The words of my mouth
I HAVE always loved words, and the struggle to find the ones that open doors on to how we understand things. The war against the cliché seems important. I also love discovering when a language has a word for something that we just don’t have the equivalent of in English — a word such as sobremesa, which, in Italian, describes that lingering at the dinner table to chat after a meal is finished.
Most of us would happily steal the Icelandic word solarfri, which refers to an unexpectedly sunny day that demands to be taken as an instant holiday. The Buli language of Ghana has the word pelinti, which describes the “hahaha” sound we make when pushing very hot food around our mouth. And one of my favourites is from an Inuit language: Iktsuarpok refers to the process, when we are both anxious and excited, of repeatedly going outside, or to the window, to check if a long-awaited guest is coming.
The wonderful work of Susie Dent teaches us many more. The word that I wish for both the Church and the world at the moment, however, has been recorded only once in The Oxford English Dictionary. It is “respair”, which means fresh hope, a recovery from despair. In our short-attention-spanned, hyperactive, information-saturated, wisdom-starved, and aggressively cruel, playground-bullying world of “us and them”, it is perhaps time to get this word back into circulation, and to work out how to translate it into reality — soon.
Alone in a crowd
THERE was a fair amount of despair in two films that I have seen recently. Hamnet explores the deep heartbreak at the death of a child, and H is for Hawk opens up the caverns of depression (which can defy navigation) at the death of a parent (Film, 25 January).
Twenty years ago, the philosopher Glenn Albrecht created the word “solastalgia” for the existential distress caused in many human beings by the changes and extinctions of the environmental crisis. He described it as “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.”
Helen Macdonald, author of the book on which H is for Hawk is based, has similarly said that it is now hard to write about the natural world without also writing about grief. Her story of how training a goshawk helped her to understand the loss of “the only person who really understood me” is raw. “Here’s a word,” she writes, “Bereavement. Or, bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone.”
Clowning glory
CHANGING emotional gear, it has been fun to put together five Daily Services for Radio 4 to celebrate what would have been the actor and comedian Kenneth Williams’s 100th birthday.
I knew Kenneth for the last few months of his life, and was thrilled when Bishop James Jones dug out some old recordings that he had produced, many years ago, in which Kenneth read stories from the New Testament (Feature, 11 April 2025). These will be heard in the services, and you are reminded of just what a storyteller Kenneth was: everyone’s favourite — along with Bernard Cribbins — on Jackanory.
He took his Christian faith seriously. Although often waspish and sometimes acidic, a person who could be desperate to be looked at and yet terrified of being seen, he knew that Christianity called out to the better part of himself, and gave him a peace that the entertainment world never would. He was a man for all emotional seasons: outrageous, melancholic, the heart of a party, a solitary at home.
His exaggerations gave him away. He loved to tell stories that punctured pomposity. Once, at a book signing, an elderly woman in the queue said “Emma Chiswick”. Kenneth dutifully inscribed the book and returned it. “What’s this?” she asked. “I’ve autographed it to ‘Emma Chiswick’,” he replied. “I asked, ‘How much is it?’” she retorted — and stomped off.
Kenneth was a talented man who made many people laugh until the tears fell — someone who helped us to burst out of the prim and proper to relish the fun of life, but who, deep down, knew that this life is much more than a mere Carry On. As an actor, he knew that life asks us to pay attention, and that that attention pays us back. He once said that “A fan club is ultimately a group of people who tell an actor he’s not alone in the way he feels.” If so, he still has thousands of fans.
Alter ego
I ALWAYS try to catch up with a bit of theatre in the new year, and I was bowled over by the marvellous production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, staged in the round, at the Old Vic. The audience felt very much a part of the story: the importance of its message was unignorably close.
As is well known, the story centres on Scrooge, a joyless old miser — described by Dickens as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint . . . secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster” — who is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. What he sees turns his heart, defrosts it, and recreates him as a generous, loving, and happy man.
In this production, there was a tender and poignant moment when the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge himself as a young boy, and Scrooge sees how lonely, innocent, but full of potential he was as a child. Hugging the vision of himself as a boy, he says, “I don’t want him to become me.” The audience was, to use the phrase of an elderly friend, “as quiet as a whisper in the woods”.
A time to mend
THE actor Jonathan Bailey was recently voted People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive”. It was good, then, if also somewhat intimidating, when he recently visited the cathedral, to show him the grave of Shakespeare’s brother, and discreetly try to discern what moisturiser he might use, or whether the hair was being dyed. All seemed natural, though, and he was very friendly, too.
Not so long ago, I saw him play Richard II and deliver that crushing line, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” It is a line that I have decided I want to take with me into Lent this year. Lent is a snowfall in the soul: a time for us to become Christian again, and to face the truth of how much time we waste — not creatively, but behind screens, and on futile pursuits of the enviable life.
The average adult Brit spends three hours, 21 minutes, on their phone each day. So, while the Government moves to limit social-media use by under-16s, I wonder whether it is targeting the wrong group. As our phones get thinner and smarter, they sneer at us as we do the opposite.
This Lent, I want to learn the truth that our happiest days are not when we have the best of everything, but when we make the best of everything — and not with a phone in our hand. Whatever demon in your life you decide to take on over the coming 40 days, may the season bring you some respair.
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is Dean of Southwark, and Whitelands Professorial Fellow at Roehampton University.