Animals Kneeling???

Someone, you won't believe this but I swear it's true - someone found my blog by doing a Google search for, and I quote - "west country poem about animals kneeling"! Now I'm a liberal kind of bloke. I believe that there is room on this planet for almost all the various shades of wierdo that you would be likely to meet but; what kind of a sick mind would dream up a poem about animals kneeling! And what kind of a sick mind would want to read it. So I did a quick Google search myself and, my God I can't believe what I saw! These people need help, and it's not confined just to the sheep shaggers of Aberdeen. By the way, does anyone know the full text of this poem, out of curiosity?

Meanwhile - it's the time of year when we should all be planning our New Year's Resolutions. I want you all to think about this because that's what the next post will be about.

Why Does Mary Have To Be a Virgin?

We went to Mass yesterday. It was the vigil Mass for Christmas. Anyway this time of year, like no other, there is heavy emphasis on the virginity of Mary the mother of Jesus and I ask myself; why does this have to be?

If I point you to some internet-based information from the BBC then this is about the only page you will find on this subject, from a Google search, which is not apparently written by a bunch of ranting lunatics. On the BBC site you will find the following:-

The Gospels of Mark and John and the letters of St Paul do not mention the Virgin Birth. It is only included in the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke, although both give very different accounts. Professor James
Charlesworth says: "Should we take it literally, symbolically or metaphorically? Christians lineup behind every one of those".

If Mary’s pregnancy was not divine, who might have been the father of her child? As an unmarried mother-to-be, Mary was in a perilous position – Joseph could have had her banished or even stoned to death. But, according to the New Testament, Joseph was a good man and he did not abandon his young fiancée.

Historians have looked for reasons to explain Joseph’s loyalty and sympathy towards Mary. One second-century historian claimed that Mary was actually the victim of a rape by a Roman soldier called Panthera and, indeed, many women at the time would have been raped by soldiers. However, that story is much more likely to have been circulated falsely in an attempt to discredit the growing Christian movement.

Biblical historian Mark Goodacre concludes: "The Christian in me wants to say that it is quite likely to be God because I like the idea of a wonderful, miraculous birth – something supernatural … happening right there at the origins of Christianity. The historian in me does have some problems with that and does wonder
if Joseph is the better option."

Now the above is quite rational and does not try to come to any forced conclusion. So why does the Catholic Church insist that Mary was a virgin? Take this extract from the Catholic Catechism:-

People are sometimes troubled by the silence of St. Mark's Gospel and the New Testament Epistles about Jesus' virginal conception. Some might wonder if we were merely dealing with legends or theological constructs not claiming to be history. To this we must respond: Faith in the virginal conception of Jesus met with the lively opposition, mockery or incomprehension of non-believers, Jews and pagans alike; so it could hardly have been motivated by pagan mythology or by some adaptation to the ideas of the age. The meaning of this event is accessible only to faith (my italics), which understands in it the "connection of these mysteries with one another" in the totality of Christ's mysteries, from his Incarnation to his Passover.

It seems a little forced to me, and it goes on:-

Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, "full of grace" through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:
The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.

Again, is this not a contrivance. "Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware..." It's balderdash! It is either evident or it isn't. If it was not then fair enough. I personally do not believe that the story of Christ has to depend on the fact or otherwise of the Immaculate Conception. His teachings do not depend upon it. So why construct this legend, this myth. What purpose does it serve? Let me say right here that I have not (yet) read The Da Vinci Code. I haven't had time but I believe it fleshes out the argument that the whole issue of the Immaculate Conception is a vast conspiracy in order to cement the concept of male superiority in the Church and thus in society. You can let me know.

My basic problem is that I don't believe in the virgin birth, and I want to know why I should have to. Is there anybody of rational mind out there who can answer my question without saying "It's a mystery"?

TMA 04 History - Result! Yesss!

Well now gentle readers, I know you've all been on tenterhooks since I posted my script on Robespierre, my History TMA 04. I was too. I had to ask for a postponement I was so behind, and so last week-end I spent two days just hanging around my apartment in my shorts getting stuck in. And it's paid off. 74%! Is that not amazing. I am stunned. I can only presume one of two things, either (a) I am a genius or (b) the good Dr. Clench is so intoxicated with the holiday spirit that she is giving out presents to idiots like me. Since (a) is out of the question then it must be (b) - quod errat demonstrandum. Or maybe I'm a genius.

Can we keep up this momentum? Who knows, we shall find out in due course. Anyway I want you to do something for me. I've already had some kind comments from Straddle Pipping Reel, who is also doing this course. That was great, and by the way good luck to her (I think she's a her), so if you've had your mark for this TMA let me know how you got on. And even if you're doing something different in the OU let me know as well. Good luck and hope to hear from you in the comments part below.

High Flight - by John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of; wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sun-lit silence. Hovering there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air;
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark nor even eagle flew;
And while, with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

This poem, which I've known and loved for a long time, is featured in the Writer's Almanac this morning. Garrison Keillor reads it in the kind of downbeat manner which is at odds with the sheer exhiliration of the piece. Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr. died in a training accident in December 1941. The poem was sent by Magee in a letter to his parents about three months before his death with the note; "It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed. I thought it might interest you." The scribbled poem was "High Flight."

Whenever I read this poem I always think of Magee's parents. He was only nineteen when his plane crashed, in England, in a training accident. You can see from his picture that he was a handsome boy. And how gifted he was. To lose such a beautiful child must have been truly devastating. Why do I dwell their loss? I suppose that it is because I have two sons of my own. My oldest is about a year older than John Magee was in 1941, and the younger boy is just fourteen. And it's every parent's fate that, whenever we reflect on such tragedies, be it airmen in war or schoolchildren abducted by evil men, or any of a million other terrible things which could befall our loved ones , we feel these as though they are happening to our own. Glimpses of horror visit us and we push them away before they overwhelm us. And then we want to hug our children to us and tell them we love them and just ... be careful, OK! And they look at us as if we are the child and tell us not to be silly, and they walk out of the door and down the street as if they own the world, like John Gillespie Magee Jr. owned it in September 1941.

I'm Reviewing The Situation

I received a comment from Straddle Pipping Reel (What the handle refers to, fuck only knows.) on the subject of plagiarism. That's not the situation I'm reviewing by the way. I'll get on to that in a minute. Anyway, plagiarism is not something that bothers me. This blog would provide meagre pickings for anyone looking for OU glory. They're welcome to it. Anyway, if you have come on to this blog because you are an OU student and you are looking for inspiration then please feel free to critique my posts. That's what they're their for. If you are an OU tutor or any kind of a high heid yin then your advice would also be welcomed. As for the rest of the mince that I throw up, have a go at that as well if you like. Just don't take it too seriously.

I've been thinking about these various posts that I've been doing and, to be frank, I'm a bit bothered. I think they were starting to go in the wrong direction. Too serious, not enough laughs, too up my own arse, if you get my drift. This is a journal, as well as place for me to fuck around in. And a place where I can practice the act of writing; not the art, the act.

Some of you may notice that I have edited out parts of previous postings and I have removed one altogether. I did this because I want to feel relaxed about what I do here. It's meant to be fun after all.

I'm going back home for the holidays now. I won't be back in Dalmatia until the New Year. You all have a nice holiday if you're having one, and if you're not ... then don't.

TMA 04 - History - Robespierre's Journal

We were asked to come up with an 800 word essay on the following extract from Robespierre's journal. It was written in autumn of 1793.

"Principal measure of public safety. it will be necessary to send through all the republic a small number of strong commissioners, armed with good instructions and above all good principles, to reduce public opinion to unity and to republicanism - the sole means of ending the Revolution to the profit of the people.

These commissioners will above all concentrate on discovering and inventorying men who are worthy to serve the cause of liberty. To purge the surveillance committees, we must produce a list of all their members, their names, occupations and addresses ....

We must revise the list of the leaders of the counter-revolution in each locality ....

Overturn the decree of the municipality which bans the saying of the mass and vespers. it does not have the right. It is a source of trouble."

Hardman, J. (ed.) (1999, 2nd ed.) The French Revolution Sourcebook, (London, Arnold, p. 198)

The questions were -
What kind of primary source is this .... ?
Particular words or phrases requiring elucidation.
What can we learn with respect to Robespierre and the French Revolution, distinguishing between witting and unwitting testimony?


I hated doing this at the start. I was under pressure at work and could not concentrate on it. Once I was able to give it the necessary time though, I enjoyed it; almost, but not quite as much as my last on the Colosseum.

Fuck This For A Game Of Soldiers

Actually the title of this post has nothing to do with what I am going to write. Why do I say that? Well, because at this moment in time (waffle) I have no fucking idea what I am going to write. The OU course is going badly at the moment. Work is taking up all my time and something happened on Monday that has been at the forefront of my thoughts at all times of the day. It was very upsetting and the result has been that I cannot concentrate on a thing. It's receding into the background now and hopefully it will die a natural death in due course. So - what to do?

There's a Tutor Marked Assessment (TMA) due in on Friday on the French Revolution and I've hardly done any work on this part of the course so far. I am so busy at work that when I come back to my apartment at night I just want to relax or, when things get too fraught (like on Monday) go out on the screaming piss. It's hardly conducive to good studying.

I was worrying about this because, having made a decent mark in my last TMA, I wanted to keep up the momentum. I knew if I cobbled something together at the last minute for this it would be shite. So I girded my loins and called Dr. Clench. The conversation went something like this:
"Hello Matilda, it's West Coaster"
"Oh! Hello West. How are ye getting on?"
"Oh, it's going fine. I'm very busy and I'm trying to keep up with the studies and you know the work is frantic at the moment we're right in the middle of a .."
"You need more time for the TMA."
"That would be great Matilda, just through to next Monday."
"Well, I'll let it go to the following Friday. How's that?"
"Brilliant!"

You know, I don't know how I ever had a downer on the old bird. She's first rate. The trouble is that, as I said, this part of the course is about the French Revolution and I've just got no interest in the thing. Bunch of fucking plebs chopping the heads off a load of poofs with powdered wigs and rouge on their cheeks. I think I'll just crib the whole thing off the internet. And that is what someone is doing on my site! I was looking at my stats and one of the search phrases was "Critically evaluate the relationship between form and function in three aspects of the design and construction of the Colosseum."

That is precisely the phrasing of the question for the first part of TMA03. I wonder if whoever looked at my page just cut and pasted it and called it his/her own work. Do people do that? They do, don't they, the plagiarising bastards. Oooh-er!

Good Advice

Lingo Slinger, in response to my below request was so nice in giving me some advice. I'm going to lay it out here and try to give my honest response because it touches on some fundamental issues regarding what I want from this blog.

• You have great opinions on things, you have a great way of communicating, and are more insightful than most... You also have (as displayed in this post) a sharp sense of humour, a confident wit about you. That's the aw shucks I'm blushing part over. It's nice of Lingo to say these things. Such positive feedback is worth a lot.
• I do think that the OU stuff might be a bit heavy for the average blog reader. It is very interesting, but could perhaps be a bit much for some. She's right here. I was thinking, if I stick with it (and I have time) that maybe I should open up another blog just for OU stuff and simply put down the start of an essay here with a link to the whole piece on the other blog. I don't have time at the moment to do this but I might in the future.
• Here's some ideas:Expose yourself - photos, personal stories and experiences. This is the tricky part. I shy away from exposing myself (sound like a failed flasher, don't I!). There are personal issues, deeply personal, that I want to explore but I'm afraid to start, to fess up.
• Opinions on current events & news or just things in general that you feel strongly about. Who's got the time! Of course I feel strongly about current events. Tony Blair's a cunt because he's in the pocket of that other cunt G.W. But they have teams of PR people and spokespersons (Isn't that the people who follow Lance Armstrong in a van in case he has a wheel failure?). And the last truly decent leader of the Labour Party was Michael Foot and he got gutted by the press, and all the honest men and women who could have made a difference are dead: Mo Mowlam, Robin Cook, John Smith, Donald Dewar - real people who didn't give a shit for image makers and spin doctors and focus groups and all the rest of the shite that politicians think they have to surround themselves with. Current events! Fuck current events.
• More photographs - you, your fam, your friends, your environment. I use this to get in to another environment. Maybe I'm creating a parallel universe where - no scratch that. Parallel universe dreams are bullshit. There is only one and we are stuck with it. Anyway my universe mostly is work, and this will not be about my work.
• Desert Island type themes. Used to be Roy Plomley but now Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs ask their guest to choose eight records, one book (they've already got the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare), and a luxury to ease their days stranded on a desert island. It's marginally more interesting than Gardeners' Question Time on BBC Radio 4.
• Poetry Interpretations - ask others for their interpretations. Good idea. I'm not any kind of expert. English literature is something I want to get more involved with. It would be good to exchange ideas and I should positively seek opinions, rather than just make comment for the sake of it.
• New words - scour the dictionary for new words and post one every day (perhaps in conjunction with a post) to give your readers a healthy dose of vocabulary. Old Horsetail Snake does this so well. I'd feel such a fake. I like words though, and improving my vocabulary. OK, I'll think about it.
• Short stories or poems written by you. This needs time and when I was doing the OU short course in Creative Writing I could just post my work straight on to the blog. Long term project.
• Short history lessons & links to interesting things found on the net. I'm reluctant to come on all pedagogical (today's word - see new words above) but if it flows naturally from what I'm studying then fair enough. Interesting things I have found on the net. Mmmm. Do you mean like this?, or this?

Dylan Thomas - A Perfect Website

I have always liked Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. His use of language is fantastic with alliteration overload and onomato-(check dictionary)-poeic streams of words conjuring up a psychedelic picture of an imaginary small town in Wales, long before psychedelia was conceived.

To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

So to find this website was wonderful. And wonder of wonders! You can listen to the original BBC production of Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton as the narrator. To listen to that voice with it's rich mellifluous Welsh accent reading this masterpiece is bliss itself. There's lots of other audio including Thomas reading his own poems.

Sheep!

I mean they are so boring, all they do is stand around all day nibbling grass. There's not an interesting thing to say about sheep, unless it's a recipe for a nicely cooked leg of lamb, washed down with a full bodied French red, say a St. Emillion 2002.

Anyway, dear readers, I have been looking for some feedback on this blog but despite the number of visits I get, admittedly not a huge number, there is a distinct lack of social intercourse. (saving your presence Lingo Slinger). Now I know that you readers of West Coast Ramblings are sophisticated, intelligent, people (otherwise you wouldn't be reading this, right!) with busy lives but I really would appreciate the odd comment or two just to be reassured that my modest output is mildly stimulating...Or not, now that I come to think of it.

If you believe that this blog is the most odious pile of shite that you have ever had the misfortune to come across then please say so. This will have the immediate effect of transforming my epistles into heavenly dissertations on the subjects which are closest to your hearts. How exactly this will come about I don't know but I'll think of something. Anyway it would relieve the tedium somewhat so don't be shy.

Trouble is, at the moment I am not (although I should be) heavily engaged with my Open University work. It's a rather deep study of the methodology of the study of history. Now I'm sure that most lively minded people would agree that history per se is interesting. If you are not interested in history then please leave. Fuck off! Go! Out! Begone! But (I know I've asked you this before - can you start a sentence with but?) the study of the methodology used by historians (please hang on - you have taken all this trouble to get here) is about as boring as going to mass. So the point I am making here (yes, yes, please get to it - a reader) is that I do not have enough material relating to the OU and therefore I need to tap the old brain cells to keep up the blog. Please help me out. What direction should I take with this - random ramblings - more poetry stuff - less introspection. Tell me.

A Funny Blog

Please read Old Horsetail Snake. This blog is funny and touching in equal measure. And it's where I got this quote from Robin Williams:

"See, the problem is that God gave man a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to run one at a time."

Open University - Introduction To The Humanities

My result arrived this morning for TMA03 which I posted on Nov. 27th. 60%! A good pass I would say. Anyway I'm pretty satisfied with it. The tutor, Dr. Matilda Clench, is a pretty strict old bird and she doesn't give away much. I know we've had our differences in the past but that's all water under the bridge now. I think we're rubbing along pretty nicely now. The thing is I know I could have done better. I posted the thing too quickly. You know how it is, you've laboured manfully ('laboured personfully'? I don't think so) on something for ages and when it's done, you just want to get it off you're back. Take my advice (I might even take it myself). Sit on it, even for just half an hour, if you can, and then make sure you have it right before submitting it. My piece was all there, it just could have been ordered better, perhaps tightened up a little. It would have been worth the extra effort.

It has been a beautiful day here in Dalmatia. Lovely and sunny all day. And perfect conditions tonight for the kick-about on the five-a-side park. We lost 7-4 or something. The Ollie was our best man. We were up against it though, with Pizza Paddy and Jimbo in the opposition. Our side was me (The Old Crock), The Ollie (v. good, even if his was a rugby school), Farmer Giles (almost as useless as me), and Tommo (Young Croatian Poser). Despite that it was a good weekend for sport. Rangers have now failed to win in nine consecutive games (fuck them). The Blue Hoops won, keeping up their promotion challenge. Croatia won the Davis Cup, and Monty won in Hong Kong.

I'd better get to bed now and try to rest my aching muscles. I'm sure I'll have siezed up by tomorrow evening.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I love this poem. To me it is so musical. It rhymes effortlessy (although the second line looks a bit contrived) and the rhythm of the metre (iambic tetrameter) makes it ideal for reading in a kind of sing-song, perhaps Welsh, accent. Richard Burton or Anthony Hopkins would be perfect readers for this. The sussurations of the lines -
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake
- clearly echo the wind and soft fall of snow through branches. What, we wonder, is he imagining that lies in the wood, what temptations does he turn from? The woods are lovely, dark and deep. This is such a sensual line, perhaps hinting at physical passion. But he must be faithful and press on, he has promises to keep. The repetition of the last two lines seems to speak of a terrible resignation. There is a clear echo of these feelings in The Road Not Taken. Perhaps he speaks to all our mid-life crises, or is that just me.