The Manifold Letters

OM 90. A Story of An Elderly Man and three Drug Addicts. Or: When Uncle John Came to Stay... Scams are ubiquitous these days as people try to deceive us through the misuse of compassion or the perversion of the norms of decent behavior. A few weeks ago I received an email, apparently from John, an elderly relative, asking if I would lend him £500 so that he could take to the Small Claims Court, debtors to whom he had given “too much money” to reclaim the debt. Of course I immediately thought that it was a scam and phoned John to tell him his computer had been taken over by a virus and was sending out requests for money. His reply was “it's not a scam, I really need the money”. It turned out that over the past few years he had felt sorry, for drug addicts he had met in a park in his town in the West Country. They had asked him for money, and over time he had sent them unrecorded payments which amounted to many thousands of pounds in savings and his pension, and instead had ...

OM 89. On being Head of the Church of England. Dearly Beloved, When we celebrated 70 years on the throne of Queen Elizabeth II, a worthy celebration of monarchy, that day was also an opportunity to look forward to the royal succession as Her Majesty took the opportunity to raise the standing of the wife of our future King to Queen Consort. The Prince of Wales had a difficult start to married life including an adulterous affair and the death of his Princess of Wales in a car accident. This will raises questions about the suitability of the Prince of Wales to become head of the Church of England and to take the title of Defender of the Faith. Nevertheless, a degree of chaos within personal relationships is common to all of us, and the royal family is no exception. We do not have to go back to Henry VIII and his six wives, we can look more recently at the behaviour of George IVth and his Queen Consort, Caroline of Brunswick. Although George, as Prince of Wales, was already married to ...

OM88.   Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli at St John's College Chapel, Cambridge. The Choral setting of Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli (c.1562) at St John's College yesterday evening was so extraordinary that I have had to take several hours to think about what to say about it. This was the first performance by St John's new Director of Music, Christopher Gray, who has just completed 20 years at Truro cathedral and is well known for the integration of girls and young women into the choir at Truro, a choir that will emigrate to London to sing at the King Charle III's Coronation on 6 th May where it will be under the Westminster Abbey Director of Music Anrdew Netsingha, who was, until December last year, Director of Music at St John's College. This Palestrina Mass is a major work, and has been regularly sung at the coronations of Pontiffs.  The service started with a strong baritone solo voice singing the Introit for the day, as the choir and clergy pro...

87. On Rewilding Dearly Beloved, Rewilding is now fashionable. It is attempt to recreate the natural condition of nature before man intervened. It is mostly associated with just letting go and allowing plants and animals to repopulate as far as they are able. That sounds all very simple but the reality is often more complex and requires a lot of work. The first problem is that the climax biotope in much of Europe is woodland or forest. England and Scotland could clearly do with more woodland and much of the moorland was indeed once woodland. So woodland is straight forward although you may have to cut out unwanted tree species.  If however you want to produce a riverside meadow things are much more complicated, if only because the price of success is continual vigilance and a lot of cutting of self- planted would-be trees so that the climax woodland does not re-establish itself. A herd of deer is needed to do that naturally but may not arrive when needed. Furthermore you may de...

86. On The Importance of Doing the Washing Up. Dearly Beloved, I was reminded by the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the world of my miss-spent youth. At the age of 20 I undertook to protect a University camera crew on one of the Anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in 1968. Fortunately, despite the violence, my defensive skills were not tested, but at one point we entered a building where the organising committee was sitting. At the time there was talk of revolution. The demonstrations were supported by Trotskyists, Marxist Leninists, Maoists, Anarchists and numerous other groups and doubtless a few individuals who disliked the war for its own sake. The arrival of my camera crew was, understandably, not welcomed. During our brief visit I noticed an enormous pile of washing up, cups and plates, in a sink. Immediately I was reassured for it was clear these people were incapable of doing the washing up so it was unlikely they would be able to manage a revolution. The...

85 Seven Revelations  -- October 2020. Dearly Beloved, One It is now Autumn and with each new day the wind blows colder and harder, but through the grass by the River Cam cyclamens have emerged overnight. Two Dante describes his escape through a tunnel from the Stygian gloom, “the dead air” and ice cold of the bottom most circle of hell back into the light to describe the sky,“ Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro ” the colour of Oriental sapphire. He has escaped back to “the beautiful planet that induces us to love” Lo bel pianeto che d’amar conforta. He will walk onwards and upward to meet once again the soul of the love of his youth – Beatrice -- to travel with her in a chariot pulled by griffins. --see image attached below. Purgatorio 1 . The Divine Comedy Three In his Dearly Beloved Letter of 9 September Mark Thomas wrote about his tough and exhausting pilgrimage on foot to Walsingham, despised and rejected, but he tells us that on the return journey he received a ...

84. On Humility. Dearly Beloved,  When I worked in Switzerland for World Wildlife Fund International I became involved in a difficult argument with an American donor who was upset by my modest presentation of myself. She was positively offended by the fact that I was disinclined to boast about my history in wildlife conservation and my feats of daring do in desert mountains pursuing elusive and rare wild animals. As we were in Switzerland, and there is no greater neutral ground, I stuck to my guns, or rather my modesty, and both of us ended upset. When I mentioned this incident to an American colleague he said, “ Oh yes! American's don't do modesty!” Perhaps the extraordinary competitive nature of US society makes it unsafe not to blow one's own trumpet lest one be overlooked; perhaps being modest in the UK is part of our class system – indolent and poorly informed aristocrats perhaps did not want to be reminded that other people, their notional inferiors, did things whi...