Tag: Cold Comfort Farm

I really should stop writing about Cornwall.

The tin tabernacle in Cadgwith

Another wet day in Cornwall – in Camborne they’ve exceeded the biblical flood by exceeding 40 consecutive days of rain. It hasn’t been a huge problem for us down at the southernmost tip except for the lanes – there’s only one really main road and the rest are pretty much lanes anyway and they are running with water; some right across and others at both edges but all the puddles are sheltering murderous suspension wrecking potholes. If anyone’s got a spare billion pounds we could do with some of it down here.

Anyway, the upshot of the long days confined to our rented cottage on the top of a cliff is that Madame has been doing a lot of internet surfing, and today she typed in my name into Gemini and discovered that I am the landlord of a pub in Helston whose wife was once a police dog-handler but who has sadly died. In fact, according to the infallible AI, several pubs in the neighbourhood are claiming that I am their landlord – which prompted me to ask her whether it would be OK to pop down to the Five Pilchards to see my virtual wife. Madame was not amused. Much as I love Google Gemini, it makes more false connections than a village gossip, and bigamy is still a crime.

Sadly spring has not sprung nearly as much as we’d hoped so neither the plant hunting nor the moth trapping have taken up much of our time and among other things – like writing this blog – we’ve been binge watching the old DVD’s we brought down. John Schlesinger’s “Cold Comfort Farm” is one of the funniest films ever, and Ian McKellen’s sermon to the Quivering Brethren as Amos Starkadder is an act of sheer joy. I’ve even (naughtily) started sermons myself once or twice with the words “ye’re all damned”; not forgetting to grip the edge of the pulpit and stare at the congregation with sheer malevolence for fifteen seconds. But we also watched Alec Guinness’s superb performance as George Smiley in John Le Carré’s Karla trilogy. The two BBC series miss out the middle book. It was a treat, and an acting seminar, to watch Alec Guinness playing such a morally complex character. The very last words that Smiley speaks as Karla is led away, when someone says “George you’ve won” and he replies “I suppose I have” made me wish I could hug him. It was so brilliantly done; the way he managed to express the sadness and loss of winning his epic battle.

All that ambiguity sent me straight back to yesterday’s post with the thought that I’d missed an important aspect of flourishing even though I did say that it’s by no means a primrose path. When, back in the day, I talked to parents about christening, I would often find that they had an odd idea that we believed that babies are born bad and needed to be made good by baptism. Something about washing away sins had taken root in the collective understanding. Frankly I think that’s a horrible idea, but even horrible ideas deserve a bit of thought. I talked yesterday about cultivating virtuous habits – Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage; but I didn’t offer any idea of what the starting point might be. The idea that we’re born bad and need to be made good which I described as horrible would be one place (but totally wrong I think). On the other hand I’d find it difficult to say that we’re born perfect at the top of a greasy pole of corruption because that’s equally far fetched and nasty. So what about a working definition of what we might call the human condition which pitches us somewhere near the middle point that Aristotle was so keen for us to maintain. Then we say that we can move up or down the scale by way of good or bad habits.

Each of the four or perhaps fifteen virtues which can, in combination lead us towards flourishing and fulfilment have their counterparts which can lead us in the opposite direction; unhappiness and suffering. As an example I could mention affairs. We’re all much of a muchness in the sexual attraction stakes; many of us have primary commitments but that doesn’t stop us from meeting others that we find attractive. In a very long career of helping people through crises of their own making, one factor comes to the surface almost every time. We rarely get ourselves into trouble in one giant act of folly. We do it step by tiny step and then one day it’s too late. The same goes for any kind of addiction; food, alcohol, drugs, erotic fantasies, fraud, thieving, field botany or hoarding rubbish. Thankfully I’m not a counsellor so you needn’t worry that I’m about to offer advice but I’ll just quote a line from an ee cummings poem –

where’s too far said he

where you are said she

Notice also that I haven’t mentioned any divine punishments or rewards. That’s because I don’t believe in them. None of the purported torments of hell can measure up to the guilt and shame brought upon us by our own perversity, although there are many occasions when I wish that Danté’s circles of hell which included special places for bishops, princes, corrupt politicians and not forgetting people who didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Occasionally I really wish that could be true. But there are always some wicked people who seem to get away with it. On the other hand I’ve sat with some horrible people who – as they lay dying – seemed to be suffering terrible agonies of remorse. Too late!

Conversely I think that the idea we should punish ourselves and live shadow lives in order to achieve the extremely notional rewards of heaven is also wicked. The way we live our lives can’t or shouldn’t be reduced to the spreadsheets and calculus of rulebooks. Is there anything wrong with muddling along and trying very hard to learn from your mistakes?

Looking out to sea in a gale from Kynance Cove café towards Lizard point. Hot chocolate – heaven; rocks – hell.

This won’t buy the baby a new coat

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After quoting from Cold Comfort Farm a couple of days ago, I couldn’t resist reading it again for the umpteenth time and once again it made me laugh out loud  on almost every page. I mean it’s not as if it’s a piece of great literature, but it’s absolutely joyful  and it feels as if it was written in much the same way that Jack Kerouac is supposed to have  written “On the road” – in one long binge. I’ve read it so many times, now, that I’ve worn it out over and over and my latest copy – bought from an Oxfam shop – started life at 2/6 – that’s half a crown or twelve and a half pence in new money. While I was reading today the spine began to break once more so that’s something else I need to look out for.

But there’s more to it than just the comedy.  The book was written as a riposte to the Thomas Hardy school of literature. I’m a great fan of Hardy but you have to say the unremitting grimness of, say, Jude or Tess does make it something of an ordeal to read them – the grey wraiths of fate hang over them rather like an appointment for a colonoscopy….

But then I suddenly remembered my first ever sermon while I was training when one of the assessors said it was like being immersed in Thomas Hardy – which I didn’t take as a compliment. A rather kinder mentor said gently that it would be best if I didn’t try to say everything that was on my mind at once. Being a Hardy fan is not unlike being an old fashioned Marxist – you know something terrible is going to happen but you just don’t know when: which is precisely why my mind travelled to Amos Starkadder’s sermon after seeing the photographs in Cardiff last week. I needed something to laugh at amid the suffocating thought that something pretty awful is happening to us all.

Reading the whole novel again brought other rewards as well. Madame, for instance, reminded me that it was one of my father’s favourite books – a fact which I’d completely forgotten, and which prompted me to remember that I had seen him laughing until the tears ran down his face and he fell to coughing furiously.  It was a great memory for displacing some of the more gloomy ones as he grew old.

Last night the south westerly wind was in one of those strange moods where it simply blew hard and steadily, without variation, finding the tiniest cracks in the window frames and causing a continuous soughing noise.  We woke up this morning to rain, again the uncommon sound of a heavy and continuous shower, blitzing through the early sunlight as the sun rose over the roofs of the buildings opposite with a fine mist rising up in the intense brightness. All very Hardy-esque I thought. They call it synchronicity when events and thoughts seem to coincide. It happens a lot at the Potwell Inn.  The other memory to bubble up from the silt was the phrase spoken by (I think) Mrs Beetle – “This won’t buy the baby a new coat” – one of my mother’s frequent expressions.

Yesterday I glimpsed a newspaper headline suggesting that the government had decided to treat Extinction Rebellion activists as potential terrorists.  I’m not much of an activist but it amuses me to think that at my ripe old age I’m finally being taken seriously as a threat to the way we do things so badly round here. Good thing too, we need to shake things up a bit if we’re going to survive – this woebegotten bobbery pack of a government can stick their fingers in their ears and shout “lah lah lah” as much as they like but it hasn’t worked in Australia and it can’t work here.