Eggs, rabbits, chicks - and a wooden cross??

I've just read a friend's blog in which she laments that Jesus bloke taking over her birthday celebrations, and I have sympathy because my daughter's birthday is very close to Christmas so it happens to her every year. But that Jesus bloke actually has taken over the original spring festivals - I mean, what have the 'traditional' Easter celebration rites - chocolate eggs, Easter bunnies and chicks - got to do with a torturous death by crucifixion and a resurrection three days later?

The answer of course is: nothing! These accoutrements were appropriated by the early Christians from the pagan spring fertility celebrations. As was much else.

Note, I said the early Christians - not Christ himself. Whoever and whatever Jesus was, I absolve him from any guilt in this regard - I can find no Bible verse in which Jesus holds up a chocolate rabbit and exhorts his followers to eat it in remembrance of him (and if I could find a religious excuse for eating chocolate, believe me, I would!) In fact, there is no instruction in the Bible on how Jesus' death and resurrrection should be celebrated at all.

The clue is in the naming of the festival: Easter is actually an updating of Eostre, the Saxon mother goddess repreesenting fertility. It is from the same root we derive oestrogen, the female hormone. The festival of Eostre was originally a fertility rite in her honour, held to celebrate the return of life to the world in spring.

Thus, eggs and chicks represent new life and rebirth, and of course we all know what rabbits are known for, which is why there are so many of them. Admittedly, go for a walk and you won't see too many, because they scent humans and fear them - probably because they know we are the creatures who inhabit those huge metal machines that tend to squash them if they venture on to roads. But go for a horse ride, and magically there is a hopping rabbit carpet over the field. The hare is also the symbol of the moon and the mother goddess, again representing life and fertility.

Eostre was one of a pantheon of mother / fertility goddesses in various traditions (Aphrodite, Ishtar, Astarte, Venus, Cybele) who represented feminine power as the source of life. In stark contrast to the modern pressure on women to be youthful, thin and passive, these goddesses were portrayed as older, maternal, curvaceous and dominant over their younger lovers, who were seen as gorgeous young men devoted to the service of the divine womb.

In later mystery cults this young male consort took on the role of earlier 'green man'-type gods of fertility; he was portrayed as having been born of a virgin, and represented the cycle of the seasons by dying and returning to life around the spring equinox, usually over a three day period starting with Black Friday. Hmm,sound familiar?

Spring celebrations in older times varied in different places and cultures, but they centred on fun, enjoyment - and often, being fertility rites, sex. When the patriarchal religions took hold they repressed this aspect of the festival along with the celebration of the feminine, but left us with such innocent pleasures as decorating eggs and giving fluffy bunnies and chicks. The naugtiest thing we are left with is chocolate, so excuse me now while I go and celebrate the season by indulging myself with a packet of Lindt mini-eggs...

It’s not a competition…

Last week I received what I now view as a compliment, though once it would have filled me with shame, dread and horror. A friend, normally justly confident with her lovely trim body, was preparing to meet up with us for a meal the other day. Her husband commented that, unusually, she had chosen a high necked top. Her reply was: ‘Maureen will be there – I can’t compete with her cleavage’. Love her, love the comment – thank you very much and good night….

But ‘twas not always so.

I was the ‘good girl’ at school. You would find me in a corner of the library, not hanging out with the cool kids. Throughout my schooldays I received plenty of praise from adults for my intelligence and commitment to study, but little recognition from anyone – least of all my schoolmates – for what really matters to a teenage girl – my looks. I was overweight, spotty – and flat-chested. My best friend, tenth in class tests while I felt let down if I slid to second place, was the boy magnet: skinny, bubbly, extrovert, she clinched the deal by possessing two elder sisters to share clothes and makeup tips – how could I compete?

Consequence: my belief system was created. It said ‘You can to be clever to make up for the fact that you’re unfanciable’.

I now know that we choose our beliefs – back then, they chose me and I blindly accepted. So when my chest suddenly decided to act like it had been attached to an airline my reaction was embarrassment – hide them! It took the appreciation of my husband to make me accept – grudgingly – that my body might actually be, well, sort of OK.

But throughout most of my life, I have been able to accept a compliment about my intelligence with equanimity and genuine pleasure, a personal compliment directed at my appearance has immediately triggered a ‘why is this person saying this?’ response. I looked for a subtext: is it a joke? Blatant empty flattery? What is its purpose? This does not accord with my core belief system: does not compute.

I once (only once!) watched ‘What Not To Wear’ and was horrified at the humiliation of the poor subject, being told she couldn’t wear garment after garment because of her figure. In contrast, I love ‘How To Look Good Naked’ in which Gok Wan, while grabbing bits of flesh, contrives to make women feel proud of what they have. This was perhaps one trigger to help me realise I could choose my own reality.

Another was receiving male attention and appreciation, initially at a time when I was feeling very low for several reasons, and which increased the more confident I became in my appearance, and in a couple of cases at least could not be explained away as anything other than genuine, however hard I tried. Reading Dawn French’s autobiography helped too – I fully identify with her feelings about her boobs, and her confidence boosted mine. (my confidence, not my boobs – they, like Dawn’s, need no further boosting, just good scaffolding!)

I can now accept my body as, to quote a Tim Minchin song, Not Perfect, but it’s mine’, make the most of its good bits and take attention away from the things I don’t like so much. I fully realised how much things had changed last Christmas when a (male) friend who I hadn’t seen for a year commented not only on how good I looked, but on my change of style: skinny jeans, fitted low cut top and leather jacket – clothes I wouldn’t have had the confidence to wear at twenty. So I’m writing this in honour of National Cleavage Day yesterday – I can now celebrate! I no longer feel like I have to compete – but I do finally feel like I’m winning.

Is it my destiny to be fatalistic?

I was born and raised in the flat wilderness that is East Anglia, and proudly - but inaccurately as it turned out - boasted that my pedigree back to the seventeenth century was pure Norfolk with the occasional dash of Suffolk.


Most of the people around me as a child seemed to have a fatalistic attitude to life. I remember one of my Mum's friends - the sort most of us had as children, who we termed Auntie as a mark of respect but no regard at all for bloodlines - on the way to the doctor's for the results of some test (by the Les Dawson impressions she and Mum were doing, mouthing words I wasn't supposed to understand anyway and hitching up bosoms, I guess it was some gynaecological problem) saying in a resigned tone: 'Oh well, if your number's up, that's it.'


My childish mind, even then, baulked at this notion. Oh no, if the grim reaper was coming after me with his scythe I knew how to run and dodge - you don't catch me that way. But then, I'd never been faced with death, or even its possibility, at that stage.

I have still, thankfully, undergone relatively few bereavements, and those such as one might expect in the normal course of events, but even in my limited experience I have been struck with the different attitudes of people to the prospect of death, and they seem to be heavily influenced by whether the person comes from a rural or urban background.

Rural folk, perhaps beause of a genetic history of living close to the elements, engaged in times gone by in agrarian activities and thus dependent for their very survival on the vagaries of wind and sun, seem to me to take a more fatalistic view of death - and life - than those raised in towns and cities.

My father, on receiving a diagnosis of cancer, remarked without any discernable emotion: 'I'll be gone by Christmas'. True to his word, he died in November. Yet a dear old friend kept a body riddled with cancer, thrombosis and various other ailments going till he was nearly 90, mainly because every time - and this was a regular occurrence - he ended up in hospital 'on his death bed', he remembered a few jobs he had to do before he shuffled off this mortal coil... Yes, a Londoner.

Understanding your background influences is the first step to choosing to control them, and either through this or by replacing my rural family fatalism with that of my London-born husband I don't know - but I believe that any experience can be shaped by my brain so that I can take approach it positively.

But this does not stop me enjoying Greek tragedy - or the fatalistic novels of the very rural Thomas Hardy!

Londinium

I’ve had a long relationship with the capital city of the UK - not quite as long as the title of this blog suggests, I hasten to add: I don’t go back to Roman times, although one of my favourite novels, ‘London’ by Edward Rutherford, does – it traces the history of the city for over a thousand years by following fictional families – thoroughly recommend it.

No, I was virtually unaware of the place except as a name on a map and in history books until I was ten, when our Norfolk primary school thought it would be ‘a good thing’ for us innocent rural souls to widen our experience of life, and arranged a day trip. Not to Camden market, a few high rise flats, a crack den and an underground rave to complete the day, as they could have done, but to the Tower of London and the Science Museum. Relatively tame on reflection, but we were ten – and our mums had to give permission. And I had enough problems trying to convince my mum I would be safe: perhaps the teachers were wise to avoid the crack den after all.

“You might get lost - London’s a big place,” was the first objection. How she could know this I’m not sure – the furthest from home she had ventured was Frinton-on-Sea, in deepest, darkest Essex.

There is an apocryphal tale of a Norfolk lorry driver sent to London with a cargo of wooden planks. He successfully navigated his way as far as Liverpool Street Station, which everyone in East Anglia knows is London, then stopped and accosted a passer by.

‘Excuse me, do you live in London?’
‘Yes mate,’ came the reply.
‘Good,’ said the driver. ‘I’ve got some wood here for a Mr Jones. Can you tell me which house is his please?’

Although I’ve since come to love the Science Museum, my only memory of it is walking time and time again through this new-fangled automatic door contraption – just imagine, some day in the future, we could have a door that opens whenever you approach it! Just like on The Prisoner…. (though I’d not seen that at the time).

My other abiding memory of the day is driving through streets crammed with buildings, people and traffic – more than I’d ever seen in my life. And loving the buzz that emanated from the very tarmac, the vibrancy and the life-giving force. The Tower and its history has been a passion of mine ever since that day, when I dazedly retraced the steps of Elizabeth I on her walkway outside the Bloody Tower, marvelling that I was seeing the same vista as that long ago young princess. London does that – it puts you in touch with history.

Which is why I moved to live near London, and probably partly why I was drawn to and married a Londoner. Not just a Londoner indeed – a genuine ‘Orl roight mate’ Cockney, bless him. I’ve learned to see the Mile End Road as a second home – especially since we found out (after years of me boasting about my pedigree Norfolk breeding) my nan was actually born in Bermondsey.

I was back at the National Portrait Gallery recently to lap up more history – I love to gaze at paintings of my heroes down the ages, pondering on the fact that when the paint touched the canvas, they were actually in the room. Brings them closer, that thought. Paintings seem more personal than photographs; it’s not, as so often quoted, the camera that takes a bit of the subject’s soul – the artist’s brush captures it so much more effectively. And – as Dorian Gray attests – the best paintings portray the artist’s emotions as well as the subject’s.

There are a few favourites I visit every time: the Romantic poets, clustered in one room: Byron looking proud and handsome, Keatshead down, reading, looking simultaneously absorbed and defeated; Wordsworth towards the end of his life, now very much part of the establishment he once railed against. Mary Woolstoncraft and her husband William Godwin look possessively across the room at their daughter and son-in-law.

I also visit John Wilmot posing with his monkey, which sits on a pile of books. I’m told the monkey represents Milton, the laureate, hence the laurel crown held above its head. The image always however symbolises for me the monk and the monkey – psychological terms representing the superego and the id – the highest and lowest thought processes of humans. Which summarises Wilmot’s life and poetry perfectly.

This visit I spent more time than usual with the Shakespeare portraits, intrigued at the possibility of a new one having been discovered. And while perusing that exhibition I was drawn to Ben Jonson. I'd never really looked at him previously and I was struck by the fact that he doesn’t look like I expect a poet and playwright to look: to bluff, too hearty, not sensitive enough. Though yes, the sort of writer who can start a play with ‘I fart at thee’! He reminds me of Tom Baker – not so much as Dr Who but as the legless sailor in Blackadder II. Well, if nothing else, I could now advise on who should play Ben Jonson should anyone decide to make a biopic….

Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore

The Bob Dylan quotation I've used as the title for this blog is one of my all-time favourite lyrics, and is very apt for a recent revelation.

Let me take you back in time to the mid-70's. I was studying for my A levels in a very traditional rural grammar school in which every teacher was - to my teenage eyes - at least 90 years old and hopelessly out of touch with modern life - the ladies wore tweeds, the men suits and ties. There were even segregated male/female staffrooms, and us girls were regularly inspected for the length of our skirts and whether blazers were done up properly.

We were waiting for our new English teacher, when an interesting sight mainfested itself in the classroom. In walked a tall, handsome man in his early thirties with a mop of curly dark hair, zapata moustache, intense hazel eyes, open-neck checked shirt and cords. We thought he'd come to mend the radiator - especially when he introduced himself as Roger - no teacher in our school ever revealed their first name.

But our English teacher he was - and the most inspirational teacher of my school career. Because of this one person I encountered and fell in love with the work of Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, John Keats and other great writers, and because of him I became an English teacher - I wanted to inspire the same enthusiam for literature in others that he had in me. From the start Roger stood apart from the other staff: he informed us that if we wanted to speak to him we should ask for him in the female staff room as he found the company more congenial in there...by the time I visited the school two years later the outmoded segregation of staffrooms had ended, in no small part I guess because of Roger's maverick refusal to abide by the gender divide.

Towards the end of our course, as we approached our exams, he expressed frustration at being told we would be leaving as soon as we had completed our course of study: he was looking forward to sharing with us 'some more interesting and important stuff' rather than being bound by the requirements of the syllabus. We shared his disappointment, but our consolation was an invitation to a party at his home. If my parents thought this was a civilised taking tea with sir, they were misinformed...

Roger lived in a rambling Elizabethan farmhouse which delighted me - to this day I would love to live in a house like that. For the occasion the huge garden / field at the back had been littered with bean bags and mattresses to sit on and there were huge speakers in the upstairs windows ready to provide the now-familiar strains of Dylan. At 2am he announced to the by now not entirely sober conglomeration of students: 'A couple of miles away there's a lovely thorn bush just like the one in the Wordsworth poem'. There a re very few people who could persuade me, without hesitation, to trek across muddy fields in high heels in the middle of the night in pitch darkness to 'see' a three foot high clump of shrubbery - but Roger was one of them.

As usually happens, I lost contact with Roger after he left the school - I remember being told his leaving gift was a goat, which struck me as entirely appropriate.

A few months ago I was reading a book by Iain Sinclair, which traces a journey round the M25, when I came across a reference to 'the writer, Roger Deakin'. Unusual name - could this be my old mentor? This is where the internet comes into its own - within minutes I was able to establish that this was indeed the same person; that he had gone on to write, broadcast and make films, living in the same moated farmhouse in which he had hosted our party, and sadly that he died about three years ago. But there was a reference in his writing to finding an old chain that had once tethered a goat....

I have bought his books to read so the inspirational teacher I knew all those years ago can continue to teach and influence from beyond the grave - perhaps that's true immortality...

Distances in Wales are really far apart, aren’t they?

This week I spent a few days travelling in Wales and the Borders. Not the first time I’ve been to the area, and it was a last minute decision, founded on my husband’s need to go to Monmouth for some bus-related reason (to do with his job, though I wouldn’t put it past him to do this just for interest). As I had some time off he threw out that carrot that if I were willing to accompany him and witness this – to my mind decidedly dull – undertaking, we could drive up to Portmeirion via Hay-on-Wye and back via Gloucestershire. A picturesque prospect that played to several of my life’s passions.

The deal was sealed when on phoning to book the advertised off-peak mid-week special offer on hotel accommodation in Portmeirion we were told that sadly the rooms on offer were all taken – all they had spare was the Peacock Suite, which as a late booking they could let us have for just £30 above the standard offer price.

‘Go for it’ I said, not knowing what the Peacock Suite had to offer. Then I looked at the website: luxurious suite overlooking the sea with a sumptuous four poster bed….yes, I thought, I could live with that – as indeed I could – and did!

The downside of the trip was that hubby had to drive a very long way – provoking the remark from him which I had to use as the title for this piece: ‘Distances in Wales are really far apart, aren’t they?’ Umm, yes, grammatically correct sentence but, er – I know what you mean dear….

The payoffs:
En route to Monmouth we passed through the Wye Valley and Tintern Abbey. Yes, we could have gone a different way but suffice to say I was planning the route and navigating. And Tintern is one of the places I keep coming back to. Like Wordsworth, Turner, Cobbett and many others down the centuries I see the magnificence of this ruin as so many things.

There is the historical and geographical perspective: the abbey was built in a remote location to reflect the Cistercian belief in shunning the corruption of society, ironically corruption in which the Catholic church of the time, of which the monastery was a part, played a huge role. Maybe slightly because of this inherent corruption, but mainly because of Henry VIII’s greed, narcissism and insistence on having his own way, the abbey was sacked as part of the dissolution of the monasteries. And rather than gradually falling into disrepair like many buildings, it was deliberately reduced to the ruin it is today to feed the whims of the king.

Then there is the poetic side: Turner’s lovely rendition of the abbey; Wordsworth’s best poem was written about, and in, this place and sitting by the Wye now, reading the poem, I still see ‘theses steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion.’

Onward to Portmeirion which deserves - and will probably receive – a blog all to itself. Suffice to say that as we turned into the track leading out of Minfford into Portmeirion itself I commented: ‘Prepare to leave the real world behind’ – as anyone who has eve been there will vouch, that is how it feels. The place is a beautiful retreat, and as Jools Holland said after visiting it, the main question in his mind about the TV series ‘The Prisoner’, filmed there, is now why anyone would to leave such a place. The hotel and suite were everything we expected and more, service faultless. It left me realising that I have missed my true vocation in life – I was born to be part of the nobility, surrounded by beautiful architecture, décor and furniture, waited on hand and foot and able to do exactly as I want. Oh well, back to reality….

Our final stop off was at the tiny town of Newent in Gloucestershire, birthplace and resting place of Joe Meek, record producer and entrepreneur of the 1960’s. I navigated us to Newent in the mistaken and deluded belief that once we got there my husband knew where the grave was located. Ha! Some hope! After wandering aimlessly round a churchyard bearing stones dated no later than 1850, he decided we might be in the wrong place – Joe died in 1967.

So we searched the town – even a tiny town is big when you are looking for a gravestone! Finally hubby’s male pride gave way to the necessity of asking for directions. ‘You need to ask in the Tourist Information Centre’ we were told – we had followed signs for that already and not found where they were pointing to. After asking three people we actually found the tourist information centre masquerading as council offices, which were shut for lunch. We peered into the window and spied a worker who was probably incredibly well-informed as to the whereabouts of every grave in the town, busily ignoring us in favour of his packed lunch. Hubby tinkered half-heartedly with the touchscreen information computer in the window but this yielded nothing further than there were over 300 sites of interest locally – we hadn’t the time to go through them all only to find that inexplicably Joe Meek’s grave wasn’t considered of interest.

Hubby then tried local shops – only to find that the only person employed on the high street who was actually a local was so deaf that she tried to show him the way to Joan someone’s grave… Finally we accosted a poor woman at her front door who – with the rider that she wasn’t a local (does anyone born in Newent still actually live there?) volunteered the most helpful information so far – that there is a cemetery the other side of the town. Following her directions we reached it only for hubby to go through the aimless wandering ritual again. On seeking advice from the cemetery lodge we finally reached our goal. I hope Joe, wherever he may be, was looking down on us with a mixture of appreciation for our devotion and amusement at our folly.