A Week in the Life: Sunday

For this week only, I thought I would try returning to the idea behind the blogs from the early 1990s. Blogs (or web logs) were initially used as a type of online diary - or journal, to use the seemingly favoured American term - in which details of people's personal lives were recorded. Coupling this with the fact I always find myself desperately searching for time to do things, I thought I would try to find out where my time went by cataloguing this week a little more carefully.

Up at 8.00am, despite not being needed at the morning service at the Cathedral today, and spend an hour drinking tea, tidying the kitchen, sorting the washing, and doing a couple of administrative tasks on the computer.

By 9.00am, my posthuman essay is on the screen as I once again try to find the details of the creation of Talos in Greek mythology. Dinello's book Technophobia! tells me it is in Homer's Iliad, but I can find no reference in any online translation. I message a couple of Classics teachers on Facebook asking for help.

At 9.45am, I give up (again) on Talos, shower, and then pop to the supermarket to get the weekly staples. Back by 10.30am and find a very helpful reply on Facebook which gives me a link to a website which unfortunately appears to be down today. Out of frustration, I also post a status update asking for help from anyone.

Receive a phone call at 10.45am from my wife asking me to pick her up as she stayed in the Cathedral Close last night to avoid having to carry her costume and bits and pieces up the road while trying to maintain her balance in the snow, after the charity performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe.

Back to the essay by 11.15am and manage to piece together bits and pieces from the suggestions offered on Facebook and some original texts: none of which is anything to do with the Iliad.

A lunch break of coffee and croissants at 12.15pm and then return to the essay at about 1.00pm. Tidy up and finish the section about Talos and rue the fact that some three hundred words have taken all morning to put together as a result of the poorly referenced comments in the original book I was using.

Having finished the section, I turn to start writing today's blog as I think it will be easier to try and do it in small chunks rather than a mammoth task before bed. 1.30pm and the next short section of the essay on Frankenstein's monster beckons.

At 2.50pm it is time to head to the Cathedral for a short rehearsal followed by Evensong at 3.30pm.

Home at just after 4.30pm, cup of tea and try to sort out lessons for Tuesday as I had forgotten that tomorrow evening will be taken up with a Year 9 Options Evening until 9.00pm at school.

Lessons for Tuesday and some school administration bits and pieces completed by 5.30pm. Return to the posthuman essay to clarify how to reference ancient Greek texts, and revisit and extend earlier notes on Frankenstein.

Finish the first draft of the Frankenstein section and synced my USB drive for school tomorrow by 6.50pm, and hope that my wife has also finished preparing lessons for tomorrow so that we can spend the evening together over food and catching up on a couple of hours' of television that is still waiting from mid-January.

Bed finally calls at 10.20pm.

Ancient and Modern

In what is an era of rapid change in so many areas of our lives, I am a great believer in respecting tradition and upholding customs (even if they are, at times, outmoded) as I feel it is important that identities and histories are not lost in the name of progress. Nevertheless, when people do make changes, as long as they are justified, explained and attempt to retain the spirit of the original concept, I endeavour to accept them without complaint and view them as the next stage of development in what are often long established practices. I like to think I am not so arrogant as to insist that people, societies and nations remain static.

However, in the course of this week I was faced with a tradition being up-held which frustrated me. The Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust is inviting applications for two new trustees as a result of two retirements. According to the publicity, the Trust makes charitable grants to individuals aged under 25 to further their education and to local organisations for more general purposes and, having been resident in Lichfield for more than five years and thereby fulfilling the stated requirements of the post, feeling that this might be a good opportunity to get more involved in the local community I decided to apply.

I already knew that the Trust had been founded in January 1545 to provide water for Lichfield and it was an organisation I had encountered while researching the history of the Cathedral’s Choral Foundation as records of Chapter’s nineteenth century meetings discussing the management of all aspects of Cathedral life include the provision of water for individual houses in The Close.

The fact that it is such a historical organisation had an inherent appeal, and the four meetings a year seemed manageable; the only question to which I did not know the answer was when the meetings were held.

I contacted a representative of the Trust to answer this question and was given the dates. Apparently, the meetings in March, June and September are always held on Wednesdays and December’s meeting is held on a Tuesday in keeping with an ancient tradition. Quaint, but not unmanageable. However, the meetings are always held at 3.30pm and, having been that way throughout living memory, I was brightly and confidently told ‘that’s not likely to change any time soon’.

Suddenly, a tradition was being upheld but for what purpose? By implication, the applicants and trustees must, most likely, either be retired or unemployed. The trustees of a charity making donations to help young people are to be distanced from their beneficiaries: I had felt that, as a teacher, one of the strengths of my application would be my work with young people.

I bit my tongue merely saying that, being a teacher, there was clearly no point in applying – which was duly agreed with – and I hung up. I struggled mentally for a few minutes with the question of tradition and rationality and decided that if people are going to be so protective of traditions which, when considered in the larger scheme of things, appear risible there would be no point in questioning it.

As I sighed to myself, I was left with my penchant for tradition tarnished and a sense of disappointment that, even in our era of rapid change, there are still some people who seem too stubborn to acknowledge it.

‘I am wiser than the aged’

I have spent what feels like much of the weekend as part of Lichfield Cathedral’s fund-raising ‘Psalmathon’ which involved the five choirs associated with the Cathedral singing all 150 psalms between Friday and Saturday evenings.

Apart from confirming that any event with the suffix ‘-athon’ is nothing but exhausting, it has introduced me to something new in a familiar setting. Even as a cathedral musician for the past 26 years, I only know about half of the book of psalms: the psalms assigned to each day’s evening worship are old friends, but the morning psalms are the newcomer that everyone regards warily. Discovering the unfamiliar in a familiar context has, for the second time in the past year, caused me to reflect on the impact of psalms on my life.

As a boy chorister, the daily round of psalm singing was part of the job and the strange language and ideas were simply accepted. While the gamut of emotions and events portrayed in the psalms is difficult for a pre-teen to grasp, details did stick out: who were Oreb, Zeb, Zeba and Salmana that princes should aspire to be like? What did God do to the Madianites, Sisera and Jabin at the brook of Kison? Why did the Philistines join Gebal, Ammon, Amalek and Assur at Tyre to help the children of Lot? And all these are just from psalm 83. Many of the names of the people and places are fantastical and would not sound out of place in the worlds of JRR Tolkien or JK Rowling; indeed, the same psalm also includes the Edomites, Ismaelites, Moabites and Hagarenes.

 

As well as providing a rich seam of people and places there is also the inevitable poetry of the psalms. As an adult this is more apparent, but there are images I remember from childhood readings and psalm 55 is one of my clearest memories:

The words of his mouth were softer than butter, having war in his heart:
His words were smoother than oil, and yet be they very swords. 

Even as a youngster, the dichotomy between what one says and does was familiar to me and the simple metaphors make a clear image. Although I can now identify and comment on the poetic devices in the texts, I was certainly aware of some of the meanings and imagery when I was younger.

Having sung psalms on a daily basis, I have never shirked away from attempting to read English texts. My students shy away from Shakespeare because the language is ‘difficult’ – some even object to the ‘thee’s, ‘thou’s and words ending in ‘-eth’ – but, having been brought up with the words of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, these have always sat comfortably with me.

There is an absolute maximum of seven hundred child choristers in England in any academic year. Through their singing of the psalms they are – unwittingly, like me – having worlds opened up to them to which many children just do not have access. The regular repetition of poetry, some dating back three thousand years, must influence the linguistic development (and possibly even subconscious ability to appreciate poetry) positively and the psalms could, perhaps, in their own small way be admired as a rare, but precious, gem in the crown of children’s literature.