We gotta get out of this place...

It was 1965. The Animals.

We gotta get out of this place
If it's the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place
'Cause girl, there's a better life for me and you

These are the words which became the theme song of the Vietnam War and are burnt into my brain.

Every time I get away for a break, note - not a positive thing like a “make” but a break, a destruction of something that works I resolve it’ll be the first of many. Never is. 

This one’s hardly a summer holiday. We’ve already had one of those but as I recall – a rather fuzzy memory -  I had Covid and spent most of the time asleep. No, this is a retreat to a quiet apartment overlooking a nature reserve and a stream.

In Canterbury for glorious choral music, Elizabethan architecture, lazy lunches and bison. Virtually extinct in Europe and pretty well unknown in Britain these creatures, the heaviest living wild land animals, are like powerful demolition machines. In a rewilding experiment  at Wilder Blean in Kent they are turning jungles into parks. And a baby bison has just been born so things are looking up.

And everyone else seems at it too. Good friends have just returned from a brilliant trip to and around India. It’s strange that when I was there a few years ago it seemed somehow familiar as though I’d lived there in a previous existence. It smelt wonderful and mysterious and was exciting in a way China, although fascinating too, somehow wasn’t. Poetry as opposed to prose.

And our daughter, son in law and grandchildren are in New York doing what we all do in the most thrilling city in the world. Walking. Walking. Walking. Walking through diversity. Chinatown. Harlem. The Financial District. Brownstone buildings. Central Park. The High Line. The Staten Ferry. Broadway diners where resting artists are now waitresses who suddenly burst into song. The biggest burgers ever. Whale sized Lobsters. And Walking. Walking. Walking.

What we missed through the drab days of lockdown was travel, experiences and change. In those same as, same as days of imprisonment that sixth sense of discovery and change was turned off which was tragic because ultimately it’s that sense which we need and which turns us on when we get weary.

So we are getting away because there’s a better life than Brighton great as Brighton is. But right now it feels like this dirty old part of the city where the sun refused to shine. Living in Brighton is like a never ending dish of scampi. Delicious but occasionally I need steak or – can this be me – tofu. 

I’m looking forward to rediscovering deep sleep and getting rid of mental cobwebs. I’m also looking forward to learning a few new things – I don’t know what yet but when I find out I’ll be sure to tell you.

Have a great week. Have fun. Plan your next adventure.

MAD DOGS AND CONSERVATIVES

It’s been a rather strange time for everyone. Our disgraced PM resigning. A bare-knuckle fight to choose his successor. At last summer holidays really beginning. But it’s getting too hot everywhere. 

Air travel is chaotic. Rail travel is subject to industrial action. And the economy’s in turmoil. Meanwhile especially Sri Lanka and Italy and France are in various levels of political array. And the horror story in the Ukraine gets worse.  The world’s overheating in almost every respect.

Back to a more Enid Blyton world. 

Two Go on their Hols. We went on a brief holiday to Canterbury of which I remember little as I had Covid and managed marathon sleeps. If any of you has trouble sleeping Covid’s the solution. I also had a bizarre dream in which I was in a company which had a large cryptocurrency portfolio. I decided, unilaterally, to sell the lot putting hundreds of millions into the bank. Two days later the cryptocurrency crashed and the previously held portfolio would have been worthless. Nonetheless the Board were outraged and forced me to resign. I agreed but pointed out I’d saved the company. “That’s not the point” they shouted. I went into an even deeper sleep.

Canterbury is beautiful and the Cathedral always an awe-inspiring sensation. They had a visiting choir, the King’s Counterpoint from South Carolina. 

They were astonishingly mellifluous and brought calm and harmony to those who on hearing South Carolina think of “Donald Trump.”

But harmony has not been the highlight of the Conservative Party election process. I think I’d prefer to have Covid again. Do the candidates and their respective supporters have any idea of what impression they leave on the electorate? Matthew Parris said that should Liz Truss win he’d dust down his Scottish credentials, move north of the border, get out of any sterling savings he had, vote for Scottish independence and had he any grandchildren (he hasn’t) he’d try to help them get Canadian citizenship. 

It must be the effects of Covid that caused this with me but initially I rather fancied Penny Mordaunt who resembled the sort of amply bosomed nurse I felt I needed. But we need a competent Prime Minister not a nurse. I think Boris Johnson might even win if he stood again. Isn’t it weird that this tawdry process has somehow slightly mitigated his disgrace? 

A lovely hot summer? Here’s the Guardian headline from Saturday:

“England braces for 40C temperatures as experts warn thousands could die” 

I’m going to attach “as experts warn thousands could die” to anything I feel like in future – so hysterical, so Guardian. It’s going to be as hot as it used to be when we went to Greece a long time ago…that’s what we went for. But that was before the current air travel chaos. And isn’t it ironic that of all the airlines in control and doing a proper job it’s Ryan Air and that old rascal Michael O’Leary who come top of the class for reliability?

As we head towards a “summer of discontent,” as experts warn thousands could die – sorry I couldn’t resist it – I watched RMT Union boss Mick Lynch and thought the unthinkable.

He’s a fantastic interviewee – a slayer of BBC upstarts – and he looks, compared to those Tory hopefuls, almost Prime Ministerial. 

He’s arguing calmly for a large but below inflation level wage rise for his and other workers. As companies like PWC give their people a 9% raise and their partners (all 900 odd of them in the UK) £1 million bonuses doesn’t anyone see the irony of the government saying: “we can’t afford it”? Maybe we can’t afford not to negotiate more positively.

Meanwhile Sri Lanka has inflation of around 55% and the economy has collapsed. In relation to that we are very rich.

Strange times? What’s new? But let’s hope we all regain our health, wealth, sanity and cool soon. Happy summertime everyone. 

A STORY OF EXCESSES, RAGES AND A BAD APPOINTMENT

This weekend following the British Museum exhibition “Beckett: Murder and the Making of a Saint”, we are going to a conference which is about Thomas in Canterbury.

It’s the 12th century. England has been ravaged by 14 years of civil war between Stephen and Matilda. The country is in chaos. In 1153 Henry 1’s grandson, at 21, becomes King.

What’s he like? He has hyper-energy, eats standing up, is always on the move, he’s petulant and impetuous. But in his short reign this man-of-action restores order. The barons submit to him; castles built without permission are torn down. The mercenaries who’d been hired in the Civil War have a few days to leave England or be executed. They decamp in a hurry. He sets up trial by jury and assizes (old French for “sittings”) where judges hear cases. Prisons are built and villages and towns are repurposed with proper market days. The country becomes less mediaeval, more civilised and calm; much of this owing to Henry’s decisiveness. 

Yet he only speaks French and Latin and lives 2/3 of his life in Anjou. A key to his success is Thomas Becket, who is recommended to him by his Archbishop, Theobald. They get on tremendously well, so well that Henry makes him Lord High Chancellor. Thomas is smart, charming, a fixer and a man who makes things happen. He’s the King’s right hand but also his best friend.

He’s a show-off, dandy and poseur. He keeps monkeys and wolves. He has a vast array of silk garments. When he goes to France to negotiate the marriage of the King’s daughter he does so in fabulous luxury with a huge entourage. He behaves as if he were King. He loves bling.

Then something awful happens. When Archbishop Theobald dies Henry has a brainwave. Why not make Becket Archbishop as well as Chancellor?  Henry has been irked for some time by something called “benefit of clergy” which simply means whatever a member of the clergy does they’re immune to civil law. So, if they commit murder, say, a Bishop’s Court might defrock them or exact a penance. That’s all. But there’s a bigger game to play. The church represents a sixth of the population and is very wealthy. Henry wants to clip its wings. Thomas is the man to do that job. He’s proved this before.

 Huge mistake.

Becket’s transformation from super-rich courtier to Man-of-God takes two days. One day Thomas next day the Reverent Thomas, next day Archbishop Thomas, answerable to the Pope as well as the King. 

But he won’t do what an increasingly bemused and enraged Henry wants. He becomes as saintly now as he’d been epicurean before. For 8 years he’s an absentee Archbishop in France. From brilliant Chancellor and best friend  to intransigent churchman and obstructive foe (as Henry sees it). Thomas cannot be judged a success in his new role. He has constant rows with Henry causing great distress to the people who’d seen this previous effective partnership  collapse and create national disharmony..

Henry’s increasing frustration and rage is interpreted by four loyal but not too bright knights as a wish that Thomas be silenced. So, they come over from France and butcher him in Canterbury Cathedral.

It’s the most infamous murder ever. For the last 19 years of his life Henry bitterly regrets it, lamenting the loss of a friend, his own rashness and poor judgement, the tarnishing forever of his previously brilliant reign and becoming just a footnote in history.

We instead have the most famous Saint. 

Lesson for today: Be very careful about senior appointments. Especially if it’s a friend.

 

WHEN A BREAK MENDS YOUR SPIRIT

I hadn’t realised how shredded I was until my second day’s break in Canterbury. Canterbury? Hardly the Cote d’Azur or Paxos. But it did the trick. Most surprising of all wasn’t just the Cathedral – the choirs there are astounding, the architecture stunning and, as we discovered just after returning home, the stained glass is the oldest in Britain and maybe in the world dating back to the 12th century. Years older than previously thought.

No it was the Great Stour which together with its many tributaries flows through the city. This is a city of water, locks, sluices and punts not just “the” Roman Road – Watling Street -  or the stage  on which the extraordinarily gruesome and historically significant and symbolic murder of Thomas Becket took place. Canterbury feels old, Elizabethan architecture, pedestrianised and very quiet – like Oxford’s Turl street but on a smaller scale. 

I bought T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in the Cathedral bookshop. Reading it I discovered how stunningly theatrical it is. Read the self- justifications of the four knights – the murderers -  who walking to front of the stage in blokey language explain they were alternatively, tipsy; that there was no benefit to them for doing it; that Becket could have escaped but effectively, because he stood up to them, was (or so a jury would surely conclude) committing suicide whilst of unsound mind. Black humour.

The final thing about this small,  43,000 population city (city status because of the Cathedral) is it’s crammed with glorious gardens. Real gardens created and tended by real gardeners not Council workers. Gardens that merge into water meadows. At Abbott’s Mill in the city they’re creating a city woodland with the Stour rushing through it only being interrupted by an electricity generating wooden water wheel. 

Canterbury opened my eyes, my mind and mended my grumpiness. The word I’m looking for about it is civilised. 

Shortly after we got home Storm Evert struck. 

“Blow winds crack your cheeks” said King Lear – and so they did last Friday in Brighton. But then again I love weather – WEATHER (it needs capitals) when people say “it just doesn’t know what to do”. Because WEATHER combines exciting cloud formations, gales, sunshine, torrential rain. I remember Greece where it was identically beautiful every day. No excitement. No unpredictability.

And that of course is what we’ve been missing over the past year or so because  Covid’s been so oppressively a one-paced presence.  Life has been a bit dull with one day following the next. Until Canterbury. And until the Olympics of which I’m not generally a fan. 

But that was before Beth Schriever and BMX. Beth couldn’t get financial support from Team GB who meanwhile, like a mad gambler were ploughing nearly £25 million into rowing. Instead she managed to crowd-fund £50k getting her through the trials to Tokyo where she won a gold medal. She’s 22 and amazing. I watched her race with joy. Her spirit wonderfully was not broken. She got a break on her own terms. Golden girl.

Routine is the killer for most people. If all our lives comprise the “the same as” we get bored then depressed then diminished. We stop learning. That’s why I love Canterbury – I learnt some new stuff. That’s why Beth is so interesting. I didn’t know BMX was an Olympic sport. And I’d never heard of her.

Everyone needs to multiply the number of new things they do. To many the pandemic has been characterised by watching repeats on TV. We can do better. We need to find our Canterbury because……