The Silent Throne

The Supreme Governor's opinions about almost anything are a mystery, which is part of the point. I do wonder what she thinks of this week's constitutional shenanigans. Some of my Remainer friends have nurtured the incongruously Cavalier fantasy that she might tell the Prime Minister that he can't prorogue Parliament, that he is a liar and a fraud and that he, or his messengers despatched Balmoral-ward, should get out of her sight. But of course she can't. The Opposition protests that power in Britain resides in Parliament; the Tory Brexiteers, that it flows from that amorphous and manipulable if unpredictable spring, The People. Neither is right: the source of authority in this realm is the Crown, and the Crown means the executive, much less restrained by legal checks and balances here than Mr Trump is on the far side of the Atlantic. In theory the Queen acts on the advice of her Prime Minister; in fact it is he that acts, no matter what she may advise. 

The former minister, the estimable ex-spy Mr Stewart recently said on the wireless that had Mr Johnson prorogued Parliament over the fateful date of All Hallows Eve itself, he thought a majority of MPs would simply refuse to be prorogued, and sit somewhere else. Revolutions often happen when nobody intends them, when constitutions break under the pressure of events, and 'revolution' would not be too extreme a word to describe the legislature decamping and leaving the executive to its own devices. 

I suppose it all depends now on whether Mr Johnson can bring something back from Brussels which will amount to an agreement allowing the UK to depart the EU in something approaching good order. If so, the revolution might not happen even yet. But if he doesn't, I somehow don't think the electorate will reward him for the results. 

And the Supreme Governor? As I say, I wonder about her thoughts. As she draws to the close of a long life of (as she and many others would see it) dedicated public service, she must at least be contemplating the very possible ruin of everything she swore in 1953 to preserve: the rule of law, the Union, constitutional monarchy itself, all at the hands of a supposedly Conservative and Unionist administration, one in reality anything but, one which is prepared to sacrifice everything for a single goal. And she can do nothing about it. As someone commented, the Queen has a veto over the Government, but she only has one veto. Once she plays that card, the game is over. Once she takes sides, she is no longer impartial. She destroys the constitutional monarchy in the very act of trying to preserve it. 

A Return from the Cloud

My day off took me to Salisbury where I was meeting with Lady Arlen and her daughters, down in the South for a festival. Despite some confusion we successfully met at a Wetherspoons where she took some pleasure in ordering a meal-deal so cheap it would actually have cost ardent Brexiteer Tim Wetherspoon money to serve it to her. I discovered that I had managed to put an un-charged battery in my camera, meaning to record anything from the day I had to struggle with my phone. This was the only usable image, of the cloisters at the cathedral.

For several days I'd been entering an exceptionally bad mood for a variety of unreasonable reasons, laid on top of the general discombobulation of the times. On the way home on the train this sharply deepened until the thoughts passing through my mind were quite shockingly destructive and dark. I couldn't read any more and listened to music instead, looking out of the window and thinking how pointless everything seemed. Then almost instantly, as Lana del Rey's 'Cruel World' changed to Rykarda Parasol's 'Withdrawal, Feathers and All', it was gone. It wasn't actually anything to do with the music, although Parasol's output is nothing if not humanistic in comparison to the lush vapidity of del Rey's imaginative world: it was as though a switch had been flicked. I thought of S.D.'s theory that we can stray accidentally into clouds of ill-temper and then just as abruptly leave them. 

A Challenge to Challenge

"And of course it's all the meat-eaters' fault now, I knew that was coming!" said my friend Carl the cemetery photographer (he does other things) at the picnic on Saturday. I suppose that's a hazard of mixing with vegan Goths a lot of the time. I don't remember a particularly logical sequence of thought which led to this offering, which must have been why it took me aback and I could only respond with something a bit lame like 'Well, obviously there's more to it than eating meat'. 

In a fallen world, there is always a flip side to any positive characteristic, and if I am usually inclined to be a diplomatic and emollient influence in any situation the flip side of that is a reluctance to face disagreement. But I also wonder whether a certain slow-wittedness, or a fear of slow-wittedness, is also at work. I never feel as though I am very good at mustering words when called on to do so. They jostle around in my mind in an unhelpfully ill-disciplined way as I think of the exceptions and caveats to anything I might say. 

It occurs to me that S.D. is very good at the whole business of challenging the way I think, which is part of the point of going to see him. He usually does this by asking something like 'Do you think that's true?' or 'Is that really what you feel?' in a slightly camp manner which expresses a sort of exaggerated puzzlement. Once I have conquered the faint feeling that he's taking the mickey I am compelled to take the thought further, and that is really what you want. At least asking a question back when confronted with something you don't quite agree with gives you time to rally thoughts and words. I wonder how long it took him to learn this technique, and whether I might learn it too. 

True Stories

Nancy sent me a three-page letter describing how her marriage to Martin came to an end. He-did-this-I-did-that, etc. etc. It's the usual sort of sad tale of the destruction of a relationship through nobody acting wilfully or carelessly, but gradually drawing away and damaging each other until the trust is impossible to repair. 

I wondered what to say. The catalogue of mutual disappointments doesn't actually help me: there is a truth here I can't really access. To her credit Nancy doesn't say it was all Martin's fault, but she clearly feels she has done what she must do, what her heart compels her to do, even while she hates herself for doing it. Perhaps she hopes that by admitting to guilt I will tell her it's all OK.

I remember how Jesus could meet someone and see the thing they needed to hear, could sum up who they were in a single sentence, or even a story which bore only an oblique, but nevertheless as it turned out exact, relationship to what they were on about. Those three pages of events and reactions are not, really, the story of what happened to Nancy and Martin: they are not the single line that God would say, and I can't deduce from them his perfect, merciful summary of the sad fourteen months they describe. So I merely say that that is what he could do, and because he could, because he understands who Nancy and Martin are better than they do themselves - let alone each other - that is why he is able to forgive. That's where forgiveness comes from. 

A Worthwhile Distraction

It is quiet in Swanvale Halt rectory (if not in the village outside), and I am weary in mind at present, so I will merely present you today with a photograph I managed to take of one of the much-heralded and much-enjoyed Painted Lady butterflies which have been visiting this year - not one in my garden, but representative. None had stayed still long enough before Tuesday this week?

Showing

What an amazing occasion the 2019 Swanvale Halt Village Show was last weekend. Expanding the categories of entry to include art and handicrafts resulted in a rise of over 100 exhibits, though it made the judging a bit more complicated. Alan was astonished to win a prize for his Hedgehog Hotel made from salvaged materials as it was just something he'd bodged together in his garage, but it attracted much favourable attention (and even a commission for another one). It was a relief to bring forward the prize-giving by half an hour, too, as the afternoon has always tended to drag a bit. The chaps from the tandoori turned up with their traditional 'curry sauce challenge' (one I foolhardily accepted), and I even got rid of some pots of Rectory apple chutney ('nice and spicy'). 

A Mystery Solved and a Saga Discovered

Unbeknownst to him, my friend Fr P from Kentish Town recently answered a question that has haunted me for years by posting on LiberFaciorum about a book he’d recently read – the story of an unfortunate priest in a remote corner of mid-nineteenth century Spain. Alarums rang in my mind as I recognised what was almost certainly the origin of a TV series I’d caught hallucinatory bits of years and years ago, and all of which I retained in my memory was a priest making his way with a donkey through dark woods dripping with rain, a menacing theme tune, and the suggestion of ‘goings on’ which in the fragmentary narrative I encountered were never clear. The book is Los Pazos de Ulloa by the late-19^th century Spanish novelist Emilia Pardo Bazan and I can barely express my astonishment and joy that this ghost was laid to rest in so unexpected a fashion after nearly 20 years! I found that I could watch the TV series via the archive of a Spanish broadcaster, if I was prepared to put up with a moderate quality picture, occasional stumbles and jams as the internet caught up with itself, and a painfully literal translation which was almost as much a hindrance as a help.

There are four episodes, comprising not only Los Pazos de Ulloa itself but also its sequel, Madre Naturaleza, crammed into a single chapter. The story concerns Fr Julián, newly arrived in Ulloa, buried in the Galician mountains and a long way from anywhere, as domestic chaplain to the Marquis, who isn’t really the Marquis but the nephew of the real one who lives a much more civilised life in Santiago. Julián’s introduction to his new employer is when he, the Marquis, knocks him off his donkey next to a wayside cross and puts a gun to his head. The priest soon discovers that the Manor House of Ulloa is not a haven of the spiritual life. The Marquis gets a filthy little boy who hangs around the kitchen, and who, it turns out (though nobody will talk about it) is his illegitimate son, drunk to shut him up; he is having a long affair with his maid who later tries to shock Julián by stripping and throwing herself on his bed; the Marquis’s majordomo (the maid’s father) is a malign fraudster; the chapel is a rat-infested ruin; and the local clergy have long since given up trying to affect their parishioners’ lives for the good. The whole estate is dreadfully run down and the people are superstitious and brutish. Julián decides optimistically that God has sent him to sort it all out, and he starts with trying to civilise the Marquis by finding him a wife from among his four cousins in Santiago. They both pick the virtuous Nucha and bring her back from shiny city life to moss-encrusted Ulloa. Predictably this all goes horribly wrong, and in the last episode the disgraced and sacked Julián appears as a sad figure in a battered hat and besmirched cassock, living in a hut in the woods and praying at Nucha’s tomb. ‘You have brought nothing but misfortune here’, Sabel the maid told him as he packed to leave the manor, and indeed it doesn’t even stop when he has left: the Marquis’s son by Sabel and his daughter by Nucha, unaware of their shared patrimony, fall in incestuous love which ends with him running off and her going into a convent.

This tale has elements of the Gothic novel: based around a run-down, isolated house, peopled by extreme individuals, and pervaded by an atmosphere of inevitable doom. ‘What will happen will happen,’ the residents of Ulloa tell Nucha’s brother Gabriel who has come to rescue and ideally marry his niece, when he confronts everyone with the truth about her and her half-brother. It’s that kind of place. The theme tune starts with a melodramatic shriek and Julián and Nucha are both prone to having terrifying dreams as the lightning flashes around the Manor and its shutters batter its walls in the wind. Julián, especially, has a vision of witchcraft and devilry on his first night there, and how much is real and how much is dream is hard to discern. The cackling old village woman La Sabia certainly looks the part of a rustic witch. But Ulloa’s real tone is more social satire than anything else, like a less relentlessly miserable and more mocking take on Thomas Hardy.

Because Julián is really the central character, it’s his flaws and those of the Church he represents which are most to the fore. He seems to have lofty intentions but neither the resolve nor the realism to carry them through, and for all his moping about the woods in the last episode never even manages to face his own responsibility for the disaster, getting no further than a limp ‘perhaps it would have been better had I never come to this House’. Deluded by his own idealism throughout, he never stops being shocked and baffled.

There were two odd elements I couldn’t get past, though, apart from various plot elements I missed because of the risible translation. Right at the end, Gabriel insists that, as she makes her confession, Julián makes clear to his niece Manuela that he will still marry her despite what’s happened. What we see on-screen, to ominous music, is Julián, from behind, describing to the girl that God will be her only earthly consolation and that she should concentrate on Him, implying that he has sent her unknowing to the cloister. When Gabriel confronts her, though, she states that she knows full well what he’s prepared to do, but that she still feels she must take the veil. Finally, the voice-over narrator – God? – states that ‘Julián fulfilled his revenge’. One can’t imagine the daft priest having any such thoughts, really, although seeing Manuela wrested from the poisonous atmosphere of Ulloa might have come to him as a sort of victory. Did he or didn’t he? And secondly, given that Manuela’s relationship with her half-brother is incestuous, were late 19^th-century Spanish mores such that nobody batted an eyelid at her uncle planning to marry her? As she and Nucha are both played by beautiful Victoria Abril, I so wanted her to say, ‘So, quite apart from you being about 30 years older than me, you’re saying you mainly fancy me because I remind you of your dead sister? That’s not creepy at all, is it?’

I will have to read the books now ...