Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell

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This early work of Orwell displays all the quality of writing that you would expect and many of the social themes common to his work get expression here.

However there was for me a tension, Orwell is writing of poverty as a “lived experience” but in certain ways I wonder about the true authenticity of his experience. There is an aspect that makes him feel more of a voyeur that a true participant.

This is particularly true of second half of the book when he has returned to England on the promise of a job arranged by a friend. On arrival in England it turns out there will be a delay of a month before he can take up the position, and so he spends that month tramping around. It calls to mind the song “Common People” by Pulp, especially the lines “you'll never get it right, 'cos when you're laid in bed at night watching roaches climb the wall, If you call your Dad he could stop it all.” Orwell's experience of poverty was ultimately finite while I think a virtual characteristic is exactly the lack of opportunity of escape from the situation.

The other aspect which I struggle with, which I had encountered before in some of his other writings, was his reflection on the different the experience of being a tramp within the “causal wards” of the workhouse for the educated and uneducated man/mind. He feels the enforced idleness of the “causal ward” is a particular hardship on the uneducated who, beyond manual activity, have in Orwell's view no capacity to occupy their minds. The educated man, aka Orwell, could spend this idleness in reflection on Opera, the great works of literature, thinking of Old Masters, etc, and so escape the boredom. Now at one level this is a reasonable conclusion but the differential does not sit easily with me – is there some implied or inherent value judgement lurking here? He seems to be advocating work not education as the solution. I can't quite put my finger on it – is it saying there is a class of people for whom manual labour is a liberating experience, and a class for whom perhaps educated “idleness” is the proper state.

Poppy, flower of hope

Here is a poem that came to me the other day

Poppy, flower of hope...

Do you have faith the size of a poppy seed,
a hard shell, black like the darkest night?

And will you plant it in the barren, tortured, soil,
crying out with your brother's blood?

And watch it grow and brust to flame,
(Red, of martyrs, and of Holy Spirit),
undying life-force rising from the dead?

And will you turn and face the world,
and in the darkness live the chance of light?

Under Another Sky Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins

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This is a travelogue which, like Dr Who, journeys in both time and space. Higgins tours the country visiting Roman sites but their physical presence is not the focus. The heart of this book is the journeys through the relationship that successive generations have had with our Roman past.

This is partly the story to the developments of historical and archaeological practice over the last 300 years or so, a story filled with some delightfully colourful characters. But it is also the story of the wider social understand of the Roman Empire and its lessons for the contemporary self understanding.

The dominance of a “Classical” education during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries drove a desire to make links between the Classical world and our own origins. There was a need to show that we had a share in the inheritance that was being privileged as the gold standard of education and civilisation.

And then during the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries Britain’s own Imperial status patterned our reading of life under Roman rule, that Roman brought civilisation to these islands became a justification for the export of British civilisation to other parts of the globe. After the initial resistance the Ancient Briton was seen to have settled down and embraced the benevolent rule of Rome, so the story went.

And today in our “Post-Colonial” age we tell different stories. We are more ready to see the diversity of the “Roman” population, that there Africans and Arabs stationed on Hadrian's Wall becomes politicised, in both positive and negative ways. We are less certain that Roman rule was benevolent, or that the native population was in such need of external “civilisation”, Rome did not arrive on a blank canvas.

The main lesson is that the past is not as static as we at first imagine, “History” is not a closed book but one that is under constant revision. And the Histories we write often tell us more about ourselves that they do about our ancestors.

Astonishment by Anne Stevenson

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This is a powerful collection of poems, I will share a couple that particularly touched me:

After the Funeral

(for Sally Thorneloe, in memory of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, killed in Afganistan, 1 July 2009)

Seeing you lost in that enormous hat,

Your face rigid with grief, I thought of how

In love with life you used to be, so much that

'Happy' seemed a word kept warm for you.

Seeing you stunned there in the camera's eye,

Forbidding your chin to undermine your lip,

I knew the knife in you was asking why?

And ceremony couldn't answer it,

Thought they were trying desperately to give

History's unspoken underside a face,

A frame, words and a reason to believe

The afterlife is ordered – like the place

In which, beside his flag-draped coffin, you

Acted, like him, the role you'd been assigned to.

Caring More than Caring

(for Dewi Stephen Jones)

So, we will not meet, we'll never sit

Filling in the silence, smiling bravely,

Chatting about the weather, sipping tea,

As if time's passing mattered not a bit

And age's roughcast could be faced with wit.

Nothings will not be handed on politely,

To lighten hours that otherwise might be

Heavy with language caring won't admit.

My not visiting, your not wanting me -

What could bring us closer to understanding

The unsaid rules of truth and poetry?

Not playing well is sometimes more demanding

Than playing to win, where winning would be lying,

Where losing is a kind of setting free.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

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Having devoured Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother books I was keen to read this “adult” story. I was really pleased to find the same quality of story telling and sense of place. I found myself transported to the Arctic and to the darkness, and felt that I was really inhabiting the experience

This is a powerful study of the human response to loneliness, that as social beings, in the absence of interaction the mind fills in the gaps, even if that involves conjuring unwelcome ghosts into existence. The question it leaves is whether terrors of the mind are more or less powerful than dangers of the “real” world around us.

There was an echo of Wolf Brother because in his isolation the Jack bonds with one of the dogs, a relationship a kin to Torak and Wolf.

At one point one of the characters quotes a Norwegian saying “If you're warm enough when you set out, you're wearing too many clothes” - I am not sure if this will be a real Norwegian saying or an invention of Paver's. Either way it certainly captures a great piece of wisdom about how we approach life. The phrase “comfort zone” is over used, but it is true that if we never allow ourselves to feel a little of the cold we will never be able to progress. In trying to protect ourselves and avoid all risk we will in fact smother and suffocate ourselves.

Liturgical Sense By Louis Weil

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This is a short and fairly “light” book, 140 pages and I would suggest that you skip straight to chapter 5 because if you have the inclination to pick up this book it is highly likely that you will merely find the first chapters an irritation, as they breeze through 2000 years of liturgical history with the depth of analysis appropriate to the back of a cereal box.

The one line of the whole book that will stick in my head is Weil's claim “I am not a rubrical fundamentalist.”. Well, I will be honest – my name is Gwilym and I am a rubrical fundamentalist and I do get upset when the rubrics are abused (often more upset than I do about the abuse of the text) and the worse offence in my eyes is the stretching of the interpretation of “occasional” use under Common Worship, but at least the first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have one...

Weil also has a long rant against the use of “manual acts” during the Eucharistic prayer, which I think is an entirely personal prejudice – but then as a fan of “manual acts” I would say that – however the point is the Weil makes a “universal” case for their unhelpfulness which I don't think is justified nor evidenced.

So overall this book was something of a disappointment.

Allegories of Heaven by Dinah Roe Kendall

I think I saw a couple of Dinah's painting at Greenbelt a few years ago.

The style of the paintings has a strong echo of Beryl Cook, and while not especially radical artistically there setting of the Gospel narrative in the “ordinary” has a power.

It is about allowing an encounter with the stories stripped of the familiar, and so safe, depictions – so many moments from the Bible have been seen so often that they have almost become invisible.