrospect, was a deeply subversive programme. There were traditional, fun, sing-along songs, things like ‘Antonio, it’s raining again’. But there were some songs that gently challenged our Anglo-Saxon view of the world like the 17th Century Huron Carol. There were even songs that were downright radical and would surely have prompted letters to the ‘Daily Telegraph’ if it had been know that primary school children were encountering such lyrics.

My first encounter with the Irish famine was in the words of ‘The praties they grow small’. I remember feeling aghast that Britain, which I had always been taught stood for freedom and justice, should trample people in the dust. My sister recalls the words of ‘Blackleg miners’, how it got past Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher is a mystery!

I don’t mind not being able to sing, what I fear is a loss of singing in our culture. The tales that were told in our folk songs will not be carried by the banality of the average iPod download. It is not just music that will be lost, it is something of the truth about the society in which we live, and losing the truth can never be a good thing.

Perhaps I should learn a song for next Christmas, ‘On Raglan Road’ or ‘Four Green Fields’, something that can be ground out in three notes from the bass line.  It would persuade them it was better to sing together.

P.S. You’re a real singer if you can identify from which film this cloister comes!

P.P.S. On reflection, Brendan Behan’s ‘The Aul’ Triangle’ is probably the best for someone who has grind out a song.

]]> http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2012/01/18/singing-together-again/feed/ 4 http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2012/01/12/too-small-not-to-make-a-difference/ http://www.forthefainthearted.com/2012/01/12/too-small-not-to-make-a-difference/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:15:05 +0000 Ian Poulton http://www.forthefainthearted.com/?p=8890 One of those programmes that showed the BBC at its best – a natural history programme on the migration of birds, following the flight of barnacle geese to their breeding grounds in the Norwegian Arctic.  The exhausting flight brings them to grassland where the twenty-four daylight of the Northern summer provides ideal conditions for the breeding pairs.  The offspring, fluffy bundles of feathers, the sort of creatures that might feature on birthday cards, lack even a fraction of the mobility of their intercontinental parents.

The narrator proceeds in a sinister …

Collateral damage in the 21st Century  tends to be associated with actions by United States’ forces, possibly because they admit to causing such losses, while sub-Saharan dictators, and others of their ilk, embarking upon incursions into neighbouring states deny even the presence of their forces on foreign soil.

American responsibility for collateral damage is likely to decline as their forces disengage from the conflicts of the past decade.  If oil has been the motivation behind United States involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, then that motivation is dwindling.  The United States Energy Information Administration provides extraordinarily detailed data on the country’s energy production and consumption, its energy imports and exports.

The United States depends upon imports for less than half of its petroleum requirements, and of the 49% of petroleum that is imported, 49% is from the Western hemisphere and just 18% is from the Persian Gulf.  Just 9% of American petroleum consumption comes from a region that has so preoccupied US politicians and military forces.

If the United States reaches the point where it no longer needs Persian Gulf oil, it will be logical to begin to disengage from the Middle East, where its experiences, while securing oil supplies, have brought considerable pain.

And if it disengages from the Middle East, will it not look also at its involvement in Europe?  Europe has an ageing population, is persistently rude and hostile and offers a market of declining importance.  Why not pack the bags and look instead across the Pacific where the huge Asian economies offer considerably more prospects than tired old Europe?

And what would happen to Europe without an American umbrella over it?   At the level of continental politics, would Russia under Putin take the slightest notice of a European Union left militarily toothless without an American presence?  How many other situations would change for the worse with an American departure?  Even if their current presence is only a matter of self-interest, with the Americans gone, the countries of Europe would be prey to the nationalisms and religious divisions that plagued the continent for so much of its history.

The loss of any life is unacceptable, collateral damage is unacceptable; but so also is a world where the liberal democratic values are pushed aside.

‘You can tell a lot about a person from the contents of their shopping basket’, I remarked to the sergeant who was standing next to me.

‘Don’t start’, she responded, ‘it’s for our Christmas good turn.’

Surveying my shopping, I immediately regretted my remark – a bottle of Power’s, a bottle of Jameson’s, a bottle of Croft, two jars of hot chocolate and a bottle of shampoo.

‘What were you saying, father,  about the contents of a shopping basket telling you something?’

‘Ah’, I said, ‘that’s not for me’.

‘Of course, that’s always what they say’.

The checkout operator scanned my purchases and said, ‘do you have any ID, sir? A driving licence or a Garda national ID card?’

‘Do I not look over 21 years old?

‘No, sir’.

‘Sergeant, do I not look over 21?’

‘No’ I’m afraid not’.

‘I’ll have to admit to dyeing my hair grey, then’.

We laughed. ‘Are you working over Christmas?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, but I don’t mind’.

‘I hope it’s peaceful’.

‘And I hope yours is, as well’.

I picked up my shopping and walked on.

Memories of banter with policemen in the summer came back.  There were two officers from the San Francisco Police Department driving a pick up marked ‘Bomb Squad’ who pulled up at a red light at a junction were we were waiting to cross. ‘You guys having a good holiday?’ one asked us.

‘We are. Are you having a quiet day?’

‘We sure hope we are’.

Then there was the sergeant in Newport, Oregon who crossed the street to bid us ‘good morning’. Wearing a Leinster rugby jersey was a giveaway as to our origin. ‘I should arrest you’, he smiled, ‘your golfers keep coming here and stealing our silverware’.  He stood and chatted until his radio summoned him somewhere.

Policemen very different from those in Burundi who repeatedly stopped us and interrogated our driver.  No money changed hands, but it became clear that our progress might have been smoother it it had. Policemen very different from the man in Rwanda whose demand that we pull over prompted our driver to turn the radio on loudly and to stare straight ahead through the windscreen until the policeman grunted something and the driver started the car, not once making eye contact with the officer.

Perhaps the accountability of a police force can be measured by the humour of its officers.

His endeavours might have seemed analogous to trainspotting were it not for a moment in July when the 57 degrees Fahrenheit temperature and the biting wind of the Oregon coast prompted a journey inland from the town of Gold Beach.  Visiting a forest park ten miles or so inland, the temperature had risen by thirty degrees.  Walking beside the river for very long seemed unattractive, so we returned to the air conditioning of our four litre Dodge.

At the entrance to the car park, a sign pointed coastwards to Gold Beach and inland to a town called Agness, some 23 miles away.  We decided to visit Agness.  The journey was slowed by repeated roadworks and we finally reached a junction where the road to Agness, and nowhere else was to the left.

There were obviously others who had made the journey in the past and who had experienced a reaction similar to the one awaiting us.  A place with such a sense of humour was worth a stop.  Having grown up in England where a county town might have a population of 100,000, to describe the population of Agness as small is probably an understatement.

There was a shop that, amongst other things, sold cold beer and ice creams, and a grass airstrip that crossed the road and went uphill, and, beyond the airstrip, a school.  In the warmth of the July sun, it was hard to imagine what the place might be like in deep winter, and hard to guess how many people there might be living in the hills around.  If Gold Beach was thirty odd miles away, maybe the community here was much bigger than it appeared.

What put Agness on the map, though, with a Zip code of 97406, was its post office.  Later on our West Coast journey, someone explained that the post office was often the first place established when new communities were emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The post office conferred status in a place, gave its community an official standing.

 If the BBC report is correct, then places like the post office at Agness are under threat, and when they are gone, what marks of community are left? What have people left to share in common if the one building that united them is gone?

Speaking at Independence Hall, Philadelphia on Independence Day, 4th July 1994, Havel attempted to describe the contemporary worldview:

Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel’s back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. I see it rather as a typical expression of this multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures is taking place. I see it as proof that something is happening, something is being born, that we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible.

‘Everything is possible and almost nothing is certain’, he goes on to say.  Even language does not have certainty in  a world where there is no consensus on meanings. Italian philosopher and writer Umbert Eco wrote,

‘I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.’

In a world where nothing is certain and where things formerly expressible may only be articulated by reference to a former age, the church continues to speak as if the last fifty years of history had never taken place; as if the propositional approach, whereby things are declared to be so because the bishops say they are so, was an adequate response to contemporary culture.

Vaclav Havel was feted by the churches as an opponent of Communism, yet they failed to engage with (or deliberately ignored) the new reality he described.  Havel saw that the end of modernism, the end of rationalosm, ushered in a dangerous age:

Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more dangerous today than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic. Armed with the same supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal cults are at war with one another.

Havel believed that if those tribal conflicts were not to lead to an ultimate destruction, then there needed to be self-transcendence:

It logically follows that, in today’s multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies – it must be rooted in self-transcendence.

It is a proposal rooted in a sense of the ‘spiritual’, but not in any of the spiritualities offered by those selling certainties.  It is a voice that is hardly likely to be popular in organisations that depend upon an allegiance to beliefs in difference and conflict.

Without voices like Vaclav Havel, the world is a more dangerous place.