Tag: aurelius

As I sit here by my solitary candle I am looking at the corner opposite me in my lounge. It is now empty. Today I took down the Christmas decorations and so the tree in the opposite corner is no longer there. My candle seems very solitary indeed now that the lights on the tree are packed away upstairs. Now that the garlands and cards are gone from my bookshelves too, the room seems empty indeed and cold as if a chill winter breeze has crept in though the window or under the door.

I am reminded once again of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, when the Spirit of Christmas Future returns Scrooge to the Cratchits’ parlour and the corner where Tiny Tim used to sit is sadly empty. Of course, Scrooge changes heart when he wakes up in the present on Christmas morning. He helps Tiny Tim as much as he can and presumably Tim recovers from his illness and lives so the corner will not be empty at all. And of course I will be putting up the decorations and tree once again in December and, like Tiny Tim’s corner, my lounge corner will not be empty once more either. And it will once again glow with the lights on the tree.

At the end of ‘A Christmas Carol’ we are told that ‘it was always said of Mr Scrooge that he knew how to keep Christmas well’. We are also reminded: ‘May that be truly said of all of us.’ What does this mean? Scrooge’s sudden change of heart, indeed the opening of his heart in generosity to others, including those less fortunate than himself, did not end with that first Christmas season when he became truly alive. The spirit of Christmas remained alive in him throughout the year. Moreover, his heart had been opened for the rest of his days.

You may remember the phrase ‘A dog isn’t just for Christmas’, warning people not to buy a puppy for Christmas without being aware of the responsibilities of looking after it afterwards. Well perhaps Dickens is saying ‘Christmas isn’t just for Christmas’. We should keep the generous spirit of Christmas alight in our hearts even though the Christmas lights have been extinguished in our home. Just as, if we buy or receive a dog or puppy at Christmas, we have the responsibility to look after it, so we also have the responsibility to be generous and kind to others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves, all the year round. If we are looking for a New Year’s resolution perhaps this should be it. Or perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of a New Year’s attitude.

A few days ago, I mentioned to a friend that my lounge looked gloomy now that the decorations had been taken down and packed away. He suggested that we should put up different decorations for each month of the year, in line with the seasons I suppose. I do know that in Hungary (and I imagine other parts of Eastern Europe) people put up an Easter tree in their homes. This is very often a large bunch of bare branches decorated with ribbons and imitation eggs made from wood or papier-mache. The eggs are painted with traditional designs and are very colourful. I have a few on my Christmas tree! When I bought them in Budapest several years ago, I thought they were Christmas decorations!

My Christmas lights may be put away now but my solitary candle is still burning brightly. Perhaps in the year ahead, we should burn a candle to remind ourselves of the spirit of Christmas in season and out of season and to remind ourselves to live by that spirit. And

to encourage us, in the dark and uncertain opening days of this New Year and new decade.

Happy New Year.

Ave atque vale – Hail and Farewell! Till the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up!

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.

A selection of previous meditations is also available in audio form as ‘Meditations of Neiulus Aurelius’ ASMR on YouTube. I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

I am home again from my Canadian sojourn in British Columbia. Once again I am writing this meditation beside my familiar candle with its steady flame. It has taken a while to recover from my trip. My return flight was the customary overnight one and so I have been suffering from jet lag. This, combined with the extreme heat we have been experiencing here in the UK, has been quite a heady cocktail for me! Perhaps, when we suffer jet lag, our bodies are telling us that it is not right that we should travel such long distances in so short a time by air, (aside from the carbon emissions issue). Perhaps our bodies are telling us that we have travelled too far too quickly.

Nevertheless, it is wonderful to think that within half a day or so I travelled over 4,700 miles. And then made the same journey back again two weeks later. An impossible feat for Marcus – even though he was an emperor! Of course I did not have a real sense of those thousands of miles as I jetted through the clouds. Only a journey by sea would have given me a real impression of the distance travelled. It would take over a week, I imagine. This is the illusion that air travel creates: we do not realise how far we have travelled. Only a different time zone or a different language or culture reminds us of that – once we have landed at our destination of course.

Our lives sometimes create the same illusion as air travel. We do not realise how far we have travelled, how far we have moved forward. That is because we are thinking of the next destination: be it a job, a project or a relationship or another stage of our life. It is only when we have the chance to look back, to reflect, that we can see how far we have come as a person, and appreciate how much we have changed – hopefully for the better!

I do not think this perspective is only for older people looking back on their lives. It is a perspective we should all have, whatever our age. To do this we need to forget our immediate, pressing destination for a moment and take time to reflect, to appreciate how far we have travelled thus far. So often, when I was teaching, I have comforted a student with the observation, ‘You have come a long way since you started this course.’ It is a comfort. And it can be a challenge too to move on further. Reflection is rather like a plane landing to refuel before moving on.

So over the last few days I have been in the throes of heat and jet lag. I have also been bereft. I am missing the big skies and the ocean; the tall pines and firs and cedars; the beaches with their rocks and scattered driftwood blanched white by the waves and that special moon I mentioned in an earlier blog. And I have met with so many people, who have been kind and generous towards me. So I am missing them too. There is an emptiness when you come back to your house alone after seeing so many people.

When I have laid awake at night, unable to get back into my normal sleep pattern, moments from my holiday have flooded in: people I have met, places I have explored or stayed in, details of conversations, views and vistas I have seen and meals I have enjoyed. A myriad of impressions, like a frantic slide show on a laptop or like one of those kaleidoscope toys I had as a child. I would shake the tube and look through the glass at one end and the colourful pattern at the other end would have changed. The moments of my holiday seemed to change shape too, melding into eachother.

One place keeps coming back to me. Maybe it is because it is a place where I could see myself. It is in a little town called Brackendale and it’s quite near to Squamish, an hour or so out of Vancouver, up the ‘sea to sky’ highway. My godson Jonathan drove me there as he has a friend who lives there. The journey itself is very spectacular. You can see the ocean below one side of the highway and rocks and mountains towering over the highway on the other.

It’s a small community and there’s a rail track at the back of it. We heard the train go through while we were in Jonathan’s friend’s home – that old fashioned train bell ringing that you usually only hear in Western movies. It’s a really small town and calls itself ‘the World Centre for Eagles’ as it is near Eagle Run, which we visited, where thousands of bald eagles spend the winter. Understandably, as it was summer, we didn’t see any eagles (though there are other species in the area) but we did see hawks circling around in the sky.

And we also visited the Brackendale Art Gallery. It is a small wooden building set in a lush little garden of greenery, where statues by local artists are scattered about. There are First Nations designs on the outside walls too. As I went inside from the brilliant sunshine, the gallery looked quite dark but welcoming nonetheless. There were some artefacts by local artists on display and pictures by local photographers too. As I stood at the top of the steps at the entrance and looked down into the gallery, the place was a hive of activity. A group of volunteers were arranging tables and chairs for what looked like some kind of meal that evening or maybe a party or cabaret. Because of the wooden architecture of the place, inside seemed snug and cosy and the volunteers were warm and welcoming. Then I noticed the stage: a modest black platform at one end with a black back cloth, a few theatre lights and some old church pews for seating. At the opposite end was a tiny bar, more like hatch, for interval drinks I guess.

I was quite excited by that stage. I wandered down the stairs to take a closer look. Standing in the centre of the room, I could see myself in that gallery, helping to run the place, performing and directing. What a way that would be to spend my retirement! Looking around at the little gallery and watching those volunteers shifting furniture there was a real sense of community. In fact, it felt like home.

I went upstairs where there was a loft area with some local Squamish artwork and some striking photographs of the forests and of course eagles and hawks. There was even an office behind a screen. And there at one end, underneath a window, were some copies of pictures by one of my favourite artists, Emily Carr (1871-1945).

On my visits to Vancouver Island I have got to know Emily very well, through her pictures and her books. When she stopped painting, she had a whole new career in her 60’s and 70’s writing books, mostly quirky memoirs of her youth in early Victoria and the boarding house she ran for a while. I have mentioned her once before in my blog.

I have seen the permanent exhibition of some of her drawings and paintings in Victoria Art Gallery several times. She was a true original who embraced tribal art forms and frequently visited far flung Haida villages by boat and canoe to do so, an amazing feat for a single lady to do at that time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her paintings of totems have become iconic. Most of all she is a great painter of forests (especially in the last phase of her work) and she was an early environmentalist. She finds the teeming life force within tree trunks and branches. The trees are never still, they are always in motion, sometimes even dancing in the wind.

I don’t know why I like her pictures so much. I normally prefer portraits or scenes with people in them. That’s why I love Rembrandt. His portraits are such wonderful character studies. Any actor or director should go and look at them: the hands and the eyes say so much about the person sitting for the painting. That’s what acting is about: hands and eyes.

But Emily’s trees? I guess I like them because they are so full of life, her forests are teeming with life. Emily and the trees are rejoicing in being alive, rejoicing in being. She made several sketches and paintings of areas in the forest where the trees have been cut down. The logging industry in BC was taking off in the early 20th century, when she was painting. Those pictures have a real sense of desolation about them, of stark tragedy.

So apparently Emily came across the water from Victoria on Vancouver Island to Brackendale on the mainland to look after her two nieces who were ill. This was in 1913 so that would have been quite a journey then. She made several visits to the area and made sketches of the forests nearby which led to some of the tree paintings I have just mentioned.

Somehow Emily will not let me go. I didn’t visit her pictures in the Victoria gallery on this trip but here she was in Brackendale, reminding me of herself.
What was it about that little gallery and art centre that made me want to be part of it? It is amazing to think that a place thousands of miles away could have gripped me in this way.

Was it Emily? Or that little stage? Or the friendly community of volunteers? Or the cosy atmosphere? It was more than somewhere where I felt I could do. It was somewhere where I felt I could just be. Where I could live another life -not that different from the one I am living now – but different enough.

Now that I am home, I have learnt that British Columbia has become a part of myself. I have also learnt from Emily and her trees to rejoice at just being. Here where I am.

Ave atque vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up!
And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.
I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.
Many thanks
Neilus Aurelius

Once again I sit here gazing at the candle before me, and like Marcus, I reflect up on my life or one part of it: my youth.

I have spent the long weekend at my old Oxford college: Pembroke. I go there once a year to preach to students at Sunday Evensong and to catch up with friends, including the chaplain, Andrew Teale, who is a most kind host.

Inevitably memories flood in as I walk around the college where I studied English for three years. Pembroke is a small college: intimate and cosy, I would say, and I felt at home there most of the time and made good friends there, a few of whom are still part of my life now. One, my friend Peter, came to Evensong and stayed to dine in Hall. As we looked out over the sea of young faces in Hall, the inevitable line came to us both: ‘Were we ever that young?’

I like to stay in college in one of the guest rooms and one room in particular, which overlooks the Chapel Quad. I look out onto the small squat 17th Century chapel to the left and the Victorian dining Hall ahead with the lawn in the centre. This weekend students have been playing croquet on it. But it is the buildings to the right almost under the window which most attract my interest. At this time of year, with the window open, I can smell the lush wisteria that blooms around the entrance of the old senior common room and the roses around the arch to North Quad immediately under the window sill. The stillness is inviting in this heady fragrance.As the sky darkens, the old lamps in the walls of the buildings make their sandstone glisten. I sit watching the sky fade ineluctably into night and the glow of the lamps growing stronger, giving warmth to the gloom.

When I was an undergraduate in college, I noticed little of this, except the stillness and the freshness of the twilight sometimes. Summer term is something special in Oxford. My first summer term was like arriving at college for the first time all over again. The college looked so different in the summer, and the city too: the other college gardens and the parks and Christchurch Meadow by the river.  I was intense and in my own world in a way: self absorbed then recklessly convivial. Little has changed! I was young – and, dear me, the students do look so very young now to my older eyes. No: I am wrong. I do remember being caught up in the stillness of those summer evenings fading into night and the intoxicating perfume of the flowers.  

But I didn’t notice the lamps then: the indigo sky, yes, but not the lamps. Perhaps lamp-gazing in the twilight is for older people, when we are more mellow and content, when life is less intense, less raw, less filled with angst. Less vibrant? No: I am still capable of reverie: in that room overlooking Chapel Quad.  When I was an undergraduate it was that heavy floral perfume that sent me into a reverie, and the violet sky. Now it is the glow of the lamps. I am older now, so I am looking in a different direction, I suppose. The reverie is still real, still potent, but not as intense.

Earlier today I visited the Weston Library, which is the new building opposite the university’s main library: the Bodleian. The Bodleian Library is one of the largest libraries in the world and houses manuscripts and books ancient and new. It is the old medieval university library which was restored by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598. The library has a right to a copy of any book that is printed and famous people have bequeathed their private papers to the library too and there are a multitude of volumes from all over the globe.

So the Weston library is a new overspill of the extensive stock for use by students and academics. I like to go in there because on the ground floor there are always some interesting exhibitions and there’s a gift shop and cafe.  

As I sat in the cafe in the entrance hall this morning, I noticed two strange customers seated a few tables away, opposite me. It was a man and woman dressed in identical long dark green gaberdine coats and identical woollen green and cream hats. It was cold for May today but they looked trussed up for winter and they both wore mittens. There were two large cups of coffee infront of them: they were sharing one and the other was being saved for later as the saucer was placed over the top of the cup to keep the contents warm.

It was difficult to work out their ages as their faces were lined and worn with care. They could have been late middle-age or a little younger. The man’s face and hands were dirty but the woman looked cleaner and their bags were on the floor beside them.

Oxford is famous for its eccentrics but I am not sure they were. I would call them ‘homeless’, but it seems too modern a word for the odd couple sipping coffee opposite me. If they were both male, I would use the old phrase ‘gentlemen of the road’ or ‘tramps’. They seemed to be vagrants. But their innate dignity makes me ashamed to use any of those phrases to describe them. They seemed more like late 19th or early 20th Century rural travellers, going from place to place looking for work. Yet they were happy and content and totally at home in the tall and spacious modern entrance hall, watching the world go by, looking rural and incongruous in this centre of academia: to be written about, rather than writing themselves. Or perhaps in their shabby bags, a masterpiece lay hidden. Or a thesis to shake the world.

The woman’s face was round and lined: an apt subject for Rembrandt to paint. The man had a red hatchet face and would have been more at home in an illustration in a Dickens’ novel. As they conversed their heads bobbed about in comical fashion.  There was something cosy about them, as if they were Hobbit residents of Tolkien’s Shire.

As I observed them, I tried to work out their relationship: fellow travellers perhaps? Or brother and sister? Husband and wife? Or lovers even. The man would look around now and then as if protecting the woman from a hostile world. They sat side by side and seemed close and intimate, sharing the cup of coffee lovingly.  Then the man looked around again and quickly kissed her on the cheek. Such a tender moment as if they were two secret lovers on the run.

I finished my coffee and wandered into the gift shop. Then I went into the exhibitions. I was meeting a friend for lunch and still had time to kill when I came out so I got myself another coffee.

There they still were, sipping coffee from their own loving cup, cocooned in their own company, comfortable and free. I envied them their intimacy – something I have never known.

Then I worked out where they were from. They would have been at home in a Thomas Hardy novel. They had brought Hardy’s Wessex into the Weston Library. His novels are on the shelves somewhere. I thought of students studying them and analysing them

somewhere in the library or sequestered in their rooms in colleges nearby.

Perhaps they would learn more from studying this deeply intimate and totally free couple and then their own intense student angst would drift away. I wish mine had.

Ave atque vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail.

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.

I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

​​

       

The candlelight beside me is steady this evening as I begin to write. However I will not be writing about the small flame of a candle this time, but about a larger more vibrant light.

I have recently been back to my hometown, Redcar, which is on the North East coast in Cleveland. I was visiting my sister Ann for the weekend. Ann collected me from the station at Thirsk, a market town in North Yorkshire. As we drove towards Redcar, I could see a flare glowing in the twilight sky. It was from one of the tall narrow jets outside the local chemical works. It was a continuous stream of red and gold as it rose in the sky. The flare was stately and thin compared with the huge tubby grey chimneys belching smoke behind it. It was magnificent, yet welcoming.

We were driving on the edge of Wilton, Redcar’s main industrial area. Clearly the ICI chemical works is still in operation, but tragically the steelworks over the road has finally closed down. Many years ago, My father worked in both: British Steel (or Dorman Long as it was originally) and ICI. I remember him bringing home plastic beakers and small bowls, samples from the plastics plant he worked in at ICI.

Whenever I go into my school, I am still reminded of my hometown. One of the girders supporting the stairs to the first floor has ‘Dorman Long, Middlesbrough’ emblazoned on it. That area of the school is part of the original building, which was opened in 1959. I like to think my father shaped that girder in the blast furnaces he used to work in.    

Observing the flare from my sister’s car reminded me of being on the local bus when I was  a teenager on the way home from school in Middlesbrough. Often on the journey I would notice the flare. It would burn all day and all night. If I was coming home at night from Middlesbrough, from the cinema or from a rehearsal at Teeside Youth Theatre, I remember it burning brightly in the dark. It was like a beacon reminding me I was almost home.  And now the flare was welcoming me home again.

At that time, of course, Teeside (as it was known then) was flourishing and quite prosperous with other light industry besides the two giants at Wilton and with Middlesbrough docks still operating.    

I remember Mr Maidens my English teacher telling me that Teeside was a good place to live because there was plenty of industry to support the area and there was so much  beautiful countryside round about: the coastline by the North Sea and, inland, the rolling North Yorkshire Moors. He took the class to see ‘Macbeth’ at the newly opened Forum Theatre in Billingham (where ICI’s other large works was situated). The theatre was a source of civic pride. The metal framed set for the production had been built by the local steel works. That production starred a very young Michael Gambon in the title role. I was so excited to see a live Shakespeare play, even though some of my fellow pupils weren’t really bothered and were quite boisterous. Fortunately some of us ended up in a side box away from our unruly mates, though it wasn’t all gilt and red plush like the West End, but very modern and metallic.  Ever the theatre critic, at age 15, I thought Sir Michael was good but not magnetic in the role!  

That was half a century ago. The area has slowly gone into decline and the steel works is no more. So now the flare is a beacon of hope – hope that the area will once again be prosperous. It is also a symbol of the warmth of the local people.

The people of Redcar have lived with an unclear future for decades. Now the nation (and indeed Europe) is living with an unclear future too. Every day the future becomes more a and more uneasy as the ‘ignorant armies’ are still ‘clashing’ in the House of Commons (to quote Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ again -as I did a few months ago). Times are even more unsettling as we witness terrorist attacks in New Zealand and Europe, and not long ago, in our own country.

The flare has reminded me of another poem – this time by W.H.Auden: ‘September 1, 1939’.  

It’s set in a bar on 52nd Street in New York, where Auden was living before the imminent outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. He writes:

​​‘We must love one another or die.​​​

​​Defenceless under the night

​​Our world in stupor lies;

​​Yet, dotted everywhere,

​​Ironic points of light

​​Flash out wherever the Just

​​Exchange their messages:

​​May I, composed like them

​​Of Eros and of dust,

​​Beleaguered by the same

​​Negation and despair,

​​Show an affirming flame.’

In these fragmented times of unease, may we all be a point of light – an affirming flame – a flare of hope.  

Ave atque vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail.

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.

I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

​​

As I sit here writing beside my candle, winter is upon us at last. Blizzards and snow have slowed down the country or so it appears from the news on the television. Here, where I write, in the South West London area, what snow there was has turned to miserable freezing rain. In these wintery times, candlelight is cheering and comforting as is, of course, a blazing fire in the hearth. Something we miss with central heating!

It must have been a comfort to Marcus as the wind howled over the Danube plain outside his tent. A comfort and an inspiration: as fire-gazing can lead to internal reflection and even deeper, to meditation. The fire must have been a fixed point to help him focus on the centre of his consciousness in the whirlwind of his thoughts. I am probably wrong: I am imagining that Marcus’ mind was similar to my own! From his writings, I have a sense that there was a great stillness in Marcus. I doubt he got as frazzled as I do! But then as he was a Roman emperor with absolute power it was easy for him to radiate stillness. Or is that the image he presents to us in his ‘Meditations’? Is it what he wants us to imagine he is like? And his ‘Meditations’ are, after all, the compositions of a mind in repose.

When I was a child in the North East, I used to love gazing at the fire in my nan’s back kitchen. There was a huge black cast iron fire guard in front of it, usually festooned with her stockings, hung out to dry. An Alan Bennett scene! I paid no attention to her hosiery hanging there, but concentrated on the heart of the fire, watching the wood burning to grey ashes in the bed of white and orange flames and listening to the crackling and sputtering in the grate. Looking at the flames would lead me to my first stirrings of inner reflection. I would think of ideas for little plays I might write or poems.

I did a lot of writing then. I would coerce my school mates and friends in the street to be in my little plays. We’d act them out in the road. There were very few cars then, you see. One of my friends in the street – Michael – took a play of mine and passed it off as his own at his own school.

I remember I would arduously write out the parts by hand, like a little monk. And now, what seems like thousands of years later, in my retirement I am writing again and I am still a little monk. But in between, I have been writing plays for my school too, and coercing my students to take part instead. Except they haven’t needed much coercing because they enjoy it and because it might involve a week on tour in Budapest.

I’ve been thinking about my childhood in the last few weeks a lot. I have just seen the new film ‘Stan and Ollie’ about Laurel and Hardy, the great movie comics. They were part of my childhood. Their short comedy films were on BBC TV every Saturday teatime after the football results and before ‘Doctor Who’. I was ten or eleven years old when the first one was shown. It was ‘The Music Box’: Stan and Ollie trying to get that upright piano in a wooden crate up all those flights of steps. I vividly remember watching it in my nan’s back kitchen, which was where she had the television. I was leaning over the kitchen table with an iced bun in my hand entranced by their comic antics while the fire cackled in the background.The films were in black and white but what did that matter? Television was in black and white then too!

Of course those little comic gems have been repeated on TV so many times since – but not so much now, which is a great shame. And now they are on blue ray and DVD and I am

sure you can stream them. Through these little films (which were originally fillers on a cinema programme) and a handful of feature films, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy very quickly became international movie stars and held in great affection by a worldwide audience to the extent that they are now cinema icons. It is amazing to think that their films are 80 years old in the main (and the silent ones 90 years old) yet there is still such a strong interest in them and affection for them that recently a movie about their lives has been made.

In the film, Steve Coogan (Stan) and John C. Reilly (Ollie) are very adept at adapting the duo’s movie mannerisms to situations off camera and off stage in real life. The story deals with their final UK tour in the 50’s which was initially not as big a success as their tour a decade earlier. Their working relationship is under strain not least because Ollie’s health is in decline and because the offers are no longer coming. But the working relationship survives – because they are great friends. The friendship endures. And that is what shines through the slapstick mayhem in their films – there is an affectionate bond between them.

Their humour is gentle and warm. Yes humour has changed a great deal since they were in front on the cameras – it is more cynical, sarcastic, sexual and foul mouthed – even in family movies – and slapstick is not so funny to general audiences now. I’ve played some of their movies to my pupils -the younger ones love it, but the older ones don’t find it so funny. But when Stan and Ollie were working in the 20’s and 30’s,there were caustic, cynical and sexy sophisticated comedies too.

I think part of their enduring appeal is their screen personas, which was so very different from their off-camera personalities. Though Ollie was the dominant personality of the two

in the movies, in real life it was Stan who wrote the gags, directed and produced (in this he was like his contemporary Charlie Chaplin). He had already appeared in silent movies as a solo star. Ollie was a jobbing actor who generally went along with whatever Stan had devised.

Stan had that rare quality of being able to portray pure innocence on screen and not make it sentimental or something to be jeered at. It was a childlike innocence – Chaplin was more artful (in some ways like the Artful Dodger from his favourite book ‘Oliver Twist’). Stan may be slow-witted (and gets them both into high water as a result) but it is part of his charm. We don’t deride him for it, but laugh with him.

Ollie is all politeness, Southern gentility and charm. He is always eager to help others in the films. Despite his large frame, there is a grace about his movement at times, as there in Stan’s movement too, evident in their famous dance in ‘Way Out West’. He is a Southern gentleman (making use of his roots in Georgia) or tries to be in the most ridiculous of situations.

At the root of the duo’s appeal is there inherent goodness. They are good people to be with – as a German comedian commented in a TV documentary I recently saw.

Of course it was television in the main that prolonged their longevity with the public. Though their popularity was on the wain in the mid-1950’s, when their movies appeared on TV (first in the U.S.A and later in our own and other countries) they were given a new lease of life. And years later, after endless repeats the movies were issued on video and DVD and colourised and digitally restored. Modern technology has resurrected them. Yes it’s a kind of resurrection.

Of course, without the modern technology of the time, the development of the moving picture, Stan and Ollie would never have got together at all. I ask myself what would have happened to them instead. Before becoming besotted with the movies and working in cinemas around 1913, Hardy was a singer and had a cabaret and vaudeville act. Without the movies, he may have graduated to being a actor in plays and musicals around the U.S. I guess and maybe he would have got to Broadway. Laurel was a music hall comedian, in Fred Karno’s comic troupe (along with Charlie Chaplin). That may have been how he would have carried on, along with Charlie, playing the music hall and later variety circuits. If he survived World War One.

But for technology, they would never have got together and we would never have known them decades later.

Ave atque Vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’.

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested. I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

 

—————————————————————————————————————————————–