Still Calculating After All These Years

 I found this calculator by accident, buried in a drawer I hadn’t properly sorted for years. It was one of the small promotional units I used to give customers in the mid 1990s — slim, black, with a neat gold strip and my business details printed across the top. I hadn’t seen it in decades. It felt like the sort of object that would have quietly died sometime around the millennium.

It hadn’t. Of course, when I pressed the power button, nothing happened. The battery was long gone, so I looked out a replacement. After a short detective session by the young man in the hardware shop, who took genuine pride in identifying the correct button cell, I tracked one down. He approached the problem with the earnest concentration of someone decoding a minor mystery. Button cells have their own taxonomy — LR1130, AG10, SR1130 ... — a bewildering equivalence chart in front of him. He worked it out, eventually. A small, obsolete puzzle from one era to another, solved with patience and curiosity.

I got back home, inserted the new battery and typed in a random number, 3663, simply to confirm it was alive. 

There was something pleasingly matter‑of‑fact about the whole experience. No sentimentality, just the recognition that this small, inexpensive device had endured. It was designed to be functional, not memorable, yet here it was: still capable of doing exactly what it was made to do.

These calculators were never grand gestures. They were practical giveaways, chosen because they were useful, portable, and unlikely to be thrown away immediately. Seeing one again reminded me how straightforward that logic was. A customer could actually use it. It didn’t pretend to be anything more.

Now, decades later, its survival feels almost like a quiet joke — a reminder that some technologies persist  because they are simple, durable, and unbothered by the passage of time. It is a small object, but it has earned its place as a curiosity: and  it still works.

And, as I’ve since discovered, these little calculators  turn up on eBay and similar sites, sold as retro novelties. I won’t be going on a world cruise on the proceeds of mine, but it’s oddly satisfying to know it has entered the ranks of collectible curiosities.

Poets, Statues, and the Stories We Tell: On the Volatility of Memory

 “I am a lantern— My head a moon of Japanese paper.” — Sylvia Plath ,'Fever 103'

In those early months of 2020, in those COVID times when the world often shrank to the size of a laptop screen and friendship was conducted in little squares on Zoom, I was part of a small college group which found itself talking about everything and anything literary or culturally. 

Someone would recommend a documentary; someone else would watch it that evening; someone would suggest a poem; or a novel; someone would suggest a video of a dance performance; by the next call after each and any of these ideas, we were all deep into it.

On one occasion the subject of Sylvia Plath came up, with a reading of Ted Hughes’ ‘Night Ride on Ariel’. I made some notes afterwards:

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Ted Hughes' Night Ride on Ariel (Jun 16th 2020)

I suppose as one who has looked into the fortunes of some famously troubled women in my time ( Vivienne Eliot, Sophie Brzeska, Judee Sill, even Ida Nettleship back in the day) I should also have looked more deeply into the life of Sylvia Plath, and especially through her poetry. I have no idea why I have only scraped the surface of who she was. I know the broad outline of her story of course, and the "Monday" - 11 Feb 1963 (harshest of winters, not a great time to be in meteorological desperation). I even spent time downloading and listening and keeping lots of her poems, read by her, at the time I discovered I had a new sister.

So I am miles behind anyone who knows her story fully and has thought about it through the prism of The Birthday Letters. I suppose when the book was published I baulked at the furore it seemed to engender. Even much later, I believe, people were hacking off the name on Ted Hughes' memorial in Dartmoor sometime after his death. ( More memorial desecration....).

I do know about her horse Ariel. And I think I get the point of her poem, which Hughes' references in his. Her fantasy ride  into the  creative Sun finds in Hughes' counterpoint response poem, a ride into the everlasting night. That is the simple basic framework isn't it? The rest would take reams of words! Anyone up for that?

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Later, one of the group sent this message: “You may already have seen this, but we watched an excellent documentary about Ted Hughes on iPlayer…” And so we watched it — Hughes’s face in still photographs, Plath’s voice in recordings, the long shadow of their marriage, the tragedies that followed. 

I remember a mental double-take  when Frieda Hughes said, almost offhandedly, that her father had been “vulnerable to women.” I joked in reply: ‘Did I hear the words “Ted was vulnerable to women?”Now there is a title for a thesis. "Was Ted Hughes vulnerable to women? - Discuss". But I probably won’t'. But beneath the humour was something else: a reminder of the shifting perspectives of individuals in any life story.

It was Simon Armitage’s point in the documentary — that biography matters as one way of entering the imaginative world of the poet. Eliot scholarship, for example, for all Eliot’s protests, has moved in the same direction. 

And so the documentary, and our conversation about it, was helpful. Amongst all else we were reminded of Plath’s poem 'Ariel' and how it describes an uncontrolled horseback ride that becomes a symbol for emotional release and personal change.

Hughes’s answer is a ride into the everlasting night — two visions of the same moment. A shared life split into incompatible narratives. A trail of desperation and tragedy, as one of our group put it, left in Hughes’s wake.

And then the further sadnesses: Frieda's brother Nicholas Hughes was a  renowned expert in stream ecology and behaviour of species like trout and salmon.Frieda remembered him with affection and his achievements with pride. His life ended early and in shadow, a fact unmentioned in the programme.  

It was a little later that I realised how closely the perspectives of the documentary mirrored aspects of other conversations we were having at the that time — about Churchill, about Edward Colston, about the toppling of statues. Our conversations seemed to converge on the selectivity and the volatility of memory. 

And so, in those few days, I found myself checking Colston’s Wikipedia page almost daily. On 17 June 2020, at 10:49, a new line appeared: that his philanthropy had been directed only toward causes aligned with his political and religious views. The moderators were busy; the footnotes bristled with warnings — ‘unreliable source’, ‘failed verification’. A few days earlier, none of this had been there. Here were scrambled attempts to fix the meaning of a man whose legacy was built on both charity and the slave trade.

I wrote these notes:

                                                     -------------------------------------    

Edward Colston (Jun 17th 2020)

I looked up Colston a few days ago on  various sources including Wikipedia. I am still looking forward to learning more about the 1895 debate about the raising of a statue to him in his native Bristol, over 170 years after his death. But meantime I see that the latest update to the Edward Colston Wikipedia entry was made ( as I write this  June 17 2020) today at 10.49. Something new is this:

"He was promoted as a local benefactor in his native city of Bristol[1][unreliable source] in part due to having donated money to charities which supported people aligned with his political and religious views.[1][unreliable source][2][failed verification][3]:7-10"

Thus the Wikipedia moderators are kept busy. Someone is saying that Colston's philanthropy was directed only to causes dear to him. Is this true? Only a few days ago, the entry made no such differentiation about his philanthropy. One can go slightly barmy if we follow these things too closely.

                                                    ------------------------------------

Yet the volatility of that Wikipedia page felt familiar. It echoed the instability I felt in the Plath–Hughes story: the way narratives yield to pressure, the way memory shifts when the present demands a new accounting of the past. Literary biography, civic controversy — both revealed how fragile our stories become when they are forced into the light. 

The pandemic seemed to magnify this effect. It stripped away the illusion of normality, and so also of memory . Everything was provisional, subject to revision, open to reinterpretation.

And so, looking back, I was mindful in those days, how we were being drawn repeatedly to contested figures — people whose lives resist simple moral categorisation, whose stories have been misread, weaponised, or oversimplified. A troubled woman whose voice has been distorted. A poet whose memorial was defaced. A philanthropist whose statue was toppled.  Churchill, whose legacy was being re-examined in the heat of public protest.

 Each of them became, in their own way, a site of struggle: between competing narratives, competing moral frameworks, competing visions of what the past should mean.

And perhaps that is why those fragments from 2020 still feel connected, despite their differences. They belong to a moment when the past began to be rewritten in real time — by poets, by historians, by activists, by anonymous editors tapping at keyboards in locked-down houses. 

Those times were unsettling, sometimes exhausting, occasionally absurd. In that suspended season, we saw the fractures, the revisions, the contested edges of memory — the places where the narrative is still alive, still shifting, still capable of surprise. 

 “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — Faulkner

Eliot’s Wartime Poetry and the Hidden Labour of Four Quartets

 

The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume X: 1942-44 
edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden.
Faber, 1080 pp., £60, July 2025, 978 0 571 39649 8

A summary  of The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume X: 1942–44 in the London Review of Books  

If Eliot’s wartime letters reveal anything consistently, it is the extent to which he lived behind carefully constructed forms of order — routines, masks, correspondences — all designed to keep the inner life from spilling into the outer one. This makes it all the more striking that the years 1940–42, years of disruption and displacement, were also the years in which the last three of the Four Quartets took shape. Yet the letters themselves tell us almost nothing about how these poems were made. They record the intention to write, the occasional admission of labour, and the retrospective announcement of completion, but the act of composition remains hidden. The poems seem to have been written elsewhere, in a private chamber of the mind, and only afterwards carried out into the daylight of correspondence.

With the exception of Little Gidding, the Quartets appear in the letters as sudden, concentrated bursts of creation. The case of The Dry Salvages is typical. On 10 December 1940 Eliot mentions to Hayward that he has been “working this morning at a poem to follow E. Coker”; then silence. Three weeks later he informs another correspondent that the poem is finished and that he now contemplates a fourth to complete the sequence. The intervening struggle — if there was one — leaves no trace. The poem simply arrives, as if composed behind a closed door, in a single sustained exhalation. Little Gidding alone shows signs of prolonged labour, the poem Eliot jokingly called “Spittle‑Skidding” as he submitted it to Hayward’s scrutiny and revised it more extensively than the others.

There is, however, a further reason why these volumes add so little to our understanding of the poems’ formation. For decades after Eliot’s death, Valerie Eliot guarded the unpublished material with jealous care, granting access only to a very few. Among them was Helen Gardner, whose long friendship with Valerie and deep admiration for Eliot’s poetry gave her unparalleled freedom to examine the Hayward papers. Her The Composition of “Four Quartets” (1978) remains the definitive account of the poems’ evolution, mapping the exchanges between Eliot and his first readers with meticulous clarity. The editors of the present volumes acknowledge as much: the publication of the letters in full confirms, rather than revises, the picture Gardner had already drawn.

What emerges most strongly from these years is the reminder that Eliot was, by temperament and circumstance, an occasional poet. Long stretches of the correspondence show him absorbed in publishing, criticism, religious work, and the daily obligations of wartime London. Poetry arrives only intermittently, in rare, intense periods of concentration. The serenity of the Quartets — their poise, their stillness, their sense of time gathered and redeemed — is hard‑won. It is the stillness of a man who wrote only when the inner pressure became irresistible, carving out moments of contemplative clarity from a life otherwise dominated by duty, noise, and the need to keep the self under control.

In this sense, the letters do not diminish the mystery of the Quartets; they deepen it. They show us the surface of Eliot’s days — the committees, the manuscripts, the travel, the polite refusals — and leave us to imagine the hidden chamber where the poems were made. The contrast is instructive. The Quartets emerge not from a life of monastic withdrawal but from a life crowded with obligations, interruptions, and masks. Their quietness is not the quietness of ease but the quietness of a man who had to fight for silence, and who found in that silence the only language adequate to the spiritual pressures of his age.

Summarised June 27th 2026

The Fan, the Diagram, and the Early Days of Web Search

Thirty‑five degrees of heat in West Oxfordshire is enough to make even the most stoic of us look for any way at all to keep cool. So I ended up in the garden studio, hunting for an old electric fan I knew was tucked away somewhere.

I found it quickly enough. And as soon as I picked it up, I remembered where it had come from, twenty‑odd years ago. On the centre badge was a logo I hadn’t thought about for years: Overture.

My Overture Sponsored Fan

The name once meant something. Overture powered a huge share of the sponsored links on the early web — a company right at the centre of the first wave of Search Engine Marketing, and one that had sent me, and others in the field, this fan as a promotional gift.

Now, with this relic blowing warm air at me, the past felt unexpectedly close. The fan still worked. The company did not. And somewhere in the back of my mind, in heat‑induced nostalgia, a memory surfaced of a diagram — a map of how search engines once related to one another, before the web settled into the shape we now take for granted.

That rediscovery sent me back into my cloud archive. And there it was: an image file from 2004, a tangle of arrows and logos showing the hidden plumbing of early search. A reminder that the web search was once built around a federation, not an empire.

This is it:

Search Engine Relationships 2024 - Click/Tap to Enlarge

Why the diagram looked like this

Today we’re used to the idea that a search engine is a single, unified thing: one company, one index, one set of results. But in the early 2000s, it simply didn’t work like that.

Most companies calling themselves “search engines” didn’t actually crawl the web. Building a full index was expensive and technically demanding. So many licensed results from someone else. Some mixed those licensed results with their own small index. Others layered paid listings on top. And almost all of them relied on partnerships to fill the gaps.

It was a patchwork — but a functional one. A kind of cooperative competition. Everyone needed everyone else, and the boundaries between “search engine,” “portal,” “directory,” and “advertising network” were far more porous than they are now.

That’s the world the diagram captures.

How the diagram works

The diagram itself is straightforward once you know what you’re looking at.

At the top are the big names of the time: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, AltaVista, AOL. Each sits in its own box, but none of them stands alone. Arrows run between them, showing who supplied results to whom:

• Google powering AOL’s search results

• Overture supplying paid listings to Yahoo

• Teoma feeding Ask Jeeves

• MSN still relying on partners while building its own crawler

The arrows show the actual flow of data — who depended on whose index, whose ads, whose directory listings.

Below that, the diagram widens into the “verticals”: travel, cars, shopping, insurance, property, finance, business, technology. These were early attempts to organise web search into categories. Each vertical lists the major UK sites of the time — lastminute.com, Auto Trader, Ciao!, Norwich Union, PC Pro — many of which licensed search or directory data from the engines above.

Taken together, the whole thing looks like a wiring diagram. And in a sense, that’s exactly what it is: the wiring of early web search, before consolidation simplified the picture into something far more monolithic.

Looking back, the most striking thing about this 2004 diagram is how provisional everything feels. None of the relationships were fixed. Most of the companies were still experimenting. And the whole structure depended on assumptions that didn’t survive the decade.

Three big developments reshaped the landscape.

1. Crawling the web became cheaper

More companies could build their own indexes. Partnerships became less necessary.

2. Google’s model proved overwhelmingly effective

Cleaner interface, faster index, scalable business model. Portals stopped trying to compete.

3. Advertising consolidated

Overture’s pay‑per‑click model was clever, but Google’s integrated approach was simpler and more profitable. The old PPC networks faded.

Put those shifts together, and the old ecosystem simply couldn’t hold. The arrows on the diagram stopped making sense. One by one, the portals either adopted Google wholesale or faded from relevance.

Finding that old fan — and then this old diagram — was a reminder of how different search on the web once was.

The modern landscape is simpler, and in many ways more efficient. But simplicity has its own cost. Today, Google dominates both the search index and the paid advertising that sits alongside it. And of course AI driven results, a whole other story. Bing is there, and it matters, but the balance is nothing like the distributed ecosystem shown in that 2004 diagram.

Ah well -  perhaps that’s why the rediscovery of a dusty fan on a hot afternoon felt oddly significant. It wasn’t just a piece of early‑2000s junk. It was a small, working fragment of a world that has since disappeared.

Namesake Novel

There cannot be many people who unexpectedly discover a forgotten novel bearing their own name. Yet that is precisely what happened to me recently.

Quite by accident, I learned of a little-known novel published in 1931 by His Honour Judge Ruegg KC entitled David Betterton. Given the rarity of the surname Betterton, I was astonished that I had never heard of it before. The discovery immediately raised a number of questions. Who was David Betterton? Why had Ruegg chosen the name? And what sort of story lay behind this curious literary namesake?

My Copy of Judge Ruegg's Novel

The novel has long been out of print and appears to have escaped the attention of modern literary historians. Contemporary references describe it simply as "A Novel of Staffordshire," and one rather dismissive review in The Spectator [ Link here in new tab ] referred to blackmail, socialist villains, and dreams involving Queen Mab. The description sounded eccentric enough to provoke curiosity but gave little indication of the novel's deeper concerns. But of course, I hunted it down and bought a copy.

As I read through the novel, however, a more interesting picture emerged.

The story begins not with David Betterton at all, but with a young man named Fred Dominey. Leaving home in search of a future, he falls in with a drifter named Jim Owlton. Penniless and desperate, the two decide to rob a house. Owlton persuades Fred to carry out the burglary while he remains at a safer distance.

Fred is caught.

At this point the novel takes an unexpected turn. The owners of the house do not summon the police. Instead, they take pity on the young man and allow him to go free. Legally, the matter ends there. Morally, however, it has only begun.

Although forgiven, Fred cannot forgive himself. The guilt of the attempted burglary follows him as he travels to London, where he hopes to pursue a career on the stage. Through a series of fortunate connections, he finds lodgings with a sympathetic couple whose theatrical contacts help him gain a foothold in the profession. His talent is recognised, a manager takes him under his wing, and he is given a new stage name: David Betterton.

Fred becomes David Betterton [ Click /Tap to enlarge ]

The transformation appears complete. Fred Dominey disappears and David Betterton rises to fame.

Yet the past has not vanished.

As Fred’s life as David Betterton flourishes,  Jim Owlton reappears, impoverished but armed with knowledge of the long-forgotten burglary. He begins a campaign of blackmail that grows more demanding as David's success increases. The higher the actor rises, the more vulnerable he becomes. Alongside this central conflict run a love story and later experiences of military service during the First World War.

The  plot is a melodrama. Yet beneath its surface lies a surprisingly coherent exploration of guilt, identity and redemption.

The burglary itself is not really the subject of the novel. It functions as the original moral wound from which everything else proceeds. Fred's crime is serious, but Ruegg presents him less as a villain than as a weak and impressionable young man led astray by a stronger and more unscrupulous character. Jim Owlton, by contrast, becomes the embodiment of corruption, feeding parasitically upon another man's success.

More significantly, the novel turns upon an act of mercy. The household Fred attempts to rob chooses not to prosecute him. In conventional crime fiction, punishment would provide the story's resolution. Here, punishment never arrives. Instead, the burden passes inward. Fred's real struggle is not with the law but with his conscience.

This perspective helps explain one of the novel's strangest features: the recurring dreams of Queen Mab. At first glance these seem whimsical, even eccentric. Yet they may serve a serious literary purpose. Rather than functioning as fantasy for its own sake, the dreams appear to externalise Fred's inner life, charting feelings of guilt, fear and self-reproach that he cannot easily articulate in waking life.

The change of name is equally significant. Fred Dominey and David Betterton are not merely two names for the same person. They represent two identities. Fred is the private self, burdened by memory; David is the public self,  admired by audiences. The tension between these identities becomes the novel's driving force. The more successful David Betterton becomes, the greater the threat posed by Jim Owlton's knowledge.

In this respect, the novel belongs to a familiar literary tradition. Like many stories of hidden pasts and divided identities, it asks whether a person can ever truly escape what he has done. One thinks of Great Expectations, where Pip cannot escape the origins he wishes to conceal, or even The Picture of Dorian Gray, where a secret history lurks behind a public persona. Can a new life erase an old failure? Can forgiveness received become forgiveness accepted?

The First World War is also interesting.  David – and  Jim – serve in the war, Ruegg uses military service as a kind of moral testing ground. The war becomes a crucible in which earlier social distinctions and personal failings are exposed or transformed.

These questions become all the more interesting when one remembers that the author was a judge. Ruegg understood legal guilt professionally. What seems to interest him here, however, is something beyond the reach of courts. The law settles Fred's offence early in the novel. The deeper consequences continue for hundreds of pages.

As for the name itself, Betterton is an uncommon surname with historical associations in both Gloucestershire and Staffordshire. That second possibility caught my attention because David Betterton as I mentioned earlier, is explicitly described as a "Novel of Staffordshire." If Judge Ruegg was writing about the Potteries and the surrounding district, then choosing the surname Betterton may not have been accidental at all. He may have regarded it as a recognisably local Staffordshire name. 

It is also, of course,  the surname of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton. Given that David Betterton is a stage name adopted by an aspiring actor, one wonders whether Ruegg deliberately chose it for its theatrical resonance. Whether that is true or not, the choice seems unlikely to have been accidental. And it is clear that the name 'David' references the renowned 18th century actor David Garrick, as is made clear through the words of theatre manager Mr Abraham, who chooses the name in the story.

Portrait of Thomas Betterton

Whatever the explanation, there was something delightful for me about encountering my own name unexpectedly in a obscure  work of fiction. What began as a moment of curiosity became an exercise in literary archaeology. The result was not merely the discovery of a namesake, but of a novel – though melodramatic in tone and scope – nevertheless is more thoughtful and morally ambitious than its obscurity might suggest.

Except Ye Lord Keep Ye Cittie…

I was wandering in the town square in Ripon in the summer of 1973. I remember walking without any particular aim. I had time to spare. I was light and free.

I looked up and saw the verse carved into the frieze at the top of the Town Hall — an adaptation of the verse in the Psalm:

“Except Ye Lord Keep Ye Cittie Ye Wakeman Waketh in Vain.”

I knew the verse well enough, but the substitution caught my eye. The Town Hall had replaced watchman with wakeman. The word looked both familiar and out of place, like something that had slipped through a crack in time.

I later discovered that Ripon’s historic Hornblower — the Wakeman — would blow a horn at 9 p.m. each night to signal the start of the security patrol. But I didn’t know that then.

I stood for a while, looking at the inscription, taking in its message. Then I moved on. Without me, the square went on being a square. The day went on being a day.

But the detail stayed.

Ripon 1973

Summer light on the square. Stone warm underfoot. A bus purred at the kerb.

I walked without aim — air moving easily, the day loose about me.

High on the Town Hall frieze: Ye Wakeman waketh… letters cut like dry reeds.

Wakeman.

I stood a moment. The square held its shape. The day went on.

The word remained.

Sound in Movies: A Different Kind of Seeing

 

I saw the movie "Tuner" today, and one of the features of the film was the use of sound at certain times when the drama focussed around the Leo Woodall character in  his safe-cracking, and in other action moments.  We were hearing the action from the sounds in his head. This was interesting, and I recalled the role of sound in 'Rose of Nevada', which I reflected on recently. In that film,  oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape placed  a layer of distance between the viewer and the action. Use of sound in ‘Tuner’ was different.

In ‘Tuner’ the sound design functions as a form of subjective immersion. When the drama centres on Niki White’s ( Leo Woodall ) safe-cracking, or on moments of heightened concentration and danger, we are drawn into his  sensory world. External reality recedes and we hear what he hears and what his mind attends to. Small sounds become magnified, irrelevant sounds disappear; rhythms and mechanical noises acquire an almost musical significance.  

Rose of Nevada had the reverse effect.  I guess one way of putting this is that ‘Tuner’ uses sound to move us closer to experience, while Rose of Nevada uses sound to move us further away from it.

But in  both cases at least, we are reminded that sound is as important to any film, and  cinema is more than  a visual art. The eye tells us what is happening, but the ear helps us  to inhabit what is happening.

In Rose of Nevada, the unusual soundscape contributes to the feeling that the events are being recollected, half-remembered, or viewed through a veil of memory and myth. The distant dialogue and unreal acoustic space make us feel that we are  never entirely "there."

In ‘Tuner’, by contrast, sound compresses the distance between audience and character. Every click, scrape, and metallic resonance becomes charged with significance because we are experiencing events from within Niki White’s concentration.

So, in  both movies, sound is controlling our psychological distance. We should look out for the next award season: both movies will surely be listed for Best Sound?

Great Tew: Wall Paintings and a Priest's Apology

I took these photographs of the wall paintings at St Michael and All Angels, Great Tew. They belong, I understand, to one of the most important surviving groups of early 14th‑century wall paintings in Oxfordshire. They form part of a larger narrative cycle running along the south aisle wall, and the image shown here is one of the panels that fits neatly between the aisle windows. It depicts scenes from the Passion cycle.

At the right-hand end of what is effectively the lowest tier is the Appearance to Mary Magdalene — one of the clearest surviving images. Two small trees frame the scene, and Mary, on the right, kneels reverently before Christ, who holds the banner of the Resurrection.

Noli Me Tangere - Appearance to Mary Magdalene

There is a certain irony in the fact that the central image of the Resurrection has been largely lost beneath a later memorial tablet. When such monuments were installed, the existence of medieval wall paintings — often whitewashed after the Reformation or simply forgotten — was probably not suspected. And so this central and crucial image is now reduced to Christ’s foot stepping out of the tomb and a handful of tiny soldiers, one of whom, on the right, is seen leaning on his shield.

The Resurrection 

The memorial is to the Reverend Charles Dayman, M.A., who served as the Vicar of Great Tew from 1830 until his death in August 1844. His tenure spanned a transformative and highly turbulent era for both the local parish and the wider Church of England.

Before arriving in Oxfordshire, Dayman was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially found clerical work as a curate at St. James’s Church in Dover, Kent, where he lived with his wife. 

He was formally instituted as the Perpetual Vicar of St Michael and all Angels in 1830. Dayman ran the parish at a time when religious nonconformity was surging in rural Oxfordshire. By 1834, just a few years into his tenure, Great Tew was reporting a massive spike in residents identifying as Baptists or "Ranters" (Primitive Methodists). 

Dayman spent much of his energy trying to retain his congregation against the draw of local cottage meetings. He took an active role in running the local school and his strict, structured educational regime was highly regarded by the regional gentry, who sent their children to Great Tew specifically to be tutored under his leadership.

Dayman’s family was profoundly impacted by the Oxford Movement.

I thought I might imagine how the Rev. Dayman might look on his own memorial today:

An Apology from the South Aisle 

Forgive me, Lord, for where my marble lies,
Blotting the ancient pigments of Your grace.
My passing breath they sought to solemnise.
With heavy hand, and blind to any trace,
The parish carved my name in polished stone,
Right where the medieval masters drew
The rising Christ, who broke the tomb alone,
To bring the dying world a life anew.
Yet here I stand, imposter before the grave,
My cold memorial blocking out the light,
A mortal man entombing Him who saves,
And hiding resurrection from our sight.
Dear Saviour, scratch away my proud decree;
Let Dayman fade, that we might look on Thee.

These survivals remind us how precarious medieval art can be. Parish churches were living buildings, altered and adapted to the needs of each generation. What remains is accidental and all the more precious for it. At Great Tew, the faint red lines still carry the energy of the original hand, working I imagine, from familiar models and with a sure sense of narrative and gesture.

For those who want to explore the cycle in more detail, an excellent and comprehensive review is available here , with fine, clear images of each section  

Into the Forest, Towards Oblivion: Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence

 Here I look at two 20^th century poems about death and dying.   Each deals with the subject  through images drawn from the natural world or from everyday experience. The poems are  are Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death. Both poems contemplate the end of life with unusual honesty, yet they arrive at very different visions of what awaits us. I explore the contrast.

The poems are here [ Valid June 15th 2026: Open in new tab]: The Ship of Death  and  Lights Out

Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death are poems that confront mortality without sentimentality. Neither turns away from the fact of death. But these poems express two very different visions of what it means to approach the end of life.

In Lights Out, Thomas guides the traveller to the edge of an "unfathomable" forest. Roads and tracks lead towards it, but at the brink they lose their certainty:

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

The roads of life appear to promise destinations and purposes. Yet at the forest's edge these distinctions dissolve. The traveller enters a realm beyond ordinary understanding.

Crucially, Thomas never tells us what lies within the wood. The mystery remains intact. The forest is 'unfathomable' because it resists explanation. Yet the poem is not troubled by this ignorance. On the contrary, its serenity arises from accepting it. The speaker declares, 'I desire to go.'There is no struggle against the darkness. The forest is entered willingly. The poem's power lies in its trust that not everything needs to be known. Death is imagined as a mystery into which one passes.

Lawrence's poem begins from a very different premise. Here death is not a mystery, but a destination repeatedly named. That destination is oblivion.

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

The word appears more than once and stands at the centre of the poem's vision. Unlike Thomas's forest, oblivion is not unfathomable. Its meaning is stark. It suggests the extinction of consciousness, the erasure of identity, the end of striving and memory.  

Yet the drama of Lawrence's poem does not lie solely in its destination. It lies in the possibility that the destination is not always  finally reached. The poem's most striking moment comes with a sudden reversal:

Ah wait, wait, for there is the dawn,
the cruel dawn of coming back to life...

The adjective 'cruel' transforms the poem. The return to life is not welcomed. It is endured. The voyager approaches oblivion, only to be drawn once more into existence. Death itself is no longer the primary challenge. The challenge is recurrence. The voyage is undertaken, interrupted, and perhaps undertaken again.

This difference separates Lawrence fundamentally from Thomas. Thomas imagines a mystery entered into. For  Lawrence the destination has a finality, but it is the journey which carries the uncertainty.

Even the famous image of the 'little ship, with oars and food and little dishes' acquires a different significance in this light. At first these details seem reassuringly domestic. They bring the language of the comfort of ordinary life into a poem about death. Yet they do not soften the destination. Rather, they express sympathy for the traveller. The little provisions are not evidence that the journey is easy. They are evidence that it is difficult. The tenderness lies not in confidence about what awaits but in care for the one who must undertake the voyage.

Meantime, Lawrence's allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet are particularly revealing. Hamlet imagines death as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’ Lawrence presents a more unsettling possibility. His poem expresses the  anxiety is that the traveller may return before the voyage has finally achieved its destination. The repeated references to oblivion suggest that extinction remains the goal towards which the journey moves, yet the 'cruel dawn of coming back to life' introduces that possibility of interruption and recurrence.

The Hamlet echoes deepen the poem's darkness. Shakespeare's prince contemplates the possibility of ending life with a ‘bare bodkin’  yet hesitates at the uncertainty of what may follow death. Lawrence inherits something of that sombre atmosphere. The question is no longer whether death should be chosen; death is inevitable. The question is how one prepares for its arrival.

The result is a poem that possesses a stoic rather than a consoling wisdom. Lawrence does not ask us to trust a mystery. He does not promise that oblivion is benign. Instead he insists that the voyage awaits us and that preparation is necessary. This is where the contrast with Thomas is sharpest. Thomas finds peace in mystery. Lawrence finds dignity in necessity. The traveller in Lights Out walks willingly into the wood. The voyager in The Ship of Death builds his vessel because he must.

 

The Quest of Simon Richardson

As part of my recent focus on the life of H.W 'Bill' Tilman, I have read the story of his final voyage as a member of the crew in a 1977 expedition. The voyage was headed by the 23-year-old Simon Richardson, who had previously sailed on one of Tilman's own voyages.

Simon Richardson was a young, adventurous sailor but whose expedition aboard his boat En Avant ended in complete mystery. After leaving Lymington and reaching Rio without incident,  En Avant  left Rio for Port Stanley with a crew of six, including Tilman, and was never seen again. 

In this book, Simon’s mother, Dorothy Richardson, offers a calm, clear-eyed portrait of her son’s short life, weaving in his 1973 diary from his earlier voyage with Tilman (the diary gives a rare and sympathetic portrait of the the man. ) and letters he wrote from Rio that show no hint of trouble. 

The appendixes gather expert speculation about what might have happened to En Avant, but no firm conclusion is possible. The result is a restrained, sympathetic account that appeals to sailors, adventurers, and admirers of Tilman’s world.

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Footnote:

There is more to say about the story of En Avant. Next year sees the 50th anniversary of her departure from Lymington. 

Meantime here are some details (results of web search  today)  of  an HTV / ITV documentary titled "No Pay, No Prospects and Not Much Pleasure".   Broadcast in the early 1980s, this  documentary was produced and directed by John Mead to honour the extraordinary life of Tilman.  

Programme Details & Background

• The Title: The name of the documentary is taken directly from Tilman's famously blunt, recurring classified advertisement used to recruit crews for his perilous voyages: "No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure."
• The Interview Context: The documentary covers Tilman’s final, fateful expedition in 1977. At 79 years old, Tilman signed up as an ordinary crew member under the 24-year-old skipper Simon Richardson. They set sail for Antarctica's Smith Island on En Avant—a converted, old steel tugboat that Simon had painstakingly stripped down and rebuilt himself. 
• The Disappearance: The ship and its six young crew members, along with Bill Tilman, vanished without a trace in the South Atlantic in late 1977. 
• Dorothy Richardson's Role: In the film, Simon’s mother, Dorothy Richardson, provides a  moving interview about her son's fierce spirit of independent adventure, his bond with Tilman, and the legacy of the En Avant crew. She later compiled her son's diaries and letters into the      biography under discussion here: The Quest of Simon Richardson. 

Current Availability

The documentary was originally produced by the regional ITV franchise HTV (Harlesden Television / HTV Wales). Because it is a historic regional broadcast, it is not widely available on mainstream commercial streaming platforms. However, physical DVD prints exist, and it is occasionally preserved or shared within classic sailing networks, outdoor film societies, or regional British television archives. 

I've yet to find it, or see it.....

When Inclusion Becomes Erosion — Revised

 

Inclusion without capacity isn’t compassion — it’s abandonment. When the state hollows out, communities are left to carry tensions they never chose. Here, I have written about how Britain’s outsourced systems are turning welcome into erosion.

I take my cue from Anoosh Chakelian’s 'How Britain Lost Control' New Statesman cover story this week. The article offers a vivid, unsettling portrait of a country where the state has hollowed itself out, outsourcing its responsibilities to private contractors and leaving communities to absorb the consequences. Her reporting from Wigan — of overcrowded HMOs, fraying neighbourhoods, and a government that has lost the capacity to enact its own ideals — illuminates the very dynamics I was trying to name.

This revision is an attempt to place my earlier reflections within that wider, more concrete frame. The erosion I wrote about  in the abstract is visible in the streets, houses, and lives Chakelian describes. To speak of inclusion today is to reckon with the structures that make it possible — or impossible. And so I have rewritten this piece to acknowledge the lived realities that now press upon it. Realities  about which many  folk living comfortable privileged lives for example, continue to parrot abstract banalities.

There are moments when a society’s virtues begin to fray not because they were wrong, but because the institutions meant to hold them have grown too weak to bear their weight. We speak easily of inclusion, hospitality, openness. These are good words, necessary words. But they depend on a moral architecture  and when that architecture weakens, even our best intentions can become sources of strain.

In recent years I have found myself returning to this question: What happens when a society tries to welcome more people than it can meaningfully care for? Not because the newcomers are unwelcome, nor because the locals are unkind, but because the state that once mediated between them has abandoned the business of leadership and lost the ability to understand a nation which daily witnesses a tolerance of injustice and unfairness and which shows a lack of empathy for justified concerns.

Anoosh Chakelian’s recent reporting from Wigan offers hard detail. She describes Darlington Street — a long terrace of redbrick houses, once home to mill workers and miners — now transformed into a symbol of Britain’s political and moral drift. “Every other house has been taken up as an HMO,” one MP tells her, as private contractors pack asylum seekers, ex‑offenders, and the homeless into the cheapest streets they can find. The result is not hostility so much as exhaustion: neighbours who no longer know who lives next door, communities that feel transient, and a quiet sense that something once solid has begun to dissolve.

This is not the fault of those who arrive, nor of those already there. It is the consequence of a state that has outsourced its responsibilities to companies whose duty is not to the common good but to the contract and it's financial drivers. Serco, Mears, Clearsprings — names that hover at the edges of public consciousness — now run vast tracts of what used to be the work of government. They house asylum seekers, manage detention centres, operate speed cameras, run NHS catering, and even maintain the radar stations that watch the skies. They are, as Chakelian puts it, the “shadow state”: indispensable, unaccountable, and largely unseen.

In such a landscape, inclusion becomes a slogan rather than a practice. The state disperses vulnerable people into the cheapest corners of the country, leaving local councils to absorb the consequences without the means to respond. Residents feel policies are being done to them, not with them. Asylum seekers live in houses where toilets go unfixed for a year, where four mattresses are pushed into a single room, where the weekly support payment sometimes fails to arrive and where easy money is to be made by property speculating go-betweens who can buy up properties and sell them on as risk-free investments as a Serco- managed packages. And all the while, the political class speaks of compassion and control as though either were still within its grasp.

This is the erosion which should concern us all: not the erosion of values, but the erosion of the structures that make values possible. A society cannot meaningfully include newcomers if it cannot house its own citizens. It cannot preach neighbourliness while leaving neighbours to negotiate overcrowded streets, rising rents, and the slow unravelling of local trust. It cannot ask communities to carry burdens that the state itself has deliberately laid aside.

The tragedy is that everyone suffers. The asylum seeker who fled war only to find him/herself in a broken house and hostile, suspicious neighbours. The lifelong resident who watches her street change overnight and feels she has no voice in the matter. The council officer who knows what needs to be done but lacks the budget to do it. The politician who promises reform but inherits a system too entangled to unwind.

Inclusion, in such a context, becomes a fragile thing. It requires more than sentiment. It requires capacity — the ability to build homes, to plan coherently for education and employment, to mediate between competing needs, to hold communities together rather than leaving them to fray. 

Without that capacity, inclusion becomes erosion: not because we welcomed too many - though as an island nation losing  vast tracts of productive land for food security or for breathing space away from crowded cityscapes this also can be debated - but because we built too little, planned too little, cared too little at the level where care must be organised.

We need a  recognition that compassion without competence is a brittle virtue.

In the end, the question is not whether we should be an open or a closed country, generous or guarded, welcoming or wary. The deeper question is whether we still possess the civic and moral power to hold the tensions that any real society must carry: the tension between neighbourliness and change, between compassion and capacity, between the needs of those who arrive and the needs of those already here. 

A state that has hollowed itself out cannot hold these tensions; it leaves communities to absorb them alone, and then wonders why resentment grows. If we are to rebuild anything worth calling a common life, we will need a politics that can bear disagreement without panic, and a public realm strong enough to mediate between competing goods.

Our country needs to be governed — not managed, not outsourced, not placated — by a government that understands inclusivity and understands that dissent needs to be part of that inclusivity, not judged by any arbitrary virtue‑signalling standard.

 

 

Bob Dylan, Faith, and the Language of Darkness

I was looking at two songs by Bob Dylan. The first is "Gotta Serve Somebody" from his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, which was one of 3 (I believe) issued during a time when he committed himself to Jesus Christ, in a charismatic, evangelical environment, and so made that leap of faith, that commitment to a personal relationship to Christ known to Bible believing Christians.  

Gotta Serve Somebody https://share.google/qdKHTmB00Y348j3hk

The second is Not Dark Yet from his 1997 album Time Out of Mind. Looking at the lyrics of these two songs, and also understanding from later interviews that Bob Dylan is still a man of faith, I thought I might explore the differences in the language and themes of these two songs, and think about Bob Dylan's development and use of lyrics in those intervening years, which might also reveal changes in his approach to his faith. This is what emerged.

Not Dark Yet https://share.google/npqK5oXCa3ujm09Bx 

Gotta Serve Somebody  is direct, declarative and prophetic. Its message is clear: every human being ultimately serves either God or the devil. The lyric proceeds with the certainty of a sermon. Social distinctions are stripped away, and the listener is confronted with a spiritual choice. The voice is authoritative, reflecting the confidence of a recent convert who believes he has discovered a fundamental truth about existence.

Nearly twenty years later, Not Dark Yet presents a very different voice. Here there is no proclamation, no doctrine, and no explicit reference to Christ or salvation. Instead, the song inhabits a mood of weariness and mortality. The famous refrain, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," evokes aging, decline, and the approach of death. Rather than offering answers, the lyric dwells within a state of consciousness.

Some Christian listeners have viewed this change as evidence of a weakening of faith. From an evangelical perspective, life "in Christ" brings assurance, hope and spiritual renewal. The New Testament proclaims victory over death and despair through Christ's resurrection. If this is so, why should a believer continue to speak in the language of darkness? Why contemplate suffering rather than transcend it through prayer and trust in God?

This objection seems to me to raise an important question, which can only be answered by highlighting the distinction between faith and art. Faith enables a proclamation of truths and offers answers, and indeed lives within them. Art often seeks to describe experience in all its complexity, even when no resolution is immediately apparent.

Going down the route of art, we find for example the literary critic Christopher Ricks who draws attention to the affinities between Not Dark Yet and John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. Both works explore weariness, mortality, and the attraction of release from suffering. Neither arrives at a final conclusion. Instead, each remains suspended between life and death, hope and uncertainty. The power of Dylan's lyric lies partly in this refusal to define precisely what the approaching darkness means.

At the same time, Not Dark Yet can be understood within a religious tradition older and broader than post-Lutheran evangelicalism or the preoccupations of the English Romantic poets. The voices of Job, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms all find expression in darkness, lament and questioning. These texts are not records of unbelief but of faith wrestling with the realities of human existence. They remind us that  life in the Spirit has always contained both confidence and anguish.

What emerges, is not necessarily a contrast between faith and doubt, but rather a contrast between two modes of spiritual expression. One mode emphasises certainty, redemption and proclamation. The other emphasises contemplation, mystery and the honest acknowledgement of suffering. The first finds its natural home in preaching and testimony. The second often finds its home in poetry and song.

This distinction helps explain why Not Dark Yet continues to resonate with listeners of many beliefs. The song does not argue for a doctrine. It gives shape to a universal human experience. In doing so, it occupies a space shared by biblical wisdom literature, Romantic poetry, and modern existential reflection.

The journey from Gotta Serve Somebody to Not Dark Yet may therefore be understood not as a movement away from spiritual concerns, but as a movement from proclamation to meditation. The 1979 Dylan speaks as a witness. The 1997 Dylan speaks as a poet. One announces a truth; the other explores what it feels like to live in the shadow of mortality.

Whether one views this development as a loss of certainty, a deepening of wisdom, or simply an evolution of artistic voice will depend largely on one's own understanding of faith. Yet the enduring fascination of these songs lies precisely in their ability to sustain a meaningful contemplation, inviting us to consider whether faith abolishes darkness or teaches us how to live within it.

Voyages Through Time: Rose of Nevada

 

Today I caught up with the movie Rose of Nevada.  I came away with that familiar feeling  with movies of this genre,  that a coherent meaning was obscured  from view. As  a consequence it was difficult to find sympathy for the characters and their relationships in each time frame. Without some kind of signpost we find ourselves using much of our mental and emotional resources just to piece together and grasp a narrative. 

I found myself finally able to accept this technique, but by then my feeling was disinterested detachment from character, and I looked more at the surface techniques, including the extraordinary realism around the storm. It is the kind of movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer or Memento, where time slicing is a vital part of the narrative. So, a second viewing becomes more enlightening and the experience becomes richer.

Such  films that fragment time ask us  to do significant intellectual work, but there is usually an emotional anchor that keeps us invested while we solve the puzzle.

 In Memento, it is Leonard's desperate search for meaning; in Oppenheimer, it is Oppenheimer's moral and psychological journey. Even when the chronology is fragmented, the emotional trajectory remains relatively clear.

Rose of Nevada seems less interested in such emotional identification. It works around atmosphere, memory and place. The characters often feel like discrete, disconnected figures in a folk tale or legend rather than fully developed psychological individuals. That may be intentional, but it comes at a cost. We expend  energy simply trying to establish "where" and "when" they are. For me at least, not a lot left over for  empathy.

So, "disinterested detachment" sums up my initial response. Maybe this mirrors the way the film is crafted?  I have learned after viewing (I tend not to read reviews before seeing a movie)  that the movie was shot without sound, and all the sounds – voices as well as all else, were dubbed in afterwards. Oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape, and the fragmented timescales all placed  a layer of distance between me and what was in front of me.

The storm sequence is perhaps the clearest exception to this direction of trvel in the film. Here, narrative uncertainty becomes irrelevant in these isolated action snapshots. The sea, the boat, the weather, the physical peril—these are immediate and comprehensible. Here, the technique adds to  the experience rather than obscuring it. I found these sequences, and the business of catching, gutting and storing the fish,  among the most compelling for exactly that reason.

So yes, a second viewing of Rose of Nevada  is for the best, though I think there is an important distinction with Rose of Nevada compared, say, to a  second viewing of Memento. Here, a second viewing (I haven’t tried it yet) should reveal how meticulously the narrative has been constructed. We expect the  puzzle pieces to click together, because that is the story, and the story lose ambiguity and brings a clarity by its end. With Rose of Nevada, I am not entirely sure that a second viewing would lead to that kind of resolution. Rather, it would just help me to stop worrying about the puzzle and attend to other things: the imagery, the sound design, the symbolism, the sense of Cornwall as a place haunted by its own past. And all that.

So , thinking on awhile, Rose of Nevada  has something in  common with modernist literature than with puzzle-box cinema. For example, reading The Waste Land for a second time – or even umpteen times -  does not necessarily “solve” it; instead, once we are  less anxious about understanding every reference, we begin to notice patterns, echoes and moods. The experience deepens without becoming entirely transparent.

That raises the question of what kind of satisfaction a film owes its audience. I suppose over these years of looking at  traditions around  modernism through art cinema and modernist poetry, we know that ambiguity and uncertainty are watchwords. But for me anyway,  ambiguity works best when there is still something solid to hold onto—character, emotion, theme, image, or story.

So for me,  Rose of Nevada is too ambiguous. It asks  too much of the audience before it has earned an emotional investment. It’s not just me saying  "I didn't understand it."  The film’s  artistic method and  ambitions compete with, rather than support, its human drama.

I will see it again: I am confident my opinion will shift, like those gutted fish on the trawler's deck!