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The old agriculture

Languishing at home with bronchitis, I've been reading George Ewart Evans Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay, of 1956 (the year I was born :-)). He doesn't gloss over the hardships of the old agricultural life, but he does have a great sympathy for it. Yes, it must have been claustrophobic to grow up, live and die amongst the same bunch of people, but your life would certainly have been well-populated: pre-WWI agriculture was highly labour intensive. That was one of the things I noticed also about The Return of Martin Guerre, which I finally got to see, courtesy of the Independent, who were giving the DVD away free. There were so many extras on set all the time, even in domestic interiors. No doubt authentic.

There was a great dependence on cooperation in the old farming life as well. This is obvious in the harvest gangs, but it happened in smaller ways too. For instance the barm for brewing was passed round from household to household.

They went in for some crazy amusements to relieve the monotony, though. Evans' accounts of flailing are hair-raising. The flail must have been a devil of a thing to use, and beginners were as likely to thwack themselves on the back of the head as not. Old-timers showed their insouciance by sticking six-inch straws in their mouths and flicking them with the swipple at each pass.

Protective tabus

I'm a bit torn today between support for James Randi, who does a terrific job debunking quackery and unreason, and my affection for folk tradition. He has an item A strong fairies' union? on his online newsletter, Swift, about the people of St. Fillans, Perthshire, managing to save a local landmark from property developers by appealing, straight-faced, to the local tradition that it was the habitation of fairies. Which seems to me a very proper use of local history and tradition, really. Funnily enough, there's an article in this week's New Scientist Tibet's mountain gods have a way of preserving nature, which shows that places preserved as sacred in Tibet are full of rare plants. I think these are rather benign cases of people's susceptibility to superstition being exploited.

Hello Britain, you can stop beating yourselves up now

What a sweetie Dr John Sentamu is. The new Archbishop of York. Normally wouldn't care what goes on in the Church of England, but this man has given England a message, as reported in The Times that must go for Scotland too. More or less: "Okay, you've beaten yourselves up enough about the Empire; you can stop now."

Sometimes there's a historic moment that just takes your breath away. And this wonderful warm southern blast of forgiveness is such a moment.

It has taken black commentators to say it - Trevor Philips and now Mr Sweetie. It's all right to be proud of being English (read Scottish, etc.). So can we have Scottish history and culture taught in Scottish schools now, please, without the Labour Party recoiling in horror at the reactionariness of it all, and the politically correct biting their nails over whether they shouldn't be giving equal time to Eskimos.

The Lady and the Highwayman

Well, I'll be dipped in dogshit - as Fat Freddy always used to say in the cartoons - Tesco has got The Lady and the Highwayman on DVD for97p. They have a load of old rubbish in minimal packaging, mainly children's cartoons, and one or two grown-up films. Maybe the person who gave my new second-hand video to the junk shop had got themselves the DVD. Or maybe it's just coincidence.

Long live backlists

What wonderful times these are for film-lovers. There are so many old films coming out on DVD. It must be twenty years ago that Channel 4 had a season of Mae West and Rudolph Valentino, and I've been waiting years to see them again. The Mae West box set is stashed away for Xmas - Male Parent doesn't do Xmas shopping, on account of disability - at least I always get what I want. I got two Rudolph Valentino DVD's in Stirling, in one of those remaindered book shops, for £2 each, £3 the pair. Couldn't believe it. I've waited years! The Eagle and Blood and Sand. Despite all the melodrama, the old b&w films are so close to ordinary lives - the characters are people who've known hardship, weariness and cold, hunger, indignity, heart-scorching distress. But the best of them retain their humanity, decency and sense of purpose, and all but the very worst honour the bonds of family and friendship.

And talking of melodrama, I found an old video in a charity shop at the weekend: The Lady and the Highwayman of 1989, with a very young-looking Hugh Grant as the dashing hero, looking 'sad' in the Middle English meaning of the word - very serious and high-minded. Oh, he does it so well. It's so camp, and he looks so gorgeous in lace.

Heimat

I had occasion today to look for background on the word Heimat, the German word for ‘home, one’s native place’, with untranslatable connotations of the countryside, village life, childhood and community. I suspect that for younger people the main association to the word is the well-known film - which is also very prominent in Google results. For me, being older, the echoes of German romanticism have to be double-checked. And indeed I found that political ideologies polarise around the concept of Heimat. At Eric Zuelow's excellent Nationalism Project, I found a review by Tom Donahue of Bernhard Schlink, Heimat als Utopie (Frankfurt am Maine, 2002), from which I learnt that Heimat is embraced by romanticism and nationalism, but also over-shadowed by its exploitation by Nazism. Marxism and existentialism, which reject the idea of the individual’s identity being tied to a place, see national, regional and ethnic sentiment as reactionary.

So we still find, in the modern politics of the left, that people are able to embrace multiculturalism, and accept the integrity of ethnic sensibilities in non-western cultures, but display an instinctive distrust of the same phenomena lingering in western society.

So much the worse for local, and even national, cultures within the UK, which never seem to find any support on the left. For so many years, we've struggled to get any money or support for the Scots language from government. The hopes raised by the creation of the Scottish Parliament have come to nothing. As I recall, even before the first election the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, as it then was, self-censored a report advocating a place for Scottish culture in the school curriculum, in anticipation of the expected Labour majority.

In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, the linkage of Ulster Scots to right-wing populism (the Protestant interest) has produced the Ulster-Scots Agency. Unfortunately, the state of political culture over there is such that little money has been spent on projects and much on junketing and bureaucrat's salaries.

P.J.O'Rourke's defence of civilisation

When democracy is discussed, I always think of P.J.O'Rourke's defence of the West:

<< Civilisation is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof. No reasonable person who has had a look at the East Bloc … can countenance the barbarities of the Left. … So-called Western Civilisation, as practiced [sic] in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western Civilisation not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it's also the only thing that's ever tried to. Our civilisation is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.

We are fools when we fail to defend civilisation. The ancient Romans might as well have said, "Oh, the Germanic tribes have valid nationalistic and cultural aspirations. Let's pull the legions off the Rhine, submit our differences to a multilateral peace conference chaired by the Pathan Empire and start a Vandal Studies program at the Academy in Athens.">> (P.J. O'Rourke Holidays in Hell, 1988, New York: Vintage, 1992: 3-4 - from his summary of everything he has learned about trouble).