Yesterday afternoon I went to watch Granddaughter Number Four’s infant school nativity play, a curious version of the story, one in which Mary’s reaction to being told she is having a baby is to start knitting a blanket. Everything hinges on whether she will manage to finish the blanket in time - aided by Sidney the Shepherd getting his best sheep to provide the wool.
I had some difficulty recognising Granddaughter Number Four in her costume, with a colourful sort of Arab headdress hiding half her face - colourful sort of Arab outfits courtesy of one of the supermarkets’ dressing-up department. She was one of a team of narrators, all dressed alike. One of the “best sheep” cried, pretty much throughout the performance, so much so that she was unable to speak her lines: “I’m Sara Sheep”. Later I asked Granddaughter Number Four why one of the sheep was crying. “Oh,” she said, “that’s just Bea. She cries at everything. She cries when she goes to birthday parties.” Super-sensitive seven year olds!
The Angel Gabriel cried later, when he was getting changed to go home, overwhelmed by the whole business. He had been a good Angel Gabriel. The rest of the heavenly host were all small girls in long white dresses with cardboard wings pinned on. The guiding star was quite a star too. All in all, a good effort.
I’ve been reading Umberto Eco’s book, The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery with an ecclesiastical twist, set in a medieval abbey in Italy. I’ve just read the part where the narrator, a young monk by the name of Adso, has been allowed to see the abbey’s “treasure”: ancient relics such as the head of the spear that pierced Christ’s side, a thorn from the crown of thorns, a fragment of wood from the true cross (at this point Adso’s mentor points out that he has seen so many such fragments that Christ must have been crucified on a whole forest), and various saints’ bones, among other things, all of these expensively encased in silver. Amazing!
I was reminded of the scene in The Leopard where the wife of Don Fabrizio has her personal collection of holy relics assessed by a priest/expert who throws out just about all of them. I also thought of some research we did for my Italian conversation class regarding Santa Lucia - yesterday was her day, by the way! I discovered that her remains lie in state in Siracusa, Sicily, where she was born, but also in Venice. Some of those saints must have had a lot of bones!
Nowadays we are more sensible and only collect relics connected to the rich and famous, pop singers and the like. Having “liked” various things about singer-songwriters I appreciate, I now find myself bombarded with other fans’ pictures they have painted of their heroes, selfies with their heroes, photos of their tickets to concerts they have attended, all of which is fine. But there are also the people who are using social media to sell t-shirts and other such trivia. I confess to having purchased the odd t-shirt at a concert but it’s not the same as buying one off a random vendor who has jumped on the social media bandwagon.
It seems we have a “campus free speech tsar” - perhaps as a result of all the fuss about groups expressing sympathy with Gaza. Here’s something about that:
“University staff and students can make provocative statements on subjects such as Israel and Gaza as long as they do not break laws on incitement or harassment, under proposals by the government’s campus free speech tsar.
Arif Ahmed, the newly appointed director for academic freedom of speech at the Office for Students (OfS), said universities and colleges in England that infringed the rights to expression of individuals would face fines under the new complaints process.
Ahmed said he would not pronounce whether students or staff voicing support for a “global intifada” against Israel, or the use of slogans such as “from the river to the sea” would be protected by the new rules before their introduction in August.
“I’d be reluctant to say any particular phrase is always going to be acceptable or always not, because with many of these things it’s going to be depend on a variety of factors. I’m definitely not going to say: oh you can always say something or you can never say something, for that reason,” Ahmed said.
You wouldn’t think that slogans calling for freedom and equality could be so provocative.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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