Advent 21

Volume 21 (Sord to Texas): South Africa.

This page 63 game has a nasty way of serving up a philosophical minefield for the Overgraduate to negotiate. Not content with Advent 13 lobbing the grenade of Zionism to me (there I go again, mixing my metaphors and bringing them home to roost) the equally troubling entity of South Africa now hoves into view. Well, I'm going to dodge the trickiness if you will permit me and move onto something I do know about - South African rugby. 

The Springboks have won the last two World Cups so whatever they are doing is obviously working. Furthermore their deployment (perfectly legally and intelligently) of the so-called bomb-squad has been less successfully aped by other sides and, also predictably, has provoked calls to change the laws, most particularly so far as they relate to the numbers of tactical replacements. Now here's the news boys and girls - putting genies back in bottles is notoriously difficult and you can almost sense the lawyers getting revved-up in readiness for any new dictates that mandate medical certification of departing players. 

As it happens I think the laws as they have been framed for professional rugby are doing a bloody good job of murdering the game at the recereational level I loved, the playing of which I still miss on a daily basis. But that is not the Boks' fault. And here's another piece of news - England should not be trying to play in the style of South Africa. Law of averages, they won't be as good at it as  those they mimic. You can run around walls just as well as you run through them.  

Advent 20

Volume 20 (Sars to Sorc): Scheldt.

The River Scheldt rises in northern France then meanders for two-hundred -and-seventy miles through Belgium towards Antwerp before entering the North Sea in southern Netherlands.

It was the site of a notable five week battle in October/November 1944, Allied victory at which freed Antwerp to be used as a port to supply the forces forcing their way toward Germany. The battle therefore made up some of the ground lost by the Allies as a result of the famed failure at Arnhem (memorialised as the bridge too far). The spearhead at Scheldt was the First Canadian Army under the leadership of Guy Simonds, a hard leader who was thought by Montgomery to be the best of the Canadian soldiery. The role of the Canadians in World War II deserves to be greater emphasised, alongside those of other colonial forces. I attach the modern Canadian flag, the Canadian red ensign (bearing the Union flag in one quadrant) having been abandoned (entirely appropriately) in the mid sixties. I note that there is some agitation for Australia to take a similar step - this gets reported by the dreg elements of the  British press as somehow bigoted. Bollocks - they can have any flag they choose, having more than earned it.   

Advent 19

Volume 19 (Rayn to Sarr): Regence Style.

Not much for me to get my teeth into today. The French regencey ran from 1715 to 1723, so designated because between those dates Louis XV was still a minor. Philip, Duke of Orleans was in charge.

The Regence Style in architecture and decorative arts marked the transition from the classical grandeur of the Louis XIV period to the more free-form rococo of Louis XV's reign. In doing my research (that is code for surfing the net) on these design matters, I have decided that rococo is a great word. The V&A website describes it as a style that is 'excessively flamboyant'. Or to quote that great philosopher Mel Brooks, we might term it the 'if you've got it, flaunt it baby' school of design. Here's a rococo interior for you to wonder at. Not even the OG is that daring, although he has been accused by some insensitive souls of taking Brooks' comic mantra (put into the mouth of that great comic creation, Max Bialystock in The Producers, Brooks' best film) rather too seriously. 

Advent 18

Volume 18 (Plants to Raym): Plato.

Plato (427 -347 BC) survives as a major influencer on philosophic and political thought. The man himself stayed out of active politics having become convinced that there was no place in that field for a man of conscience. I hope that conclusion is wrong but it is a difficult proposition to name men or women of absolute conscience who have played on the major stages of political life. Britannica explains the foundation of platonic philosophy thus:

The reason why men forfeit felicity is that they mistake apparent good for real, the conditionally for the absolutely good. If a man ever knew with assurance what absolute good is, he would in practice never pursue anything else. It is this sense that 'all virtue is knowledge' and that 'all wrong-doing is involuntary' (i.e. consists in the pursuit of what is falsely supposed to be good).

 

  

Advent 17

Volume 17 (P to Plant): Painting.

Last year's advent calendar was the grand tour of Big Fat Pig's dubious taste in art. Well what do you know, the magic of page 63 brings right back round to painting. But older readers will have had quite enough of my tastes so instead today, in what I think is a first in the history of these calendars, I am bowing to the superior and less affected opinion of the Groupie. Her favourite artist is Hans Holbein the Younger and so here is his right regal portrait of that old villain Henry VIII.

 

Twelve Films At Christmas - 5 & 6

 

In my limited and amateur stage career, the most taxing emotionally of the plays I have been in is The Diary of Anne Frank. This is a daunting text for any amateur group but we were brilliantly directed by JK and, I think, pulled it off. By its very subject matter it has to be a claustrophobic piece and I had my doubts that it could properly be presented on film. Having watched the 1959 movie, I still have those doubts. Don't get me wrong, the film works but its presentation in Cinemascope is plain wrong. As well the film suffers from one particular piece of miscasting and is too long. I would still recommend it but this frighteneng tale fits better on the stage. 70/100.

The Colditz Story may share the same historical space as Anne Frank, but is different kettle of fish altogether. This is a broadly faithful telling of the Boy's Own heroics of would-be escapees from Nazi imprisonment. There is a predictably reliable troupe of British character actors on display and it rattles along. 69/100.

Advent 16

Volume 16 (Mushr to Ozon): Names (in Linguistics)

Linguistics, the scientific study of language and its structure. This has been an overlooked element in my sprawling education. Yes there were bits and pieces in my primary education (more, I suspect, than is currently fashionable) and studying Latin at secondary school certainly helped (funny how we've come back to the classics for a third consecutive day!) but there was little of it an English degree. It does impinge upon the study and practice of law because meaning is at the heart of good drafting - and believe me, good drafting is a disappearing art. One of the great challenges with the advent of AI is going to be seeing whether it promotes clarity or rehashes obfuscation. If legal AI programs could take as their first source the delivered opinions of the very great Lord Denning (the greatest jurist of the last century) then we might just be in for a new age of enlightenment. As an undergraduate I used to eschew library time and instead wander down the Strand to sit at the back of the Master of the Rolls court to watch this titan in action. I have a signed first edition of his The Discipline of Law. 

Names. The intriguing and diverting article in my Britannica suggests ten categories of name in what it concedes is a 'rough classification': 1. Personal names (who is the real David Roberts?); 2. Quasi-personal names; 3. Names for things not definitely personified; 4. Place names; 5. Names of tribes; 6. Names of institutions and corporations; 7. Titles (The Overgraduate); 8. Brand names; 9. Names of events in history; 10. Names of abstractions not personified.

I could have hours of fun with this! But you don't want to know about my personal predilections.