20 December 2024
Yet another pair of new M&S cords on which the button hole in the fly flap is too small for the button it is meant to go over! What has gone wrong at M&S about this? Have they made the right-sized eye, then stitched it round with such stout thread that it is too small for the button — and never tested it? I have to strangle the trousers to get the button through, even though I’ve tried enlarging the eye. (But if I did that with scissors or a Stanley knife the eye would doubtless tear.) Is this the fashion now? Are these trousers made expressly for weightlifters with Herculean thumb muscles who don’t blink at the task? Or am I completely self-deluded and the problem is simply that I am seventy-six?
27 December
Following the Archbishop of York’s sophistical Christmas Day sermon (‘Empty words. I have no words more than that to describe their meaning’, the excellent Bishop of Newcastle said of it), the media are full of further condemnations of ‘the Church of England’ because of its ‘handling’ of the Smyth, Tudor and other abuse cases.
To reduce the scandals to a failure of ‘handling’, or say such things as ‘I admit the Church could have acted differently’, is very characteristically to overlook that it was a failure of moral-ethical duty at the very top of an organisation whose very raison d’être is to proclaim and enact the very highest moral-ethical values. They simply don’t get it: that it’s the failure in fundamental moral action that shocks and infuriates people.
A few days ago I attended only the second Christingle service in my life, at a parish church in bleakest North Norfolk. It was theologically, liturgically, humanly, empathically, musically, lovingly magnificent, conducted with marvellous warmth, directness and humour by the young chaplain of a local school. The children who took part in it were completely relaxed, threw themselves into its spirit, and thoroughly enjoyed it (e.g. being entrusted with lighted candles and eating the jelly babies adorning the orange and symbolising the fruits of creation). This was the real Church of England, the majority Church of England for the majority of people who either attend its services or benefit from its charitable ministry, the real, loving Church of England in action; the ‘body’ of the Church of England, and not the ‘Church of England’ which failed in its ethical duty to victims of abuse — that was its head, its hiercharchs, the top of the organisation that has been obsessed with ‘management’ (‘handling’) since Justin Welby became archbishop.
As it happens, I attended a sermon that Welby gave in Canterbury Cathedral soon after his enthronement. I was appalled: it was entirely management speak and trendy sociology. He worked in two oil companies for eleven years before becoming ordained, and I seriously think he believed God ‘revealed’ to him that the Church of England should be ‘managed’ like an oil company. I worked with oil companies for fifteen years myself, and can assure Welby it shouldn’t. The purpose of an oil company is to produce oil (they may produce it ethically: western oil companies’ environmental protection, for instance, was hugely appreciated by the local populations of Sakhalin, Central Siberia etc). The purpose of the Church of England is to proclaim and live out Christ’s utterly, purely, completely ethical, inter-human message (Christ reserved one of his strongest condemnations for those who ‘offend these little ones’). It was this supremely ethical purpose that Welby and the hierarchs forgot. An oil company regularly takes on highly paid consultants to manage specific issues that the consultants know about and are the best people to tackle. This has been Welby’s knee jerk response to issues in the CoE. But where the issues are ethical ones like abuse and safeguarding, you do not need to take on droves of ex-policemen and secular regulators if the whole point of your church is that you are supposed to know about such issues from the fount of ethical knowledge. Your duty is to apply that knowledge of right and wrong proactively yourself. Instead, CoE hierarchs have burbled wokely for ten years and given absolutely no spiritual leadership, for example during the pandemic. When the Church’s ‘managers’ have failed at their first and foremost mission — enacting Christ’s ethics — then the very sight of their rich vestments makes people feel sick. There are also far too many bishops. The CoE is bloated with such burbling ‘managers’.
During the pandemic, when Welby inimitably informed everyone that church services were ‘not an essential service’, Charles Moore wrote of the CoE that its ‘system is so obsessed with saving face that it makes everyone else lose faith’. (Welby actually admired Paula Vennells, the CEO of the Post Office equally disconnected from personal responsibility!) My own opinion — I’m afraid — is that Welby, chosen from the ‘evangelical wing’ of the CoE, is not seized by Christ-led ethical action, but some sort of ‘charismatic’ afflatus or effulgence, ‘prayer in tongues’, ’empty words’ and a form of supreme un-self-doubting righteousness. He lives in a blessed world of his own.
30 December
The days when we had to go out and catch bigger and bigger pike are past. Now we go as much to see the wildlife in the Fens as anything. Today, for instance, we crouched or stood in dense, seven-foot reeds and nettles for five hours, saw not a single human being, but beheld three marsh harriers, a kestrel hunting, a buzzard, a sparrowhawk, a water rail, two egrets, two herons, cormorants, a barn owl, and more, in bright crisp air. We have also become obsessive about not harming the pike we catch. Why catch them, then? Well… It satisfies something, to defeat such a fierce and beautiful predator who once was simply considered vermin and ‘tapped on the head’, and who puts up a cunning fight against being landed. Today, at a spot where we have landed pike in the past up to 17 lbs in weight, we caught just a 3 lb pickerel. It was not even hooked, it had ripped off the bait and clamped its jaws on the wire trace. ‘Pike, perfect Pike in all parts’, as Ted Hughes wrote.
all the pike wields now: its green-gold stick
6 January 2025
Both Harvey Pitcher and I have received emails expressing admiration for his new translation of Chekhov’s ‘Lady with a Little Dog’. Their given seems to be that the story is a masterpiece. This could be why no-one has left a Comment about it. Dozens of Russianists subscribe to Calderonia, but they are unlikely to want to raise points of translation in a Comment and they perhaps feel that the story itself ‘leaves nothing to say’.
Another possible reason occurs to me. Apparently, after the first showing of the film Shakespeare in Love (1998) many couples came away arguing whether it was realistic about love, or even moral, and London dinner parties resounded with disagreement on these matters. ‘Lady with a Little Dog’ also purports to show what a ‘true’, a ‘great’ love is like. (‘He understood clearly that she was the nearest, dearest, and most important person in the world for him now; this little woman, lost in the provincial crowd, not remarkable in any way, holding a cheap lorgnette, now filled his whole life, was his joy and sorrow and the one happiness that he longed for.’) But if you have never experienced anything like that, you are unlikely to want to stand up and say so, or that the story is ‘romantic’, ‘unrealistic’, not ‘universal’. If the story sweeps you off your feet, you aren’t going to need to Comment. If you are not convinced by it, you probably aren’t going to want to say so.
Time to take down the mistletoe
14 January
This blog was never intended as a forum for contentious national issues. I acknowledge that I may have broken my own rule about that in the entry above for 27 December by attacking the hierarchs of the Church of England, but I have had experience of this issue and have been thinking about it for a long time. I had to get it out.
When John Polkinghorne and I were working on our book What Can We Hope For? it so happened that a long-standing friend of mine, deeply active in the CoE, was arrested and charged with viewing heinous child pornography on the Web, and two ecclesiastical colleagues of John’s were also charged with serious abuse of young people. One of these was a local theologian whom we were actually quoting in our book! I asked John why he thought there were so many cases of this in the CoE, but he became very sad, looked down at the floor, made a slight gesture and would only say quietly: ‘It’s a terrible problem.’
I think the first question that has to be answered is, why does the CoE attract so many paedophiles and abusers, when, as I said above, the ethical source of its existence utterly condemns such activities? You would think that might put potential offenders off. I dare say the public believes, however, that these offenders coolly identify the opportunities for them within church life; that in abusers’ terms the church offers them ‘havens’.
But why does it? Most paedophiles, I suspect, believe they are ‘right’, that paedophilia is defensible, even ‘normal’, and that they are ‘victims’ of illiberal laws. Churches are known for their ‘tolerance’, so paedophiles must see that as a further opportunity, even encouragement. Moreover, Christians are always supposed to forgive.
The latter, in my opinion, is why sexual abusers have got away with it for so long in Christian churches. Theologians, hierarchs, and modern Christians generally, are terribly confused about forgiveness. They believe it is always incumbent on them to forgive, when it is actually incumbent first on the sinner to repent. To the outside world an over-willing forgiveness is indistinguishable from a cover-up. Forgiveness without repentance in the offender merely makes the Christian him/herself feel right and good, and our priests and hierarchs always want to feel that, of course. My instinctive feeling is that the clerics have been ‘tolerant’ to abusers because they believe forgiveness is always a virtue. I don’t believe this myself. Forgiveness of an abuser without repentance is smug self-gratification and merely forgetting, not forgiveness. I admit that John Polkinghorne and I disagreed over Christian forgiveness (see pages 59-63, 65-66), but we certainly agreed that it should be mandatory for the church to report all abuse cases to the Police and pursue them to legal conclusions — whether the abuser repented and the victim forgave, or not.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
The diary of a writer-publisher: 35
13 October 2025
There were a number of letters in The Times earlier this month describing butterflies that the authors had witnessed turning up at funerals and even settling on the coffin. The point was that people found it mysterious and strangely comforting, as though it were a sort of sign from the beyond, or a ‘second presence’. I had discussed this well attested phenomenon (in one case, a couple of barn owls flew in and perched on the coffin) with John Polkinghorne in our dialogathon published as What Can We Hope For? in 2019:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
On 6 October the newspaper printed a brief letter from me drawing attention to the relevant pages (50-52), but they cut the page reference. I then discovered that butterflies weren’t specifically indexed (the phenomenon comes under ‘animism’), so I don’t know how Times readers could be expected to find the subject in a 90-page book. I hope they weren’t disappointed. But when we looked yesterday at the sales for our books through Amazon, there was a conspicuous spike for What Can We Hope For? after 6 October!
(Ol’ga Leonardovna was unsettled by the fact that a ‘large black moth’ flew into the hotel room at Badenweiler where Chekhov had just died and beat itself against lights.)
30 October
It is, of course, very good news that Trump has at last sanctioned Russia’s biggest oil companies and that the Coalition of the Willing is getting its act together to inject Russia’s frozen overseas assets into the Ukrainian war economy. Even so, there is relatively little in our newspapers these days about the war and yesterday Roger Boyes wrote in The Times of the ‘rotten heart of European war fatigue’ under the headline ‘I hate to say it, but Kyiv won’t last till spring: for all the EU’s rousing words, there just isn’t the money or the will to keep defending Ukraine’. Surprisingly for Boyes, who is a very respectable commentator, I think he has muddled cause and effect in this article. I still maintain that the will to help Ukraine defeat Putin remains firm both in Britain and Europe. The will isn’t fatigued. But if the money literally isn’t there, then of course it won’t be possible to implement the will. However, it is going to be to Europe’s everlasting shame if it doesn’t come up with the money to match the existing will (which Boyes brands ‘rhetoric’). So it is a question now not of the will but of the determination. Nor do I personally underestimate Trump’s increasing impatience with Putin. In his own eyes, Trump is not ‘a loser’.
13 November
A qualified subscriber has jocularly asked: ‘Why on earth did you bring that stuffed seagull into the first line of your translation of Brodsky’s “October madrigal”, as though you were Shamraev in Act 4 of Chekhov’s play? There is no “gull” in Brodsky’s poem, or faintest whiff of one, just a “stuffed female quail on the mantelpiece”!’
Quite so. Actually the two lines translate literally as ‘a stuffing [chuchelo] of a female quail/stands on the mantelpiece’. That is how you say in Russian what we say in English as ‘a stuffed female quail’. Except that in English you can’t say ‘stuffed’ here of the bird as it would suggest a culinary delicacy involving shallots, herbs etc. (There is another meaning of ‘stuffed’, of course, and that too could interfere here; there’s definitely a sense in the play that by Act 4 Nina is a ‘stuffed seagull’.) So how do you not say ‘a stuffed female quail’? Well, these days perhaps a chuchelo is more a solid ‘model’ of a female quail? We can’t tell which Joseph Brodsky saw/meant in 1971, as he is not here to tell us.
The solution I hit on was to get the adjectival participle ‘stuffed’ away from qualifying ‘female quail’: by saying first that a stuffed seagull did not grace the mantelpiece, I could convey that a stuffed female quail did without having to repeat ‘stuffed’ to qualify ‘quail’. I liked this solution (a) because it was a solution, (b) because you might well expect a stuffed seagull in a cottage by the sea, not a quail, (c) it is a joke, alluding to the hilarious stuffed seagull appearing upstage in Act 4 of the play, and Joseph Brodsky loved ‘allusions’.
But there is another problem: ‘female quail’. Yes, perepelka is the feminine form of perepel, a quail. The female is perhaps more attractive, with her speckledy breast, but it is too late to ask Joseph whether he knew it was a hen bird, or just needed the extra syllable and rhyme. In any case, the -elka ending could equally well be a diminutive/affectionate form; the accepted affectionate form of perepel, perepelochka, would have had too many syllables and anyway have sounded tautological, since the bird is tiny in the first place. So I chose to take perepelka as an affectionate form; a ‘darling’ quail to the lovers.
I don’t like ‘explaining’ a translation — they either work for the reader or they don’t — but equally I feel a reader’s gauntlet deserves to be picked up. Who said translation was easy?
20 October
I can imagine the mirth triggered in some subscribers by the communication on the Goathead Press’s new website that my book of twenty short stories ‘will be published in early 2026’. They doubtless recall more vividly than I do the trail of missed publication dates for this book that has been laid by announcements on Calderonia over the past year!
‘Going forward’, yes, it is so. If I am honest with myself, the main reason is that the last story in the collection, ‘Pouring Out’, has taken me far longer to write than I was expecting. Maybe it will completed before Christmas. But I should also say that the unplanned turmoil with Sam&Sam has taken up a great deal of our time since 16 June. Getting a basic website like the Goathead Press’s up and running may not look very complicated, but as well as the new ‘Who We Are’ it included checking all our stock figures connecting directly with PayPal, updating all three postage rates for every one of our available books after weighing them, adding new books, compiling the new list of secondhand books, buying the website name etc etc. Well, it’s done and we have already had some nice feedback.
What it means, though, for this blog is that I shall probably be posting only once a month from now until February 2026. My name really would be mud if I didn’t get The White Bow/Ghoune out when I said this time! I will try to post things seasonal, of course.
30 November
As I write, Ukraine’s delegation (now led by Rustem Umerov) is in the U.S. to discuss Steve Witkoff’s 28-point peace plan. Witkoff has come in for a lot of mockery for his apparent amateurism and I think that using only Putin’s interpreters in his three-day Miami discussions with Dmitriev was probably unconstitutional (treasonous). Witkoff appears simply to have swallowed Russia’s maximalist wish-list. But nothing less than that would have got the Russians on board. Whether it was a conscious bait or not, it has succeeded in at last hooking Putin onto serious negotiations. It will now be difficult for Putin to ditch the peace process — although he promptly rejected the Europeans’ rewriting of Witkoff’s plan, of course. Putin lost his war long ago, he knows it, and is now entangled in a Trumpian ‘deal’. That’s about as positively as one can put it. Ukraine has not won the war and looks as though it is going to lose the peace. Sorry, I mean ‘peace’.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.