Brian Hodgkinson's heroic history of the way civilisations come and go and give us our heroes

Agamemnon walked home through this gate! True!

Brian Hodgkinson

I have a friend who looks just like an ordinary person, walks and talks like everyone else, drinks tea and coffee, smiles and moves around just like everyone else but HE IS SO CLEVER!  He would probably say that he just reads a lot but then so do I but I don't retain the information.  He does, his brain must have so many places full of interesting and accurate facts that when he sits down at his desk and concentrates on what he wants to know, he can bring a decade, a whole century or even a millenium to mind and have it in an order which he can then explain in such a way that someone like me, a person of very moderate understanding, can feel the texture of history in my own bones.  He has written both poetry and history and his name is Brian Hodgkinson.  I have been reading his extraordinary new three volume book which is so beautifully written and crafted it could be called poetry.  The three volumes cover The Advancement  of Civilisation in the Western World, and that is just what it is, a great panorama of millenia which makes sense of who we are now and what we might have been and what we could be.  Hodgkinson weaves myth and legend into factual evidence so that Homeric heroes have their feet in facts and turn out to have their descendants in every heroic action performed by every person we recognise today as heroic.  His starting point for the beginning is way back in the foundation of time, farther back than the written word, back into the mystery touched on in Scriptures which try to describe how something comes into being from consciousness alone and takes form through words.  This may sound fanciful but when we begin to see that all our understanding of anything from the most sublime to the most prosaic is expressed in words in our minds, this capacity words have to create makes sense of In the beginning was the Word....

Now, this great work from Brian Hodgkinson, my friend who I am glad to introduce to you is available to pre-order from Shepheard Walwyn publishers at £65 for all three.  

I have been zooming through the first book because it has pace, isn't dry and dusty and have just ordered one copy for myself and one other.  It might be for YOU!!!

Copies should arrive in October and great Autumn reading ahead.

Dr Jonathan Sachs takes us by the hand through the Moral Maze which faces us

Dr Jonathan Sachs has a nice face too!

We aren't going to hell in a hand cart! But we need to know the pitfalls and the avenues which have curiously always led to hell.  Dr Sachs, former Chief Rabbi has compiled a series of programmes which you should listen to, you should listen quietly, picking one at a time following the journey he has taken us on looking for Morality in the 21st century, where is it to be recognised and do we measure up to its call?  Do we want to?  And here is a good question, why do we want to?  Do we want to be good moral people to feel smug or do we want to be good moral people in order that our families and communities and the wider world don't suffer from our immorality.

It is going to rain this weekend probably, the evenings and drawing in and the mornings are later.  You could just sit in your bed, or even lie there having clicked this link and start the adventure he sets before us.  Why not start with Episode 14 where Melinda Gates talks about using all her good fortune in small and large acts of kindness.

I went to Sinai and this is what I found!l

Desert, where would you put your sleeping bag? Or find your bathroom

I went to Sinai with my friend Mary.  She has given me books across the years of our friendship and this journey started with my reading her Christmas gift of The Sisters of Sinai by Janet Soskice (you can hear her talk about them by clicking the link.)  These two sisters and their journey to discover what really was written in ancient manuscripts stored at St Catherine's Monastery and their connection with the Monks was our starting point. My friend Mary has always inspired me because she has a stillness about her and as an artist has a discerning eye.  I am the one of this friendship who can't resist taking action and having read the book and found a journey going to Sinai led by Sara Maitland (click for info), I persuaded her that we could do it, we could camp in the desert for a few days not realising we would really be out in the middle of the sandy desert with no tent, just ourselves in a sleeping bag and the stars above us, no loo, no electric rollers, no radio, no i phone, just 12 people scattered over the desert gazing upwards and watching the light of the sun and moon changing our days into nights and our nights into days.  As we woke, we would see others sitting up in their bags, getting dressed in the bag, clambering out and walking across to the one tented structure which contained the hole in the ground which if we had been American, we would have miscalled the bathroom.

Inside the Monastery

We were a long way away from England, from Sainsburys and what we thought of as our lives!  And we finished our time there by visiting St Catherine's Monastery which is where the next part of my adventure began.  This was where hermits and ascetics travelled from the earliest days of Christianity to be at the foot of Mount Sinai where so many old and new testament stories meet and where since the 4th Century there has been a fortified Monastery which over the centuries has filled and emptied with Monks according to the desire of men to renounce the world and which has the most exquisite collection of icons and manuscripts.  At this time, there are perhaps 29 monks attached to the Monastery, some very old but interest in it has increased as the realisation of the threat to religious freedom has risen and polarisation and misunderstanding has threatened so many buildings and communities.  In an age where we preach liberalism in so many parts of life, true freedom to worship has been reduced to a point where instead of enjoying the diversity of ways to approach and pray to God through the pathway we have chosen, people feel threatened by the ways of others leading to extreme thinking that 'my faith is The One faith and No other should exist'.  

Father Justin

Here at the Monastery, while following with devotion and absolute adherence to their own programme of worship, pilgrims and visitors just interested in the history of the Monastery are welcomed.  Here is where I knew I wanted to return, to return over and over again, not just to stare and wonder at the treasures, but to simply be there, attending or not, the services I was allowed to go to, sitting in front of the icons, not understanding or knowing enough to translate anything into my own language but to allow the place and the feel to enter my heart.  And so growing to love the place, being of an active nature, I wanted others to know about it and to take it to their heart so that it would continue to be protected.  This year, Father Justin, an unusual Monk given that while he is a Greek Orthodox Monk, he is a most erudite and intellectually sharp Texan born, quietly spoken man.  He is coming to England and YOU can meet him too.  He will be here on November 28th, speaking at St Martin-in-the-fields in the morning and at Mandeville Place in the evening.  You can read about all this and register for both events by clicking this link to the newsletter with all the details.  

If you never get to camp in the Sinai desert and you never manage to come with me to St Catherine's Monastery, then register now to hear Father Justin and book your ticket to London from wherever you are.  This is an opportunity not to miss.

So pleased to show off the renovation work in the library

Summer leftovers

The Full Team

We saw you all, every single one in July and August and now you are gone, the stocks are low and we are trying to keep our spirits high.  Not so difficult because summer takes a breath at the beginning of September, there is a natural pause.   All the burning hot long days are dissolving into damp dewy chillier mornings and earlier cooler evenings and a change is clearly in the season and in the air.  We wave you off, the last of our own summer visitors today just as the swallows are dipping and chasing and practising their loop the loops across the fields, landing on the telegraph wires and seeming to chat to one another.   Grandpa sits  in his chair with his feet up reading the paper then falling into the sort of sleep that Grandpas need after a long summer of entertaining and gossiping with sons on the front step with an evening cigar and perhaps a glass of this or that.  There is comfort in tidying up, it keeps sadness away when you have all gone.  The fridge is full of leftovers, little bits of slightly wrinkled green pepper and a few old pots of yogurt, well past their sell by date.

The summer house beckons

The best leftover of the lot though is the once teeny tiny space ship baby, now pointing things out and wandering around finding new words every day, new skills and developing distinct character.  She and I get to spend this leftover day together and we end up with a leftover ice lolly together on the front steps.  There is nothing like this time of year for peacefulness, all the rush has settled down, most of the harvest here is in, GCSE results and A Level results with their attendant joy and relief or the opposite are delivered; jobs which change location are mostly in place and I am absolutely desparate to get back to regular meditation which doesn't have thoughts of washing or food preparation.  I feel the pull towards the early morning summer house quiet right through me and tomorrow will be the day!