Worth repeating.

The Lie

BY SIR WALTER RALEGH

Go, soul, the body’s guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant.

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What’s good, and doth no good.

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others’ action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate.

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust.

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honor how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favor how it falters.

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness.

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention.

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay.

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming.

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

Tell faith it’s fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity;

Tell virtue least preferreth.

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing—

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing—

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.

Yesterday was just another boring day in my uneventful life. I am in awe of everyone on here who seem to have such exciting lives, so full of skips, hops and jumps, although today I think it's just called 'the Triple'. I suppose it saves on characters? Easter is nevertheless a special sort of time with its religious connotations. I always feel a spiritual pull towards the events of that time, encapsulating the best and worst aspects of human nature, interwoven into people and the past. The world would still exist without people but history could not. However we interpret life or try to give meaning to our existence, it is a journey or even a pilgrimage to wisdom and enlightenment - or should be. Everyone has the ability to be inspired and inspiring - the 'light' that shines in every person as Quakers believe. I think there is something in that. Jesus said don't put it under a 'bushel' - apparently a wooden bucket of eight gallons! - but let it shine forth and be a light unto men. So I made my weary way to Ludgvan Church across the fields and met two tired walkers on the St Michael's way resting on a bench outside it: modern day pilgrims. The church was dark and empty and silent, an anachronistic structure taking us almost half way back to those events in Jerusalem two milenia ago, that have reverberated down the centuries. They test our powers of belief. They shock our modern sensibilities. They challenge the view of ourselves - our sophisticated, self-satisfied complacency. I walked back in a gentle rain, the sea on my left, St Michael's Mount arising out of. and surrounded by the restless waves, and I thought of those Phoenician traders from Tyre who came for the tin, and wondered if indeed, as the mythology holds, that that Man of Destiny came with them, and perhaps even took in the same view?

See also:  https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/search?q=easter+donne

28.4.23: Another dull, dull day but the sun is trying to break through. I'm on page 355 of Alan Bennett's 'Untold Stories', although half of them are told, at least to me. Always fascinating to enter other people's lives, even if belatedly, as indeed it must always be, especially if they are so full of incident and clever observation. It was an eventful time already two decades ago, brimming it seems with the departure of the great and the good. The latest funeral recorded in Golders Green of Paul Foot, the left wing journalist and campaigner of righteous causes, once described as "The Leftest of the Left Feet." (I once lived in Golders Green before Paul Foot thought to end his days there) When reading the diaries of other people, essentially auto-biographies, one cannot help comparing notes on the timeline, of events and opinions with one's own. If every life is a line drawn on a page, what a complicated pattern they would make, sometimes touching, sometimes not, interweaving like a complicated knitting pattern, sometimes even resonating with an emotion or incident shared? Bennett was gifted with a unique ability to observe and capture the flavour of interactions with people, the odd expression, the poignant moment. He will always be remembered for his books and memorable plays, some turned into films, but most of all for his self-deprecating humanity.

Tim Veater

In 2020 he wrote: "He tells, with characteristic humour, of one evening walk, which happens to be on a Thursday, and which coincides with “a fusillade of clapping and pan-banging from the neighbours out on their balconies in celebration of the NHS”. Bennett is unable to join in the clapping as he needs to hold on to his walking stick, and he fears that, as he walks along the road, “I appear to be acknowledging the applause and even generating it. I try to disavow this by feebly smiling and shaking my head, but this just looks like modesty. It’s an absurd and inexplicable incident.”

Isolation, he says, is “beginning to rob me of speech” – calling the optician about a pair of broken glasses, he found himself “so much at a loss” that his partner, Rupert Thomas, had to take over. “He didn’t find this at all strange. I do,” writes Bennett in July. He laments the wreckage of his hands after constant washing, writing that while he has “never been that fond” of them, they now “scarcely bear looking at: shiny, venous and as transparent as an anatomical illustration”, describing them as “an old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere”.

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Tim Veater

Another inimitable encapsulation of the public and personal that almost become as historic as the events themselves.

My Aunt lived in Ridgeway Lane all those years ago before the estates were built to the south and west and before they moved into our Pensford cottage. I was sad leaving it for the joys of Amercombe Bungalow in 1962. How my mum and dad worked hard to make the house and overgrown garden habitable. In many ways it marked an historic cusp for nature and the world - the point when agricultural practice changed dramatically and farmers became enamoured of mechanical and chemical innovation that promised short-term gains but had devasting consequences for nature and saw the assassination of John F Kennedy that shook us like the loss of a son. It was a moment gathered around the radio that emulated those sombre words of Chamberlain in 1939 ten years before I was born but which still reverberated down the years. The old recumbant apple tree at the top of the garden flowered each year but the magnificent Elm tree perished with millions of others, from a disease placed at the door of a fungus and beetle, but of course nothing to do with the thousands of tons of chemicals sprayed everywhere. Meanwhile back in Ridgeway Lane, the sound of the signature tune to Coronation Street, marked the time to leave for the Street bus that dropped us off in the village. To this day it is impossible to hear that tune without being transported back to that Whitchurch house, to the blazing open fire, the benefit of Uncle Redge being a coal miner, the smell of his pipe tobacco and the twitter of his Budgerigars in their resplendent colours, which he bred out the back, probably as a counterweight to the darkness of the pits. It was a time of the 'swinging sixties', a time of liberation, dominated it seemed by mini-skirts and the Beatles, whilst in the background these seismic social, environmental and political changes and the dark clouds of war, as on the other side of the world, young men fought in Vietnam and had to live for ever after with the horrors they had experienced, abandoned by the country they served. Mary Quant, emblematic of the period, died last week. Surely That was the Week That Was - when some of us grew up?

Brian Bilston's 'The Caveman's Lament'

Good one. Only wish me wrote it. But damn pen and ink and paper, Haven't been discovered yet.