What a day – I had lots of plans but didn’t get very far with any of them. Lois likes me to tutor her through a couple of pages of Danish each morning, to keep her knowledge ticking over. After that I tried to read all the stuff we were asked to read before this afternoon’s meeting on zoom of Lynda’s U3A Middle English group, and, before I know it, it’s lunchtime – Lois is suffering from shoulder pain at the moment and lunch preparation is devolving on me every day: that’s fine, it’s no problem,
Lynda’s meeting starts at 2:30 pm – usually it’s over by 3:30, but today it went on till 4:30 pm, and then Lois wanted us to drive out to post a birthday card to our friend Fran – the card has to get there by tomorrow, so we have to use a particular postbox that has a collection at 5 pm. And that’s the day gone.
14:30 Lynda’s Middle English group meeting is fun – perhaps a bit too much fun. We’re reading John Wycliffe’s arguments in the 14th century for his project to translate the Bible into English – a project that the Church fought tooth and nail to prevent. Wycliffe said the Church opposed it because its leaders didn’t want ordinary people to know how much the monks and friars were flouting Christ’s teachings: the monks wanted to live a nice quiet life in their monasteries and not do what they were supposed to be doing, i.e. preaching and doing good deeds for the poor and sick etc. What madness!!!
Despite the seriousness of Wyciffe’s writings, it doesn’t stop us group members cracking a few jokes along the way, so once again this afternoon turns out to be another jolly zoom meeting for the 7 of us able to take part: which is ironic in a way, because Wycliffe clearly didn’t like jollity - jollity was a sin, he says, although perhaps not a deadly sin.
One thing I’ll say in our defence: we don’t do any singing during the meeting, and singing is something which Wycliffe says often leads to jollity – oh dear!
þat songe…. acordiþ not, for it stiriþ to iolité
Or in modern English, “singing is not a good idea, because it stirs [us] to jollity”. I suppose he’s right there – he was obviously quite an astute man.
I sympathize with Wycliffe to some extent – it can be annoying when people start singing, especially when you don’t like the song concerned, especially if it’s an annoying song like the Birdie Song, for instance, which is often played at wedding receptions. Wycliffe may have had the Birdie Song in mind here, I’m not sure.
Lois says that pop concerts are being arranged again in the UK, for the first time since the lockdown started, with a socially distanced audience. But the artists have been asked only to sing songs that aren’t in their usual repertoire – songs that they’ve never sung before on any of their albums. This will inhibit the audience from joining in in a kind of singalong, and so not encourage the spread of Coronavirus germs from person to person through the air of the concert hall.
This restriction will also cut down on the jollity, no doubt about that. And that’s something Wycliffe would have be pleased about, that’s for sure!
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!
20:00 We watch some TV, the second half of the two-hour Channel 5 documentary on Lawrence of Arabia, that we started watching last night.
This second half tells the story of Lawrence’s life from 1919 to his death in
the 1930’s. A bit of a sad anti-climax to this troubled man’s daring exploits
in World War I, when, dressed like a Bedouin, he was dashing around the deserts
trying to help the Arab rebels get their independence from the Ottoman Empire.
Lawrence took part in the post-war Versailles and Cairo Conferences, trying to achieve his Arab allies’ dream of a big independent Arab state in the Middle East, but the British and French delegates were dead against this – they had already agreed amongst themselves to carve up the region, using totally artificial borders, into a number of states, some effectively controlled by Britain and others by France, with nominal Arab rulers in place. The only concession Lawrence managed to wring from the conferences was to get his wartime Arab ally Feisal installed as king of Iraq. This small concession did nothing to assuage Lawrence’s feelings of personal guilt.
Lois and I can see that Britain and France still hadn’t woken up to the fact that they were no longer the great powers that they once were: and they had failed to foresee the decades of potential dangers that they were setting the stage for, by not acknowledging the Arab world’s aspirations for self-determination.
Meanwhile, Lawrence, hailed as a hero after Lowell Thomas’s heroic portrayal of him in his film feature “With Lawrence in Arabia”, was now trapped in a world of media fame and of plaudits he felt he didn’t deserve. He retreated to a cottage in rural Dorset, wrote his best-seller “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” to record his wartime experiences, and got some relief and escape by indulging his masochistic tendencies, and forgetting his troubles by speeding down the country lanes on a powerful motor bike that could do over 100 mph. He finally met his end in a crash, when trying to swerve to avoid two young cyclists.
The documentary ends with the programme’s experts giving their collected thoughts on the Lawrence saga. Many say that Lawrence’s most seminal contribution to history was the development of the tactics of guerrilla warfare, tactics later exploited in Cuba, Vietnam and Algeria, and many other places.
Lawrence himself, ironically, became disillusioned with guerrilla warfare. He was happy to be involved in guerrilla operations against the Turkish army, but he bitterly regretted the fact that blowing up Turkish railway lines and trains killed innocent civilians as well as Turkish soldiers – this didn’t square with his notions of being a modern day Sir Lancelot.
The programme’s experts, however, hail him, first and foremost, as being his own man: he “marched to the beat of his own drum”, an honourable and decent man, always conscientious about doing “the right thing”.
And Lois and I think he was tragically unfair on himself for thinking he had to carry all the guilt for the failure of Arab aspirations – he was hardly in a position to do much more than he did, in the face of short-sighted Anglo-French imperialist machinations.
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz !!!!!!
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