Tag: doctor who

MEDITATION 83

This morning I began thinking about this meditation while sitting in my garden and enjoying the welcome winter sunshine. The sunshine seems a little incongruous as today is Black Friday. That name sounds ominous, redolent of dark clouds and threatening storms. In fact it is just another excuse for shops and certain websites to pedal their wares in front of us. And not only shops: some theatre ticket sites and even the Festival Hall are offering juicy discounts today. 

The phrase ‘Black Friday’ is a misnomer in another way: in some shops and on some sites Black Friday is actually extended to several days or even a week. This is sometimes referred to as Cyber Monday or Cyber Week. It reminds me of those sinister ‘Doctor Who’ monsters called the Cybermen and conjures up an image of them parading up and down High Streets and shopping malls forcing people to buy things they don’t want or really need. Just like the shops and trading outlets themselves.

The Black Friday sales began in the U.S.A. and take place on the day after Thanksgiving there. The custom (or rather marketing ploy) only began in this country about 8 years ago in the shops though it started a few years earlier online. I am not sure if Black Friday has super-ceded our traditional Boxing Day Sales in revenue yet or the January Sales that follow or the Summer ones. Along with special discounts in shops and on websites through the year I wonder if anyone pays full price for anything these days, unless they want to be among the first to buy a new edition of a computer game or console.

When I was a boy (and yes I was once) on one of our annual family trips to London we visited the famous Petticoat Lane Market, near Spitalfields in the East End. It is still there I believe. My grandmother loved street markets so we had to visit. One of the attractions was a man who had a cheap crockery stall. He had been running it since the 1930s and was a market celebrity. He wore a Lord Mayor’s hat and sometimes a Mayoral cloak to gain attention. His way of attracting a crowd was to slowly ascend a wooden stepladder with a very large tray filled with crockery precariously balanced in one hand. Then he would shout ‘Gather round, gather round  – this tray of fine bone china for 2 quid!’ or whatever. Sometimes, as a crowd would gather, he would pretend to slip on the ladder or drop the tray. He never did of course. I was fascinated by his performance. It was much more cheerful that ‘Eastenders’ as I remember it. He would have been an interesting character in the series, had it been running on the TV then. 

Just like this market trader of old in his cocked hat, the media are shouting at us, to get our attention. They are shouting at us digitally to “Buy, Buy, Buy – on Black Friday.’ They are offering us huge reductions and hopefully something for next to nothing.

It is in our nature of course to look for a bargain, which is what the sales appeal to. Prices are all relative anyway and fluid. Some stores are quite canny in increasing their prices before the sale so that what appears to be a bargain, is hardly one at all. Part of our desire to buy things may come from comfort or boredom or, at its worst, addiction. There is also the sense of novelty or curiosity. I have bought some my DVDs and classical CDs as much to see or hear what they are like as to really want to play them over and over again. Buying something new can cheer us up for a while too and it can be a talking point with friends.  

There are those of us who will wait for the sales to purchase a large item, like a fridge or a washing machine or furniture. Some might use Black Friday as a way of making their finances go further in buying Christmas gifts, especially this year when many may be in straitened circumstances because of the current bleak economic climate.

Nevertheless the Sales, especially Black Friday,  give rise to rampant consumerism and aggressive purchasing – sometimes literally with fights in the shopping aisles! It is as if people are grabbing at happiness. And they may even literally push others aside to obtain it! Have we ever asked asked ourselves if we really need that purchase? Or, more philosophically, what do we really need. Perhaps exploring those questions might stop us in our tracks before dashing to the stores, or make our finger hover over the keyboard before clicking ‘buy now’ on a website.

A friend of mine, Andrew, is chaplain at my old Oxford college, Pembroke. For a while he would take a friend of his in his car for his regular cancer checkups. This was an Orthodox bishop, Kallistos Ware, who was also a Fellow of the college for many years. He sadly passed away earlier this year. On one of these visits, Andrew was being enthusiastic about his new car, which they were driving in. He said something like ‘I love my new car.’ Kallistos replied to him, ‘You can’t really love a car. You can’t really love things. You can only really love people.’

We must also remember that for many, many people, for example the hungry, the homeless, those living in poverty and destitution and those living in war zones, every day is a black Friday.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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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

 

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