Whatever you do, bring the truth…

A couple of months ago – on Sunday 17th July, just before 7pm I was outside a pub in Windsor and my heart was beating fast. I had driven 80 miles to meet someone I’d never met before, but whose voice I’d listened to every week for the past 4 years. I wasn’t alone: I was expecting to meet a group of complete strangers too.

I walked into the pub and looked around. I knew (sort of) what ‘he’ looked like from pictures, but couldn’t see him there. One guy was sitting on his own, and a group of about 6 people were sat around a large table, drinking and talking. I tentatively approached them. “Excuse me, are you guys Filmspotters?”

They paused for a moment while they tried to understand the label I’d given them, before politely laughing and saying ‘no’. Moments later they left the pub joking that they were “just in time to ‘spot’ the 7.14 to Maidenhead”… With hindsight it should have been obvious that they were all good friends, rather than a group of cinephile strangers with a more-sophisticated-than-average-taste-in-film-podcasts.

However, the guy on his own was one of those cinephiles: we introduced ourselves and sat down together. We were both there to meet Matty Ballgame, co-host of the very excellent Filmspotting podcast. His ‘other’ job had brought him from Chicago to the UK for a few days, and another listener had made the effort to invite him to a pub for a few beers.

They arrived a few minutes later, as did around half a dozen other Filmspotters, and until closing time we drank beer and talked about stuff – mostly films and music. My fellow Filmspotters are all very nice people, we had a laugh. Matty is charming and funny, and talks about pretty much everything he cares about with passion and commitment. What you see is what you get, in a very good way. He was also being very positive about potential acting opportunities which at the time made me wonder how long he could keep presenting the show if his intended career took off.

Malcolm, Matty Ballgame, Ellen, Danny and me

And so it now transpires that Matty Ballgame is leaving Filmspotting, at present for destinations unannounced. Filmspotting is my favourite film podcast by some distance (sorry Dr Kermode), because it has done more to broaden my cinematic knowledge and experience than anything else. I rarely make it to the cinema, and FS fuels my DVD-rental list months in advance. Even better, it has introduced me to directors and films I might never have sought out, but for the passionate, committed and considered recommendation of its hosts.

Filmspotting will survive Matty’s departure (sorry, Matty!) because (a) it’s a terrific format that has been consistently delivered by the fantastic Adam Kempenaar for 6 years, alongside 2 co-hosts and occasional guests, (b) it has a scale of supporters (including me) who love it, and (c) there will always be films worth talking about.

I don’t know Matty, but it feels like I do. His frank openness and honesty about himself, his work, his love life (or lack of) and his love of films make him much more than just a radio presenter or film critic (although he might deny that he’s even a film critic!). I want to wish him the very best of luck from all his Filmspotting fans. I hope he succeeds in his ambitions (whatever they might be!?), that he continues to Bring The Truth™ and that he can occasionally return to Filmspotting once in a while.

In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait to see his Lear. But we’ll always have this piece of broadcasting gold…

And if you want to hear the quality and range of his performance skills, you should really check out this gem of a Massacre Theatre scene from FS#258 (starts around 33mins).

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Let the children play…

I’ve had a growing sense that my last few posts have been a bit serious, so now for a bit of Good News.

Tetbury has a new, improved Play Area for children that should last for a generation. We and many others had long thought that the previous equipment (installed about 25 years ago) was looking shabby and tired. Worse, the area was at one end of the expansive Recreation Ground: being mainly used for sports pitches, this is a pretty barren, open space. The old play area had no path to reach it, making it almost inaccessible in winter months as the ground became boggy or snowy, and there wasn’t much there to inspire the youngsters.

About 20 months ago, a volunteer group of local parents – including my fantastically lovely wife – decided to do something. One is a local councillor and was able to muster some support from local bodies. But most of the rest of the work has been done completely in their own time: fund-raising, public consultations and market research, negotiating with the sports clubs who use the fields, filling in grant forms for any number of possible sources of funds, project specifications, selecting equipment, appointing the landscape architect, overseeing the actual installation of the agreed equipment, more discussion and negotiation with local councils and committees…

I won’t lie: however noble and worth the cause, at times this felt like a Sisyphean labour. During the last 20 months Rachel has started a new job on top of taking this on. The other parents have their own responsibilities, and at times it did seem like they were trying to do something controversial. We would read about billions going down the drain in banks all over the world, but were still struggling to get a decent play area for the kids in our town.

The project encountered pretty fierce initial resistance from nearby residents. Now I really can understand the issues, but their apparent contempt for the so-called oiks was depressing. Their arguments were mainly something like “don’t build a new play area, it will only attract more children, who will just smash and break and bash everything, swear and fornicate, and leave rubbish everywhere”.

The local sports clubs who are the main (organised) users of The Rec’ wanted to keep the grassy public areas for their training games. But, we tried to suggest, however brilliant your club is at getting some kids running about, it’s only once or twice a week for about half the year. The play area will be for everyone, all of the time.

Lesser people (including me) would have given up under the continued chipping-away of resistance, bureaucracy, form-filling, and an unending barrage of emails to be tackled late in the evenings. It’s a good job that Rachel and the rest of the team aren’t lesser people. They secured virtually £50,000 from The National Lottery, and around another £15,000 from local charities, community groups and individual donations.

There was a Launch Party last weekend attended by over 100 people, and since there’s been a palpable difference. We live on a street close to The Recreation Ground, and there has been an obvious increase in the number of families walking past our door on the way to the play park. We were up there this afternoon and it was packed with children of all ages and their families together. Parents can sit at the new picnic tables and chat or read the paper while watching their offspring race about over the newly-formed ‘humps and bumps’. It’s clean and easy to get buggies and pushchairs over to the Play Area as there’s now a permanent path in place.

We’ve seen people enjoying themselves there whom I’ve never seen at the old play area, despite having lived here almost 8 years. It now feels like a nice place to go. Children will start asking their parents if they can go to The Rec, and their parents will be happy to take them. The basket swing is a genuinely terrific piece of kit that can be enjoyed (or endured) by kids from 5-15 (or even older!). There are some really lovely and inventive pieces, and Tetbury’s Dolphins make repeated appearances, most notably in the brilliant sculptures by Andy O’Neill.

The fantastic Dolphin Seat (and climbing Frame...)

Speak into one dolphin's mouth, and listen from the other. Really.

The Basket Swing - for kids of all ages

I don’t think we yet understand how this might affect Tetbury in a positive way. It seems to lift people’s moods and provide a focus. It took persistence and determination, as they were guided by nothing much more than they wanted to make a difference, to create something for the whole of our community, and especially for the children. I’m extraordinarily proud of what Rachel and the team have achieved.

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I believe that children are the future…

…teach them well and let them lead the way.

These words of wisdom (ahem) from Whitney Houston seem completely at odds both with pronouncements of recent weeks, but also policies of recent years. David Cameron has employed his most Daily-Mail-baiting sound bites in describing the recent London riots as “criminality – pure and simple” and lamenting the “slow moral collapse” of a whole generation. The press seem to revel in any incident which enables them to leer over so-called feral youths, gangs of teenage thugs, and how they represent broken Britain, while films like (the excellent and terrifying) Eden Lake depict unspeakable horrors inflicted by children on ‘innocent’ adults.

Make no mistake, these kids are evil, but ONLY IN THE FILM...

I recently heard an excellent short lecture by Ed Howker in which he argues that young people in the UK do not deserve such a reputation. Indeed he argues that they deserve David Cameron’s help much more than his condemnation. Ed Howker looks like quite an angry young man in his profile pictures, and indeed he is, but he’s got a point.

Research studies from both the UK and from UNICEF, that date from before 2010′s student marches and more recent outbreaks of street violence and rioting, seem to indicate that the UK population are far more likely to regard their young people with fear, disdain and contempt than other EU countries. Apparently UK children feel unhappier than their counterparts in Spain or Sweden, as their parents seem to substitute giving them quality stuff for spending quality time as a family. In fact, these studies from The Department of The Bleeding Obvious suggest that children are actually quite simple types, and are made happier more by time to play outside with their friends or family, than by hibernating in their rooms with games consoles, laptops, phones and televisions.

Tessa Livingstone wrote in last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph on the same issue. She has been recording the progress of children born at the start of this Millenium for the epic TV series ‘Child of Our Time’, and has noted significant shifts in the aspirations and attitudes of her subjects’ parents.

The children I have been monitoring were born at the beginning of the new millennium, a time of great optimism. At that time, I asked all our parents what they wanted for their children. All of them told me that happiness was the greatest gift they could have. Over the past 10 years, I have seen our parents subtly changing the target. Our children and their parents may wish for happiness but they aim now for success, with material goods and money as their goal.

Our society has progressed (sic) so far that we now give children access to everything that adults have – instant information about everything and anything online, mobile phones, music downloads etc, but none of the responsibility. Worse, we don’t teach them responsibility, or (more pointedly) how rubbish it is to  be a grown-up. My daughter seems to crave an iPad: apparently some of her friends at school have one. She expects she / we could get one, because her friends do, or because it’s advertised, but she hasn’t yet quite mastered the concept of budgets and costs. I’m not judging her for that, she’s only 9.

But the wider point is that awareness and access to so many things are now virtually universal and (almost) free. Back in my day (only one generation ago!) there were no mobile phones: I got my first only in my mid-20s. There were practically no computers in our whole university, there were only 4 tv channels, CDs cost more than they do today, and downloading was barely even a concept. Children grow up expecting they can have all these things, but reality is very different.

I agree with Ed Howker when he argues that society has given up equipping the next generation for the future and the challenges they will face. We have almost systematically ruined their prospects at the same time as removing their ability to do anything about it. Politicians treat the elderly with a reverence and deference that is no doubt deserved for their historic service to their country in terms of paying taxes. It’s politically unthinkable to cut (say) the Winter Fuel Allowance or free TV licences or bus passes for OAPs. On the other hand, the EMA, student grants, free Higher Education, housing benefits – all things that were considered ‘normal’  20 years ago – are now apparently unaffordable. The young represent the future of this country, in terms of future parents, future skills, future taxpayers, but we now insist they take full responsibility for paying their way through every aspect of that after they turn 16.

And it’s becoming clear that they can’t afford it. Job prospects are terrible, with more than 20% of under 25s out of work. Graduates complete their studies with massive debts and little chance of earning enough to pay them back. Research by Grant Thornton presents three chilling examples that should be required reading in every household. In each of these, students who graduate in 2015 pay £9,000 tuition fees per year and receive a maintenance loan, so that when they graduate, aged 21, they have a debt of around £40,000.

• Tom becomes a Civil Servant, does well and earns £70,000 by the time he’s 34. But he doesn’t fully repay his student debts until he’s 50, and repays more than double the original debt due to interest payments – £98,000 in total.
• Janet (God Help Her) becomes a journalist – but you could substitute ‘teacher’ here as well. She earns £28,000 from the age of 22. She never repays her debt, because of her ‘relatively low’ income and the substantial interest payments. After 30 years it would be written off by the Government. She pays off a total of £42,000.
• Leo (bless) becomes a corporate lawyer, whose employers put him through law school. By the time he qualifies in his late 20s he earns £61,500. Even Leo takes until his late 30s to pay off the debt, and repays a total of £68,000.

These scenarios starkly  suggest that only (already) very well-off students who can call on the resources of their parents, or most highly paid graduates will pay off these debts before they reach middle age, and many will never pay them off at all.

Others aren’t ‘lucky enough’ to go to university. Grade inflation means less able children are even worse off, as so many CVs now quote multiple A* grades. But the apprenticeships of old seem to have vanished. The new vogue for professional ‘internships’ are increasingly unpaid, meaning they’re practically unaffordable for people who aren’t either rich or able to live at home with Mummy & Daddy. Again, this puts all the risk and burden on the young and inexperienced to make their way. Unpaid internships effectively narrow the gene pool of people and reinforces the mental gap between the political class and the people they claim to represent. And we wonder why the kids in Tottenham and Croydon and Ealing feel disenfranchised, isolated, cut off…

We throw a celebrity / success culture at the young in countless ‘reality’ shows and magazines, then ridicule them when they try to take part. From the X-Factor to The Apprentice, we laugh at and mock young people without the real skills or experience to succeed, but who believe they can because they’ve been told they should.

I’m 42. I’m beginning to worry about my health (cholesterol, creaking hips and back) and about my pension – which despite reasonable contributions, keeps being downgraded with every annual statement. I’m lucky that my parents and in-laws are all still alive, but evidently they’re not as well as they once were, but at least they have decent pensions, and they did well in the property markets of the last 40 years.

How are my children supposed to start their own independent lives, if they dare to be ambitious enough to attend university? They’ll have massive debts that they may never pay off, they’ll struggle to save enough for a house deposit, as the average house price in the UK is now over 8 times the average income, and bank lending remains very tight. Medical science might well keep me alive a lot longer than previous generations, but my pension doesn’t look anything like as healthy as my Dad’s. Heaven help them even thinking of their own pension reserves.

If the sums remain as they are, the New Labour vision of opening up access to Higher Education looks like an insane pipe-dream. The Governing Class of 2025 will fondly recall their university education at the turn of the Millenium, but it seems that the rest will have had to knuckle down and work for a living and for skills right from the outset. There’s nothing wrong at all with that. But we should stop pretending that the model isn’t changing, and start equipping our society, employers and (most importantly) the next generations to live in that future.

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The story will be told many times. We shall make sure of that…

Philip Pullman is something of a bête noire for many religious writers. In the years up to 2000 he wrote a trilogy of novels ostensibly for older children: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass make up His Dark Materials. With a title drawn from Milton’s Paradise Lost they tell a fantastical coming-of-age story of two children within a series of parallel worlds and universes. But Pullman’s humanism is evident throughout and he presents a damning portrayal of organised religion. The Magesterium and its agents attempt to control everything, including a brutal repression of children’s spirits and souls.

That’s what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling…

It’s been described as ‘atheism for kids’. But in truth, Philip Pullman has a deep understanding of spirituality, and while he clearly distrusts organised religion, he’s certainly a lot more than a hatchet-man for the new school of militant atheists. Indeed, in his fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ, he retells much of the New Testament Gospels very faithfully, and even augments the ethical and moral strength behind Christian teachings.

Jim Crace’s excellent novel Quarantine tackles similar themes of storytelling and myths around the character of Jesus, but in a more fictional setting. There are countless reviews of this simple but profound book online. Two of my favourites are by Sally Vickers and Richard Holloway. Here’s what I reckon…

Pullman’s concept and approach is clear from the first line.

This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ, of how they were born, of how they lived and how one of them died. The death of the other is not part of this story.

It’s  a story about story-telling, about how myths and tales become truths, about the difference between what happened and what might have / could have / should have happened. It recounts the well-known Bible narrative in simple episodes, in chapters barely a few pages long of unadorned prose.

Jesus is popular, strong, and learns to be a carpenter. His weaker brother Christ is more intellectual, spending his time in the Synagogue. Quickly we see a divide between Jesus’ more extreme spirituality and that of Christ. Jesus sets extraordinarily high standards, but Christ admonishes him, instead suggesting he could really help people if they could more easily relate to what he says, if he might ‘perform miracles’. But Jesus rejects him, dismissing them as

…conjuring tricks… a sensational show for the credulous? You’d do better to forget about that and attend to the real meaning of things.

Christ can envisage a Church, a Kingdom of The Faithful, with dominion over Emperors. Again Jesus rejects him…

What you describe sounds like the work of Satan.

Nevertheless, as Jesus continues to preach to eager crowds, Christ follows, watches, listens and records everything from a distance, hidden from view. Then a stranger visits Christ, and is the key to the rest of Pullman’s story. The stranger is alternatively referred to as an angel, but he’s deliberately anonymous and often sinister, manipulating Christ. Almost immediately the story shifts from a playful experiment with an alternative version of the New Testament, to something altogether more deliberate. The stranger appeals to Christ that he needs to work to make his vision of a Church into reality, that he…

…must be prepared to make history the handmade of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.

Christ starts using his creativity to tell a ‘better’ story. We see more mundane versions of well-known parables and events transformed into miracles. Christ starts sending spies to record what Jesus says and does, then he retells the stories later. He doubts and discounts some of Jesus’ more ‘difficult’ or indeed inconsistent teachings.

Christ wrote down every word, but he resolved to improve the story later.

As we approach the Passion, the stranger urges Christ to give Jesus over to the authorities, and it is Christ who plays the role of Judas. The stranger introduces the idea that Jesus must rise from the dead to provide greater inspiration to future generations. It’s in the garden of Gethsemane where Philip Pullman abandons the Biblical sources and gives his Jesus a crisis of faith, in which he questions the nature of God, sacrifice and belief. It’s filled with poignant, human self-doubt. He rails against God’s silence and against the concept of a Church, as he fears men will corrupt God’s power, the rich will take control and wage wars ‘in God’s name’, and priests will abuse their positions.

If I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, powerless and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love… That it should own no property and make no laws.

He concludes that in the absence of God, with that continual silence, men will reject God and return to the natural world around them.

Christ hides during the crucifixion, and at the moment of Jesus’ death, he “walked away very carefully, as lightly as he could, trying to make no impression on the earth.”  From this moment on the resurrection becomes the truth. Mysterious figures remove Jesus’ body from the tomb. Christ ‘becomes’ Jesus risen from the dead, playing the part as long as he must to establish the story, then disappears into obscurity. The stranger continues to assert the importance of spectacle and miracle within the myth.

The Holy Spirit is inward and invisible. Men and women need a sign that is outward and visible, and then they will believe.

The Resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion become the central focus of the fledgling Church.

Christ is riddled with doubts and uncertainty, wracked with guilt at what he has helped to set in motion, that it does not reflect his brother’s feelings or intentions. But the stranger insists that those who follow after them will perpetuate and prolong the stories to create the Church, and in a final sentence of stunning simplicity and portent, he eats of all Christ’s food and drinks his wine.

Pullman’s deceptively simple prose helps us focus on the implications of the story he tells, how events are shaped into stories, that are augmented and adapted to create a more compelling narrative, rich with symbols and meaning, filled with rituals. The teachings of Jesus are hard and abstract. Humans are imperfect and weak, and need the structures of an organised Church.

Nevertheless, the points he is making are clear – that these structures were a priori a compromise on the core moral doctrines of Christianity, and that these compromises have been multiplied and exaggerated over generations as the corrupting influence of men has become more and more powerful. The teachings of Jesus as presented here are mainly simple and clear, and reassert much of the traditional messages of the modern Church, but without the ritual and ‘presentation’. It’s almost as though he feels that the ‘miracles’ are attempts to ‘ sex up‘ the moral code Jesus was preaching.

It feels to me that Pullman, without saying so explicitly, has written this book to try to shake both believers and non-believers into reappraising their behaviour, if not their beliefs. It was certainly my reaction. Indeed, it reaffirmed for me that I do want to live by (most of) the messages of the New Testament, even if I don’t believe in the nature of the messenger.

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That’s me in the corner…

Apparently it’s a bad idea to discuss politics and religion with people you don’t know well, and an even worse idea to discuss them with people you do know well. I’ve already stepped well over that mark on the politics front in this blog, so I might as well burn my bridges completely. As it happens, What I Reckon about religion is much less forthright.

I was brought up as a Christian, attended a Church of England Primary School, occasionally went to Church with my parents – mostly at Christmas, Easter, Harvest Festivals. So far, so very English and middle class. From 11 I was at a boarding school, where church was compulsary every Sunday morning. We dutifully turned out in our suits and ties (unlike the tieless everyday uniform). When you’re young, suits inevitably have ‘scratchy’ trousers that are distinctly uncomfortable, while buttoned-up collars feel tight to the point of being constricting. Combined with the early morning starts – we often had to attend an 8am service before breakfast – this wasn’t exactly something I enjoyed.

Nevertheless, I did acquire a kind of respect for both the ritual and routines of the service. I also absorbed a respect for many basic Christian ethics and messages: love your neighbour, look out for and care for those who are weaker or vulnerable. My parents had instilled in me an understanding that actions have consequences, and that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to behave. I’m not sure if I truly believed, but I felt a common ground with the teaching and messages, and I was confirmed when I was 14. This for me was less a declaration of deep-seated religious faith than a  rite of passage to maturity; a chance for me to do something that not everyone else did. I’m not sure why I was doing it though.

During my A-level history course I started learning more about (organised) religion (as opposed to faith): the abuses of the 15th century Catholic Church, Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, the Calvinists, the French Wars of Religion (or were they?), and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Since then I’ve learned to distinguish between personal faith & belief and religion.

My wife Rachel is a practising Catholic and has been all her life. She goes to Mass virtually every week, served for several years on our local Pastoral Council, leads the singing and helps select the hymns, plays in a music group, reads and is on the flower, cleaning and coffee rota. We were married in a Roman Catholic church, and as such I have promised to raise my daughters as Catholics. I go to church about every 4-6 weeks on average.

I’m not a believer. I do not believe that the wafers and wine actually transform into the Body and Blood of Christ. I do not believe that there is a place called Heaven, or (for that matter) Hell. But I do respect the rituals, and I admire those people who quietly practise their own faith, who gain strength, solace, calm or joy from it. I do not want to diminish their beliefs in the same way other non-believers sometimes seem to. Militant atheists are as bad as religious fundamentalists. Let people have their beliefs if those beliefs sustain them and don’t damage anyone else.

I abhor those who commit crimes under the guise of or ‘in the name of’ religion, selecting specific passages or interpretations of long-established ethics to serve their purpose. But I also dislike those who attack the whole religion for those individual crimes, for they often attack all who believe rather than the criminals. The vast majority of muslims are not terrorists. The vast majority of Roman Catholic priests do not abuse children.

I dislike those who confuse organised  religion with personal faith. A recent sermon at ‘our’ Church called on the congregation to live more closely to Jesus’ teachings and words as described in the Gospels, to act more closely with those principles. love thy neighbour, care for the poor and sick, look after your community. What on earth could be wrong with that? The messages that are preached to my wife and children at Church bear no resemblance to (for instance) the hatred between the ‘fans’ who support either Celtic or Rangers in Glasgow, or the atrocities in Nigeria, or any other the sectarian divides that are cited as reasons to count religion among the evils of the world.

All of this leads me further to respect the good people who practise the behaviours recommended and urged by their faith, and reject those who corrupt those teachings for their own ends. Does organised religion and its leaders let their followers down? Or is it even worse, that it actually betrays them?

I recently read Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ, which seemed to me to isolate in fairly brutal terms the gulf between personal spirituality and the faith of Jesus from the political/social doctrines and interpretation of those teachings by the organised Church. It’s a challenging read, and I’ll discuss it further shortly…

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