Living Wittily

The King's Speech and why I'm going to see it again

I have a friend who is a speech therapist. But though helping others speak is her job, she is much more than a speech coach. She sees her work as a vocation that involves befriending, encouraging and accompanying each of those she deals with. Many speech impediments are physiological and are helped by exercises, behaviour modification and various breathing techniques. Some are caused by trauma, psycholohgical barriers and other emotional difficulties that affect the confidence, spontaneity and social freedom to speak. But whatever the causes, the distress and personal cost of being unable to speak clearly or fluently can be all but unbearable.

Last year we were sharing in a meeting and she told the story of a child who was unable at pre-school stage to identify and make the sound of the five vowels, let alone construct and articulate words, phrases, sentences. Five years on the girl now well into primary education was able to say in class, equilateral triangle! There is something profoundly humane about a life's work helping others speak. Speech is a primary form of social exchange, of relational building, of personal expression. And those who enable and empower others to speak contribute a precious gift to people like that child, and equally provide one of the most valuable services within our education and health services.

Last night we went to see The King's Speech. Plenty of reviews are available about how good this film is. Most of them are not overstating the achievement of Colin Firth in his portrayal of a proud, self-conscious but decent man who is the son of a King, and who stammers.The speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush is equally convincing. relying on the experience of helping traumatised soldiers returning home and rendered incapable of speech by what they experienced. There are powerful protective walls in our consciousness that hold back what cannot be spoken. Rush brilliantly portrays a compassionate and good man.

I will go and see it again while it's still in the cinema. As a study in friendship across the chasm of social differences; as an essay on the human voice as an instrument of personal identity and social relations; as a demonstration, through close-up camera, of the human face as the window to that place from which our deepest emotions sustain or wound us; and as a portrayal of that longing to be free of what constrains and limits us that is common to every one of us honest enough to face our imperfections and struggles - as all of these and more, I think the film is a masterpiece. There were moments when it wasn't clear whether my tears were of laughter or sadness, and the truth is there are scenes that are comi-tragic and which encapsulate how hilarity and burden intermingle in the life we all have to live.

The Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds

Driving along Hutcheon Street in Aberdeen, Sheila looked up and saw a carved crest on a building and we spent the time sitting at the lights trying to decipher it. Eventually we got it between us. The Loyal order of Ancient Shepherds. Never heard of it. So like a good research student I made a note to google it. Here's what I found

"Shepherds Friendly started life as a sickness and benefits society, Ashton Unity, which was formed in Ashton under Lyne, Lancashire on Christmas Day in 1826. It was later renamed as the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds, "loyal" referring to the Crown and "shepherds" to the Nativity of Jesus. Its objects were "to relieve the sick, bury the dead, and assist each other in all cases of unavoidable distress, so far as in our power lies, and for the promotion of peace and goodwill towards the human race".

Now what interests me is the mission statement as expressed with the quotes at the end there. As a description of how a humane society looks out for each other it isn't bad, and it was written prior to the Victorian age. The last couple of clauses would be good filters for current Government policies and cuts and excuses and evasions and all other manner of rationalised inhumanity in the name of economics and the new God on the block who has to be served and to whom sacrifice is to be made, Deo Deficit!

Offside rules, the human eye, and the human brain - oh and the Sky Sports gender bias controversy

Yesterday the big furore over the Sky Sports sacking of Andy Gray, and the resignation of Richard Keys, filled the back pages of the papers. Apart from the unpleasant suggestiveness of some comments off screen, which were then broadcast, there seems to me to be more than adequate grounds for sacking them both on the grounds of sheer gender prejudice. And alleviation or mitigation on the excuse that this was merely dressing room banter is beside the point and both ethically and culturally puerile.

But also yesterday, a research project Vrije University shows that some decisions are impossible for the human eye to call. It requires the assistant referee to be looking at two different places at exactly the same time. So a good assistant referee is likely to get 90% of the decisions right and 10% wrong. Male or female. And also, the female assistant referee in question did indeed get the crucial decision right, demonstrated conclusively by technology which she didn't have available to her.

Now would the ex Sky pundits say that men would get the 90% right but women less than that? Or are men so omnisciently endowed and so intellectually quicksilver that they could improve on the 90%? And if men are so technically and physiologically gifted of eye and brain, particularly brain, why would male pundits fall for such a spurious and prejudiced viewpoint in the first place. Don't they SEE their own prejudice? Or are they unable to interpret the rules of the game we call human life, community and respect for others?

The photo is of the assistant referee whose skill, athleticism and knowledge of the gaem, got her in the right place, at the right time and making the right judgement.

Vermeer in the House of Martha and Mary

This Vermeer painting of Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary is on show at the National Galleries of Scotland.

I'm going to see it one of these days when I can find time to look, and appreciate that detailed visual exegesis through canvas, pigment and brush.

And when I've seen it and thought about it, I'll write about it.

Job Centre Plus taking the Bible literally - " To those who have not, even what they have will be taken away..."

Let's start with a Fibonacci - you know the drill now, a spiralled increase of syllables for each line so that each line contains the sum of the syllables in the two previous lines. Simple. Well simpler than what I'm about to try and explain further down! Anyway it goes like this  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 - and 55 if your are feeling silly, or have a lots to say. This time I've a lot to say!!

Job Centre Plus Fibonacci

Shout!

Rage!

Outrage!

Shout outrage!!

Job Centre Plus calls!!!

Job seekers, premium numbers.

People on benefits, made to phone 0845?

Job Centre Plus, a public sector service, diverts enquiries to premium charge lines!

Enquiries by phone about a letter intimating withdrawal of benefits cost a job seeker more than seven pounds to resolve.

Unemployed and looking for work; job seeker on minimum allowance; human being determined to maintain dignity; good citizen complying with written instructions; and costs them an eighth of their weekly income!

.......

Now the next line should be 89 syllables. And that would be really, really, silly. But since I'm trying to write coherently about a policy that makes coherence an emotional, intellectual and moral challenge, I'm going to try to write an 89 syllable one sentence essay entitled,

"The 0845 Job Centre Plus Scandal"

By definition people on benefits are low income,  and in a recession there are few jobs and more and more people looking for them, and those recently made redundant, or the long-term unemployed, whether young or old, male or female, are anxious to get a chance in life, so why does Job Centre Plus claw back benefits from those enquiring by phone about jobs? Scandalous!

.....

Only when it becomes personal do we discover the hidden injustices others have to put up with, day in and day out. Someone close to me took the £7 hit for phoning, as requested, to clarify the benefits position, and phoning, as advised, about job possibilities. I did a quick internet search and came up immediately with exchanges about the 0845 Job Centre Plus racket. You can start by looking here. I'm intending to follow this up with a letter to the local MP, and to the Minister at the DWP - that would be Iain Duncan Smith who did some research while in opposition into the difficulties faced by people on the lower ends of the income scale, if I recall..... Wonder if he remembers. Of course this nonsense pre-dated the present Government - but they haven't moved to change it either.

Journey by moonlight, ambushed by beauty

The drive to Aberdeen from Glasgow was a journey of two halves, or a journey of two worlds. Glasgow to Dunblane was frozen fog, a thick grey blanket of low visibility .

Beyond Dunblane the sky cleared and just about Gleneagles the full moon appeared above the hill line. Pale orange, a luminous disk suspended like a chinese lantern over Perhshire hills, creating the impossible illusion of glowing warmth on a frosty night.

Then passing Forfar the same moon reflected on the loch that is home to hundreds of waterfowl, as if an artist with a coarse hair brush had painted the surface the colour of the moon with one stroke - and decided to leave it at that.

By the time I got to Laurenckirk the magical moments were beginning to come with alarming and delight filling frequency. The moon still low over the Mearns, I looked at the new windfarm and at just the right moment the gigantic three blades were framed against the now bright cream moon. And for a brief epiphany it was the CND sign captured by heaven and earth, the moon and the mill co-operating in the sign of peace.

Finally, crossing the River Dee at Maryculter, the entire river seemed to be illumined by a thousand ripples of pale cream light, and against the background of silhouetted Scotch Pines through which the moonlight streamed with carefully controlled extravagance.

There's an enchantment that I guess is embedded in our spirits when we see such beauty, and we feel and know deep down the reverberations of our own createdness, the answering upreach of our own longing. A journey like that can change an entire perspective on life, or at least remind us that to enjoy and grow through the life we have, a first necessity is open eyed wonder at the gratuitous loveliness of the world. Tonight I gazed at the varied canvases of a night sky, painted from the palette of the One in whom is truth, beauty and goodness. 

The Cross in Our Context - an eye-opener for sleepy Christians!

Here's why I think Douglas John Hall is one of the most challenging theologians around. His book The Cross in Our Context, is a distillation of his three volume systematic theology. It is a passionate and compelling book, learned without being technically forbidding, and written as a forthright challenge to the church to stop lamenting the loss of Christendom and embrace again the call of God to be a community of the Cross. What that means is explored by a theologian who has spent decades teaching a theology that critiques power, empire and cultural conformity to consumerism. Here's his primary point:

If you claim to be a disciple of the crucified one you must expect to participate in his sufferings; if you preach a theology of the cross, you will have to become a communityof the cross. Anything else would represent a kind of hypocrisy. A purely doctrinal or theoretical theology of the cross is a contradiction. This theology is only authentic - only "for real" - insofar as it gives birth to a community that suffers with Christ in the world. Nowhere does Christendom difference from the New testament church show up more glaringly than in the fact that the birth of Christendom in the fourth Century C.E. brought about a species of Christianity that with rare exceptions could be practiced without any threat or hint of its being a process of identification with the one who was "despised and rejected". (pages 140-1)

Further comment superfluous.

37 years on, Small is [still] Beautiful

"Call a thing immoral or ugly,

soul destroying or a degradation of man,

a peril to the peace of the world

or to the wellbeing of future generations;

as long as you have not shown it to be 'uneconomic'

you have not really questioned its right to exist,

grow, and prosper."

That was E F Schumacher in 1973, in one of the great tracts of the 20th Century. Small is Beautiful fell like a benediction on a planet slowly awakening to the dangers of greed, extravagance, exploitation, over-fishing, acid rain, deforestation, habitat destruction, over-consumption and the long term toxicity of the myth of sustainable growth. But a benediction often unheard, and as often unwanted and unwelcome. And the consequences are piling up decade after decade. In the realm of religious economics, the word 'uneconomic' is the definition of sin, and economic growth the terminology of sanctity. The economy is divinely ordered and the quest for economic production, and market growth equates to the search for the good life. And the irony is that our pursuit of economic growth is ruining life, suffocating life, extinguishing, eliminating, crowding out, diminishing, devaluing and finally buying and selling the means of life in a crazy festival of waste. Read Schumacher again  - and ask what is beautiful, moral, peaceful and future preserving about the economic policies of the developed, and yes the rapidly developing world.

And pray, "Lord have mercy".

How to save your local library

I love this!

Go see!!

And smile!!!

Bibliophiles of the world unite!!!!

Been having a down day till I saw this.

 

Being careful with words - is that part of the radical Gospel too?

All depends how you say it.

If a local councillor expresses mild concern at the inconvenience of temporary roadworks, the headline reads " Councillor slams rogue firms amid ongoing traffic chaos". Made that up.

If a 24 year old high profile footballer for whom English is a second language comes to Manchester City and says the majority of manchester people support City, but admits he doesn't know much about Manchester, the headline reads. "Dzeco lays into United". "Star's first job to anger United". Not made up.

The devaluation of words, the addiction to verbal hostility, the habit of rhetorical over-exaggeration, - the manufacture of news by inflating the commonplace - all of them signs of a decadent discourse. By the way, exaggeration should suffice - over-exaggeration should mean the effect is dissipated by dawning incredulity - fatal to all propaganda!

Wonder how careful Christians are in the way we talk - Jesus' warning that we would have to give an account of every word we speak is another of those sayings sometimes reduced to manageability by saying it is recognised as Middle Eastern rhetoric, not literally meant. But suppose that's just the rationalising accommodation of Western minds trying to tame the wild words and moral demands of the Kingdom of God, in order to justify our own verbal proclivities? If I do have to explain every word I speak to One whose recall is entirely accurate and whose surveillance of heart, mind and voice is more comprehensive than any technology we can invent and install, I've had it. Or at least, I will have to do what in the end we all have to do - ask for mercy. But in the meantime - repent, and try harder to heed my words.