Advent 6

John Henry Newman (1801 - 1890) is perhaps the most notable convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism. He had links to Birmingham, studying at Oscott College (which sits proud on the horizon visible from the Aston Old Edwardian Memorial Ground) and eventually dying at the Oratory in Edgbaston.

My own passage to a far from devout catholicism is important to me. The mystery of faith has power to move and I detect  that mystery in the motto that adorns Newman's cardinalate coat of arms, Cor ad Cor Loquitur - heart speaks unto heart.

An interesting little fact that further recommends Newman to me - he took a third in his degree at Oxford.

On Me Hols

In Edinburgh for a break with my soul mate. Came up by train which was great but you really do have to travel first class. Does this make me a snob?

Did Princes Street this morning and then spent a good portion of the afternoon enjoying wine and fries in the Newsroom - details at Newsroom

Advent 5

There will be three poets in the progress of this calendar. Today we have the first. My knowledge of poetry is limited so it is with a degree of unaccustomed humility that  I offer this as the most affecting verse of all time.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, 

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, 

And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, 

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; 

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. 

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling 

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, 

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling 

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, 

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 

In all my dreams before my helpless sight, 

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace 

Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; 

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 

To children ardent for some desperate glory, 

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est 

Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen went back to the front after injury, won the Military Cross  and died just one week before the Armistice on 4 November 1918. 4 November is the birthday of my revered father, who first alerted me to Owen's poetry.

Advent 4

Abraham Lincoln was not the unreconstructed saint he is sometimes portrayed to have been. He was a politician and we should always remember that politics is the art of the possible. However his conception of the possible was broader than most men's and that allowed him to utter the greatest (and blessedly short) political address of them all. It bears repetition:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Advent 3

Today the most balanced, charming , honest and deserving entrepreneur I ever knew. Alan Robert Murrall was a Black Country boy and autodidact. He loved things mechanical and even at the height of his business flight (and trust me he really soared) he remained a simple mechanic at heart. But actually no, he was so much more than that. Alan got business, simply got it. He proved Marx wrong.

He brought his humane commercial genius to bear in many fields and he took this callow young lawyer on the journey with him. He was a champion in haulage, mining, waste disposal, property and so much more. He was modest in his accomplishments and generous with his advisers. He always said thank you. I never met a good man who begrudged him. He was taken from us far too young and in my direst moments in commerce I try to think of Alan and the sheer bloody privilege it was to be on board for a small portion of his voyage.

Sadly I don't have a photograph of Alan but here is one of his beloved Bowmur trucks.

Advent 2

If you asked me my favourite place, Anglesey would stand a very good chance of getting my nomination. The A5 is  the traditional path to that island. The Menai Suspension Bridge was the initial link from the mainland. Both road and bridge were the work of a self-taught Scottish engineer, Thomas Telford (1757-1834).

The Overgraduate likes a good pun and notes with approval that Telford was known in his time as the Colossus of Roads.

Nowadays any sensible passage by road to Anglesey will favour the larger Britannia Bridge. That itself is a wonder but not its least charm is that from it you can see the Menai Bridge. This is man overcoming nature and at the same time decorating it.

Advent 1

Aeons ago I saw Keith Joseph (then high prophet of the English right) speaking to a student audience. The host institution's resident left had come prepared to heckle and make mischief - good for them, I have always envied the left their passion and organisation. But he disarmed them when he asked his audience to name the most important thinker of the previous two hundred years: a few young fogeys ventured improbable right wing totems, but Joseph posited Karl Marx and rather gratuitously pointed out that it had been Victorian England that had provided a home for this great thinker.

So, I suspect rather to the surprise of those who think they know me, my first cultural influencer is Karl Marx. His theories were the dominant seed of political and economic thought in the century into which  I was born, the starting point for discussion even in economies following a starkly non-Marxist agenda.

I am particularly taken, as I survey the moral wreckage of the business in which I work, with the doctrine of surplus value. The labourer produces daily more than enough for his own subsistence but the capitalist pays him only a subsistence wage and the residue is the surplus value which the capitalist/rentier can purloin for himself.

It took Marx to give his postulated nemesis a name - capitalism. No matter what else you might think, you have to concede that it is pretty cool to have naming rights over your sworn enemy.

This will not be an organised ramble through the back alleys of my mind, so tomorrow we will take a different path and consider civil engineering.