Unthinkable Wings

Fascinating, and very moving story from the Guardian: Jonathan Freedland visits a drop-in centre for elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors where they never serve thin soup and there's always plenty of bread, the particular shape work with them has to take, and some of their stories.

People have to make up their minds and cannot keep waiting for ever for a sign from heaven, for a solution to the difficulty to fall into their laps... Postponed or belated decisions can be more sinful than wrong decisions made in faith and love... To believe means to decide.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1934, on the ecumenical movement, but it is more generally true, I think (it might also be taken as an epitaph on a number of basically decent contemporaries of Bonhoeffer, for instance).

The BBC has a page on answers to the difficult questions children ask, which are mostly science-y (except for 'why did God let my kitten die?' - and couldn't they have asked a theologian as well as the philosopher for that one? - and 'why does my friend have two daddies?').

One of them is 'why do I like pink?' On this, the lay answers are actually more helpful; the philosopher waffles about the Value of the Feminine, but on the other hand 'pink reminds you of other things you like' is reasonable, and an improvement on the psychologist, who produces the usual rubbish about evolutionary psychologists telling us that teh femalez haz evolved to like red, because of the redness of berries (because, of course, there's no such thing as edible blue, black or purple berries in nature!) or, alternatively, because they need to be able to spot when their babies have fevers, and are consequently flushed. Which I would have thought, if colour preference was really genetically hard-wired into us, that women would tend to be filled with a shrinking horror at the sight of pink/ red (why didn't he suggest the rosy cheeks of healthy infants, I wonder?)

Of course, it's all tosh anyway, because a brief examination of historical inventions shows that on the whole, previous centuries in Western Europe (can't speak to other places) associated red/ pink† with men, because it's the colour of blood and therefore Manly, whereas blue was rather feminine. Which is why you generally see Our Lady in blue* (which the more catholically inclined, as Mr Eliot reminds us, tend to consider 'Mary's color').

oursin, may I borrow your codfish?

† Of course there's a separate problem, in that the vocabulary we use to talk about colour is very culturally conditioned anyway, and the middle ages certainly didn't have the sophisticated distinctions between various shades; there isn't, as far as I know, a word in Middle High German for 'pink', for instance, and the colouring of paintings tends to be fugitive. Still, one can tell red from blue.

* Other iconographies of the BVM are available. Ask your art historian, parish priest, or friendly local Anglo-Catholic loon for details. (For instance, you sometimes do see Mary in red; this is to draw attention to the future sufferings of her Son and her participation in it, so it still comes back to bleeding men in the end).

Incidentally: this week's "Church Times" has a fantastic feature on the 1909 "English Church Pageant", an open-air theatrical production telling the history of the English (and, apparently, bits of the Scottish) church from, it has to be said, a very high church perspective, though one at pains to be as authentic as possible; Percy Dearmer was heavily involved, it was on this occasion that Athelstan Riley's fantastic and very Catholic hymn 'Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones' first came to public prominence, and GK Chesterton, who was still and Anglican, played Dr Johnson. The article's quite good in terms of contextualising it in terms of the - particularly ecclesiastical - concerns of its day and analysing it as a piece of popular historiography from the pre-television era.

However, the most striking thing about it is that the article is illustrated with genuine colour photographs - direct colour, not colourised by painting later. From 1909. As such, it gives a very vivid impression of how the Edwardians imagined the past, and is interesting even if you're not all that into Anglo-Catholic pagentry. Unfortunately, you'll have to track down a paper copy if you want to look at them, as I don't have access to a scanner...

I was looking at duvets and pillows today. Am not sure what to make of the (very expensive) ones that were advertising themselves as "Genuine German Brand Quality - Pure Masurian Down." I don't think they mean what that sounds like, but given that it's a very long time since Masuren was part of Germany, and I assume that they haven't been in a warehouse for seventy years, they maybe ought to rephrase it. Unless they're going for the revanchist market?

On the other hand, it did bring me up rather sharply to find the box on my residents registration form which inquired as to my whereabouts on September 1st 1939, with the helpful footnote that this data would be shared with the search agencies of the churches. Though I doubt that it's going to reunite many families at this late in the day....