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Diary

by
02 November 2006

Van and vanguard

The sun is shining, the tourists are back, and our camper-van has left its place of exile (a distant car-park where it doesn’t spoil our neighbours’ view of the cathedral) and gone to to be valeted. This all means it’s summer, and we’ll be soon crossing the Channel. I can’t wait.

I love my camper-van, and the journeys we do in it. We never know where we’re going to stay, and never worry, because no matter how far off the beaten track one wanders in France, there is always a camping municipal.

Every summer I turn into a cross between Meg the Gypsy and Toad of Toad Hall, waxing lyrical about the freedom of the open road, and sleeping under canvas (OK, fibreglass), while my children roll their eyes and tell me about friends who’ve rented a villa in Tuscany and are flying there.

My horrible, prosaic children do not understand the meaning of the word romance. To them, our elderly Compass Drifter is not a thesaurus of possibilities, but embarrassing proof that we don’t have enough money to stay in decent hotels. At speech days, it sticks out among the BMWs and Mercedes like a hippo among panthers, and the children cover their eyes and beg us to park it somewhere discreet.

But, as I constantly remind them, having a camper-van is character-forming. It is teaching them the most valuable lesson of all: not to mind what other people think. Yes, it is a Way of Pain, but the rewards are great. When they finally achieve that Zen-like state of non-caring (and believe me, I am doing all I can to force them there), their disregard for bourgeois sensibility will make them invincible.

And anyway, as I also tell them (I have to admit that this is a wild surmise), most rich people would secretly love a camper-van. The only reason why they don’t buy one is fear of being laughed at. I may be deluding myself here (the poor always try to persuade themselves that they’re better off than the rich) — but there again, I may be right. In which case, those impoverished plutocrats should wise up and get a Compass Drifter, even if it does spoil the view.     

Word to the wise

This is my last week of teaching Latin at the Cathedral School, a job I loved chiefly for its freedom from the prescriptions of the national curriculum.

I taught the old-fashioned way: through grammar. Oddly enough, the children seemed not to mind — possibly even to like the orderliness of conjugations and declensions.  Some took easily to the demands of an inflected language; for others, the variability of person, tense, number, and case was a perpetual torment. But they all understood that Latin was uncompromising and difficult; and, in a funny way, I think they were pleased to have it asked of them.

They responded enthusiastically to the idea of Latin as code-breaking, and often surprised me with their skilful deciphering and enciphering of complex sentences. We talked about Bletchley Park, and why it employed classicists, and why having to master six tricky things at once made Latin like windsurfing. Sometimes I would read them tales from the Iliad and the Odyssey, while they doodled and their imaginations worked.

But perhaps the greatest pleasure was the freedom we had to wander beyond the syllabus. What is a manse? How did it get its name? What does tacit mean? Did Helen’s face really launch a thousand ships? How stupid was Marlowe’s Dr Faustus to enter a pact with the Devil? Who has seen a painting of the birth of Venus and where?  We ranged over ethics, etymology, and aesthetics, into areas that core subjects are often too busy to touch.

Eventually, when, each autumn, a new class asked me: “Why are we doing Latin?” I learned to say not, “So that you can bore everyone about it when you’re 40” (although they nodded at that), but, “Because you’ll enjoy it.”

It was a privilege to do the job, and I shall miss the willing, polite, and generous children who shared it with me.

Sing to the Lord

The reason why I have to stop is that from September I will be taking our youngest daughter to Guildford several times a week, to be a probationer in the choir of Guildford Cathedral.

This extraordinary building, dominating the town at the top of Stag Hill, was begun in 1936 and completed only in 1961, because the second World War interrupted building. From the outside it looks like a powerhouse of theological endeavour, as if Christianity were a product to be hewn and hefted and welded by the teeming workers within. But the pale, austere interior, so reminiscent of a medieval Norman priory, invites only stillness.

As the westering sun streams through the open door into evensong, and the choir sings the Nunc Dimittis, it is moving to realise that this cathedral, not yet 50 years old, is combining the musical and liturgical traditions of centuries with the vigour of something young.

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