Being 48
Thought I'd just well.. muse slightly on something that happens this week. This week it's my birthday. Jeeze. Birthdays are beginning to feel like things that should happen to small children. You know, parties, cake, candles, that kind of stuff. Or like to my mother, whose birthday it will be in a few short weeks. Now that will be different - there'll be the family, perhaps a friend or two. We'll probably go somewhere nice, that she likes, for lunch. My mother enjoys lunch out - she and my Dad used to go out for lunch at pubs quite a bit. They enjoyed having days out.
My Dad was big into Abbeys. Apparently it all started back when he was a kid, when he and my Uncle Dave went on cycling holidays. They visited churches. As I understand it, there wasn't a lot to go and visit back in the 40's, 50's - actually this must have been a lot earlier than that. Dad was born sometime around 1911, 1912, so perhaps we're talking about the 20's, 30's. Anyhow, they went bicycling. Isn't that a lovely word? Conjures up vista's of unspoilt countryside, picnics of sandwiches and ginger beer. The odd Morris minor tootling past. The stop off at the quiet village church, with the verger tending to whatever, or the vicar himself posting some notice or other - the Mother's Union Jumble Sale next Saturday, and a beetle drive in the Church Hall. What on Gods good earth were Beetle Drives? I've read about them, not a clue what they were. I expect it was some kind of card game.
Anyhow, Dad got into Churches. Architecture and all that. And, being Dad, I expect he started to read about Church History. He had quite an education my Dad, so he would have known were to find the information he wanted. He got really into monasteries, 11, 12th century or so. He used to say that what really fascinated him was the contrast between the notions of what the church was all about - sanctity, care of the people, spiritual salvation and all that, and the 11th/12th century Abbot, fighting tooth and nail to preserve his monastery's entitlement to it's fish traps, providing knights to go off to war etc. He loved the image of the fat Abbot.
Thing is that if you study something for 30 to 40 + years, you get to be really good at it. I mean seriously good. I can't tell you how many family trips I went on as a kid, out for a picnic or whatever, that ended up in a field somewhere with Dad photographing lumps of rock in the ground, or the broken remnants of a wall, because that was all that was left of an obscure mini-monastery established by the Cartesians of wherever. And picture the sulky teenager, refusing to get out of the car and glued by invisible ropes to the car radio!
Yep. I was that teenager. My mother must have dreaded it, my father irritated by it, and my sister.. well, God knows what she made of it. I ought to ask her one of these days. Anyway, I was bored to death by it all. The naves, the this that and the other of it all. I was (as a teenager at least) way more interested by Henry VIII and his wives - yep, I saw Anne of the Thousand Days and really quite loved it, must have been all of elevan, and boy I loved those clothes. It was romantic too. I quite swooned at Richard Burton, although as an adult, I really cannot imagine for the life of me why. Anyhow, thing is I did actually start to read a bit of Tudor history - and then, somehow, got into Richard III, and that did for me. Talk about romance! Oh the northern King, the grey the black the white of him. All of him. Loved RIII, still do.
So when I finally did get my act together, and go to university, I opted to do sociology. Went to Scotland, so got to do a basic first year, then you get to choose your subject, but I was supposed to be doing sociology. After all, I was a mature student, I'd been a housing officer, I was supposed to be orientated about practicality, career etc. So in my basic first year, I did all the sociological things that fitted. And amid all that I noticed this little course in medieval history, and I thought why not? Why not just have a bit of fun? Oh God I loved that course. And when I failed to scrape in to sociology as my named degree, I went begging to the medieval department, and bless them, they opened their arms to me. It was my spiritual home, and undoubtedly the place I have felt most at home in, in my entire life. All things change, and I wouldn't change what's happened to me since I was at uni, but I did love my time there. But do you want to know what the biggest joke of all this is? Yeah of course. I got my best marks studying medieval church history. All those bloody years in that car. Maybe there's more of my Dad in me than I like to think of.
