opusculus

But this did sound awfully like that spate of books where people had A Bright Idea to Do Something for A Year and got a book out of it, which was clearly the intention, and this struck my cynical ayfeist self as 'My Spiritual Pilgrimage to a Mystical Experience, Conversion, Faith, and Publishing Deal'.

Could I become a Christian in a year?

(How long did it take St Augustine? asking for a friend.)

For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corolla and stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.

I was also, in the light of this article today, intrigued that it was two bloke friends who set her on this path: I’m delighted to see gen Z men in the UK flocking back to church – I just hope it’s for the right reasons. So am I. I have a friend who has been involved in the much-delayed and still unsatisfactory response of the C of E to certain abuse cases and some of those seem to have been connected with cultish manifestations which were praised for bringing in that particular demographic.

(And having noted the other day that Witchfinder Hopkins was pretty much in that demographic of young men aged 18-24, I'd really like to know where these Gen Z converts are in relation to issues like ordination of women, LGCBTQ+ inclusivity, etc etc.)

Intermittently I've been thinking about doing that Meangingful to Me Books List thing that people have been doing -

- and my first hesitancy was because quite early on in my first endeavour to compile one I found the database was sadly lacking (and this was before I even got to what I consider my Really Obscure Faves) so I would have to enter them manually, bit of a faff, what -

- and then musing upon the topic I keep going to myself 'but what about about? - and how could you not think of? - etc etc as things came to mind.

(It was really quite well on in this process when I went MOLESWORTH!!! chiz chiz chiz.)

And the authors and series who could make a substantial proportion of any list all by themselves - does one have just one or two token instances? Maybe the gateway work that got me into them and a particular favourite? (How does one decide?) Could one count e.g. Pilgrimage or Alms for Oblivion as a single work for the purpose of the exercise?

Yes, my dearios, you will have perceived by now that yr hedjog was making it All More Complicated.

Wo, wo, 'tis the EndofaNera.... street performers rue end of busking at Leicester Square. You know, having some acquaintance with a) colourful Victorian streetlife and b) historical studies of the policing of same I bet there were people bemoaning the loss of those colourful if dodgy characters, though I also have some distant recollection of people going spare over e.g. barrel-organs and other street music at a possibly somewhat later date, rather like the occupants of Leics Sq businesses who cannot hear themselves think, let alone make phone-calls.

***

More from the Cambpop people on the latter end of life over time: Did anyone “retire” in the past? and How did the elderly poor survive in the past?

For centuries, the elderly were regarded as the category par excellence of the ‘deserving poor’, and charitable aid took a broad spectrum of forms. Begging, while not necessarily condoned, was often regarded as an acceptable and unthreatening pursuit when undertaken by the aged. One longstanding area of philanthropy specifically focused on the elderly were alms houses. These were funded by voluntary donations (rather than through the poor law) and usually offered separate private accommodation for older people. At most, 2-3 percent of those over 60 secured an alms house place. There was great geographical variability, but alms house inmates were disproportionately selected from the ‘respectable’ female and church-going elderly.

***

Cassie Watson, whose work on murder some of you may have read (it's excellent), has turned her attention to violence short of lethal: Investigating the ‘Assault Deficit’ - assault was in fact a vague and ill-defined term:

By 1861 when the Offences Against the Person Act came into effect, the word assault was not actually defined. Instead, it was used to designate a variety of specific acts that might cause physical harm to another person. It was left up to judges to decide what was meant by ‘harm’. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word ‘harm’ was typically associated with the effects of physical assault, and so the phrase ‘bodily harm’ was used more regularly than ‘harm’. However, it seems likely that the wider concept implied in today’s usage — encompassing both emotional harm and negligence — was understood. However, if the harm took some other form, for instance disease or mental trauma, an indictment under the 1861 statute could fail.

***

This is a reasonable account of the problem with 'simple' solutions - 'if you just only....' whether the solution is some tech fix or Returning to 'Nature' and 'the Natural Way': The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers.

As somebody who has been wont to point out that actually getting Drs Ehrlich and Hato's magic bullet to where it would do some good was a complex process, I am on board with being v sceptical of solutionism.

What I read

Finished My Favourite Mistake in a mad whirl, really, it just kept going.

Anthony Berkeley, The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) - a group of mostly amateur criminologists sit round discusssing (and also do a bit of freelance detecting) apropos a recent case in which it was assumed that woman who ate the poisoned chocolates was not the target as they were sent to someone else who gave them to her husband: who had it in for the apparent target? - naturally it transpires that massively complicated plot was aimed at the actual victim but the who, how and why remain matters for debate. This was not at all bad, so I downloaded a couple more of Berkeley's Roger Sheringham mysteries from Project Gutenberg.

Unfortunately a bit less prepossessed by The Mystery at Lover's Cave (1927) and The Layton Court Mystery (1925) because we perceive a pattern of Sheringham flailing around and building up theories, coming across clues (sometimes by vast coincidence) and then constructing an entirely new theory, and then right at the end the whole thing turns more or less inside out when the actual murderer is revealed, too late or in circumstances in which it seems prudent to take no action. Do not think I shall proceed with the oeuvre.

Have been thinking for a while of a re-read of Little Women (1868). Alas, these days one does not just glide over the plonking moral lessons that are constantly invoked as one follows the story.

Have just finished Trailblazer, which I was dipping in and out of all week, because I did find the chatty style really rather irksome. Also a few niggly things (e.g. how can you mention Hertha Ayrton without the being rejected for Fellowship of Royal Society because married woman? - surely totally pertinent to the kinds of things Barbara Bodichon was campaigning about???).

On the go

Have just picked up Alison Li, Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution (2023), which I have been meaning to get to for a while.

Up next

Well, one of the books I am reviewing has finally turned up, so that, I guess, is in my future.

Why a walk in town can be just as good for you as a stroll in the countryside (Duh).

I was boggled by this: 'I have lived and worked in central London for decades and so I struggle to come up with anywhere new', because it tends to be that one develops runlines like an animal in the jungle, also, there is ALOT of London? I felt quite elated when the rather banal matter of medical appointments took me to Belsize Park and its teeny wildflower meadow beside the walkway to the Royal Free Hospital.

But I am all for urban walking and one of my current woez - has been for some years ahem - is that my urban flaneusing across the Atlantic has been on hold, and even if all the other factors no longer pertained, I am so not going at this present moment.

Sigh.

(Though I have just been looking back to see how long ago were my last visits to a) New York and b) Chicago (that was not just O'Hare for onwards transit) and it was Quite A While. Last Madison for Wiscon trip was 2019.)

There have been several reviews of this crossed my path over the last couple of weeks: The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal: The Observer, Guardian Saturday and also Literary Review (doesn't appear to be one of the ones openly accessible).

I'm not sure I'm up for reading about that amount of medical abuse.

But.

I had to do with the papers of the doc in question, which were donated via a medical historian associated with my former place of work, who was intending writing a biography - this never got completed or published, possibly because the person had a lot of other projects on the go.

I note the reviews mention that the book, besides mentioning the well-evidenced abuse of known patients, goes on into the entirely speculative area of whether Sargant was also involved in Sekkritt Guvment Research, which I had to field several enquiries about back in the day. (I think at least one of these posited that he was conducting this in the basement of St Thomas's Hospital, like nobody would notice???)

One of my personal take-aways from this (and other medical scandals of a similar period) was that our modern ideas of medical ethics (e.g. informed consent to treatment) came out of the disclosure of these and other abuses and they did not exist at the time. Doctors had a quite egregious sense of their own powers and few dared to question them.