Martin Sheen

I was listening to Martin Sheen on Desert Island Discs the other day. He had lots of things to say about his life, career and, in passing, his family. What really got my attention was that he said he loved Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.  This is an amazing book. It really has everything about all aspects of life in it, from birth to death via religion and murder. But it also focuses hard on ethics and religious belief. Martin Sheen told us that it was reading this book that made him think hard about Christianity and led him, ultimately, to join the Roman Catholic Church. 

Teaching the Reformation to A-Level students, who have little idea what Christianity is about, had much the same effect on me. I had to teach them what Catholics believed in and what Martin Luther didn't like about Catholicism and how he and other Protestant leaders developed their ideas about what really mattered in Christian belief. By the time I had done that, I found that I had regained my previously lost Christian faith. Of course, all my students avoided answering questions about the Reformation in the exam because 'it was too hard to explain', they said. They preferred straight politics or economics.

I think if I were ever to be on Desert Island Discs my eight records would be:

1. Benjamin Britten's Michelangelo Sonnets for tenor and piano.
2. Schubert's Schwanengesang
3. Shostakovitch's Symphony No 13 (Baby Yar)
4. Beethoven's Grosse Fugue. I first heard this sitting in the South Transept of Newcastle upon Tyne Cathedral many years ago and was utterly spellbound.
5. JS Bach Partita for solo violin. I heard Yehudi Menuhin play this in Coventry Cathedral. I cannot bear to hear it played by anyone else.
6. Saint-Saens The Swan from The Carnival of the Animals because it is such an incredibly graceful piece demonstrating most of the capabilities of the cello. If I can't have the Swan I'd have to have the Pianists remembering the time my brother and I hogged a pair of pianos on separate floors of the music block at school and played it with great gusto and not much accuracy.
7. Mozart Piano Concerto No 21. This is the concerto my paino teacher played in Cape Town shortly before he left for London to study and teach at the Royal Academy.
8. Elvis Presley Heartbreak Hotel.

This delightful fountain stands in  the middle of a small square in Calahonda, near Malaga, in South Spain. I am really pleased at the way that the cascading water shows so clearly.

Outside the apartment in Calahonda there is a lemon tree that my father and stepmother planted twenty years ago. When we were there in March it was heavily loaded with lemons. 99.9% of the lemons were perfectly ordinary - nothing to write home about. But hidden within the foliage was this one shaped a bit like female genitalia. I'm afraid I couldn't resist picking and photographing it.

This huge bronze sculpture stands in the middle of a roundabout on the main street through Fuengirola.  It's not quite right to call it a torso because it includes the top half of the legs. But the first time you see it, you do get a bit of a surprise. There are several other brilliant sculptures in the town that are all worth looking at.

 

Spring continues apace

Spring continues apace. Pear blossom opened in less than twenty-four hours last weekend. And today I saw that the apple blossom buds are swollen to bursting point. This will keep the bumble bees round here busy. There have been quite a few around, including half a dozen which have flown in through our open kitchen window. One or two have needed help to escape back outside.

Another sign of spring is that the groundsman has been working on the cricket pitch. First of all he put the heavy roller over the cricket square itself. He sat on the big machine and rolled backwards and forwards for about four hours in the sunshine. Then the day before yesterday he got out his brilliant sit-on mower and drove all round the outfield cutting the grass down to within half an inch of its life. Perhaps next week he'll start to mow the cricket square.

Yesterday I was amazed to hear about the grotesque scheme in America to incorporate unidentified remains of people killed in the Twin Towers disaster of 9/11 in a Memorial Museum being built on Ground Zero. When you think about soldiers who die on active service, they are buried in proper cemeteries, even when they are unidentified and 'only known to God'. There are separate memorials to them away from the cemeteries which never incorporate their remains. What are the Powers-That-Be thinking of in New York? I would have thought a separate, dignified memorial monument in front of the Memorial Museum would be the most appropriate way of remembering all the dead and injured from that disaster.

At the moment I am writing a group of stories called Bedlam. They describe one person's experience of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as well as several other stories about less stressful events. One is about a Protestant child attending a Catholic school who is told by a priest that not only is she a heathen/pagan but that she will go straight to HELL because she wasn't  baptised as an infant. Oh dear!