neil – Meditations of 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.

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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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