The three Rs: Reading
I WAS 75 when I retired from my full-time job as an active Methodist minister, only to find myself entering another full-time job — as an active politician.
I’d fondly imagined that my slippered old age would allow me to read more (in general), and to re-read poetry (in particular). I gave just about all my books away when we moved from a large manse into our terraced Shangri-La. But I kept the poets. They sit sulking on my shelves as they await my second retirement. I remember the pleasure they gave me in my student days.
But the life I’ve lived since then has served only to make me aware of how unready I was, in my callow years, to appreciate the depths of human experience, or the sweep of human history on which they draw. So Blake, Chaucer, Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Wordsworth (in alphabetical order) are lined up and ready for consumption.
In the mean time, I’ve managed to enjoy some more modern poetry: Simon Armitage, Malcolm Guite, Maya Angelou, Rowan Williams, and the two Thomases (Dylan and R. S.) among them.
My duties in Parliament have required me, in more recent times, to read massive volumes that describe the blessings and dangers of technology. They bear portentous titles: The Age of Surveillance, Democracy Hacked, Information Wars, and Our Last Innovation? The last of these takes a very pessimistic look at artificial intelligence.
My journey into Westminster from my home in Croydon is often undertaken in the very close (almost intimate) company of other commuters, most of whom are either stuck into their smartphones or have phone extensions stuck into their ears. As I try to turn the pages of my book, I feel analogue to their digital: dinosauric, and part of an endangered species, in the jungle of their gizmos and echo chambers.
Bloodied but unbowed, I arrive at Blackfriars Station and tuck my book into my bag, ready for the daily round.
’Riting
AT THE grand age of 17, I was recruited to fill the front page of our local broadsheet The Burry Port Star. In truth, it was really The Llanelly Star, which sub-let its front page in Llangennech and Burry Port to up-and-comings like me, in the hope of stirring up interest in the little townships that lay beyond the megapolis.
I reported many a colourful debate from the council chamber; I publicised the arrival of missionaries from exotic places who were giving lantern slides to one or other of the numerous congregations in our town; I gave first-hand accounts of a fisticuff fight at closing time outside the Glanmor Arms; and announced the arrival of twins to Myfanwy Morgan (name anonymised). It was relentless. It was fun.
The most memorable moment came when, after weeks of getting our water from standpipes, an inspection team from Cardiff pronounced that our water was once again safe to drink. A sub-editor’s headline on my story was wonderful: “Board man passes water”, it declared. To the delight of all my readers.
That beginning fed my creative energies and started me writing on anything and everything. Sermons and lectures, of course. Eight books, a thesis, book reviews, newspaper articles, blogs, radio scripts: decades of the stuff.
One particularly lovely piece was a paragraph I wrote for our local kebab shop, on whose nutritional and social services we came to depend during lockdown. Once a week I brought home a wonderful burger, the centre piece for our simple supper. I became friends with the Turkish team who served me. I’m still greeted as “Mr Tuesday” by all of them as I pass by.
I wrote a commendation to the powers-that-be, the National Kebabery, who were glad to award them a certificate. It’s still stuck in their window to their, and my, immense satisfaction.
’Rithmetic
I WAS born more than half a century before the arrival of the internet and the age of personal computers. That was a time when we still cultivated our memories — which we seem nowadays to have outsourced to our machines. I learned huge chunks of literature by heart. Every school eisteddfod had a special place for “recitations”. My head is still full of them — in Latin, French, English, and Welsh.
Our young minds were pre-conditioned in primary school by an exercise called “mental arithmetic”. Mr Goronwy Williams would come into the classroom first thing in the morning and shout out a series of numerical sequences. “Three times 17 plus eight!” he’d shout, and we all sought to be the first to put our hands up with the solution.
He’d sometimes help out. “When I ask you to multiply 49 by seven,” he said, “there’s a simple way to get the answer.” He told us to multiply 50 by seven (easy peasy) and then deduct seven. The answer, 343, should just pop into our mouths once we’d done it that way. Agile minds, that’s what he wanted.
Rebirth
I HAVE visited Florence just once, a long time ago. As with Rome and Venice, I felt as if I’d lived there all my life. So much of the kind of education I received at the Llanelli Boys’ Grammar School had filled my mind with pictures and my inner ear with the voices of those who’d lived, worked, plotted, and died there.
We stayed in a hotel near the town centre which, during the 1860s, had served as the parliament for those who were fighting to establish a nation that would soon be called Italy. Great characters like Mazzini and Garibaldi figured in that struggle. Everywhere we went in Florence, we found monuments and plaques that called our attention to the Risorgimento.
I was so aware of the great figures who’d inhabited these streets across the centuries: Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Dante, Petrarch. Four of those were buried in one church, Santa Croce. In England, to match that, we’d need to have Geoffrey Chaucer, Inigo Jones, John Milton, and William Shakespeare all memorialised under one roof. It was astonishing.
These great names are all associated with the rebirth of learning and art after the long centuries we know as the Dark Ages; the drivers of the movement we know as the Renaissance.
We were there on the first Sunday after Easter. You couldn’t mistake the fact. White carnations and lilies abounded — in the churches, of course, but also by wayside shrines. The flowers seemed as if they were ready, at any moment, to shout “Alleluia! The Lord is risen!”
The ancient city of Florence was alive with the suggestions of their music: the harmonies and crashing chords of the resurrection.
Here were three different Rs:
Risorgimento — the birth of a nation;
Renaissance — the rebirth of a continent;
Resurrection — the birth of hope for the whole of humanity.
A happy Easter to all who read these words.
Leslie Griffiths is a Methodist minister, politician, and life peer.
