THE SPECTATOR’S NOTES
CHARLES MOORE
For most of my life I have disliked the run-up to the British Christmas, on religious grounds. Advent is intended to be like Lent, a time of abstinence. Your thoughts are directed to the Four Last Things — Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The Twelve Days which begin on 25 December are the time for feasting, and the fun lessens if it is pre-empted. Advent is expressed in the great Sentences (‘Drop down dew, ye heavens from above... ’ etc.), and in rather mystical hymns like ‘Come, O come Emmanuel’, not in God-rest-ye-merry-figgy-pudding stuff. And even Christmas itself, though certainly joyful, has never been and should not be the most important feast of the Church. It would make no difference to the essence of Christianity if there were no Christmas (though obviously Jesus had to be born), whereas the faith simply would not exist without Easter. So the decorations in offices, the pre-Christmas parties, the paper hats, the displays in shops, the piped carols have always put me in a temper. Once, when I was editor of this magazine, I even removed a holly wreath from the front door in an access of ‘Bah! Humbug!’ feeling. But as the public presence of Christianity in our culture becomes more contested, it is interesting to see how passionately attached to the semiChristian British Christmas season so many people are. They really hate the idea that Nativity plays cannot be performed in schools or that carol-singers cannot get into hospitals. People have twigged that the attempt to secularise our public space is not really motivated by consideration for other faiths, but is a mild form of persecution. Like most persecutions, it is achieving the opposite of the effect it intends. Belatedly, I support the British Christmas.
This secularisation has put my wife and me to extra work. The Christmas card we bought is an attractive and comical illumination from the Macclesfield Psalter which shows a man pulling a deer by a rope attached to its antlers. But inside it says ‘Season’s Greetings’. We could not get the card (from the Fitzwilliam Museum) with a mention of Christmas. So we are laboriously crossing out ‘Season’s’ and writing ‘Christmas’.
At our local Catholic church we have just been issued with plastic cards. At the top they read ‘Identification as Roman Catholic’. They go on: ‘In case of my admission to hospital please contact a Roman Catholic priest. I would like my nursing care to include fluids — however administered.’ I wonder what future archaeologists would make of these cards if they had little other evidence to go on. How, they might ask, had doctors developed nursing care that did not involve fluids? Would they conclude that Roman Catholics had a religious need for water? Or would they guess correctly that the reason fluids had to be stipulated was because without that stipulation doctors would be allowed to let patients die? The need for the card arises partly from the death threat which now hangs over everyone going into hospital whose life is in danger, but also from the bureaucracy of confidentiality. We were told that a priest is now not allowed to visit a patient unless he (or she) — and not just one of his relations — states that he is a Roman Catholic. The card is for those Catholics who, when admitted, cannot speak.
Whenever you learn something about French politics, you see how vast is the gap between their culture and ours. I have recently discovered that a great many people in France believe that Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate for the presidency, is the illegitimate daughter of the late President Mitterrand. I do not know whether she is or not, but I do know that if we had an equivalent claim about one of our politicians, there would be nothing else in the papers for weeks.
In the reporting of how health and safety rules get in everyone’s way, the tone tends to be semi-comical. Often that is the right tone, but there are times when these rules do real, actual harm. A classic example is the obsession with not lifting people in case you either drop them or hurt yourself. A veteran charity worker recently told me of an old woman in Surrey whom he knows. Her carers were told that they must not lift her. As a result, she spent three months having to sleep every night in her armchair. Whose health? Whose safety?
At the funeral of Colin Cramphorn, the admirable (English) former deputy chief constable of the RUC last week, his teenage son carried behind his coffin the blackthorn stick which used to be the emblem of authority in the force. When the RUC became the Police Service of Northern Ireland, one of the first acts of the new chief constable was to ban the stick. As so often with Irish symbols, this attempt at political correctness was misconceived. In the Republic, the Garda inherited the blackthorn stick from the British days of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and use it to this day.
Last week we went to a party for the ‘retirement’ of John Casey, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, and a witty and generous patron to hundreds of undergraduates. I put the word ‘retirement’ in inverted commas because John, who is a bachelor, is being allowed to continue in his college rooms. This is one of the best features of the richer colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Retired dons have more time to be nice to undergraduates than busier, younger ones. When I went up to Trinity, Cambridge, in 1975, there were six dons in residence who had been Fellows since before or during the first world war, including Lord Adrian, the former Master, and Mr Nicholas, the former Bursar, who lived to be over 100 and made the college quite stupendous sums of money. Most institutions would benefit from having a few such people around. Hospitals should retain ex-matrons who can remember the days when the place was kept clean; stockbrokers need people who can remember the last crash. Until ill-health quite recently intervened, the Daily Telegraph had Lord Deedes, in his late eighties, commuting each day from Kent. Such people are a constant education for everyone else. As our population grows ever older, more and more of them should be kept on.
In our household, we prefer goose to turkey, but it does mean trading quantity for quality. Edward VII famously remarked: ‘Goose! Damned difficult bird — too much for one, not enough for two.’ Translated into modern appetites, that means one goose per six mouths for Christmas lunch, but with few leftovers — though any amount of useful fat — for Boxing Day.
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