How to… Model Grassy Lanes and Allotments

After the rant that comprised the last post, I thought a good way to regain equilibrium would be to return once again to that most calming of topics, Model Railway Construction. And as you will have gathered from the title, today I’m going to offer a tutorial on some scenic work – namely, how to make an overgrown grassy lane and allotments.

This is the area to be given scenic treatment: the strip of bare chipboard next to the sidings in the foreground of the picture.

The chipboard in the foregorund is what we'll be dealing with today.

The first thing to do is the overgrown lane that will run the length of the siding. To that end, you will need a long straight ruler, a screwdriver, a modeller’s knife, glue (I’m a big fan of Copydex) and some grass mat.

Roll of Gaugemaster grass mat that we will use

First cut the grass mat roughly to shape – in this case, a number of strips to cover the length of the siding – and glue in position, hard against the ballast of the siding. The walling, a Javis product, will be glued on top.

The grass glued hard up to the siding

Then glue down the walling. The walling, as you will have noticed, already comes with grass disguising the base of the moulding: we will improve this further a couple of steps down the line.

The walls glued in place.

As you can see in the above photograph, I have rolled a model truck along the grass to create to subtle tyre-tracks. I will use these as a guide for creating more definitive ruts. To do so, I use the screwdriver and ‘chisel’ along the length of the mat. Do so carefully, as you don’t want to go through the mat – you’re just trying to scrape the grass fibres off it.

The grass mat, now cut to shape, has the ruts scraped into it with a cheap screwdriver. Note the scraped grass at the end of the lane: we will recycle this shortly.

The next step is to border the lane on the opposite side to the walling. In this instance I used Hornby Lineside Fencing superglued in place. Also at this point I used the scraped-off grass to disguise joins between walling sections and any of the resin still showing at the bottom of the wall.

A Morris Minor makes the first journey down the lane. Note the grass growing up the wall in the background.

With the grassy lane mostly finished it is time to turn our attention to the other side of the fence. There are three buildings to complement the scene, all manufactured by Hornby as part of their Skaledale resin range: a garage, a greenhouse and a garden shed. These will be used as mini ’scenic breaks’ so as not to have all the allotment plots side-by-side.

First we make the allotments. To do so I measured and cut a Noch Ploughed Field to shape, and then made borders for each plot from Costa coffee stirrers. Then I put the buildings in place. Once that was done, I sprinkled Peco scatter over the remaining exposed baseboard.

The first allotment lies between the garage and greenhouse.

That being done, it was time to add greenery. Lichen, trees, scatter, flowers, long grass and fine-leaf foliage were all added to the ground to make a more vegetative scene. Gardening figures came from Preiser and Noch; gardening implements from Woodland Scenics. The greenhouse had an internal structure fabricated from foamboard and mounting board; flowers were added.

The greenhouse, with flowers, long grass, and fine-leaf foliage all in evidence.

That being done, all that is left to add are vegetables for the allotments. This is an ongoing project, so it is not yet completed, but there are plenty of fruits, vegetables, and greens that will sprout in due course…

The cabbages are early-bloomers

If you teach, you will be judged more strictly

Hi everyone.

Apologies for the long silence of late: work has been getting in the way of life (again) and I have been PhD-ing (current idea being discussed: “If Paul Muldoon did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him”). However, I have been tempted out of my incommunicado existence  by this website: www.seekgod.ca.

It is written by one woman, Vicky Dillen, who says “I am not a professional journalist and claim no  credentials, other than being a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ and a Berean” (don’t worry; I had to look it up too). Her website consists of analyses of current cultural trends, strained through her own interpretation of the Bible. It is, apparently, one of the world’s top Christian websites, according to Jesus Christ Saves Ministries (I love the semantic ambiguity here: does Jesus Christ save ministries, or are these ministries promoting the idea that Jesus Christ saves? Either way, it must be significant that their top Christian website, the most edifying, the most helpful online resource they could find, is a Christian dating site called ‘Christian Dating for Free‘) and also according to Christian Top 1000, a website that allows you to add your own site and which also features Christian Dating for Free in its #1 spot.

Nevertheless, Ms Dillen has set herself up as a teacher and interpreter of the times, and so I will treat her as such. I came to her website in the first place because I was trying to find the source of a C.S. Lewis quotation about myths, and I came to this extraordinary page, some of the comments on which so astonished me that they literally drove the breath from my body. I urge you to read it; I similarly urge you not to bounce hard off the ceiling when you have done so.

Ms Dillen makes some extraordinary claims, particularly on the nature of fantasy, myth, fiction, and Christian participation in any of these, and I want to take a long hard look at what she says. She has set herself up as a teacher of Scripture: that is her choice to make. But I will apply James 3:1-2 rigorously here, because I think a lot of what she says is palpable nonsense and because I think she is making judgements she has no right to make. If these were private opinions that would be one thing, but she is presenting them as the results of study and learning on a website available to all, and that adds a level of responsibility to which I will hold her accountable. As for my credentials enabling me to do so: like Ms Dillen, I am a Christian (and have been for a long time); unlike Ms Dillen, I do claim a level of expertise on literature, fantasy and mythopoeia (‘myth-making’). Some of my PhD work is on mythopoeia; my Masters dissertation was on “Biological Warfare explored as a metaphor for Spiritual Conflict in Dracula, The War of the Worlds and The Stand“.

And this is the first point that needs to be addressed. These are subjects on which I demonstrably know what I am talking about. We have no such reassurance forthcoming from Ms Dillen. (This is a much bigger problem than merely this example shows: if anything is likely to kill off Wikipedia, it is the decreasing numbers of experts who contribute.) Lewis, in his essay ‘Fern-seed and Elephants’ notes the same problem (though he comes at it from the opposite direction), saying:

A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people’s studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is a legend or romance, I want to know how many legends or romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel.

C.S. Lewis, ‘Fern-seed and Elephants’, Fount Paperbacks, London, 1998, pg 89

A little later he goes on to say:

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like.

ibid, pg 90

So that is my first problem. Someone who declares that they have no credentials whatsoever (declares without a qualm and even with pride, which is more bizarre) chooses to raise an argument against someone who not only was supremely well qualified on the argument’s topic (myth and fantasy), but who wrote some of the primary textbooks  (A Preface to Paradise Lost; The Discarded Image) for discussing these things. (They are still in use today – an achievement almost unheard of in literary academia, where theories of interpretation are more ephemeral and faddish than hemlines). Fundamentally, I do not begin the article with any confidence that the person writing it has any idea what they are talking about.

That being said, let us look at the article itself. Ms Dillen, discussing That Hideous Strength, says:

The reader is supposed to equate Merlin with Christ, who defeats Lucifer and evil. How blasphemous! That Merlin, who is revered by occultists as a druid, sorcerer, witch, wizard and every abomination thinkable, is viewed as Christ and that witchcraft and psychic powers parallel the saving power of Jesus Christ is wicked at best. For those who say children should just read Lewis’ Chronicles of  Narnia books, we have the same menu with witches, elves, Bacchus, false gods, and so on, all being part of the stories.

This demonstrates precisely the problem Lewis identified earlier – Ms Dillen is not equipped to offer a detailed, critical appreciation of the themes, characterisation and imagery of the novel. There is no acknowledgement, for instance, that the title is taken from a poem describing the tower of Babel, nor that the entire book reaffirms the community of Christianity as a refuge from, and defence against, the brutalities of apotheosistic, sinning man. Apart from anything else, Merlin is not compared with Christ, and his powers are Divine in origin, not diabolical. What occultists and diabolists believe is of no interest to me, as it should be of no interest to her, unless they can prove that their interpretation of the known data is supportable by argument and evidence. That they consider Merlin a sorceror is irrelevent unless it can be proven that this consideration is correct, and then it is only important if anyone seriously believes Merlin to have been a real person. If he is merely a character then why should I, or anyone else, care if he is rehabilitated in a new guise? (For Merlin’s rehabilitation, if that is what it is, closely follows the transformation and empowering of Gandalf the Grey to Gandalf the White. But that is to take things out of  historical context. Tempting though it is to read Lewis’s Merlin as an answer to his friend Tolkien’s Gandalf, we must remember that first and foremost Lewis was a Mediaeval scholar who knew well that this kind of rehabilitation and reinterpretation had already been performed as early as the 12th Century, in the Estoire de Merlin). I have no confidence that Ms Dillen is capable of reading the book (which Lewis subtitled ‘A Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups’) because her interpretation of it is so utterly far off the mark. Were she in one of my English classes, she would have to provide an exceptionally thorough and well-supported argument in favour of her claims if she wished her remarks to be taken seriously. There is no such argument available on her site.

Having bounced out on paths where more knowledgable angels might fear to tread, Ms Dillen carries on her character assassination of Lewis in fine style:

However, no rendition of any Scripture is found in these tales [The Chronicles of Narnia] except if one compares the practices of paganism and witchcraft which God calls an abomination to Himself. Lewis could not have known Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. Of the many blasphemous statements he has made in his writings, probably one of the worst is found on page 276 of C.S. Lewis: A Biography, by Roger Lancelyn Green. Lewis stated, “I had some ado to prevent Joy and myself from relapsing into Paganism in Attica!  At Daphni it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer.  But somehow one didn’t feel it would have been very wrong – would have only been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis.”

1 Corinthians 10:20 But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. 21 Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils.
22 Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? are we stronger than he?

One of the things I like about Wikipedia is its over-riding dictat for editorial interaction: Assume Good Faith. This is clearly a lesson that could usefully be applied to much Christian interaction as well. Let me then make the most important criticism of this segment that there is to make: Ms Dillen has no right, none whatsoever, to announce to the world who, in her estimation, is or is not a Christian. She cannot, nor is permitted to, make that judgement.

This is the beginning of Matthew 7: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Strong words, particularly in the mouth of Jesus. And the Greek is as strong as we suspect or fear. The word for ‘judge’ in verse 1, diakrino, means to make a final evaluation, an ultimate decision. That is precisely what Ms Dillen has done, and she ought to have known better. It is God’s right to determine who are the sheep and who are the goats, not ours, because that decision requires absolute infallibility and no human being possesses such a thing. Christ was the only person in history with the requisite authority to say to someone “Your sins are forgiven”: by what right does Ms Dillen claim the privilege to say of someone else that their sins are not?

As for Lewis’s blasphemy: first of all, I want to know the context to the remark. It does not read as something intended for public consumption; the mode of address seems much more akin to a diary or letter. If that is true then we must be more lenient in our analysis: we write in shorthand what we mean when we write to ourselves or our intimates, we do not begin at first principles every time. To suggest that Lewis worships other gods, as Dillen implies, is at best silly and at worst mendacious. Note well exactly what Lewis says: he does not pray to Apollo the Healer, he acknowledges that it would have been wrong if he had done so, and he concludes that the prayer thus offered would nevertheless have been intended for Christ. Lewis’s great blasphemy, according to Ms Dillen, is that he was once tempted to pray to Christ in a pagan aspect. Hold-the-front-page stuff indeed. Equating it with devil-worship shows a remarkable ignorance of devils, Christ and pre-Christian morality all in one fell swoop. I feel I must even stress the most basic point of all: temptation to sin is not the same as sinning.

Following some long quotations from various sources concerning the nature of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Ms Dillen makes the following argument:

C.S. Lewis also stated the Word of God was full of myths–does that add credibility to anything he might say? One can’t pretend something that is real, particularly religious belief, is just a fantasy, just because someone said it was part of a story.

Proverbs 14:22 Do they not err that devise evil? but mercy and truth shall be to them that devise good.

Note the spectacularly misguided conflation of myth, fantasy and story. Story is the biggest category here: the others fit neatly within it. ‘Story’ is, in some respects, one of the biggest words in the English language: it describes almost all human experience. Indeed, to describe any experience whatsoever one must formulate a story to encapsulate it. To describe the Gospels as stories is to do neither term a disservice but merely to accurately report an incontrovertible fact. Ms Dillen’s contempt for the term signals a worrisome ignorance.

That ignorance is foregrounded by her confusion and commingling of the terms ‘myth’ and ‘fantasy’. Elsewhere on her site, Dillen marshals a superficially impressive list of dictionary definitions for the words ‘fable’, ‘myth’, ‘old wives’ tale’, etc. But while ‘fantasy’ is always ‘a story that is imagined’ (fantasies are what daydreams become when they grow up), a ‘myth’ is a much more complicated device. Even her own definitions only succeed on her terms when she highlights meanings other than the primary one. For example, her definition for myth, which comes from the Oxford Paperback Dictionary and Thesaurus, reads:

/ noun 1 traditional story usually involving supernatural or imaginary people and embodying popular ideas on natural or social phenomena. 2 such stories collectively. 3 widely held but false idea. 4 fictitious person, thing, or idea. mythic adjective. mythical adjective.

What is the Gospel for Christians if it is not a story involving supernatural people and embodying popular ideas on natural or social phenomena? The Feeding of the 5,000, for instance, is a story in which a supernatural figure uses materials to hand in order to supernaturally – but popularly – correct a social inequality. And yes, it is a story – but (as I feel I must reiterate) ‘story’ is not a synonym for ‘fiction’.

(On the same page she discusses parables and fables. With a weirdly magnificent kind of thrawn single-mindedness she draws a distinction that isn’t supported by her own references: she says “A Parable, which Jesus used frequently, is a short story of everyday life used to teach a moral by comparison or by implication.” The primary definition of fable that she provides is “A story made up to teach a lesson.” Of course Christ made things up – unless Ms Dillen is, uniquely, suggesting that there was a literal Samaritan, a literal widow who lost a coin, a literal shepherd who lost a sheep, a literal prodigal son? It is possible that this is indeed the case – but the vital point is that it doesn’t matter either way.)

There is another tremendously useful guideline for editing Wikipedia: “You Are Not A Lexicographer”. In other words, you do not know enough about words to comment authoritatively on their usage. This is as true of me as it is of Ms Dillen. It breaks down somewhat, however, in the case of Tolkien and Lewis, and particularly when we are discussing these two men’s relationship with ‘myth’. First of all, Tolkien was a lexcographer. He literally wrote the dictionary – he joined the staff of New English Dictionary in 1918. Secondly, these authors were not only world-class scholars and experts on mythology but they were both actively involved in mythopoeia. There is good reason to argue that Tolkien, in particular, was the greatest exponent of mythopoeia in English since Spenser or even Mallory. His only real competitor in the 20^th Century, strangely enough, was probably H.P. Lovecraft. However, there is no one else that I can think of involved with myth who so successfully married the doing of the thing with the understanding of the thing. Tolkien not merely possessed the literary and philological ability to construct a coherent mythology (itself a much rarer gift than usually acknowledged), but also the scholarly acumen to understand and deconstruct the mythologies he encountered in other circumstances. These men are lexicographers of sufficient stature that we must pay attention to what it is that they actually say.

It is surely significant that with all the modern resources at her disposal Ms Dillen chooses to use a dictionary that predates the publishing of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s (and Lovecraft’s) myths – uses, in other words, a dictionary that was already outdated by the time Lewis and Tolkien were generating their own mythologies. It is not a reliable source in this instance, because Lewis and Tolkien had a much sharper, much more accurate, and probably much more scholarly appreciation of what it was they were actually up to. It is clear that Ms Dillen does not. She says of Lewis that he “stated the Word of God was full of myths – does that add credibility to anything he might say?”

Well yes, actually, because he deployed the word ‘myth’ with such absolute precision. First of all, I don’t know of any source in which Lewis states that the Bible is ‘full of myths’; as quoted here, Lewis once wrote “Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.” Lewis states that Christianity is a myth (singular), but, crucially (and as is quoted in Dillen’s article, although it is attributed to Tolkien), it is the myth that is true. Dillen’s criticism seems to take as its basis the idea that referring to Christianity as a myth somehow devalues it. Of course the precise opposite is true. Myth was the mechanism by which men sought meaning and God: Lewis explains that Christianity is the ultimate expression of this mechanism, the occasion on which the mechanism achieves its ultimate end. Christianity is how one finds meaning, how one finds God. It is the myth that is true, the mechanism that actually works. Everything beforehand had been a dim and hazy groping after the Light of the World as yet unrevealed.”Can one believe”, he wrote, “that there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths—thro’ Balder & Dionysus & Adonis & the Graal too? Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you supposed that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ”.

Ms Dillen then goes on to talk at length about the Harry Potter instances of magic. I am not going to go over this ground again, as I have already done so here, but from there she goes on to say yet more extraordinary things. First she explains that there are, to Christians, no differences in salvation. In doing so she misreads, or at least misunderstands, her source: we are back to talking about mechanisms, not outcomes. Tolkien believed that Christ saved: it is the precise manner in which He did so that is up for discussion. This is not merely a result of Tolkien’s Catholicism. I, like Ms Dillen, am a Protestant; unlike Ms Dillen, I am loath to dismiss Catholicism  in its entirity as ‘not Biblically sound’. There are, I agree, elements of Catholicism that I cannot support Biblically, but such elements seem to me to be unhelpful additions to faith rather than mortal sins imperilling it. Besides, there is plenty of debate in Protestant circles about these mechanisms too. Does Christ save because we ask Him to save us? Or are we predestined for salvation, predetermined to make the request in the first place? No answer is forthcoming from Ms Dillen’s site, but we must, apparently, rest assured that she has solved this conundrum that has defeated some of the greatest theologians of the last 2,000 years.

Dillen goes on:

Second I’ve been to Tolkien sites–and most –unless Christian already–deny that Tolkien ever intended a Christian meaning.

Ooops… Bradley Birzer, Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College and author of “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth” (so someone with proper credentials and demonstrable expertise, which must surely trump Ms Dillen) explained in an interview that “Tolkien wrote in an oft-quoted letter to a close friend [Jesuit priest Robert Murrey] in 1953 that “The Lord of the Rings” is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”

Finally, Ms Dillen makes the most grandiose claim of all:

Paul warned in 1 Timothy 1:4 Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.”

We have clear Biblical instruction to not be involved with fables, myths, fiction and so on. It does not say we can read fables and be edified. It does not say we can read or write fables and learn sound doctrine from them or use them as an evangelism tool. It says to have nothing to do with fables.

This cannot be confused with Christ teaching in parables, which some have tried to say is the same thing. If it was the same thing, we would not have been given these very serious warnings and commands to have nothing to do with fables.

…

Her statement, “Bilbo had encouraged Jonathan to start writing again, to trust his imagination,” takes us back to the imagination and the imagination of the heart. The heart is desperately wicked, and imagination is not to be trusted. Children are just as able to think about and be part of sin as adults. Children are to be ‘trained up in the things of the Lord.’ This hardly qualifies.

What unbelievable intellectual poverty, and what an odious, noxious attempt at persuasion to an unsupportable and suffocating final position. Christians, according to Ms Dillen, ought not in the final analysis to have anything to do with fiction or the imagination. Earlier in her article she claims

it is not censorship to not read Potter or other occult focused material, myths and fables. It is being selective and discerning.

One does not choose all books in a bookstore. Why? Is it due to censorship, choice, or in the case of Christians, Biblical discernment?

- but here her final position is revealed in all its dark glory. She doesn’t want to advocate censorship: she wants to make the bookshops empty of anything other than what she alone determines to be valid. Such banned material includes all fiction and anything imagined. Children should not use their imaginations lest they be corrupted. Writing stories is wrong.

I wonder what happened in this woman’s life to make her so contemptuous of all artistic endeavour. In the end I am moved less to anger than to pity. She explains in her brief testimony that

I received Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord when I was 14. I threw out books and things that either were of the occult or obviously not honoring to God. I threw out The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because of its occult content. I saw no presentation of salvation, nor did I see a parallel to Jesus Christ in Aslan or any other claimed Christian parallels. Apparently that gospel message is so hidden, distorted or contrary to Scriptural truth, that this Christian missed it and instead found the real message of Jesus Christ and the truth of the Gospel in the Word of God.

And so we find ourselves at the moment the problems begin: a fourteen-year-old girl throws away the novels she doesn’t understand. Much of what follows makes complete sense if we start from this moment. Her ensuing crusade, though no doubt genuine and well-intentioned, is not merely sadly misinformed but tragic in its scope. Determined to prevent ‘corruption’ she instead seeks to destroy that which otherwise glorifies God in modes she does not understand. I began this article genuinely angry at Ms Dillen for peddling nonsense: I finish it actively saddened that someone has so comprehensively missed out on some of the most joyous experiences this life has to offer. She will someday realise what she has lost, and that moment will be a painful one. I feel sorry for her.

“So don’t be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. Whatever is good and perfect comes down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow.” – James 1:16-17

Finally, your moment of Zen:

Gresley A3 'Humorist' hurtles through Perdido Street Station at the head of the 'Flying scotsman' express.

“You can’t pull the wool over my arse, sweeties.”

Spoonerisms are great. I love them. Earlier in the week, I managed to supplant the traditional “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes, sweetheart” with the altogether more magnificent “You can’t pull the wool over my arse, sweeties.” Which, as you might imagine, cracked us both up.

Merry japes aside, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time can be either disastrous or hilarious – or, if you have a more cynical view of history, both at the same time. Here are some of my all-time favourites:

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist -” The last words of American Civil War general John Sedgwick, May 9 1864

“Fire!”    Presumably, the command given to some anonymous Italian anti-aircraft gunner in Tobruk by his commander on June 28 1940. Unfortunately the aircraft targeted and destroyed contained Marshal Balbo, supreme commander of all Italian forces in North Africa. As historian Ivor Matanle puts it: “This was neither the first time nor the last that the Italian forces employed the ‘own goal’ as a technique in warfare, but it was the only occasion when they used it to dispose of their own Commander in Chief.” Italy had, at this point, been a participant in World War Two for a whole eighteen days.

“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as they have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.”   Economist Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics at Yale, on October 17 1929. The Wall Street Crash that triggered the Great Depression happened twelve days later, on October 29.

“$100 Million is far too much to pay”   IBM, in 1982, offered the chance to buy Microsoft.

“The concept is interesting and reasonably well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’ the idea must be feasible”   A Yale university management professor, grading Fred Smith’s paper in which he proposed a reliable overnight delivery service. Fred Smith went on to found FedEx.

“The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformations of these atoms is talking moonshine.”  Lord Ernest Rutherford, who theorised the existence of neutrons, discovered gamma radiation, worked out that radioactive half-life could be used to date matter, and whose work ultimately enabled the building of the world’s first nuclear bomb.

The list goes on and on and on and on and on. So my challenge to you this week, dear readers, is to leave your mark on history: say something not merely stupid, but notably stupid.

Just as every soldier has a field marshal’s bottom in his napkin, you have within you the capacity for some monumental error that will resound down through the centuries. It’s a form of immortality. Santayana would approve.

Bringin’ the Boogie #4

Hello again, one and all, and hasn’t it been a while since we last had one of these? My defence, if I might be allowed to offer one, is that until recently I hadn’t been listening to huge amounts of new music. However, I have rediscovered my affection for WKIT-FM, a rock station operating out of Bangor, Maine, and owned by America’s boogeyman-in-chief, Stephen King.

With that in mind, let’s kick off with a band that is making big waves on the other side of the Atlantic, even if they’re not really rippling over here (yet): Dave Matthews Band, with “Why I Am” -

…And now for something completely different: “Fireflies”, by Owl City -

(Better quality link)

Rather better than Counting Crows, these are The Black Crowes, with an excellent piece of acoustic guitar work – the sublime “She Talks To Angels”

This is cool: the Foo Fighters’ “Wheels”, a new single cheekily first released on their greatest hits album -

Finally, for a change of pace, these are the Blind Boys of Alabama, covering the Tom Waits song “Way Down in the Hole”. (Yes, TV fans, this is the version used as title music for the first season of The Wire, which is amazing – West Wing good, albeit Tarantino sweary) -

And so I leave you with news that shortages of body armour are more widespread than previously acknowledged…

Even Imperial forces are having to make do as best they can. And they can't do much better.

…and the most recent thing to fall victim to the rise of legions of the triumphant undead is, sadly, chocolate cake…

Don't suck the icing. IT WILL SUCK BACK.

…mistranslations lead to accusations of animal cruelty as those for whom English is a second language open a hot dog stand…

Add mustard, and it goes like stink!

…and finally, irrefutable evidence has been presented to support the claim that greater internet interactions are adversely affecting real-world social activity:

Personally, I find a shoe catalogue and a large net work well.

I’m not grown up. I’m just tall.

It was my birthday recently. I am in the last year of my mid-twenties (anyone suggesting I am more superannuated than that will be wrestled to the ground and then irretrievably strapped to a zimmer frame, just to make the point crystal clear). So I am not yet facing the catastrophic decrepitudes of old age, although from what I understand, aging is not dissimilar to updating iTunes: once it’s done, there’s no going back, even though some things may no longer work in the manner to which you are accustomed (or at all), and even though you preferred the earlier version, which was easier to use. Fortunately, all that is in the future (I’m not happy that that is what awaits me, but better later than now). For now, the only real differences between me and my fourteen-year-old self are that I am taller, my voice is deeper, and I am rather better at kissing.

I still tend to think about the same sorts of things. Of course my opinions have been modified by my (slightly) greater maturity, but the subjects on which I hold opinions are more or less the same subjects I used to think about when I was still a teenager. I was forcibly reminded of this a couple of days ago. Just before Christmas, I was in a car accident where someone skidded into the back of me, damaged my car (and me – ouch), but immediately admitted liability, so all repairs and so forth are being paid for out of his insurance. This is great, but inevitably, there are terms and conditions attached. Now, the woman on the phone who called me from his insurance company to go over the details did read through them, but about halfway through her discourse I got distracted, got confused, and consequently zoned out of the conversation almost entirely. I was only brought back to it when she concluded, saying “So, Mr. Browne, is that clear to you?”

I’m afraid I chickened out of acknowledging my ignorance. What I actually said was “Yes, thank you, that all sounds entirely reasonable.” Had I been entirely honest, what I would have said would have been “Actually, I missed the last half of that explanation, because I was trying to decide who would win in a fight between Batman and James Bond.”

I may be 6′4″ with greying hair, and therefore look like an adult, but a significant proportion of my disposable income still goes on toy trains, for heaven’s sake. I’m not grown up, I’m just tall, and it’s astounding the number of people who listen to me talk pish and assume, on the basis of appearance or vocabulary alone, that I know what I’m talking about. Partly it’s because my life is circumscribed by academia, which as a vehicle for one’s career is not dissimilar to a balloon, insofar as it is mostly supported by vast amounts of hot air. Partly it’s because I know longer words than the average teenager and therefore can give an entirely spurious impression of erudition. But mainly it’s a question of bearing, and that is something teenagers don’t have but that you develop as you get older.

But even here I may be deluding myself. I’m not sure that what I have is ‘bearing’. What I may in fact possess, given the aforementioned 6′4″-ness, is an ‘ability to loom’. That’s not presence; that’s just size.

It’s like the deal with teachers and authority. If a class realises that there are thirty of them, and only one overworked and harried adult supervising them, then that class will very quickly take control. It doesn’t happen because the class usually doesn’t realise just how tenuous that teacher’s control really is. Exactly the same thing happens in society at large. The estimated 2009 population of the UK was 61,113,205 (a suspiciously precise figure, but there you go). The number of police officers in the UK at the same time was only 165975. Even if you add a rough 140,000 support staff (including special constables, traffic wardens, community officers, etc.) you still are left with a mere 306,000 law-enforcement officials. Which means they’re outnumbered nearly 200 to 1. Were there to be a revolution in the UK odds like that would pretty much guarantee victory to the civilian population. Civil authority is a remarkably tenuous thing, but it happens because we, who are under that authority, choose to invest it with sufficient command to enable it to enforce its domination. But heaven help the police officer who screws that one up. There’s a great scene in the film ‘V for Vendetta’ where a policeman shoots a young girl and then tries to hide behind his badge, only to realise that the symbol is not going to protect him against the gathering mob armed with shovels and pokers.

I guess my point is that as I get older I become increasingly aware that ‘control’ or ‘authority’ is an increasingly theoretical and intangible commodity. I have written about this before, in discussing why it is that so many people enjoy building model railways, and I have touched upon it elsewhere, when discussing Fantasy literature – the common thread being that of building secondary worlds over which the creator (author/modeller) has unquestionable authority (there is a bigger debate to be had about ‘the unquestionable authority of the author’, and I’m aware that my phrase is demonstrably untrue it most contexts, but not this one – I will return to this at some point, and we can have the discussion then).

I didn’t intend this to be a morbidly self-deprecating post, and I hope it isn’t, but more and more I understand the overwhelming sense of loss that Yeats felt when he wrote that ‘things fall apart, the centre does not hold’. Of course Yeats was almost pathologically obsessed with growing old – an obsession I like to think I do not share – but birthdays, especially when they follow fifteen minutes from the end of New Year’s Day, do force one to consider how things are changing, and whether they are falling apart.

I don’t think I am, and on that upbeat note I will finish this post. I leave you with this thought – getting old encourages these sorts of recollections. Failing to grow older doesn’t encourage any sort of reflection at all – it’s hard to be introspective in a pine box. So overall, if you’re reading this, you’re winning. Why not celebrate?

Your moment of zen for today, combining the old with the new:

 

Brand-new Peppercorn A1 'Tornado' is ready for the off with a mail train at Perdido Street Station

The Rustle of Letters in the Dark…

In 1936 the GPO (General Post Office) film unit made a 25 minute documentary about one of the LMS Mail trains on its overnight run from London to Glasgow. The film is famous now not simply for the quality of its cinematography (which is genuinely superb) but for its closing sequence, in which the score, commissioned of Benjamin Britten, is overlaid with the poem written for the film by W.H. Auden. The poem now is well known: it is called ‘Night Mail’.

The first electric trainset I ever received was also called ‘Night Mail’, and it featured a short rake of three coaches, including one TPO (Travelling Post Office), hauled by a Stanier Duchess. Now, many years later, the Duchess has gone the way of all flesh – but I still have the coaches, and indeed I have added to the rake to make a much more realistic depiction of a mail train. The locomotive in the film is a Royal Scot; before Christmas, I bought a model of one, and that has allowed me to produce this: Starlingford’s Night Mail.

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro’ southern uplands with northern mails.

Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro’ the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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Re: Starlingford – Poetry Train number two

by Black-Marlin on Tue Jan 05, 2010 3:41 am

MacNeice’s great friend was, as you recall, W.H.Auden. Although there have been other notable poets who have written about trains and railway travel (Betjeman springs to mind, as does -inevitably! – Muldoon), Auden is perhaps the one who captures the rhythms of the railway best, in the incomparable ‘Night Mail’. Auden’s poem was commissioned by the BBC for their documentary ‘Night Mail’, which featured a travelling post office hauled by a Royal Scot -class locomotive.

Here is my homage.

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro’ southern uplands with northern mails.

Don’t Tell Me I’m Wrong When I’m Failing Better Than You

Hello again, Dear Readers, and prepare once again for a rant. My topic for today is ‘Correct Use of English’, and my target for today is David Foster Wallace.

Wallace was a writer, quite possibly a very brilliant one, who nevertheless continues to irritate me with his sawn-off negotiating technique when it comes to English grammar. He wrote a long, long, long article in Harper’s magazine which was, essentially, an involved and meandering rant against the abandonment of ‘correct usage’. The article was comprehensively demolished in a wonderful blog post by LanguageHat, who is an exemplary linguistics blogger – sharp as they come, and his literary analyses make for great reading in their own right. Anyway, drifting through the linguistics sections of the blogosphere I came to the incomparable Language Log, from whence I wound up on a blog run by one of DFW’s erstwhile students.

She posts this quiz, which she reports as being one of DFW’s creations: can you ‘correct’ the erroneous grammar of the 10 sentences?

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION

1. He and I hardly see one another.

2. I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.

3. My brother called to find out if I was over the flu yet.

4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.

5. In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.

6. From whence had his new faith come?

7. Please spare me your arguments of why all religions are unfounded and contrived.

8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.

9. As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating.

10. The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s resurrection.

So there you go. There are the ten sentences in which something has, apparently, gone grievously wrong. Can you fix them?

I will put up the remedied sentences below.

Just letting you know in case you’re taking this seriously and don’t want to see the offered answers.

Ready?

Here we go:

1. He and I hardly see one each another.

2. I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and at the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.

3. My brother called to find out if whether I was over the flu yet.

4. I only spent only six weeks in Napa.

5. In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.

6. From wWhence had his new faith come?

7. Please spare me your arguments of as to why all religions are unfounded and contrived.

8. She didn’t seem ever to ever stop talking.

9. As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating irritating.

10. The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s his (or His) resurrection.

So how did you get on? Did you do as poorly as I did? ‘Cause I sucked. I think it was because I kept getting distracted by bigger flaws than the merely grammatical ones…as and when I found any grammatical flaws at  all… Let me take you through my working.

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION

First off, why did the full stop vanish from the end of this sentence? And shouldn’t it be whomever, rather than whoever?

Right. On to the questions themselves:

1. He and I hardly see one another.

I couldn’t figure out what the sentence meant. Does ‘hardly’ mean ‘barely’, or does it mean ‘infrequently’? The rationale offered for the correction is that ‘one another’ refers to a group of more than two individuals, but without the context, it’s impossible to determine whether or not this is in fact the case. My judgement: if clarity is that much at stake, then rewrite the sentence to be clearer. (Interestingly, the original poster of the quiz wrote that “Many commenters took umbrage with the use of “hardly,” arguing that “hardly see” means some kind of visual impairment, but I don’t find any support for this idea.” Which ought to give all of us encouragement that the OP is no English whizz herself). On to question 2:

2. I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.

Oh come on. I mean, seriously, come on. Quite apart from the rest of us writing and working in that mysterious part of the world known to some Americans as ‘Foreign’ (zip code FN), and thus struggling with the  hideous image of menstruating sentences, what on earth kind of ghastly little tit needs to write a sentence like this one? The fix, including another ‘at’ before ‘the ambiguity’, only serves to prolong an already overlong sentence that suffers all the indignities of adverbial diarrhoea.  And even then the ‘fix’ is clearly unnecessary – were you confused as to the nature of the things the writer was cringing over? Frankly, I’d cringe at ever being given this sentence to read. On to question 3:

3. My brother called to find out if I was over the flu yet.

Apparently you should always use ‘whether’ as ‘if’ implies conditionality. I’m not entirely sure what that means, in this context, and I’m struggling to construct this sentence in such a way as to create a conditionality. Whether, if…it’s all good. Use whichever seems more natural to you. So, moving on from the dictats of the clearly infirm, let us proceed to question 4:

4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.

Apparently, the reasoning here is that ‘only’ refers to ’spent’, rather than ’six’. Which is palpably nonsense. There is no confusion possible between “I only spent six weeks” and “I spent only six weeks’. The defence which is offered, and which is, again, nonsensical, is that ‘only spent’ precludes any other activity: “I neither wept nor cried nor laughed nor frowned; I only spent the time.” The only way to defend this grammatical ‘fix’ is to assume that the reader will believe “I only spent six weeks in Napa” to mean “I only spent six weeks in Napa dead.” (Are you beginning to see why I wound up feeling so frustrated and patronised at being told I was wrong by this slack-jawed half-wit?) On to question 5:

5. In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.

Apparently, ‘in my own mind’ is redundant – where else are you going to understand things? But this is a stylistic problem, not a grammatical one, and besides, it may be obviated by context. For example: “In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening. But in my heart of hearts I know it is what we must do.” Again, the problem with ‘correcting’ statements of this type is that their ‘correctness’ is a direct function of their context, and we aren’t provided with it in order to make a sensible determination. On to question 6:

6. From whence had his new faith come?

The correction for this one is just flat-out wrong. ‘From whence’ is perfectly valid, as is ‘whence’ – or, indeed, ‘from where’. I have been saved from trawling through the Oxford dictionary of quotations by someone rejoicing in the name of ‘parvomagnus’, who put up this helpful little rattle through centuries of usage:

c1430 Syr Tryam. 431 What do ye here, madam? Fro whens come ye?
1382 WYCLIF Matt. xxi. 25 Of whennes was the baptem of Joon; of heuene, or of men?
1590 SHAKES. Com. Err. III. i. 37 Let him walke from whence he came.
1731-8 SWIFT Pol. Conversat. Introd. 29 From whence I did then conclude..that Wine doth not inspire Politeness.

On to 7:

7. Please spare me your arguments of why all religions are unfounded and contrived.

Actually, there are a couple of corrections to this. The OP specifies ‘as to’ as ‘conforming to the idiom’ (oh really?) but you could just as easily use ‘for’, ‘concerning the reasons’ or similar… And besides, the arguer is factually incorrect. All religions, whether they happen to be true or not, are ‘founded’. Someone started them. On to the appalling question 8:

8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.

The answer given is hideously clunky. I would (assuming I was at gunpoint) have gone for ‘She didn’t ever seem to stop talking’, but if I wasn’t being held at gunpoint, I would have drawn a thick red line through the whole construction and written “She just never seemed to shut up”. And then, in the margin, I would have written “Why does it have to be ’she’? Can’t we get past the fairly crude gender stereotyping here?” On to question 9:

9. As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating.

I know that irritating and aggravating don’t mean the same thing. But I am fed up to the back teeth with people ‘correcting’ me when I use aggravating. I know it means ‘worse-making’. That is the sense in which I use it. If I am aggravated, I am made worse. Your irritating facial tic aggravates me – I start fantasising about cutting the relevent muscle out of your face with a fish knife. I am a worse human being than I was before you started talking to me. Now go away and take your tic and your dictionary with you.

*calms down*

The last question:

10. The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s resurrection.

Apparently this too is redundant. But it is only redundant if the reader has a knowledge base that includes the core tenets of Christianity. The ‘correction’ offered for this one is based on the ‘corrector’s’ own understanding of the context of the quotation, and should be treated as such. In other words, ignored. Apart from anything else, I find the repetition of ‘Christ’ aesthetically pleasing in terms of how the sentence sounds, and would probably keep it in on that basis even without the additional justification I’ve offered.

So there you have it. I don’t like being told I’m wrong at the best of times (because I’m a man), but I really, really, really object to being told I’m wrong when actually, I may not only be right, but right-er (that’s a little joke, grammar fiends) than my questioner. As I said at the beginning, and with all due credit to Samuel Beckett, “Don’t tell me I’m wrong when I’m failing better than you”.

Today’s Zen:

Gresley A4 'Mallard', which set a world speed record at 126mph. And then it failed. Brilliant, eh?

Festive Greetings from Hell

This is the Screwtape Letter that appeared in the brand-new St. Columba’s church magazine, which you can read here.

Wreck the Halls with Bouts of Folly

Sixty-eight years ago an incendiary manuscript fell into the hands of C.S. Lewis. This was ‘The Screwtape Letters’, a series of epistles from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior tempter, Wormwood. Wormwood failed to secure the damnation of his ‘patient’, the Christian to whom he was assigned, and was consumed. Screwtape remained. He writes now to a subordinate demon called Ragwort, a junior under-manager with responsibility for the Scottish Sector, and from time to time these diabolical communiqués fall into my hands. I can’t imagine Screwtape is too happy with me sharing them, but then again, what Screwtape wants ought not to be entertained…

Dear Ragwort,

I wondered if we hadn’t promoted you too soon, and now I am beginning to think I was right. How is it that you don’t know our traditional yuletide techniques? If you are to remain in your current position I had better brief you. It is important you retain your apparent authority before your underlings. But for Hell’s sake take the lessons on board.

On the face of it, Christmas ought to be a time of year when we find ourselves on the retreat, assailed on all sides by Christian virtue, respect, tolerance and good feeling. Those, after all, are the sentiments so religiously advocated at this time of year even by the irreligious. It has become part of the Christmas tradition for everyone to acknowledge that these are worthy ideals, but, thanks to our constant efforts, it has become an equal part of the tradition for everyone then to continue ignoring them.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if people actually behaved at Christmas in the manner they espouse. Imagine if, when giving to the poor or needy, they considered it a solemn but unexceptional duty rather than an aberrant moment of extraordinary generosity about which they should feel proud. Imagine if the dim stirrings of their social consciences were provoked into real action, real effort. Imagine if their charity extended not merely to those obviously impoverished but towards one another as part of their normal daily interactions. Imagine if they actually behaved as the Enemy wants them to, and then realised that this behaviour is not limited to the holiday period but ought to be extended through the whole of the year.

It is quite clear that the result of such a realisation would be a tragedy ghastly beyond belief, an appalling, cataclysmic defeat that would echo down through the lowerarchies to the very throne of Our Father Below. It is only through our ceaseless vigilance that this catastrophe has been averted. Our vigilance, and our preparedness to act when necessary, has for centuries prevented anything like a really just or healthy society from flourishing. However, we cannot take quite all of the credit. The human beings themselves haven’t really worked for it. The Enemy was quite clear: “Take up your cross,” He said, “and follow me.” And we teach them, and common sense and experience show them, that this takes a great deal of effort. It’s not easy being a Christian, Ragwort, and our tempters ought to take every opportunity both to remind their patients of this and to make it ever more difficult for them. Living as the Enemy wants them to, behaving as He commands, generating the kind of society He desires – these things are not simple, even before we get involved, but we should try to discourage any attempt even to strive for them.

Nevertheless, Christmas stains our calendars with its revolting, bourgeois emphasis on the possibility of such a society, and we must fight against it. There are several stratagems that might here be put to good use. Firstly, we must encourage a lofty, semi-amused tolerance for the festival in the minds of the non-Christians. You might be surprised at this, thinking intolerance a far better solution, but this is not the case. The howls of outrage against those who defy the conventions of Christmas are too damaging to our cause. So let them have their Christmas, if they must, but let us divorce it from any real notion of who the Enemy was or what He accomplished. We can do this because this is the time of year when God seems manageable.

Babies are not threatening. They are small and weak and vulnerable, and if that is the impression the humans have of their God then so much the better. The weak God, the little God, the infantile God…such an entity is easy to ignore and even easier to dismiss entirely. The more people know the manger and the less they know the cross the better.

Secondly, this is the time of the year at which we can best promote the idea of indulgence. Gluttony, drunkenness, greed, avarice, envy and lust – we ought to be able to promote these under the tree, at the table or in the office, and better yet we ought to be able to promote in the minds of the more susceptible of our patients the idea that all these can be excused as a somewhat unfortunate but mostly inconsequential side-effect of the laxity of the Christmas spirit. The truly invaluable result of this is that it then encourages a pattern of immorality that can be excused as being the result of a special occasion, and you will find our patients become increasingly inventive in their definitions of what constitutes a special occasion. Eventually we can get them to the stage where they expect to break the rules, and will manufacture reasons to do so. Any excuse will do. After that, the final step is to remove the need even for a reason. Encouraging the little mongrels to step off a cliff may bring them to our door, but it is far easier, and far more certain, to bring them here down a gentle path with no sudden turns, no signposts, and your tender voice whispering encouragements in their ear. Remember: temptation’s for life, not just for Christmas.

Finally, now is a wonderful time of the year to deaden spirits. In the run-up to Christmas, concentrate hearts and minds on the present concerns, the financial worries, the familial obligations. In the aftermath, you want to encourage those post-holiday blues. Keep the humans so occupied in what they’re doing that they never start to think about why they’re doing it. And make sure that the messages about taking time to appreciate the One who made it all possible become another part of the tradition to which they pay lip service but no real attention. If we can’t remove Christ from Christmas we can at least make all mention of Him merely a part of the scenery. Give them their observances, but don’t allow anything to draw their attention to what it is they’re actually meant to be observing. The technique is a good and time-honoured one. It created both the Pharisees and the ‘nominal’ Christians. This Christmas, the best present you could give Our Father Below would be more of both.

I remain, as ever,

your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

Wreck the Halls with Bouts of Folly

Sixty-eight years ago an incendiary manuscript fell into the hands of C.S. Lewis. This was ‘The Screwtape Letters’, a series of epistles from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior tempter, Wormwood. Wormwood failed to secure the damnation of his ‘patient’, the Christian to whom he was assigned, and was consumed. Screwtape remained. He writes now to a subordinate demon called Ragwort, a junior under-manager with responsibility for the Scottish Sector, and from time to time these diabolical communiqués fall into my hands. I can’t imagine Screwtape is too happy with me sharing them, but then again, what Screwtape wants ought not to be entertained…

—Gavin Browne

Dear Ragwort,

I wondered if we hadn’t promoted you too soon, and now I am beginning to think I was right. How is it that you don’t know our traditional yuletide techniques? If you are to remain in your current position I had better brief you. It is important you retain your apparent authority before your underlings. But for Hell’s sake take the lessons on board.

On the face of it, Christmas ought to be a time of year when we find ourselves on the retreat, assailed on all sides by Christian virtue, respect, tolerance and good feeling. Those, after all, are the sentiments so religiously advocated at this time of year even by the irreligious. It has become part of the Christmas tradition for everyone to acknowledge that these are worthy ideals, but, thanks to our constant efforts, it has become an equal part of the tradition for everyone then to continue ignoring them.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if people actually behaved at Christmas in the manner they espouse. Imagine if, when giving to the poor or needy, they considered it a solemn but unexceptional duty rather than an aberrant moment of extraordinary generosity about which they should feel proud. Imagine if the dim stirrings of their social consciences were provoked into real action, real effort. Imagine if their charity extended not merely to those obviously impoverished but towards one another as part of their normal daily interactions. Imagine if they actually behaved as the Enemy wants them to, and then realised that this behaviour is not limited to the holiday period but ought to be extended through the whole of the year.

It is quite clear that the result of such a realisation would be a tragedy ghastly beyond belief, an appalling, cataclysmic defeat that would echo down through the lowerarchies to the very throne of Our Father Below. It is only through our ceaseless vigilance that this catastrophe has been averted. Our vigilance, and our preparedness to act when necessary, has for centuries prevented anything like a really just or healthy society from flourishing. However, we cannot take quite all of the credit. The human beings themselves haven’t really worked for it. The Enemy was quite clear: “Take up your cross,” He said, “and follow me.” And we teach them, and common sense and experience show them, that this takes a great deal of effort. It’s not easy being a Christian, Ragwort, and our tempters ought to take every opportunity both to remind their patients of this and to make it ever more difficult for them. Living as the Enemy wants them to, behaving as He commands, generating the kind of society He desires – these things are not simple, even before we get involved, but we should try to discourage any attempt even to strive for them.

Nevertheless, Christmas stains our calendars with its revolting, bourgeois emphasis on the possibility of such a society, and we must fight against it. There are several stratagems that might here be put to good use. Firstly, we must encourage a lofty, semi-amused tolerance for the festival in the minds of the non-Christians. You might be surprised at this, thinking intolerance a far better solution, but this is not the case. The howls of outrage against those who defy the conventions of Christmas are too damaging to our cause. So let them have their Christmas, if they must, but let us divorce it from any real notion of who the Enemy was or what He accomplished. We can do this because this is the time of year when God seems manageable.

Babies are not threatening. They are small and weak and vulnerable, and if that is the impression the humans have of their God then so much the better. The weak God, the little God, the infantile God…such an entity is easy to ignore and even easier to dismiss entirely. The more people know the manger and the less they know the cross the better.

Secondly, this is the time of the year at which we can best promote the idea of indulgence. Gluttony, drunkenness, greed, avarice, envy and lust – we ought to be able to promote these under the tree, at the table or in the office, and better yet we ought to be able to promote in the minds of the more susceptible of our patients the idea that all these can be excused as a somewhat unfortunate but mostly inconsequential side-effect of the laxity of the Christmas spirit. The truly invaluable result of this is that it then encourages a pattern of immorality that can be excused as being the result of a special occasion, and you will find our patients become increasingly inventive in their definitions of what constitutes a special occasion. Eventually we can get them to the stage where they expect to break the rules, and will manufacture reasons to do so. Any excuse will do. After that, the final step is to remove the need even for a reason. Encouraging the little mongrels to step off a cliff may bring them to our door, but it is far easier, and far more certain, to bring them here down a gentle path with no sudden turns, no signposts, and your tender voice whispering encouragements in their ear. Remember: temptation’s for life, not just for Christmas.

Finally, now is a wonderful time of the year to deaden spirits. In the run-up to Christmas, concentrate hearts and minds on the present concerns, the financial worries, the familial obligations. In the aftermath, you want to encourage those post-holiday blues. Keep the humans so occupied in what they’re doing that they never start to think about why they’re doing it. And make sure that the messages about taking time to appreciate the One who made it all possible become another part of the tradition to which they pay lip service but no real attention. If we can’t remove Christ from Christmas we can at least make all mention of Him merely a part of the scenery. Give them their observances, but don’t allow anything to draw their attention to what it is they’re actually meant to be observing. The technique is a good and time-honoured one. It created both the Pharisees and the ‘nominal’ Christians. This Christmas, the best present you could give Our Father Below would be more of both.

I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Undersecretary for Inhuman Resources

Back in Black 5

Now that it is December, we have entered Christmas-shopping-in-earnest season. Bah Humbug, et cetera, but, partly because it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, and partly because it might be useful round about now, here is a review of one of Hornby’s best-sellers, the Black 5…

Hornby Stanier Standard 5MT (R2449)

William Stanier introduced his Standard 5 Mixed Traffic locomotive, better known as the ‘Black 5’, in 1934 as a general purpose engine. Nearly 850 were built, and they survived until the end of steam, with four participating in the famous ‘15 Guinea Special’, the last scheduled mainline steam train to run in Britain.  They were highly regarded by their crews, and their enduring popularity resulted in 18 being preserved.

Hornby’s model has been out now for a few years in its new, extensively retooled guise. It was one of the first in the range to be modernised – a reflection on its enduring popularity. Mine is Hornby R2449 ‘The Glasgow Highlander’ in BR late black, and it has electrical pick-ups on all wheels, resulting in very smooth running. The now-standard 5-pole motor mechanism housed in the locomotive body replaces the old ‘tender/Ringfield’ combination. The new motor in the new chassis has equally new gearing, and this is where my major criticism of the model must be made. Of course the tender/Ringfield combination usually coupled a ludicrous top speed to a truly horrendous haulage capacity, which is why Hornby has gone to such pains in the last decade to change it. However, while the new Black 5 is much heavier than previous incarnations of the model, thus improving its haulage capabilities enormously, it seems slow – and not merely in comparison to older versions. It is slow compared to Hornby’s N15 and Royal Scot – both of which are retooled 5-pole-motored 4-6-0s.

The Black 5s were, as their nickname implies, turned out only in black, and Hornby’s different examples have only really differed inasmuch as they are either LMS black, BR Early Crest black, or BR Late Crest black. As we have come to expect, printing, painting and lettering are all exemplary, with some now available in factory-weathered condition as well. The one notable visual difference is the presence or absence of a nameplate, and Hornby have made models of these locomotives too – although since only 5 were named, of a class comprising 842 members, these engines were the exception rather than the rule.

Yet bizarrely this is where the real strength of the locomotive lies. They were handsome engines, found – in BR days – all over the rail network, and yet somehow anonymous – which means that Hornby can change nothing but the running numbers every year and not run out of specific locomotives for a very long time. And modellers can reproduce, in prototypical form, double-headed trains. These engines frequently worked coupled together, and Hornby’s use of optional slim-profile couplings in standard NEM pockets makes reproducing this type of train formation simplicity itself. The use of two engines together also compensates for the aforementioned slow running properties, for two reasons: firstly, double-headed trains tended to be heavy and therefore wouldn’t have run that fast anyway; and secondly the beautifully reproduced motion of the wheels, pistons and coupling rods can only really be appreciated at slower speeds anyway.

This is, as certain larger officials of the rail network might have noted, a Really Useful Engine for the modeller. Its MT designation means it is equally at home on mineral trains, mixed goods, tanker trains, suburban services, expresses and even Pullman trains. Suitable coaching stock is available from Hornby (the Stanier coaches and Pullmans) and Bachmann (their Mk1s suit the BR engines, whether crimson and cream for the early crest models or maroon for the later ones). Lima Midland/LMS stock such as their bogie parcels van is also suitable and is readily available on the second-hand market.

Ultimately this model is well worth purchasing. Concerns about speed aside, it is mechanically very sound, and will run happily for hours on end without signs of difficulty. It can find a useful home on many layouts, and for those of you fortunate enough to be able to afford two it is an excellent model for double-heading. I have no hesitation in recommending it.

Overall Rating: 8/10

Rout Britannia?

Max Hastings, a military historian, journalist and former editor of the Daily Telegraph, has had some fairly sharp things to say recently about the Royal Navy. Back in June he called for the Government to rethink its policy on its ‘big acquisitions’ - the RAF Typhoon fighters, the Royal Navy’s carriers HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth (and their concomitant F-35 Lightning-II fighters), and the upgrading of the SSBN fleet, replacing the Vanguard-class bombers with three new boats and upgrading the current Trident II D-5 missile to extend its service life until the early 2040s. The funds saved by cancelling these programmes could, he says, be funnelled into the army and used for ground-level needs: increased training regimens; adequate equipment supply, particularly of consumables (a category into which body armour falls, as it is meant to be replaced, not repaired, as soon as it is damaged); and mobility support in terms of light armoured vehicles and, particularly, helicopters.

Two days ago he returned to this theme, questioning the bravery of the officers and crew of the Royal Navy, particularly with reference to the capture of a British couple by Somali pirates within sight of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker Wave Knight, and the 2007 capture of two RHIB full of sailors and Marines by the Iranian Border Patrol.

A few things need to be cleared up here. There are three things in particular I want to talk about: the 2007 incident, the Wave Knight incident, and the relevence of the carrier acquisition.

The question, always, is “who gets hurt when we fire the guns?” Take the 2007 incident. Here you have 15 Naval personnel of a boarding party (i.e. trained specifically in Maritime CQB, or ‘Close Quarters Battle’) captured, as the papers of the time so disgustedly crowed, ‘without a fight’. Well yes. Fighting, in those circumstances, would have been suicide, and would have been the most shameful display of military idiocy in recent times I can think of. Two RHIBs containing a boarding party equipped with sidearms and SA-80 assault rifles were surrounded by eventually eight patrol boats, the least of which was equipped with heavy machine guns. In those circumstances there was absolutely no fight that could have been offered. Co-operation with their captors and prayers for a diplomatic resolution were the most sensible things the sailors and Marines could have offered, and that is precisely what they did. They weren’t cowards, they just weren’t stupid.

So what of this more recent Wave Knight incident? Why didn’t they fire? Put simply, they couldn’t.

Examine the tactical scenario with me: Wave Knight herself is large enough to make a stable gun platform for someone lying on the deck with a rifle, but you’d need a phenomenal shot to be sure of killing the pirate targeted, and you would need a team of them to kill all the pirates simultaneously. Otherwise you run the risk either of accidentally shooting either or both of the captives yourself, or, if you fail to kill all the pirates, you can bet they will either execute the hostages as a liability or keep them belowdecks and control the ship from down there. I know that the pirates intercepted by the American destroyer USS Bainbridge were killed, but that is as extraordinary a feat of marksmanship as I’ve heard of: three US Navy SEALS, lying on the fantail, took headshots, at dusk, for simultaneous kills. That level of accuracy is almost superhuman, and there are very few teams within the British military that could manage it: SAS, SBS, FPG… So what about sending a boarding party? Well, if you want to send a team of personnel on an inflatable boat into automatic fire, be my guest. Just make sure you explain it in precisely those terms to any potential volunteers for the mission. And make sure that your volunteers are qualified: Wave Knight, as a fleet support vessel, wouldn’t normally have embarked personnel qualified in CQB. Her ‘ability to conduct antipiracy operations’ as her Captain put it, is limited to supporting the warships at the sharp end. She can refuel them, and her embarked helicopter can run observation/interference missions, and the ship itself can act as a ‘logistics facilitator’ – but that’s it, and expecting more is ludicrous.

If you want the Royal Navy to run operations of this type, they have to be given either the tools and training the job requires, or they have to have the ability to support those at the sharp end – and this is where Hastings’s comments about the two carriers come badly unstuck. He complains that the army needs practical, immediate equipment support – and that is what the carriers themselves can provide. The army will not always find itself fighting far from the sea, and the ability of two mobile airbases in constant radio contact with ground forces to deliver ground-support aircraft (because that is what the F-35 is), even over defended airspace (because the F-35 incorporates low-observable technology that enables it to operate where the Harrier would get shot out of the sky), is surely ultimately of greater use to the army. Besides, carriers may prevent conflicts involving the army: it is Rowland White’s contention, in his book ‘Phoenix Squadron’, that had Britain retained a proper carrier past the end of the 1970s, the Falklands War probably wouldn’t have happened. Even if the carrier didn’t have that effect, they were needed to protect the ships carrying troops to the conflict. The carrier is the ultimate sea-bourne weapons system, protecting the ships of the Navy: but the Navy itself exists to influence policy on land. If you want a strong army then inevitably you need a strong Navy to support it, and a strong Navy is one equipped to defend itself, and since 1942 the only realistic way to do that is to have a carrier fleet. Or, as Edward L. Beach put it, in his book Keepers of the Sea:

From time immemorial, the purpose of a navy has been to influence, and sometimes decide, issues on land. This was so with the Greeks of antiquity; the Romans, who created a navy to defeat Carthage; the Spanish, whose armada tried and failed to conquer England; and, most eminently, in the Atlantic and Pacific during two world wars. The sea has always given man inexpensive transport and ease of communication over long distances. It has also provided concealment, because being over the horizon meant being out of sight and effectively out of reach. The sea has supplied mobility, capability and support throughout Western history, and those failing in the sea-power test – notably Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler – also failed the longevity one.

Today’s zen:

N15 'Excalibur' crosses the Starlingford suspension bridge with a short stopping service, while beneath an empty Royal Navy barge enters the calm waters of the bay