Mundabor on Kung

Mundabor has a characteristically vigorous post today on the heretic Kung.


I agree with him that Kung should have been excommunicated long ago.

Left-footer's Apologies to Any Remaining Readers for his Lack of Diligence

Don't call me "lazy b*gg*r"! 
Please eschew such liberties!
Don't think me an off-shrugger
Of responsibilities.

Like you, I have to work, eat, sleep, 
And go to Church. I flog
My mulish brain half dead to keep
The wolf from the door. I blog

When sleep's a no-go. Then, enraged,
I pound the surly keys.
Insomnia gets my brain engaged.
And writing's just a breeze.

But sleep comes easy to the just
And I am just too tired.
Vital to work to earn my crust.
I'll be back* - when I'm retired!


(*On a daily basis, I hope, in about a month.)

Intellectual ancestors part I

I remember reading in the Times some twenty years or so ago, a letter from a man who, in his youth in the 1920s, had met a woman in her nineties, whose first husband's first wife's first husband had been a friend of Oliver Cromwell. The long time scale was the result of very young people marrying very old people for dynastic reasons.

I forget the names and details, but if anyone can supply them, I shall be very grateful. It would have been very interesting to meet her and learn what she had learned about Cromwell from her husband. Also interesting is the idea of being five removes from meeting Oliver Cromwell.

There is I am sure something to be learned from everyone we meet.

I think it was Robert Graves who told the story of being patted on the head when still a baby by another poet (Swinburne, I think) who had been similarly honoured by Wordsworth. Graves's sister was our family doctor in the 1950s, so I can claim (as who, perhaps, cannot?) a physical connection with Wordsworth, a poet whom I do not much like.

While injecting me in the backside with anti-typhoid vaccine in 1963, she was anxious that I should think well of her brother.

"People think he's very pseudo," she said, "but he's really quite sincere."

I attended Graves's lectures when he was Oxford Professor of Poetry. He gave all of them in one term, not the usual three years, as he lived in Majorca and found travel irksome. They amounted to a sustained hatchet job on Virgil, even quoting a letter Graves claimed Virgil had written proving that he liked boys and fat women. His unjustified contempt for the Roman epicist drove me to read Homer, a far greater poet.

In 1962 I was at a dinner of the XX Club at New College, which was started by F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, whom Chesterton excoriated in one of his poems, Antichrist, or the reunion of Christendom. The two guests of honour were A. P. Herbert, who gave a witty and urbane speech, and Sir William Hayter, former H.M. Ambassador to the USSR in the 1950s. Hayter had, of course, known Krushchev, who had known Stalin, who had known Lenin.

Herbert was dressed in an old faded greenish dinner jacket, bought probably fifty or more years earlier or even inherited from his father. He recounted a slightly ribald but very funny exchange between Churchill and Bevin in the House of Commons urinals, which he heard while serving as the last M.P for Oxford University. Hayter described him as "very Edwardian".


I also met, by chance at an Oxford party, an oldish lady who introduced herself as Stella Aldwinckle, told me that her dog was a real Christian, and that she ran a riding school where she taught Christian Horsemanship, which concept she energetically and very convincingly described to me. I listened politely, but inwardly dismisssed her as a crackpot. Only ten years ago, via the internet, did I discover that she was a regular correspondent of Iris Murdoch, and was the founder of the Oxford Socratic Club where C. S. Lewis debated with Elisabeth Anscombe, who, said Lewis, "obliterated me as an apologist." Not a good idea too hastily to dismiss people with strange ideas as crackpots.

In the Wiltshire village where I was living ten years ago I met a man then in his seventies, who as a boy of fourteen working in a local big house, the home of I forget which lord, had before the war served dinner to Goering, or Goebbels, or Himmler, or Ribbentrop. Sadly I don't remember. Asked what he remembered of the German, he replied, "Not much. He seemed quite pleasant."

Tennyson wrote, "I am a part of all that I have met" and he might equally truthfully have written that all that he had met were a part of him.

Most of my family are dead and of my my more distant ancestors I know little more than names and old photographs, but rather more of my spiritual and intellectual ancestors, of whom many have been dead for centuries.


One, not so long dead, was a Mrs Wain, our neighbour in Welling, Kent. Emigrating to Canada, she gave me, a small boy, her hefty collection of shellac 78 rpm gramophone records, and so I spent hours listening to Italian opera, music hall, popular songs from the 1930s and 1940s, and funny monologues by Stanley Holloway. From her casual gift I learned to love music, and firmly believe that music is the greatest of the arts.









To be continued

Marking Time

My admiration for the Polish spirit increases daily. Today my students, aged 19-20, were in school early before sitting their English Matura (akin to 'A' Level). They were all smiling and positive, even the least confident, and students from the first class were hugging them and wishing them well. Nothing seems seriously to worry them. We had prayers, and the Priest blessed them.


The spirit of the ułan, the cavalryman (or woman), still lives. As a Pole explained, "The young ułan gets on his horse, bids goodbye to his mother, father, and girlfriend, and says to himself, 'I am off to kill Germans, Turks, whatever. I don't know what will happen, but God does.'"


While I was wishing them well, a colleague told me a beautiful story about his grandfather, a partisan in the last war, who was captured by the Germans and about to be shot. When asked if he had any last words, he replied, "Yes! I bequeath my dupa (arse) to the third reich, and my soul to Almighty God." 


A true ułan, and the Germans, unusually, spared his life.

Pilgrimage to Vilnius, Lithuania

You get on a bus in Elbląg at 9 o'clock in the evening, and travel for 11 hours without a break through north-eastern Poland, to arrive at the Vilnius bus-station at 7 in the morning.


The bus is old, Russian, cramped, packed, and without seat belts, equipped with a malodorous lavatory, and never reaches a speed above the legal maximum of 54 miles per hour. There are fewer seats than tickets sold, so one young man has to travel for 11 hours in the windowless sleeping compartment, intended for the driver, which is below the passengers. 


 Yet every year about half a million Poles travel, as I did last weekend as a pseudo-Pole, on a pilgrimage to the Church of Our Lady at the Gate of Dawn (Ostra Brama) in Vilnius, Lithuania. Vilnius was originally in Poland, and the Church is very Polish, and the focus of many pilgrimages.


 The Gate itself is a beautiful piece of Baroque, and the painting of the Blessed Virgin can just be made out below, seen through the window over the arch:

Our Lady of the gate of dawn in detail (photo - Wikipedia):

Also on the pilgrims' list are the Polish cemetary where the dead of the Polish-Soviet War are buried:

The heart of General Piłsudski is also buried there:

A better picture. The incomplete lines at the bottom of the picture are from Juliusz Słowacki (1809-1849) who lived in Vilnius. I am trying to find the complete poem.

The Cathedral of Ss. Peter and Paul is very beautiful:

It has a remarkable hanging metal sculpture of the Barque of Saint Peter:

There are many more holy places to visit and pray at. 

The pilgrimage is well worth the horrible journey.