Tag: Travel

MEDITATION 109

I am writing this meditation in my lounge and at the appropriate time: evening.  There are not one but two candles beside me. 

As I sit here I am reminding myself of sunflowers. I am not trying to conjure up a summer landscape of fields of sunflowers, golden in the sunlight. Although I could be excused for doing so as today has been very wintry: dark, dank and chill. The sunflowers in my mind are not in a field or a garden but in a vase. Not all of them are in cheerful bloom either.  Some are drooping and one or two look as if they have already expired. 

They are in fact as unreal as my imagining. They are the sunflowers painted by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90). We may think that he painted only one picture of sunflowers – the famous one. But in fact he painted several and two of them have been on display in a recent exhibition at London’s National Gallery. The exhibition partly celebrates the centenary of the Gallery’s acquisition of one of the ‘Sunflowers’ paintings. That is the famous one. There is also another one on display however from Philadelphia. 

The aim of the exhibition has been to bring together paintings from the artist’s time in the South of France in 1888-9. Moreover, it is the first time the paintings have been exhibited together as some are from private collections.  It is also the first time that the National Gallery has mounted a Van Gogh exhibition. Not only are there paintings on display but also some of the artist’s drawings in ink and chalk. 

The Gallery has billed the exhibition as ‘a once in a century exhibition’ which is no hyperbole. I am sure these masterpieces will not be seen together in one place for many a year. Standing in one of the exhibition rooms and looking around the walls I did feel privileged for a moment. The big shows which major galleries mount with artwork often from around the world provide a unique opportunity to see normally far flung artworks under one roof. We are privileged to have the opportunity to see them. And there was I, before we went in, observing to my friend Teresa that exhibition ticket prices seem to be escalating! 

Needless to say the exhibition has been hugely popular and Teresa was very fortunate to obtain tickets for the Friday of the final weekend. It was sold out all day and the Gallery was staying open all night too until Saturday morning to enable as many people as possible to witness this unique exhibition. I discovered this on a notice as I entered the Gallery, which led me to have visions of late night clubbers wandering in and taking in Van Gogh’s bright vibrant colours with tired, bleary eyes. Depending on what state they were in, they might be seeing two vases of sunflowers at once – or rather four! 

As might be expected, despite timed entrance tickets, the exhibition was very full and it was difficult to get close to individual paintings as there were always clusters of people around them. This was as I imagined it would be, but I was nevertheless a little disappointed and rather impatient. I began to use the tactics I adopt in a theatre bar in the interval to edge my way closer to a particular painting. My small stature has its uses! 

I did become rather agitated, however, as I moved from the first room to the second, which was much larger, with more paintings on display than the first and therefore there were more clusters of people gathered in front of each picture. 

The people in the room were no doubt as anxious as I was to see everything. Despite this,  I did notice that people gave way to disabled visitors and parents with buggies and children.One of the problems with large groups around one painting is that the numbers often force you to look too closely at the picture and, with others in front of you, it is difficult to view it at the right distance. This was especially true of the famous ‘starry night’ picture (‘Starry Night over the Rhône’). 

Of course many were taking photos of pictures on their phones. This is understandable as they will not have the chance to see some of the pictures again (unless they buy the expensive catalogue). But taking photos of artworks has become a natural reflex in galleries now, almost muscle memory. I am as guilty myself, although I took few photos this time. This is because it’s impossible to capture Van Gogh’s wide brush strokes on a flat image however detailed the image may be.      

There was a moment when I felt like giving up. There were just too many people in the room. It was his signature that calmed me down – that inimitable ‘Vincent’ in his broad stroke. It was daubed on the side of a box of plants in the famous painting of his chair. I had managed to find a gap as a small group moved on so I could view the painting quite comfortably. The chair was in his bedroom in the ‘Yellow House’ where he lived and there was another painting of the room itself on display on another wall. But this painting was just the chair and the box of plants to the side.

The signature began to draw me into the picture. Inevitably I became oblivious to the others around me. The chair reminded me of my kitchen as I have four similar ones around my kitchen table. I bought them because they looked like the Van Gogh chair and now, after seeing the actual picture, I am reminded of him whenever I look at them at home. 

On the chair was his pipe and tobacco. It was an invitation to intimacy, as if in the midst of all the people in that large room he was saying, ‘Hello – I am here in the middle of all this. Stand still and you will find me’. 

And I did. I stood still, blocking out everyone around me, looking at the picture till I was ready to move on. And that is how I spent the rest of my time there, standing still and letting the picture in front of me take me in so that I forgot everyone milling around me for that moment. I concentrated on the particular pictures that caught my attention – of which there were many.  

The late theatre director Peter Brook wrote that a play is a series of moments. An exhibition can be a series of moments too, if we will stop and look and let the picture take us out of ourselves. It may mean concentrating on only a few pictures for a length of time. This can be difficult when there is so much to see in a major exhibition like the Van Gogh one. But then, there is only so much that we can absorb and maybe we should let our instinct lead us to the pictures that speak to us in an immediate way, as I did. 

I cannot describe all the pictures or drawings I experienced. Most poignant were the ones that Van Gogh painted or sketched while he was in the mental hospital of Saint-Paul at Saint-Remy, where he had voluntarily committed himself several mental crises. They were of the hospital gardens and the fields behind and are far from bleak. 

As my friend and I left the exhibition and went out into the early evening of dark winter, we both agreed that we felt uplifted by the world we had experienced of vibrant colours, of parks, fields, gardens and flowers all touched by the sunshine of Southern France. 

How amazing that in the darkness of his mental state, Van Gogh was inspired to create pictures of such  bright vibrant light. 

In this week when the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is being commemorated and Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners are slowly being freed and thousands of displaced Palestinians have begun to return to what is left of Gaza we must have hope that light will come from darkness. 

Ave atque Vale

Neilus Aurelius

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National Gallery London Peter Brook

Van Gogh Exhibition

Van Gogh Sunflowers Liberation of Auschwitz

Art Appreciation/Exhibitions Palestine/Israeli Conflict. 

Arles

San-Remy. 

River Rhône 

MEDITATION 105

As I sit here by my candle, I am looking out of my kitchen window at the drab grey sky louring over my garden on this nondescript autumn day.  So to cheer myself up, I am thinking back to a beautiful golden sunset I experienced last week. Those of you who read these pages, will know that I do like my sunsets. My twilights too. They echo within me now that I have reached my twilight years. The sun has not yet set over me, but when it does, I hope it will be a golden one. 

The radiant sunset I experienced was over the River Thames near Hampton Court. As I stood at the top of the pathway down to the river itself and looked down on the swathes of green glistening in the sunlight below me, I felt transported back in time. Ahead of me was an elegant rotund building with a dome and portico framed by tall trees and hedges. The grey dome shone in the sunshine. In front of the building was the green itself which stretched down to the river. The river itself was resplendent in the light, its waters surfaced with silver. On the green some boys were playing with wooden swords. Or were they limbering up before they practiced with real ones? 

It appears I had chanced upon an 18th Century enclave. The scene could be the subject of an oil painting of the period. All that was missing perhaps, was a small dog, possibly a spaniel, scampering at the heels of the boys. Possibly there could be a small sail boat skimming the waters of the river too and a lone angler fishing from the bank. A girl on a swing hanging from the boughs of a tree near the portico might complete the charming scene. In my mind I listened for the clip-clop of a horse drawing a carriage approaching behind me. But there was none. Only the persistent mechanical drone of cars, lorries and buses came to my ears.

Actually I had walked down to the path from a bus stop. From where I stood, I was viewing Garrick’s Green, named after the star 18th Century actor, David Garrick (1717-1779). The elegant domed building was built by the actor himself as a Temple to Shakespeare. It now houses a small museum of pictures and artefacts relating to him and is called Garrick’s Temple. Over the main road, which is now a main thoroughfare to Heathrow airport, is the large mansion, Hampton House, which he occupied and developed as his summer villa and weekend haunt when he wasn’t appearing on the stage at Drury Lane in London. The mansion is now apartments. Originally the lawns would have stretched from the villa to the river and of course, minus the modern road traffic and airplanes overhead, it would have been a quiet country retreat for Garrick from the hurly-burly of the London theatre scene. 

The boys with the wooden swords were rehearsing a scene (or attempting to!). As I walked down the sloping path to the Green, I could see other boys rehearsing too on park benches or standing and reciting their lines across the river. Sadly there were no ducks or swans to play to.  They were students from Richard Challoner School in New Malden where I worked for many years. There in the sunlight by the river they were engaged in their final rehearsals for a Shakespeare evening that was taking place in Garrick’s Temple. I was there to help with rehearsals and to take part too along with some members of staff. 

I have been past the Temple so many times on the way to the airport and have always wanted to pay a visit. Now here I was not only visiting but also performing there, thanks to Leigh, my successor in the Drama department, who organised the event.  

The Temple, being small, is an intimate place to perform in and has excellent acoustics. Sometimes concerts take place there, apparently. The performing area was at the opposite end to the entrance, in front of an imposing statue of Shakespeare himself in a raised niche which is the focal point of the interior. I would like to comment that Shakespeare was looking down benignly upon the young performers, but he was paying no attention to them, looking away to the right as if in the midst of creating. 

The rest of the room was filled with chairs for the audience and every chair was filled. I felt quite proud of the students as the audience were so close to them and they could see them clearly as it wasn’t possible for the lights to be dimmed. It didn’t seem to put them off at all.  

A warm glow permeated the room during the performance. As I sat in the back row of the audience, I wondered how the room would have looked by candlelight in Garrick’s time. The warmth and the glow would have been not too dissimilar, I imagine. I have sometimes spoken in my meditations of the invisible circle between the performer and the audience in a successful performance. Well here we were, performers and audience,  actually within a circular building! However, I will not comment on whether that invisible circle was achieved as I was a performer myself. 

It was fitting of course that we were performing Shakespeare in Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, not only because of the building but because of David Garrick himself as he was the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor of his time. As I sat in the back row of the audience, waiting to perform Sonnet 29, I looked up to the domed ceiling and then around the walls filled with Garrick memorabilia and then back to the students performing a scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the large statue of Shakespeare behind them. 

As I did so, the thought came to me that we were all part of a tradition, an acting tradition of playing Shakespeare. Garrick had been part of that tradition, nearly three centuries ago, which he handed on to others and which I, in my own small way, imparted to my own students over the years. One of those was Leigh who is also handing that tradition on to his own students and here they were performing in Garrick’s building. 

Just for a moment that tradition was tangible as if hovering in the air. I saw my career as part of a bigger picture. And for a brief moment too I felt a little proud that I was part of that tradition. Then the moment evaporated as it was time for me to perform my sonnet. 

I also performed a speech by Prospero from ‘The Tempest’: ‘Our revels now are ended’. I had played the role with my students for my retirement performance in 2017.  On this occasion, I fluffed a line and covered my mistake by repeating an earlier one. 

I am sure Garrick must have done the same sometimes. Shakespeare too when he was on stage, for that matter.

Ave atque Vale

Neilus Aurelius

PS: Incidentally I have decided to become a volunteer at Garrick’s Temple! It is open on Sundays in the summer from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. www.garrickstemple.org.uk

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River Thames

Hampton Court

Garrick’s Green

David Garrick (1717-1779)

Garrick’s Temple

Shakespeare

Heathrow

Drury Lane

Richard Challoner School 

New Malden

Theatre Performance

Shakespeare Sonnet 29

”Romeo and Juliet’

’The Tempest’

MEDITATION 104

As I write this meditation, I am not sitting at a table with a candle burning beside me. I am not in my own house. I am sitting in a cafe in nearby Kingston – Upon – Thames. 

It is a fairly new establishment and is situated on a corner. The plate glass windows which reach to the floor give extensive views on two sides. As I look through the window ahead of me I can see one of Kingston’s landmarks: the leaning red telephone boxes. Pisa has its leaning tower and Kingston has its leaning telephone boxes! One telephone box stands upright while the next one leans against it at an angle and the next one leans against that one and so on until the last one is almost on the ground.  There are 10 in total – I have just counted them. This zany artwork will soon become a heritage site, no doubt, as our dear red telephone boxes are becoming a thing of the past.

Cafe Marna is just one of the coffee shops I visit in Kingston. I also visit three others and have loyalty cards for all of them. Loyalty is one of my better traits, I hope. In actuality I enjoy having the card stamped in eager anticipation of a free coffee on the tenth stamp when the card is full. Because, I go to a different cafe whenever I am in Kingston, filling each card takes time! However, I have been visiting this one more frequently than the others recently so I am on stamp no 9 now!  It is not far from where I get off the bus and it is friendly,  bright, cheerful and new, a novelty I suppose.

Wherever I am, by choice I visit independent coffee shops if possible. I am not enamoured of the ubiquitous global chains. Coffee shops seem to be appearing everywhere in our UK streets. There are three in one street in Kingston for example.  They have become a fixture in our culture, an ingrained habit now. I wonder if the habit has grown even more since lockdown, when we were confined for large stretches of time in our homes. I also wonder if coffee shops have eclipsed the popularity of pubs. Do more people go to a coffee shop now than go to the pub? To cash in on the trend, even pubs are serving coffee now.

‘Coffee on the go’ has also become a fixture in our culture too. I see so many people on my travels wandering around with eco-friendly paper cups of coffee in their hands in the street, on the bus or on the train. I even see people slurping away in the supermarket. Some time ago, I was almost scalded by one lady’s coffee as she meandered down the aisle with her trolley, concentrating on her phone. Some people are quite dexterous and agile in carrying their coffee cup along with bags and luggage, unless they suddenly have to run for the train or airport departure gate of course.

As I sit here in the cafe Marna why its bright new modern decor, I think back to my favourite coffee houses in Budapest such as the Central and Muvesz with their plush, old fashioned surroundings. And an extensive selection of cakes and pastries of course, while the Marna has a very modest display in comparison. The relaxed atmosphere and elegant surroundings of the Budapest coffee house is one of the places where I feel most at home, where my Eastern European roots take hold of me. It is not about the coffee or the cakes (delicious as they are) it is about the place, the cultured ambiance. It is one of the places where I feel closest to my true self. 

Some are not so much coffee houses as palaces with their glass chandeliers, high ceilings adorned with beautiful frescoes and elegant gilt furniture. Yet there is still an intimacy about them. They are places for conversation. Although I did notice on my last visit to the city, that in some coffee houses, several customers were working with laptops on the polished marble tables.

The full coffee house experience has to include a pianist playing in the background. At the Cafe New York, quite a long while ago, there used to be an amazing pianist who could play Strauss waltzes or whatever while reading the newspaper, which was spread out on the top of the baby grand, at the same time. I am sure there is still a pianist playing there although the cafe, beautifully restored, is now part of an expensive hotel where film stars stay. It has become equally very expensive and a tourist attraction with queues waiting outside for a table. It was always elegant and palatial but in a building that appeared to be falling down as it was shored up by large wooden beams on the corner. This was all part of the Cafe New York’s charm and attraction: a jewel of a cafe in a dilapidated old building.

As I sit here in the Cafe Marna, I am wondering whether I should recreate the heady atmosphere of the Cafe New York, by tuning into some Strauss or Chopin on my I phone. I have these wonderful new hearing aids that hook up to my phone by the wonder of bluetooth. They are my version of the ‘buds’ people wear now, the update of headphones (which like the great British telephone box may eventually also become obsolete, I imagine).  I opt to stay with the cafe’s own chill background music so as to be in the moment.

There are quite a few customers listening on their buds or on their headphones at the moment. In fact most of the customers are perusing a laptop, tablet or phone. I wonder how the cafe would appear before any of these devices existed.  In those days, over two decades ago, customers would be engaged in conversation, or reading a book or magazine or a newspaper. Cafes often provided newspapers on a rack and some still do. One or two might be making notes from a book or writing in a notebook. This is a university town after all.

But overall, the cafe then was usually a place for relaxation not for work. The situation has reversed and that reversal has taken place quite recently. Working from home or working from the cafe?

I am no different at this present moment of course, except I am not writing on my tablet or laptop but in a notebook, before writing it up on my laptop at home. Also I do not consider writing my blog as work. It is a relaxation and pleasure, dear reader.

As you can you imagine there is very little conversation taking place in this cafe at present.  In fact, aside from customers ordering at the counter, there is no conversation at all.

And yet, here we are, sitting and engaging in one task or another. I ask myself why?

To get out of the house or flat, I suppose. For some kind of company. It is company, even though we are not talking to each other. 

Writing is a solitary business. So it is good to have some kind of company.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

Kingston – Upon – Thames

Telephone boxes

Coffee Shops

Cafe Marna

Coffee on the Go

Budapest Coffee Houses

Muvesz Coffee House, Budapest

Central Coffee House, Budapest

New York Cafe, Budapest

Johann Strauss

Chopin

I phone

Hearing devices

Bluetooth

Tablet

Laptop

Bluetooth

MEDITATION 57

As I sit here gazing at the candle beside me, I am thinking ahead to the future. I imagine most of us are looking to the future this week as at last the gates of the long winter lockdown have opened – even if only slightly. Perhaps those of us who are prudent souls, are making short term plans rather than long term ones, if any. The dark clouds of disappointment have not quite dissolved into a bright shiny day. We have not quite reached a new dawn yet. So it is as well not to make too many plans to travel or meet up with loved ones and friends, incase they are scuppered once again by re-imposed restrictions.  Nevertheless, plans are a way of hoping for the future. Though we may feel rather downtrodden by the last long months, we must not give up hope. We have got this far. 

How will we view these strange times when they are all over? How will we look back? In one sense, as we return to some kind of normality and begin to engage again in our usual pursuits, it will be as if nothing has happened. The months of lockdown may begin to fade away in our memory, unless we have been seriously affected by the pandemic on a deeply personal level.  

Yesterday morning, on the first day of the lighter restrictions, I walked past the barber shop I usually frequent. There was a small socially distanced queue of customers outside the front door eagerly awaiting a haircut. I remember seeing that queue last summer, when the shop had re-opened after the first lockdown. It seemed to me as if the months in between had not happened. I have not yet ventured into my nearest town, Kingston, but I imagine when I do, I will see shoppers going in and out of the shops or queuing outside, just as before the lockdown and again it will be as if the lockdown has not occurred.  

Once we start milling around the shops, or share a meal and bottle of wine with a friend in a bar or restaurant or drive off into the sunset, perhaps the events of 2020 and most of 2021 will dissolve, unless revived by the TV documentaries which will inevitably be screened afterwards along with media articles, books and movies. But then we are not obliged to watch them or read them. After all we have already got used to screening the latest Netflix series to anaesthetise us from the pandemic and lockdown if necessary.

In Virgil’s epic Latin poem ‘The Aeneid’, Aeneas, one of the royal family of Troy escapes from the burning city with his lame father Anchises on his back and his son Ascanius at his side. Along with his band of surviving heroes, they flee the city by boat and after many adventures arrive on the shores of Italy. In the Roman legend, he is the first true hero of Rome and the ancestor of Romulus and Remus who, also according to legend, eventually founded the city.

At one point in the epic story, Aeneas cries out and weeps bitterly as he recalls the blood shed at Troy. In the poem, Virgil comments that Aeneas is suffering the ‘lacrimae rerum’, the ‘tears of things’. He further observes that ‘The world has tears as a constituent part of it and so have our own lives, hopeless and weary.’ He might have been describing our own pandemic. Our lives too have seemed  ‘hopeless and weary’ at times and we have been made acutely aware that tears, that suffering, is an inevitable part of our world, of the human condition.

This is after all what the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius is all about: acknowledging the tears and suffering in life and finding a way of accepting it. In our own post-Christian era we would add, finding a way of alleviating the suffering of others too.   

Hopefully, when the pandemic has receded, like Aeneas, we too will pause, look back and remind ourselves of the ‘tears of things’. Also, like him, hopefully we will be thankful that we have survived. Perhaps too we will be a little more grateful for what we have in our lives. Surely this enforced hiatus we have all been through has made us appreciate each other and ourselves more, along with the clutter and the bric-a-brac we have accumulated around ourselves.

For Aeneas and his companions in the story, the destruction of Troy became a painful memory, a past event. For us, though the lockdowns may become a past event, we may still be living with the virus for some time.  

There has been much inevitable speculation about what the ‘new normal’ will look like: in other words, what we will be able to do and not do. For how much longer must face masks be worn? Will office workers be working from home or back in their offices or both? When will our schools and hospitals and surgeries be back to normal? When will there be full gatherings in pubs, bars, and restaurants and in arenas, theatres, cinemas and in churches? When will air travel recommence at full throttle and when will it be as easy and casual as before? 

There will also be a lot of changes and the transition from lockdown to a kind of normality may take quite some time.  To some extent, just as Aeneas and his followers on the shores of Italy, we too will be walking in a new and different world for a while, perhaps for a long time, if not forever.  Let us face it, we already are.

These questions are obviously highly relevant to our own lives and to our society. But perhaps we should not be asking ourselves what we may or may not be able to do in the future but what we are going to be in the future. What have we learnt about ourselves in the last year? Will that change our own individual lifestyle and attitude to life and towards others in any way? Maybe we should be reflecting on what the ‘new normal’ will be for ourselves as individuals. Perhaps we should be saying, I am going to create a ‘new normal’ for myself.

Ave atque Vale – Hail and Farewell – 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.

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A selection of previous meditations is also available in audio form as ‘Meditations of Neilus Aurelius’ ASMR on YouTube. 

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

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

.

Lockdown

The ‘new normal’

Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’

Post-Covid

Aeneas

Roman legends.      

MEDITATION 51 (CHRISTMAS SPECIAL)

I am sitting here beside my flickering candle contemplating a very different Christmas from last year. We are in another lockdown in all but name, which has been announced as suddenly as the first one in March. Therefore Christmas is likely to be a quiet and subdued holiday and a muted festival. Like many other normal events in the last months it will seem rather strange, no doubt, and unusual. 

Traditionally it is a time for families and friends to get together, as we well know.  Many people make great efforts to travel to be with their loved ones. But with new travel restrictions and restrictions on how many people can meet in one place, this is not really possible this year. Some will be spending Christmas alone for the first time. Christmas is the time of good cheer but this year that cheer will inevitably be tinged with sadness, especially for those who have lost loved ones to the pandemic.

Yesterday afternoon, I was wrapping gifts for my family, gifts that they will not be received tomorrow as I am now not able to travel to Leeds for our own family Christmas celebration. But rather than leaving the wrapping-up operation until whenever I will be able to travel to see them, I thought I would cheer myself up by doing it now while watching a Christmas old movie. It did cheer me up or rather I  felt a twinge of real Christmas cheer in my veins. 

The movie was a very old one -you know how I love my old movies – the 1933 version of ‘Little Women’ based on the 1868 novel by Louisa M. Alcott. The opening scenes are set at Christmas in New England and several winter scenes follow with deep snow covering pine and spruce trees, paths and gates and snowmen carefully crafted. It is a cosy opening, like a Christmas card and ideal Yuletide viewing.  

But the dramatic situation is not so cosy or comfortable underneath. For we are in the midst of the American Civil War and the March family (who are the central characters), though dwelling in a large rambling house,are living in genteel but straightened circumstances. The mother (Marmee) and four daughters (Jo, Beth, Amy and Meg) are also coping with the absence of Mr March, who is away fighting in the war. 

There have been three later film versions (including one this year) and all in colour of course. But this venerable black and white version, perhaps because it isn’t in lush colour, somehow captures the shabby atmosphere of the house and the family’s near genteel poverty the best. Led by Katherine Hepburn as the tomboy and would-be writer Jo (who gives one of her best and most natural performances in a long career), the actresses playing the family are a real ensemble and really convey their love for each other and their enjoyment of each other’s company.

From the opening moments, there is a sense of money being short. They are almost improvising Christmas, giving each other little gifts which mean so much because each one has meant a sacrifice of some kind or other for each of them. They are making an effort as best they can and are able to be charitable too, sharing their Christmas breakfast with a poor family down the road and spending Christmas morning with them.  

I remember this scene from when I was a child in junior school. Our teacher read it to us just before theChristmas break during story time at the end of the day. I remember the snug warm classroom, as daylight was dimming through the windows. I giggled at the wrong moment and she said to me, ‘Neil you are like a champagne cork popping.’ I had no idea what she meant as I didn’t know what champagne was, of course.Needless to say, I have rectified my ignorance on numerous occasions since! Starting with hunting in bags of wine gums, when still a child, for the champagne ones! 

The Marches remind me of the Cratchit family in Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ and Alcott, like Dickens, advocates charity to others, especially at Christmas time. No doubt she was influenced by his novel, which was published 25 years earlier.

The Cratchits are a larger family than the Marches and are much poorer. But, like the Marches, there is a real sense of them appreciating each other and everything about Christmas Day and the Christmas meal. It would be their most substantial meal of the year and Dickens is at pains to point out that they ate every scrap of the goose. A goose would be a low income family’s Christmas bird in the 1840’s. Turkeys were for more prosperous families and beef only for the wealthy. It is interesting that, after his change of heart, Scrooge buys the largest turkey for the Cratchits to replace their goose on the Christmas table. 

This year, because of the unusual situation we are living through, we are also improvising Christmas to some extent, like the Marches. But the basics of the celebration are still there even if we may not be able to see everyone as usual in person and will be using zoom or Skype or whatever platform to share their company instead. In that sense it will be a digital Christmas this year! 

There hasn’t been the opportunity for socialising, parties, and eating out. Or seeing a Christmas show or going to the movies.  It is a quiet and subdued Christmas this year, as I said at the beginning of this meditation. It is also an opportunity for us, like the Marches and the Cratchits to appreciate each other, to enjoy each others’ company, whether real or digital, and every moment of the Christmas celebration and everything about it.  For example, I have never appreciated receiving Christmas cards so much as this year.  

We must remember too that the event at the centre of our celebration, the birth of Christ, was itself a quiet and subdued affair. ‘How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given’ says the Carol ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.’ 

With the new strain of the virus and numbers of those afflicted increasing, we are once again reminded of how fragile and vulnerable human life is, as fragile and vulnerable as the babe of Bethlehem. Yet that babe is our hope and our light. And the candles we light this Christmas are a symbol of light and of hope for a better New Year.

As Tiny Tim says: ‘Merry Christmas and God Bless Us Everyone!’  

Ave atque Vale – Hail and Farewell – until the next blog!

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Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

As I sit here gazing at my candle, instead of being aware of the final rays of the day’s sunshine through my lounge window, I am focused on the gathering gloom. I must confess that my spirits are rather low at present. They are being dragged down by the lockdown, I think, which has now made its weary way into its eighth week. Living alone in the lockdown and being in my first weeks of retirement is quite a struggle. It’s rather like being on a really fast waltzer at a funfair and wheeling around dizzily after you get off. And in this lockdown, it is like hurtling into a void within a void.

I am sure Marcus had his moments of melancholy. It is part of the human condition and emperors are therefore not excepted from it. Neither are writers of blogs! I am no guru, but only someone who wishes to share his thoughts and reflections with others. No-one is a guru. No human being is able to know the complete truth about anything or to be an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom, least of all myself.

In Shakespeare’s time, melancholy was not only acknowledged and accepted but fashionable. It was a pose adopted by young gallants writing sonnets to the objects of their affection, especially if they were unsure that their amorous feelings were reciprocated or if they were downright refused. Shakespeare’s own sonnets (which I am re-exploring at the moment) are no exception and Jaques in ‘As You Like It’ is a melancholic with his cynical and world-weary ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech.

Hamlet of course is the melancholic par excellence, especially at the beginning of the play and has been christened ‘the moody Dane.’ I studied the play at A Level and fell in love with it. I related to Hamlet’s mood swings completely in my own adolescent angst. I wanted to play the role of course and learnt all Hamlet’s soliloquies for my exam and enjoyed doing so. However, I think I would have been more suited to playing Horatio, Hamlet’s good friend, a role I have played constantly in real life.

I once accused one of my sixth form students of being melancholic – he was being particularly moody in class – and had to explain the word to him. Thereafter, he brightened up because there was a big word which described his feelings and he used the word continually afterwards as young people will do when they find a new word that attracts them. He adopted a melancholic pose for ages afterwards. He had morphed into being an Elizabethan gallant, thought he did not produce any sonnets as a result.

I have been trying to identify why my spirits are low at present, dear readers. Along with many others, I am sure the lockdown has ground me down week by week. The first flush of online games and fun activities and contacting friends on social media and discovering

new ways of doing so is over. And you can only go up and down the Amazon to buy online purchases for so long.

I have asked myself what I am missing. Well, the theatre (though I am enjoying online archive performances of productions I have missed) and the cinema (though a lot of new movies are being streamed) and art galleries of course and concerts and the opera. Although I have seen so much theatre, movies and operas in my time (and especially over the last few years) that I cannot complain.

I think what I am really missing is the opportunity to share them with friends over a meal and a drink. I do not like going to the theatre or the operas or a movie or concert for that matter on my own. It is sharing these with others that makes them special. Yes going up to London to see friends is what I miss and of course the chance to visit friends around the country and most of all my family in the North and have friends visit me. Especially now that I am retired and have so much time at my disposal to do so.

I have of course been in constant contact with all my friends and family in these eight weeks and it is wonderful to see them on FaceTime or Zoom but it’s is not the same as being physically together. However, I’ve gone on safe distance walks with a few friends too in a local park which is wonderful and breaks up the week. And, of course, nothing can replace an embrace or a hug.

As I am at home a lot now, I’ve been looking at all the pictures on my walls. So many are from places I have visited. I have almost filled the doors and one side of my fridge with fridge magnets I’ve collected from places I’ve been to. Gift shops in museums and art galleries are magnets to me! And I have been scrolling down the photos on my phone and computer. I bought a digital photo frame years ago which I have hardly used so I’m going to upload a selection of them onto the digital frame to cheer me up in the evenings.

Traveling abroad is in the balance at present and I have had to forego two visits to Italy this spring. Fortunately my final Drama tour of Budapest took place in February before international travel restrictions. However I am a much traveled person, as regular readers of this blog will know. I didn’t go on a plane till I was 35 years old but have made up for lost time since! Perhaps I will make a list of all the trips I have been on. If I never travel on a plane again, I have certainly travelled enough! Again, it is seeng family and friends in other countries that I miss.

I have been thinking of my aunt Barbara, who lives on Vancouver Island. She has albums and albums of photos. Some of them are quite valuable to me as her albums go back to before World War Two when my father’s family were in Poland and there are pictures of my parents’ wedding which I had never seen. And of course there are photos of my childhood.

One I find rather embarrassing. It is of a chubby little version of me as a baby in walking reins. Every time I see it, I am back to being a teenager again and hot with embarrassment at being reminded I was an infant once. However, dear reader, I do look cute!

You see at the moment we are all in walking reins. We are unable to go where we want to for our own safety. And yes we tug at the reins because someone else is in control. We want to be out and about. We want to wander off (on a plane). Built we can’t at present. For our own good.

I suppose we are beginning to realise what we really value in these days of quarantine. We are being to value what we have rather that hanker after what we do not. And to remember all the riches we have experienced up till now.

Like Friar Lawrence in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (another part I’d love to play), who counsels the miserable Romeo because he has to go away in exile (to be quarantined effectively) and will not be able to see Juliet. He reminds Romeo that at least he has not been sentenced to death and keeps repeating the phrase ‘Thereto are you happy.’

A phrase we should be repeating to ourselves at this time.

Think – ‘Thereto are you happy!’

But an embrace or a hug would be wonderful!

Stay safe and well!

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

As I sit here by my solitary candle, I am not gazing at its steady flame but at the lights on my Christmas tree, which is standing in the corner of the lounge opposite me.

Christmas is my season. I suppose now that I have white hair and a beard of sorts and have begun to look ‘Santa-esque’, it should be my favourite season. I have certainly always preferred it to the forced festivities of New Year.

Even though I live alone and spend most of Christmas week with my family up North, I still decorate my lounge and make a lot of fuss over the tree. On my travels in recent years I have collected trinkets and baubles to adorn its branches. Every year I try to put the decorations up around the first Sunday of Advent (generally the first Sunday in December) and leave them up until the official end of Christmastide (the feast of Epiphany on January 6). They are a cheering sight in these bleak and dark days of winter, especially when I arrive home from my family after my Christmas visit, to my solitary residence again.

Last week I took a friend to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. It is a tall townhouse in Doughty Street, in Bloomsbury, not far from Russell Square. The house was the first marital home of Charles and Catherine Dickens. They lived there from 1837 – 1840 and during that short space of time, raised the first three of their ten children there (Charley, Mary and Kate). There Dickens finished ‘The Pickwick Papers’, wrote ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. And it was there, in his late-twenties, that he very quickly rose like a comet to international fame.

Though now a museum, there is a homely atmosphere as you walk through its rooms. There are also mini exhibitions on display and, as might be expected, at present, there is one on ‘A Christmas Carol’ which Dickens wrote only a few years after he moved (in 1843). This is the best time of year to visit the museum as every room is festooned with Christmas decorations in early Victorian style, including, in the corner of the parlour, a Christmas tree. I am honoured to think that my own tree is likewise in the corner of my own parlour! The tree’s branches have colourful ribbons on them and small thin candles (tapers) . There were no flashing electric lights in those days or electric light at all and in the gloom of the parlour, lit only by candles or oil lamps and the fire in the grate, the tree’s candle lights must have been as warm and spectacular as our own electric ones are now.

Charles Dickens virtually invented Christmas, through ‘A Christmas Carol’ and his other annual Christmas stories.

However he was only bringing together traditions that had existed for years before, even if some may have declined by then. Just as Shakespeare created our image of Ancient Rome in his play ‘Julius Caesar’, so Dickens, in his novel, creates the heartwarming image of Christmas that is now indelibly etched in our national (indeed international) consciousness.

However, we must remember that he wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’ spurred on by his own acute social conscience. Ever the champion of the poor, as he was only a few steps from abject poverty himself in his childhood, it was the plight of children born into poverty that abhorred him most. At the centre of the book is the scene where the Spirit of Christmas Present, as he is about to leave Scrooge, opens his cloak to reveal the children of Ignorance and Want, who beset Scrooge with outstretched hands.

The book was written in Dickens’ despair at the conditions of children living on the London streets and on the streets of other major cities, heightened by the current economic depression known as the ‘Hungry Forties’, where the failure of two successive harvests left many walking the streets in starvation. He was also sickened by the use of child labour in the mines and rather than petition Parliament, he decided to write a short work of fiction instead, exposing the ignorance of the wealthy and powerful classes to the ‘want’ of the poor.

What would Dickens have to say about our own Christmas in 2019 with its own child poverty, a growing homeless population, food banks, ineffective universal credit scheme, and children slipping into drug abuse and knife crime? And successive governments that are not ignorant but refuse to see and act. What indeed?

And what would he make of the last three years of political machinations and parliamentary drama around Brexit? He would have seen huge opportunities for comedy I am sure. And what of our new Prime Minister? Dickens loved creating eye-catching names for his characters and took his time over inventing them. I fancy he might have dubbed him ‘Mr Boris Brexit Bombast’. And yet, having seen our new leader so often in the news recently, despite his attempts to be Churchillian, he does not appear to be a 19th Century Dickensian figure either, as his voice and manner are more those of a licentious 18th Century Tory. Indeed a periwig would sort out his uncontrollable hair.

Dickens wrote a story about a Christmas Tree, which he calls the ‘new German toy’ as the practice of a tree at Christmas had been introduced into our country by the German Prince Albert, the young Queen Victoria’s consort, a few years before. His tree has ‘glittering tapers’ (like the one in the museum), miniature doll’s furniture and musical instruments, imitation fruits and sweets and a host of other trinkets, including rosy-cheeked dolls hiding behind the green leaves.
What of my own tree? Yes there is a string of lights like glowing icicles and a host of different baubles and trinkets, some purchased here and many from my travels. I must admit to an aversion to Christmas trees in stores, bars or hotels that have identical baubles: all gold or blue or red or whatever and often with fake gift boxes at their base. They look so unimaginative and half-hearted. But better a tree than no tree at all I suppose.

In the Dickens story, as he looks at the tree he is gradually reminded of ghosts from the past. What am I reminded of? Well places that I have visited and the dear friends who were with me. I have decorations from Paris, Rome, Florence, Assisi, Venice several from Budapest of course, San Francisco and other places in California like Monterey, San Simeon and L.A. and Vancouver. There are even several from the Vatican – but I didn’t steal them! And there are those that were given to me by family and friends. And, like Dickens, one or two trinkets remind me of one or two friends who are no more.
The Christmas Tree is a light bearing tree. To those of us who are of the Christian Faith, it symbolised the coming of Christ into the world, the light that lightens all people. For Dickens it is a ‘commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy and compassion’ reminding us to think of others and help them at this time.

The evergreen fir tree has links with the winter solstice and so to the tree of life which is common to so many faiths and cultures. So the Christmas tree is also the Tree of Life. It is a perennial symbol of light in the darkness. And of hope too.
As I look at my own tree I see all those things. Yes my tree is a tree of life. My life.

As Tiny Tim says in ‘A Christmas Carol’:
‘Merry Christmas and God bless us everyone.’


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