Blow Your Own
The noise, the noise. Oh, the blowing of trumpets. In the front row of the Internet orchestra are those blowing their own, but these are easily outnumbered by those modelling their brass on John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558).
Every internet rant is a blast that wants to be first, and ranting is such a natural fit to the form that the temptation ought to be resisted. Over the past month I have resisted ranting about Ryanair, automated sales calls, and two more subjects that are so rantishly scrawled on a scrap of paper I have no idea what they were. Paddles, apparently, and errors in tenant paranoia. Whatever was hurting, the pain has passed. Maybe I wanted to rant about bad handwriting. I hate that.
I prefer blogs that follow the example of the Angels. Write down five good things that happened today. Add those to the base-notes of indignation, merge them with the sound of own-blown trumpets and out comes the true sound of the Internet, the Fanfare for the Common Man.
That’s the noise the Internet makes.
“…the foolishe, madde and phrenetike shal governe the discrete and give counsel to such as be sober of mind…”
This (fabulous link btw/ fabulous character – I had no idea), according to Knox, is what our put-upon, exhausted world will be subjected to when women govern men. Can only be an improvement on the current model.
The internet chorus has, I take it, always been with us, it’s just that now it sits and bleats from the lap-top on the kitchen table. (Or it does in my house.)
Go on – please give us Ryanair – the truth is we can’t get enough of that stuff. See how I followed the Knox link I just KNEW would make me burn…
I keep going back to the Bristol Evening Post’s website to see what latest foolishnesses there are about cycling. It’s like peeping under a rock in a pond. A pond near a chemical plant. “Moron shall speak unto moron…”
Nothing changes Richard! You will remember Jan Morris observing in Conundrum how much prejudice still exists simply because one is female.
I was telling Jock Mullard the other day about the experience of temping as professor’s secretary in 2004 and being in the boardroom taking the minutes for special management group.
My boss said to the team, a bunch of public schoolboys, “we had better restrain our usual ribaldry, chaps. We have Kate with us today.”
And I thought, I have been in the JCR at Radley, I don’t think you would shock me!
That particular professor is a real gentle – man who was very kind to me as a very amateur and traumatised secretary and I noticed when doing the filing that he had had rewarded a friend of mine with a bonus because she had been working hard.
But this is quite exceptional. I worked at a company the next year as a Temp receptionist where the boss’s first act was to sexually harass me. I had been warned by the other receptionist what he was going to do and she said I handled it well but what sort of despicable person bullies a temp like that?
In the end I brought up the Radley website and showed it to them and was instantly sacked. As you say in Becoming Drusilla stealth catches up with you in the end.
What I have learnt from my experiences – and is Myra Brekenridge’s conclusion too – is that it is the kind of person you are that really counts in the end, not whether you are male or female. I don’t care whether the person in power over me is a man or a woman, gay or straight..What I care about is whether they are “mild and gentle” in power to quote from a Purcell Welcome Song for Charles II written just after the Newmarket assassination plot.
As an old friend of mine from the diplomatic community in Switzerland who has also studied the Restoration said to me on the phone, “Charles had had a rough time and wasn’t going to put anyone down”. Maxine is former Canadian Champion and I haven’t seen her since we used to figure skate in Switzerland in 1984.I well remember her saying, “you have a natural grace” when she was teaching me and thinking I could have been good at this if I hadn’t been sent to a Rugby academy.
She also told me that Mr Belloc’s daughter used to come to her parties. I love Belloc who rescued me when I had no human rights in 1997. “Physicians of the utmost fame…”
I was talking to Revd David Coulton a couple of days ago and we are definitely going to get a book out of this.
On March 26th 2007, I went to the police about the shrink who attacked me in the Warneford when I was at Radley during the Russell Reid Court Martial at the GMC. I had lunch with him and I told him that my experience was closest to Jan Morris’s. Russell insisted that it was not.
I turned up in the police station wearing my Napier kilt, a naval officers jacket and a Tilley Hat and said “I want to report some serious Crimes”.
The desk sargeant said, “What are they?”
“Rape and murder!”
“That’s serious!”
The previous evening I had been in the pub with my fiance and Steve Hoey – a biker friend – celebrating the first page of a research website dedicated to my grandpa Dr JTS Hoey, Croix de Guerre. There is material all over the net about Major Charles Ferguson Hoey VC MC, my first cousin once removed, and I wanted to do Grandpa justice.
My “mother” had responded to an email to my uncle Fergus Hoey with an attached picture of me with my face covered in blood and a message saying even if you send a hit squad, the truth will still come out as I have distributed teh information and organised for it to to published on the internet. I referred to Rod Nelson, one of our contemporaries at Radley who killed his parents, and then went sailing and pointed out that Rod only got 12 years for that – Mummy immediately sent a hitsquad to get me! The CID thought that was quite funny.
Whilst waiting for CID I told the officer the story of Charlie Hoey, to whom I am said to bear a certain physical resemblance, taking out an entire Japanese machine gum battery with a Bren gun and added “think how much damage I could do with a Bren gun!” They decided I was a “vunrabilly” and “intimidated witness”!
The man who has been the most help over this Hamish Rattray, also an oR who has been persecuted and practically destroyed by ignorant shrinks. Hamish’s ancestor was Bonnie Prince Charlies physician and got him addicted to medicinal brandy! I discovered from the net that my family names – Napier and Hoey – are the names of the ancient Royal families of Scotland and Ireland. There was a Napier with King James I when he came down from Scotland to take up the throne and Lady Napier was one of one Charles II’s mistresses ..I didn’t know this when I developed my fascination with Henry Purcell and the Restoration Court.
As Mary Queen of Scots embroidered – “in my end is my beginning”. I wrote a short story called “The Passion” at university in 2002 with the end in the beginning which Professor Middleton thought was “a powerful image of love and betrayal” and and an “elegantly literary rendition of Dido and Aeneas” and noted hints of spiritual forces at work…
A little learning is a dangerous thing ..He thought Caribou, the old Alfred Mylne yacht appearing out of the dark “like a ghost” was a “bit obvious, perhaps”..
Not that obvious http://www.clyde19-24.org.uk.
In 2004, the following correspondence came to light: Mayday from the Admiral and November 5th from Guy – as an anarchist’s poster from the 50s said, Guy Fawkes was “the last man to enter parliament with honest intentions”!
http://katemiddleton-lsu.blogspot.com/2009/08/mayday-from-admiral-doulton.html
http://katemiddleton-lsu.blogspot.com/2009/08/guy-fawkes.html
Happy St George’s day! There is no male or female in Jesus Christ our Lord