Very few are drawn to read my blogs and fewer still to comment on them; not surprising, you might say, considering their plodding, witness statement style and their dubious content. However, I am not downcast as I write for the Mary Beard equivalent of the year 4023, digging up a deeply buried relic of a laptop in a corner of Wolvercote Common. What a rich vein of twenty first century life she will find there!
Meanwhile, if no-one questions what I write, I suppose I should interrogate myself. So let us start with: What is the significance of the Latin maxim Sapiens qui prospicit, mentioned in ' A Letter to the Almighty ' [ 2 May 2017 ]? This happy little adage, translated loosely as ' Planning is a good idea ' or more literally ' Wise is the person who looks forward ' I learnt from my first Form Master at Winchester College, AH [Podge] Brodhurst who had been a student at Malvern College where this saying is the school motto and where presumably everyone lives in the middle of next week.
Podge himself was a lovely man and a very keen cricketer. During the siege of Tobruk in North Africa in 1941 he produced a substantial cricket bag containing all the necessary gear and invited the neighbouring troops to several sessions of our greatest game. In fact there was a match of sorts between the Australians and the British with the former sadly coming out on top but no-one doubted the eventual success in repelling the Axis forces until relief arrived several weeks later was in some part due to this unusual diversion; were the Aussies or the Nazis the real enemy?
Incidentally it was an unbending stipulation that the umpires for these matches carried rifles, causing us to wonder whether President Trump's plan to equip teachers with guns is such a novel idea after all.
There once was a young man named Podge,
Who needed the mortars to dodge;
He rolled a sand wicket,
Played Aussies at cricket;
Huns thwarted in plans to dislodge.
After the war Podge was entrusted with an even greater responsibility, the reintroduction of cricket to Holland, where the flourishing club scene of the 1930s had all but disappeared during unfriendly occupation. In this he was no less successful and cricket has prospered among the tulips ever since. This does not necessarily mean that Sapiens qui prospicit is the best guidance for life; planning always for the triumphs and disasters of tomorrow, you may miss the joys of today not to mention the ceiling falling unceremoniously in on you.
My second question is what is this business of Stonewall Jackson riding ahead in ' The Stuffing of the Flyers ' [ 10 December 2017 ]? We all know that Jackson was a highly respected Confederate General in the American Civil War, who appears to be 60 in the pictures of the time although he died at 39 but what was he doing ' riding ahead'? The answer lies in a romantic poem about an elderly federal female supporter, Barbara Frietchie, who resolutely waved a union flag out of her upstairs window in the town of Frederick, Maryland, as a demonstration of defiance against the confederate forces under Jackson marching through the streets.
' She leaned far out on the window sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.
"Shoot if you must this old grey head,
But spare your country's flag" she said.'
Great stuff, you may be thinking, but the poem, written by John Greenleaf Whittier several years after the event may not be rooted in fact at all but it reflected that nineteenth century portrayal of heroism in much the same way as , on the other side of the Atlantic, Macaulay was ken to tell us all about Horatius at the bridge. What we do know is seventy years later, in May 1943, Winston Churchill was visiting President Roosevelt to discuss what was eventually to be the allied invasion of D Day. En route from Camp David to Washington, they passed Barbara Frietchie's house and Churchill, determined to impress his host, insisted on quoting the whole poem [ and it isn't short ] from memory from ' Up from the meadows rich with corn ' right through to ' And ever the stars above look down on thy stars below in Frederick town!' One can just imagine Roosevelt, shifting uneasily, wanting to get on and possibly even thinking ' What a tedious old crashing bore we have here '. I never learnt the poem but my elder sisters did and I am grateful to them for quoting it, Churchill like at full length, in the 1950s.
And is it true and is it true that it was or is a good thing to learn poetry by heart? Cue a long debate, I suspect, on whether that version of education has merit but it does give another old bore an experience for a blog and grounds for a touch of senile serendipity.
There is one further question to answer but I suspect that is enough for now. You will have to wait a few days to discover the significance of the title of my first blog. I know you will be on tenterhooks and I hope you survive.
23 April 2018
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