A Sort of Christmas Card (2)

Last year it was TS Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”.

This year, something much closer to home by Thomas Hardy.

And it feels right for us, living as we do, surrounded by livestock on the edge of our village on the borders of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.

Written during the First World War, Hardy recalls a Wessex folk tradition that, at midnight on Christmas Eve, the cattle kneel.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Faith, mingled with doubt, and the wish to cling to childhood certainties.

Happy Christmas, one and all.

(Portrait photograph of Thomas Hardy by H Walter Barnett, c1909.)

The two stages of childhood

Discussing my seven year old and her process of growing up with my colleague at City University, Kristine Karlsen:

“There are two stages to child development,” said Kristine. “First we teach them to walk and talk. Then we teach them to sit down and be quiet.”

This seems to me the pithiest and most devastating of summations. It tells us so much about why children emerge into adulthood with their creative faculties diminished. And why too often we need to have that side of us re-awakened later in life.

I have been thinking a lot recently about the lack of creativity in our British education system and I have some ideas about it.

But what do you think?