Today, after an entirely misspent and almost entirely sleepless night, leading to an early morning comedown of Biblically epic proportions, I ironed our super-king sized bedsheet (the first time it’s been ironed in at least a decade; possibly ever?), remade the bed, and took the door to the studio/office down.
A change is as good as a…
The latter had to be done, really, as the new chesty o’drawers arrangement is such that this door could no longer be opened wide enough to allow passageway. Teresa’s draft-excluder curtain is now all that separates the bedroom from the studio/office.
And, relax…
We got a lot of stuff out of the room, either into the corridor, the office, or elsewhere. But there’s still shitloads of clutter n’ crap to be dealt with.
But as the above pic hopefully conveys, a corner of the room is now neater and less cluttered… at least for a while. I want to hang the mirror on the wall (it’s just on’t table at the mo’), move (or even remove?) the hand drum, and… well that’s about it, actually.
This post is actually a retrospective one. I made a second visit to St Andrew’s, in Abbots Ripton, in February, ‘24. And that reminded me I’d been before. So I looked for it, as a previous entry, here on my blog. But it wasn’t there. Hence this post.
And that lead in turn to my realising that this had been a two church day. A good day! Here’s the other church, the rather splendid, St John The Baptist, in Wistow. The village of Wistow is also quite pretty in parts.
A lovely old wooden porch.
The porch of this church is wooden. Whilst that makes it look and feel very old, I suspect that wooden porches might need renewing. I wonder how old the current pitch actually is?
Entering the porch.
As I entered the porch I spotted a gargoyle waterspout.
I do love a good gargoyle waterspout!Nice carving in the porch.
The contrast of wood and stone is very pleasing to the eye and mind.
Weirdly architectural glass.
The stained glass here is glorious. It’s amazing to contemplate that in rather humdrum little villages up and down the UK there are so many buildings like this. Churches are, not always, but very often, incredible repositories of human art, architecture and endeavour.
Boom!
The intensity of colour in some of these windows is, frankly, breathtaking. The richness of the reds and blues in particular, in the lights above and below? Pretty staggering.
Utterly fabulous.Oh my God!
The fact that these windows elicit an ‘OMG’ from me, a devout atheist, or – as I prefer to term it – naturalist and free-thinker, is, I think, quite remarkable. The window pictured above is pretty mindblowing.
Why are these windows so mesmerising?
In light (get it?) of the functions of these windows, it’s quite astonishing how powerfully effective they can be. Certainly they work a kind of magic on me. And I guess this was as intended?
At first glance the same as the previous one…
And then you get the effect of repetition. The above is very similar to the one that precedes it. But it isn’t the same one. The effect of this density of imagery, and the repetition, it’s like a visual chant. Again, the word mesmerising seems apt.
More beautiful would carving. Inside this time.Very attractive stalls, with carved screen behind. Just… wow! That celestial blue? So intense.
I need to know more about the stained glass here, as it’s so intensely magical in its effects. Whoever did it, they were artist and magician. The alchemy of glass, lead and light, the symphony of colours? Just phenomenal.
That’s a door.
And I leave, a sadder and wiser man! Perhaps. Or perhaps not? I do feel time spent in these ‘sacred places’ has a powerful and very positive effect. How this squares with their intended functions, and how that in turn is faring in modern times, when these buildings are no longer as central to so many lives as they once were… it’s all a bit of a mystery.
Wow! Quite an eye-catching autumnal display.
I simply had to stop and check out this church, looking so attractive in the autumnal season. And with those red poppy lines, presumably a Remembrance Day thing?
Looking around…Approaching the church.
These few photos track my walk up to the church. Which, alas, was locked up, closed.
A nice mossy roof on the porch.The porch.Looking back out through the screen door.
That’s as far as I got on this attempted visit. I’ll have to return at some point. See if I can find the keyholder, and have a look around inside.
Very pretty picnic area, beside the church.
Another attraction here is a cute little rest area or picnic spot, adjacent to the church. I took a couple of photographs. Thinking it’d be nice to have a picnic lunch here on a sunny spring or summers day.
What a dude! An Ayotte kit very like mine, and a brown pinstripe suit, very like mine. Is it any wonder I love the guy!? Oh, and the last survivor of the original group that cut many of these great Peanuts (& other) tracks, with Vince Guaraldi, back in the day. Granelli passed in 2021.
After a long spell of very satisfying sleep, I seem to have entered upon a new cycle of insomniac troublesome-ness!
I’m not about to delve into the causes right here and now. Rather, I want, very briefly, to touch upon responses.
I might do a bit of blogging. Have a wee snack-ette (gratifying but poss’ unwise!). Have a wee (almost always!). Or read. And this latter seems ok to me. It’s enjoyable, edifying, and often even helps get me back to snoozy-snooze-land.
Right now I’m continuing to read volume two of Shelby Foote’s monumental and totally excellent The Civil War. And what prompted this post was the sheer joy I was taking, in reading Foote’s account of the travails of confederate general Braxton Bragg (what a great name!), shortly after Vicksburg, 1862.
Bragg.
It’s fascinating to read and reflect on how the conduct of war – or indeed any human enterprise requiring very large scale organisation and cooperation – is so fraught with interpersonal strife!
I can’t help but compare it to current UK politics, and think how blatantly shabby and amoral current Conservatism jockeying for power/position is. Surely history will see and judge it so? Just as we judge history that has drifted further down time’s stream.
But then that reminds me of that rather disheartening but alarmingly true aphorism, I forget who said it (and this is my version from memory): ‘if history teaches us one thing, it’s that history teaches us nothing.’
Hegel.
After typing the above, I googled it, and discovered it was in fact Hegel, and, if on-line sources are to be trusted, he said ‘The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.’ I’ve also seen something more like my rendering attributed to actor/bon vivant Peter Ustinov!
I haven’t watched this yet. I did see a clip of the central quote, on a recent Rick Beato ‘highlights’ type showreel.
So I’m putting it here to bookmark it and watch it myself. I may then agree or disagree, or reflect on it. We shall see. But I intuitively feel I understand what (I expect/anticipate) he’s saying.
And I expect to feel much the same way, or agree. I think the crux of it, though, might be potentially misleading or confusing. Inasmuch as a lot of thought and a lot of work go into attaining the level of skill needed to then relax and let go of the kind of thinking (or over-thinking) that may be an ‘enemy’ of flow.
It’ll be interesting to watch the video, and then return and see if I’ve mis-read it, in my above assumptions.
It’s rather bleak, and negative, in focus. But it does speak the truth, as far as I’m concerned. A rather ugly set of truths, perhaps. Stuff we feel inclined to deny or hide from, for our own sakes, most often. But a truth nonetheless.
people
look at the people: elbows, knees, earlobes, crotches, feet, noses, lips, eyes, all the parts, usually clothed, and they are engaged in whatever they usually do which is hardly ever delightful, their psyches stuffed with used matter and propaganda, advertising propaganda, religious propaganda, sexual propaganda, political propaganda, assorted propagandas, and they themselves are dull and vicious. they are dull because they have been made dull and they are vicious because they are fearful of losing what they have.
the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries
you could be sitting in a room with one of them now or with many of them. or you could be one of them.
everytime the phone rings or there is a knock on the door I'm afraid it will be one of the disgusting spiritually destroyed useless babbling ugly fawning hateful humans.
or worse, on picking up the phone the voice I hear might be my own, or upon opening the door I will see myself standing there, a remnant of the wasted centuries, smiling a false smile, having learned well, having forgotten what I am here for.
A commonly held but meaningless contemporary platitude, based on accidental linguistic resemblance.
Re God & Good; are these terms in any way related? And if so, how?
I had an interesting chat with uncle Terry today. During our conversation he suggested – well, asserted, more accurately – that God means Good. And that that this idea stands for all the Abrahamic religions.
I have heard this said before, of course. Esp’ back when I was moving in Christian circles. But it’s not an idea I’ve often encountered since I left religion.
And I’ve always suspected – so far without bothering to look into the matter – that it’s a mistaken assumption. Based, initially perhaps, on what art historian Norman Rosenthal rather pompously and portentously (as is the way with too many art critics) calls ‘morphological resonance’. Or, in plain English, the two words look so similar, they must be related. Right?
Wrong!
I thought I’d simply ‘google’ the phrase ‘God etymology’, and did so. And I subsequently read perhaps four of five articles or essays on the topic. I’m linking two of those here, that I think are short and simple enough to make easily digestible reading:
And then there’s this, which is Wikipedia’s entry on the etymology and definitions of the word god/God.
What these folk, linked to above, who delve into the history and archaeology of words and language – call it etymology or philology, or whatever – have discovered, is that the roots of these words are obscure and unrelated.
And in tracing these deeply buried roots of meaning, they unearth concepts almost wholly alien to those embraced by the kind of idea embodied in the image at the top of this post. That idea seems to stem from and thrive in our very current need to soothe and calm ourselves in a busy modern world.
The needs addressed by our distant ancestors, and the consequent evolution of these terms – and I’m primarily taking about ‘god’ now (not good) – ironically address that same need – to help us cope with life’s adversities – but from a radically different viewpoint: one of placating higher powers, because they (note the plural) fill us with fear.
So god(s) were powers or entities, capricious if not outright hostile, we tried to placate with worship, offering libations, for example.
And it transpires that one of the strongest contenders re the origin of the term ‘god’ (at this time both plural and gender neutral; the evolution into a singular male deity being a much more recent development in the conception of ‘higher powers’ than are the roots of the word god) is, or rather are ‘god means either “the one invoked” or “the one libated”!
And those murky roots are located more in an ancient polytheistic soil of fear and incomprehension than in the self-soothing modern day platitude ‘god is good’.
NB – This is a very lightly revised version of a review I wrote many years ago.
I really loved reading this book.
Waugh’s colourful and irreverent romp through huge swathes of material – mostly Biblical, but casting his net a bit wider, in terms of sources (albeit concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian deity) – much of which is either arcane, pure gibberish, or mixture of both, is both very educational and highly enjoyable.
It’s decidedly not a book likely to be admired by the devout. Indeed, I was made aware of it – and actually given my copy of it – by a believing friend, who refused to read it, for fear it will undermine their faith (exactly why he should read it, in my view).
From certain perspectives Waugh is, I’ll admit, more than a little disingenuous in his intro (to find out what I mean by this, I suggest reading it). Long before the end of the book one gets a strong sense that he finds the highly irrational, deeply contradictory, and frequently plain nasty image of The Almighty, which one glimpses through his multifarious sources, a very ill-defined (through over-description – or, in other terms, the hagiographies of hordes of believers – rather than any want of such descriptions), nebulous, and on the whole repugnant creation of the human mind.
It is remarkable how many of us non-believers feel so drawn to examining what a believer might choose to call our ‘apostasy’. I think it just goes to show how deeply enmeshed in our lives and cultures religion remains.
I might share the desire of many naturalists and free-thinkers in wishing to see humanity’s consciousness collectively evolve beyond the religious phase, but unlike Dawkins and some others, who at some points seemed to believe such a state was imminent, I think we’re a massively (depressingly) long way – as a species – from choosing rationality over superstition. But that’s exactly why books such as this are so important.
Waugh is at times flippant, and frequently very funny, but underlying all this (and despite the occasional lapse into cheap shots at straw-Gods) is the very serious desire to see, both for oneself and as a society, just who on earth this damnable God is, exactly.
Personally I loved this book and, having gone as far as buying copies for friends, would obviously recommend it to anyone interested in such things.
As ever, if, whilst I’m oot delivering, I spot some stuff I find gobsmackingly beautiful, I may tarry a wee while, and get off a snap or two. Flying solo, that’s fine. Teresa, accidentally along for the ride, wasn’t altogether settled with the idea/practice, alas!
All Saints, Elm.
Our joint afternoon jaunt began with a drive, via Friday Bridge (love that name), to Elm (another lovely name!), to finally take a look at The Parish Church of All Saints, Elm. The crisply clear slanting golden light of a cloudless autumn day was poifeck.
The gorgeous autumn light is sublime.
Sadly the church was locked. So we just had to content ourselves with walking around it. But it’s still beautiful to behold. Esp’ on a day such as today was, weather-wise. And the graveyard is very picturesque.
The Sentinel.Some headstones really draw the eye.
Admiring the human crafting and carving of certain headstones makes for an interesting comparison with nature’s slower and subtler encroachments.
… others for the much slower workings of nature.
I got so snap happy here, I very nearly forgot I had managed to book a delivery shift, and that said shift, fast approaching, was now really looming over me. Fortunately, once I’d realised, I was easily able to get to work on time.
Adopting Fenny tones: Wo’sa’, through them trunks?It’s a corking leaner!
‘It’s a corking leaner!’ sounds like Alan Partridge in full exultant flight (‘it’s an extender’… ‘smell my cheese’, etc.).
As I type this, I spy that the time … daddzzzzzxxscfrd ussreeedeerdddddddddygddd wxddddehdeezzzz deedryuttftfdtrr reds CCC mm … erm!? Woah… Sleep just produced that! I was trying to say it’s approaching 11.35pm! But I’m fading in and out o’ consciousness.
Midnight approaches, and I needs must sleep more… g’night.
Afore I slope off, back to snoozy-snoozeland, here are some more pics from todays peregrinations:
Gorgeous trees on Gorefield Rd, Leverington.
Another gorgeous looking church I was unable to explore the inside of today was St Leonard’s, Leverington. I’ll need to go back to the churches in both Elm and Leverington (and so many more!), to look around and document their insides.
St. Leonard’s, Leverington.Splendid!A rather grand side entrance.
